Hormones + mourning = mess

I am a blubbering mess.

I've decided to blame pregnancy hormones. Because it's the only reasonable explanation for why I've been bursting into tears at the drop of the hat. I am a blubbering mess. With heartburn.

With the tears has come full blown nesting. Which has unintentionally led to more tears. In rearranging a corner of our bedroom to make way for a new chair (for baby nursing), I discovered an innocent looking bag lurking in the corner. A bag, it turns out, used to throw stuff in hastily, rather than putting it away.

From the time of Harper.

There were receiving blankets from the hospital. Extra pumping supplies. Hospital socks. And a letter.

A letter to Shea. Written, by me, for his third birthday. This is my tradition: letters to my son on his birthday, and sometimes in between, so one day he can read and know what he was like growing up. How much his mother loved him.

This letter was written the night before Harper was born.

I specifically remember writing it. Purposefully writing it before the baby was born, because I wanted to capture that last moment of his being an only child. I had come home early from the TEDMED conference, skipped the party, so I could have those last hours with only Shea, and I wrote that letter late at night, after tucking him in.

I was a blubbering mess then, too.

The letter is mostly a love letter to Shea. But I do mention that I'm worried the new baby might have serious health issues, and that I'm worried how that might affect him, our family.

With everything that happened in the weeks after, I guess I never tucked it into his baby book.

It's hard to read now, because I can barely imagine that time, worried, but not knowing what was to come. Having no idea that I was writing to my son about a sibling who would no longer exist three weeks after that letter was written.

As Shea's fourth birthday approaches, I've been thinking of that annual letter again. As impossible as it is to capture in words everything he means to me and every way in which he's evolved this past year, it is more impossible still to express how much in particular he meant to me this year, this year when so very much has changed. How much he has kept me alive through the sadness, how kind and sweet and empathetic he has been, even though he doesn't fully understand why I'm mourning, what makes me cry. He is still there with a hug, with a smile, with an offer to help me feel better.

And I feel nervous, writing to him at the dawn on another baby's birth, worried I might jinx it all again.

The tears fall.

Other things that have brought me to tears in the past 48 hours? A note, unearthed from who knows where, that appeared on our dining room floor, which was once attached to a bouquet of flowers sent for Harper's memorial. A small miscommunication with Lou over when to meet up this afternoon. The happy thought of feeling my new son on my chest for the first time, and the joy and relief that will bring after all the fear of Harper's birth. Not being able to open a can with a slightly bent can opener. Estate planning, because it's the grown up thing to do, but no longer with the naive belief that bad things don't happen to good people. Frustration at the yard work needing to be done. Watching Shea fumble in his attempts to invite friends to play at the playground or the ice rink, and the sudden worry that time and society will change my kind, sweet boy into something less guilelessly friendly, less innocent.

The overwhelming urge to protect my children from anything and everything that might hurt them. Even after having been made painfully, horrifically aware that sometimes that's impossible to do. Knowing that no matter how much you do, children get hurt, children can suffer, children can die.

It makes me want to run upstairs and hug Shea and never let him go. But I resist, because he's had a busy weekend, a happy weekend, and needs his sleep.

And so I cry. Typing this, I am angrily wiping away tears, because I'm sick of this irrational crying.

I feel like I can't possible sleep until I purge these stupid tears. The combination of out of whack hormones and mourning is a powerful and unpleasant combination.

Ugh.