Impatience

I had a terrible day of snapping bitchiness and impatience. It was snowing here. The Christmas music was echoing through the house. It is the formula for my happiness, and yet: The dog. The kid. The husband. Lack of sleep. Dust bunnies. Things dropped and broken. Being smacked across the face with a stuffed tiger. I  could not manage that "Up With People" kind of attitude you need with toddlers, so I put my apron on and made her some cookies, just to, you know, buy her love with chocolate. Maybe a little. Beatrice asked to help, and for a while, that worked. We stayed present and focused on Laura Bush's Cowboy Cookies. (They really are good.) But after the last batch began cooling on the rack, I barked at the dog and girl for being underfoot and wrestling in the kitchen and sent them both for naps, muttering cusses under my breath.

This year has left me absolutely unsure of my ability to be a decent friend, good mother, and adoring wife. I'm not even sure I can be a good me anymore. I went into my corner and licked wounds this year when I could not be generous with my listening and with my spirit, but somehow, I just never fully came out of the corner. About June, I began feeling friends become less and less patient with my grief, my sadness and my sensitivity. Maybe it is that their defenses went down and they were ready for the old Angie, though my heart was still raw. Or perhaps it is just that I began telling people my truth, and I seemed too impossibly hard to read, or deal with. Somehow things haven't really recovered. I read blog posts about women talking about girl's nights, or getting together with friends, and I don't even know of anyone I could or would call anymore. I am simply a vessel now. A vessel for emotions. A vessel for babies. A vessel for grief.

Early in this journey, someone said to me that I would "feel" Lucy all around me. "Just wait, you will. Lucy is everywhere." It made me angry to hear that then, and I almost rejected this community wholeheartedly because of it, as though they knew this supernatural essence of my baby when I didn't. I miss not knowing her soul or her spirit. I miss not feeling her aliveness enter a room.  I still haven't felt her. Not the ghost of her, not the memory of her. I feel like I even fail in being a dead baby mama when all these women feel their babies or see them everywhere. I can't imagine Lucy as anything but what she was and is now--dead. I am somehow incapable of visualizing her, or conjuring an imaginary future for her.  I can't even imagine her smiling, because she never breathed and I never saw her face move. I conjure her in symbols, but can't even develop a mythology elaborate enough to make her responsible for the symbol I created. I pretend for a day or two, then abandon the endeavor to poetry and allusions.

I stopped looking at my pictures of Lucy. Not because it hurts, or reminds me of what I have lost, but simply because she looks dead to me now. I am disgusted with my inability to be a proper mother to Lucy. I used to will people to say her name. I wanted to speak it aloud right next to the phrase, "My daughter." I wanted to write it across the sky in big loopy letters. I wanted to be asked the questions about myself, so I could tell my story. Now, when people speak of my daughter, I recoil. Everyone seems to know her better than I ever did. They imagine her, what this one year old little stranger would be doing. And I just hold a dead baby lost amongst disturbing nightmares and fearful realities. There is a sinking resignation in the complexities of having to talk about Lucy. I didn't just lose a daughter. I lost everything, except the facade of our life. Last year, I was exactly right here, sitting on this couch pregnant, yet things couldn't be more different.

This past week or so, I have been writing my depression, my anxiety, my insomniatic inarticulations and self-pitying rants on this blog. And the emails have been coming in, "Are you okay?"

I am okay. Nothing has changed, sadly. Nothing. Has. Changed. I have no insight. No enlightenment. No deep knowledge or insight into the universe. My daughter is still impossibly dead. I am still waiting for results and answers about this new baby. My other stuff is still there, the same as last week, and the week before, and the month before, but I'm just exhausted and overwhelmed. Everyday I pull it together for the life and joy of a two year old girl who needs a whole mother. I simply have nothing else left. This past week, we remembered my father-in-law on the one year anniversary of his death. (God, we miss him around here.) There is a distinctive pallor of grief around both Sam and I, and the bubble of ignorant bliss around the girl. When we cry, she still wants milkie. We just miss our people and our feeling of safety. I sometimes just want everything else to pause, so I can go have a good cry somewhere, and a night where I fall asleep easily with no nightmares, or interruptions of oppressive anxiety and grief. It is the same as everyone else in the community of sad people. It is just another in a series of bad days.

In two weeks,  we remember the day that Lucy died and then we remember the day she was born.  I don't really know what to do for Lucy's day. Part of me wants to do some elaborate ritual, and the other part wants to treat it like every day when I ache for her and miss her, but manage to exist without reliving the trauma, grief and pain of that day by immersing myself in snips of her hair, her pictures, her footprints on a piece of paper in a box. There is no ritual to commemorate the death and birth of your child. I crave something automatic and unthinking. All the creativity of trying to discern where I will be emotionally on that day seems too impossibly cruel. I just want to kneel. Stand. Sit. Stand. Cross. Sit. Stand. Shake hands. Cry. My children have given my life a deep sense of meaning and essence. In Lucy's birth, I gained a sense of God and lost my faith in the same moment. How can someone so beautiful be so dead?

What kind of cake do you bake for that?