I’m Not Okay

No, I am not okay.  Thank you for asking.

I feel like a shittier, more volatile version of myself.  Who I was is dead – I will never be that person again.  As much as I might hope and pray that I could go back to who I was before, I’ve been replaced by an angry, unpredictable, pathetic manifestation of myself.

I have never had anger issues before.  Now they are all I can think about most of the time.  Things get under my skin, and I start quietly seething.  I don’t know how to make them go away, but while they persist, all I want to do is yell and punch people and break things.  I get so mad.

Of course, I get sad, too.  Those episodes are even worse, because I can usually see the rage coming… the sorrow, not so much.  I will go from fine to bawling inconsolably in a matter of minutes.

I am so sick of being asked if I am okay.  No, I’m not.  None of this is okay, none of it will ever be okay, and every time you ask me if I’m okay, it reminds me that I very well might not be.  It reminds me that I have suffered a devastating loss, and that I was robbed of my son.  Even if I am holding my own, it might only be seconds before, for reasons even I can’t fathom, I fall apart at the seams again.

Because that is just part of me now… sometimes, I just have meltdowns, because I’m broken now.

I will never be 100% okay again.

I was right.

It upsets me so much every time I think back to October 19th and realize that I was right.  I did all the right things – I even argued with them when they refused to do anything and said he was fine.  I did everything within my power, and, if I’d been properly assessed and taken seriously, I would probably be snuggling my 3-week old baby right now.

I cycle through a lot of emotions in a day, most of which even I don’t understand, but I spend most of my time angry.  Angry at her for sending me home when he wasn’t moving… angry at myself and my foolish body for not going into labour sooner, and for not insisting that they do more than they did… angry at the universe, and any horrible higher power that would let this happen to me.  Nobody deserves to go through what I’ve suffered in the last month.

Now I forever get to carry around the stigma of being a woman who has lost a child.  People don’t know how to interact with me anymore.  I try to behave normally, but they still feel the need to pussyfoot around me, like I will fly off the handle at even the slightest reminder of my son.  Nobody knows what to say, or understands that I just want distraction from it all.  Even just sending me a text to say hello is a couple of moments where I am thinking about something other than the fact that I’ve got hundreds of dollars’ worth of baby clothes sitting in trash bags in my mother in law’s closet.  It’s a few brief moments where I don’t think about how lost I feel, and where I don’t feel distressed by the silence surrounding me.  I would give anything to fill that silence with my son’s cries, or giggles, or the sound of a rattle, or a camera shutter as I take hundreds upon hundreds of photos of him and become that person I hate by uploading them, en masse, to Facebook and flooding my friends’ feeds with them.

Why can’t I have that?  Was it really so much to ask?

There are people who make far shittier parents than I would, and they get to have kids.  Why was mine taken from me?

I feel completely displaced, like I’m not in the right place.  I am supposed to be tickling my son’s toes to try and get him to smile, or scrubbing feces out of cloth diaper liners, not sitting at home by myself and desperately trying to figure out where I belong and how the hell I’m supposed to get there.  I don’t know what I did to deserve being here, and now that I am here, I have no idea where I am supposed to go.  The idea of returning to ‘normal’ is monstrously intimidating to me… I don’t even know what normal is anymore.  I spent so long preparing to make being a mom my whole life that I didn’t prepare a backup plan.