Blasted Holidays!

I hate Christmas time.  I mean, if I were honest, I would say that I have hated it since early childhood.  My parents are divorced.  I hated that it was always about them, who got us when...for how long, where we would be...know one ever asked me what I wanted to do on Christmas, where I wanted to be.  And my mom was always a screaming mess of stress, Christmas morning we were ripped out of our house to go be with my dad and his family...and here I am 34 years later and I still spend every Christmas on the road.  I hate it.  Now we can factor in Logan and Rudy, or rather the lack there of.  And its so hard for me to get outside of those facts.  And everything happened this time of year.  My first child, my living child, was born January 27th...Logan died the following January 24th...and now Rudy should have been born this coming January 21st.  I should be standing here with a huge belly.  Aching, starving, excited...  And here I am again...angry, sad, confounded.  And I stand here bewildered at what has happened to us.  Like its all this really cruel jape and I'm the dumb blond who isn't catching on.  I think that most of the time I must have this stricken look on my face.  Or the "duh" look.  And its narcissistic, I know, but I swear people still stare at me.  Like they KNOW.  Sometimes I feel like I have this weird appendage on my face or something.

I think as much as I still can not seem to grasp, much less accept, that I have children who are not with me, I think that I am starting to accept that I will be sad forever.  It is my destiny to grieve.  I mean shouldn't I?  I have two children who are dead.  Should I not be sad until the day that I die?  And it [stupidly] is just starting to dawn on me.  I should be sad.  I should be sad every moment of every day.  How weird would it be if I wasn't sad for my dead children?  How cold and heartless would I be?  Instead of worrying that I'm still sad, I should worry that some day I might not be sad...as much as I desperately want the sadness to go away, the sadness means that they were real, and that they mattered.

Yesterday my husband said that this year he is trying to live in the moment, to enjoy what we have and not to dwell on what we don't.  To enjoy our 4 year old daughter who is going to really come alive this Christmas.  It seems like a nice thing.  I'm going to work on that.  It seems like such a far stretch away for me.  I mean we can't avoid the elephant in the room, especially now that there are two here, but we live each day living around them, with them.

I thought I was pregnant last week.  I had convinced myself that I was.  Funny, the things your body will do if you believe hard enough.  By the time my cycle rolled around, and 4 pee sticks later, I had pretty much accepted that I was not.  But I wanted it so bad.  And I know that another pregnancy won't fix anything, and in fact may make things worse.  None the less, I wanted it to be true with every breath that I took.  My husband is not ready for another pregnancy.  I know he wants more children, hoards of them, but pregnancy is such a scary prospect in this house anymore.  Who can blame him?  The Ectopic episode in May took a real toll on him.  Most of the time I just pretend it wasn't as serious as it was, or that it didn't really happen, or that I wouldn't have died because well...I just wouldn't have.  But he feels very differently about it.  The heartache in this house is so great.  Its breathtaking.

My 35th birthday is in April.  That scares me too.  How fast life has gone.  When you are young you are ignorant to how fast time goes.  And it has flown by for us.  We thought we had all the time in the world...even at 30 when my daughter was born.  But then having a baby with Down Syndrome at 31, when society tells us that it only happens to old women, will age you pretty fast.  The doctors seem convinced that my turning 35 doesn't make our odds of having another child with DS any greater than they were at 32.  Our odds are pretty high, in my opinion 1 in 100 is pretty high, regardless of my age.

I guess I am having a bad day.  I'm not sure why today is so much worse than the others, but today is definitely a bad day.  And its raining...which is always pleasant. :(  Sigh.