Why We Do It- Monday September 5th

We write our blogs because we don’t know what else to do. The pain of loss feels like it’s cooking our insides and dissolving our souls. We recall the dramatic images we used in our teen aged diaries. Now we understood the phantom pain we felt during puberty. It was a warning, a conditioning- our pubescence was practice for our gory adulthood.

“I can’t even understand what you’re going through” you say, as a matter of comfort. So we keep writing, keep tearing ourselves open, hoping that you’ll understand if we say it just the right way.

We watch with unsurprised horror while you show us how much you don’t understand. We hear you talk about us to other friends, expressing sympathy and murmuring praise for our strength. But you want us all better and you want us to be the same people we were before. Our tears make you excited and uncomfortable.

Time passes slower than we expected. We remember other people dear to us suffering tragedy and feel guilty because we didn’t understand. None of understand pain until we understood it. Then we tried to write more.

Our firsts posts about happiness makes us feel guilty. We think our little ghosts cry in agony at our happiness. The first few incidents are followed by a depression almost darker than the few weeks right after our babies died. As much as we needed to move on, we didn’t want to. We couldn’t stop ourselves it seemed, even with drugs and alcohol and self indulgence…we were going to move on instead of dying. Although sometimes we just wanted to die.

In our blogs was a secret world. They were as dark and horrible as we wanted to be, but we were afraid of what our friends and coworkers and family would say. We hated to scare people, but you said yourself you couldn’t understand. So we hid it away on our blogs, and we knew the people who didn’t want to be near our pain would be satisfied with our fake smiles and hollow laughter.

Eventually some of us got pregnant again. We didn’t know what to say on our blogs, where so many of us struggled with infertility or were still mourning empty arms. We didn’t know how to feel ourselves about the new life inside of us- better not to be too hopeful, not to get too attached. This time our hearts were weaker and they might not heal another time.

We just keep writing, because we don’t know what else to do.

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Comments

  1. sue says:

    I know. Sending you love.

  2. Catherine W says:

    Beautifully written. I agree with every word.

  3. Leslie Ann says:

    Amen Sister! Love you from afar!!!!

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