Right now?
Right now it sucks. I'm laid up in the apartment, no work for four months now (two more to go). I've just gotten to where I can drive myself around short distances. And my best friend from the teen years who lost her wonderful dad a couple months ago called.
I sit here at 2:30am with no reason to sleep now and get up later in the day. My daughter is dead. She is gone. And most people won't acknowledge that she ever existed. Some say I lost nothing. Nobody seems to get that I lost every part of myself the day I realized what I lost.
The funny thing about my miscarriage is that I didn't 'know' she was gone. It took me two months later and high on sleep medication to feel the full effect. I was in bed, trying to sleep. All of a sudden, I felt my stomach and I felt incredibly alone. Two months had gone by since I had bled so heavily for over two weeks. Since I had gone to the doctor and been told 'It was likely a miscarriage. But do you really want to dwell on that? Go home and pretend it was just a weird period."
I walked out of the room and down the swirling hallway to Dill. He sat at his computer as I leaned onto the futon. I whispered, "I need you", before bursting into some of the most heart-wrenching sobs I've ever created. It was then that I knew what I lost. I didn't lose my pregnancy. I didn't have a miscarriage. My child died. My child died.
If you go and tell someone your child died, they will exhibit so much sympathy the world will shift on it's axis. If you tell them you lost your baby, they still show similar horror and sympathy. If you say you lost your pregnancy, they seem to expect you mean after the first trimester and feel pretty upset for you. But if you tell them you had a miscarriage...they might say they are sorry, then turn to you and expect the conversation to be over. A miscarriage is just a passing thought. People don't seem to understand a person died. A child died. A parent is now questioning what they are. Are they still a parent if they have no living child?
And so when my friend Que called me to talk about her father who passed...I couldn't help but continuously wonder why I was doing this. Never once has she comforted me over Taylor. Anytime I brought Tay up, she would change the subject. And here I was comforting her. Listening to her story, her experience, her sobs. Whereas she let me say I had a miscarriage before changing the subject.
Yeah. Recovery sucks. No, I'm not okay. But that's okay. I'm learning that you don't always have to be okay. I'm learning that despite it being 2 1/2 years since her passing, it's perfectly fine for me to not be okay sometimes.
I can't tell you how much I miss Taylor. Words do not express to anyone how painful and lonely this is. But I do. I miss Taylor. I love Taybear so much, and I miss her. And as much as it sucks and hurts...
It's okay.
