The Madness Between

Dr. N (my therapist) once made me create a timeline of events  – starting from when Mac and I decided we wanted to grow our family beyond Riley and ending with taking Tommy home from the NICU.  She asked that I just write down a date and a fact.  Surgeries, consultations, fertility treatments, decisions.  No emotions.  No title to the timeline.  When I brought my homework to our following session, I had four pages of paper in my hand.  I sat down in her office and she said to title the assignment “My Journey to Tommy”.   The wind was instantly knocked out of me.

While I have the chronological order of these events forever engrained in my head and clearly written on paper – it is a very overwhelming exercise to relieve it all in that same order.  The purpose of this blog to give my head and my heart a place to go when a trigger hits.  And often the triggers come out of no where, and in a completely unorganized fashion.  I had every intention to sit down tonight and continue working through my first week in the hospital – detailing our boys’ diagnosis, the incredibly scary conversations and decisions that followed, the outpour of support from our family and friends.  But I ended up in a completely different area of my grief tonight.

We decorated our Christmas tree tonight which is hands down one of my favorite traditions of the holiday season.  When my parents divorced, my dad always put me in charge of hanging the lights on the tree because I used to watch my mom do it and I had it down to a science.  My dad would buy the tree, set it up, and wait until we were home from college break to hang up our personalized ornaments.  While majority of my childhood stuff is missing in the aftermath of divorce, I still have all of these personalized ornaments.   It brings a good dose of nostalgia each year when we take them out of storage and I love watching the same joy now on Riley’s face as she unwraps her footprint from her first Christmas and last years’ preschool ornament.

As Mac and I made our way through the box tonight and handed Riley each one of hers, it started becoming very obvious that there was not a single one for Tommy (he was asleep so it didn’t bother him much ;)) and there are several for his brothers.  I looked at each one tonight as if it was the first time seeing them.  I pride myself on having a good memory, and I can’t remember who they came from or if they actually hung on our tree last year.   Did I cry when I received an ornament for Greyson or Oliver last year?   Did I feel thankful?   Did I hurry to hang it up on the tree like I do all others?  I honestly cannot remember and it is a scary reminder of the numb fog I lived in for so long.  Deny.  Survive.

One ornament did not make it’s way to the tree tonight.  It’s one of my most treasured gifts – and another that I don’t remember my response to at the time.   On January 19th, when our three boys were born – our bereavement nurse came into the room, moments before we met Greyson & Oliver, rambling about a little project she was doing a ‘trial run’ on.  Knowing that I would soon be holding my twin stillborns, I was far from focused on her project.  Almost a year later – I ache a deep, deep ache over her amazing ‘project’.  An ornament with the real footprints from our precious boys.

Tonight my heart aches.  My head aches.  And my belly aches the most.  Ironically the place these two boys last lived.