Friday, March 30, 2012

Fewer Posts=Happier Me

A very good friend pointed out that my posts have been sounding angry lately. I agree. My therapist says that's because, as the grief softens, the other feelings emerge. The things you didn't deal with "back then." So I guess I am okay with that. It's hard to write about the happy stuff, the things that are happening everyday without your noticing because it doesn't suck. And that is totally reflected in the frequency of my posts. Fewer posts=happier me.

As it turns out, I do have a Good News Alert: I've been off Prozac for three weeks now. One more week or so and it will be gone from my system. And I feel really good!

I am more sensitive. I am a little quicker to cry. Sometimes about things that are not crying things. Like today, I listened to one of my favorite Kathleen Edwards songs, one that (admittedly) used to make me cry. Today I started crying as soon as I heard the intro. But the thing that made me cry about the song? It's not happening anymore. It's never going to happen again. And maybe I cried as I let that go.

The song is called Copied Keys and the lyrics start out like this:

This is not my town and it will never be
This is our apartment filled with your things
This is your life, I get copied keys
Try and force a little smile hold it a little while for you

These are your old streets and you know them well
One way shortcuts all the way downtown
But your favorite find is just my secondhand secret
Try and hide a little pain for the things I can't explain to you

When I first heard it I had moved from Steamboat Springs, CO to Boulder to be with the first man I really thought I would marry. I was about to turn 29. I had wanted to stay a few more months in Steamboat, but the thought of being apart from him seemed worse. So I moved, and I moved in with him, and I got copied keys. He had a drawer full of them.

I loved Boulder and I made it my town. I even moved back for a summer in law school. But that took awhile, and in the meantime I'd needed his help, but he didn't understand what was so hard about moving (Try and hide a little pain for the things I can't explain to you). The end of the song says "This is your town and it will never be ours."

It took only two weeks before I realized the relationship was going to fall apart. He didn't want to have sex with me. He seemed annoyed I was there. He let on that there were things that had bothered him from the beginning. He thought if we lived in the same place, those things would...work themselves out? Go away? He made me move for him! Oops, Anger Alert. But really, it's unforgivable.

And about a year and a half ago, as I drove home from a beautiful day of rock climbing in the Gunks, I cried to this song. I was thinking how this guy had stolen my opportunity to settle down when I felt ready to settle down. How if we had worked out, I'd have a few kids by now (by then, age 33). I'd have a husband, probably a decent job, possibly not as a lawyer. I had been dating a series of New York assholes--not that Colorado assholes were any better--and I felt...left out. Left out of the life I wanted.

Fast-forward about six months, and I'm pregnant with SS's child, against his will. (Except now I feel better about the guy from Boulder, because I'm forming the family I was worried would elude me before it was too late.) A few months later I'm moving into his apartment, picking up my copied keys. Fitting into his life like a missing puzzle piece. Except I don't fit the space available.

Deciphering the parallels between these two guys was...disappointing. How could I make the same mistake twice?

But now, nothing is the same. I have a say in my future with AFF. AFF wants it that way too. We will choose our own place together, and it will be ours.

. . .

I realized something else recently. It's quite obvious, but it helps explain to me why I feel like other people don't understand (and why they actually don't). I see how Blue released me from a horrible life with SS. I think some people think I was lucky to "escape." And they think that not having your sick baby provides some sort of relief, when in your mind your baby was always perfect, just like their babies...until the terrible diagnosis. But, no matter who my baby's daddy was, no matter what life we would have had, I never loved my baby any less. And I think that's hard for people to comprehend. You don't stop loving your child because now he's dead and his dad is an asshole anyway. In the beginning I felt like other people thought I didn't deserve my pain. Because I didn't deserve to be pregnant and happy about it at the time. I'm not absorbing that anymore. Instead I'm absorbing my love for Blue. There is so much of it. I don't care if you can't understand it.

. . .

Back to a sweet story. Around Christmastime, I laid a wreath on the ground at Blue's tree. A family friend made it, a BLM whose daughter lived for 19 days with Trisomy 13. A week ago my dad asked me what I was going to do with the wreath, suggesting that I should remove it, with its dried and brown boughs and all. I picked it up and moved to to a corner of the yard until I could decide to fully remove it. Where I laid it, next to the water hookup to the house, grew a patch of clover. And my eye went straight to a clover with four leaves. I left it in the ground, but I walked away happy and hopeful. 
 

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