I got angry yesterday. I am not angry at God, I am angry at my situation. Alot of the time I am ok, but sometimes I just get mad. This situation just stinks. I got mad about a blanket. Luke has these blankets that are for swaddling. I swaddled him when he was a baby and he got very attached to these blankets. Fortunately, there are four of them so I can change them out sometimes, but the bad thing is that they were expensive. I knew I was going to need to buy some more for Andrew when he came because Luke certainly wasn’t going to allow me to use his. I was lamenting that he had to choose the expensive swaddle blankets for his “blankie” and not some cheap receiving blankets. So, I had created this list in my head of stuff I would need for Andrew and one of those things was swaddle blankets. So, I was putting Luke down for nap yesterday and I remembered as I gave him his blanket. I got mad. I got mad because I won’t need those blankets. It’s the little things that get me.

It was at that point that I realized when you are pregnant you get lots of things that are good, and when you loose a baby you get nothing. When you are pregnant you get a baby shower, I got a memorial service. When you are pregnant you get doctor’s visits, I get counseling sessions. When you are pregnant you get to bring home a baby, and as I left the hospital on the day Andrew was born emptyhanded, I realized there is no greater emptiness than leaving the maternity ward with nothing.

It’s ok to be sad. It’s ok to be angry. Those are all normal grieving emotions and if you don’t allow yourself to feel those things during a difficult time you will short change your grief and end up having to make the circle of grief again. It’s like the children of Isreal wandering the desert for 40 years when they were only a few miles from the Promised Land. You have to keep circling if you don’t allow yourself to fully feel things as you journey. Someone asked me recently why I chose to not have any medication during Andrew’s delivery. I said,  I knew I wanted to feel everything. I needed to feel all the pain physically and emotionally to really come out the other side with my sanity intact. I needed to allow myself to grieve. I keep reminding myself of that even now. It’s a whole lot easier to just stuff down your feelings and not allow them out. They come at the most inconvenient times sometimes. But if you stuff them down and ignore them they will just eat away at you. I was driving to the doctor’s office yesterday and singing along with the radio when a song came on and I found tears streaming down my face. I just allowed myself to sob. I dried my face when I got to the office and hoped no one noticed. I don’t really care if they did though, it’s what I need to do right now. I am allowing myself the space to grieve and to not be ok all the time. I am not going to apologize and tell people I am fine if I am not. That’s how I am going to care for myself. People around you want you to just be ok and not break down. They don’t like it when people they care about are having a rough time. That’s crazy though. It’s not healthy to act like you are ok when you aren’t and it’s not a bad thing to feel sad or angry. We have to change our attitudes about that. If you need to cry in my presence don’t apologize. If you are going through sometime hard, I want to know about it. I will cry with you and I won’t try to cheer you up. It’s not what you need and it’s not what I need.