Sensitive

I've been away, both figuratively and literally. I was out of town last week with my daughter. My first trip ever alone with a child. We both did really well. I thought I'd post while I was gone, but it was nice to get away from pretty much everything about real life, so I barely went near a computer. Before that, I was swamped with work, and life, and couldn't pull my thoughts together.

A year ago, being alone with my daughter for long stretches of time (e.g. on a plane) would frustrate me, make me incredibly impatient, and at times I'd even scream at her. It was a horrible combination of sadness that my other daughter was gone, and anger at myself for not being more present for my younger child. Somehow, I don't feel or react that way these days.

Early on, a friend gave me a book, a sad story in which about half the characters are killed, but told me not to read it. She said I was "sensitive," and to wait a while. Which I did. I couldn't figure out what she meant by that word.

Now, I realize that many of the things that made me sad or angry before don't affect me, at least not the way they used to. It's like the desensitization that supposedly occurs for teens and violence. Watching one violent movie after another tends to make us more aloof towards actual violence. Being sad and angry day after day, seeing other children my daughter's age, coming across her pictures or clothes, all of this seems to have gradually desensitized me.

As I've said before, I do think this is a choice, like many other things. If I'd chosen to preserve her room the way it was before, to stop working and try to live in the past, then I probably would still be sensitive. As another friend said, we're just not equipped to live in "alt" forever. We can pretend only for so long. I admit, I do sometimes imagine her with me, walking along beside the stroller as I push her sister through a store. But it's a brief flash, a wish, a daydream. It's limiting myself to only that which I believe has made me less sensitive.

Having said all this, there's a part of me that wishes I'd started blogging much sooner. It was of course hard to function at all for a very long time. But I wish I had something from then that would show me, show you how much things have changed.

There is one thing. I was keeping a baby journal for my second daughter during her first year. Just after my firstborn died, I wrote a very brief entry there and in my personal diary. One of these days, I'll look them up and post or summarize them. I've always believed there's value in looking back, to see how far you've come, especially when you felt you could barely take a step.

Desensitization. The word has been absolutely ringing in my ears lately.

The Yellow Brick Road

In a March post about Stages of Grief, I described the stages as a spiral. I've been thinking lately about my reluctance to participate in the three groups I belong to and it's led me to thinking about this path I'm on as a spiral. At first, I imagined myself falling off a cliff onto a new path, but now it's more like a tornado picked me up and dropped me somewhere else entirely.

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I started out in the middle of a spiral. When she first gets on the yellow brick road, it's a tight spiral, and she walks it surrounded by all the people there cheering for her because her house fell on the witch. As she keeps walking, the spiral opens up and takes her away from them.

This is exactly how I feel--like the spiral slowly took me away from all the people that surrounded me. Or at least it took me away from near-constant surveillance, from the phone calls and visits of people making sure I was still alive, had gotten out of bed, and fed myself and my baby.

Slowly I've moved back out into the world, back to work, back to stores. The first time I left my house (to go to breakfast with friends and family) I nearly fell apart. I looked around the restaurant and saw so many people, but my daughter's face wasn't among them. And while I hated my house (because that's where she died) I also felt as though by leaving it, I was leaving her.

I'm at a point now where I feel safe in more environments, but I'm still not quite on the open road. I almost want to run back to the center of the spiral sometimes. And I guess I do--I choose to be with the friends who gathered around me during that time. I was at one friend's house and there were several other women there from the group we all belong to. A couple of them have girls my daughter's age and it pained me so much to be there with them, and not see my daughter playing with them.

So for a while, I avoided them. The women and their children. Now I'm back to seeing the mothers, but am still avoiding the daughters. And so it goes, with that group and the others.

I'm planning a tentative step towards one, maybe seeing one of the groups in about 10 days. We'll see how that goes.