Stop...Pause...or at least Mute

I have been sitting here with this blogger window open for a while now and I simply cannot think of anything worth saying that doesn't make me sound like a broken record. I'm sad...blah, blah, blah. I miss Alex...blah, blah, blah.

Fact is, I'm at some sort of an impasse in my life and I don't really know where to go from here. I'm not pregnant (that I know of anyway), I haven't "moved on" from my grief and yet I'm not as grief-stricken as I used to be, and I'm not entirely sure exactly what to think or feel anymore. Sometimes I feel completely in control of myself and other times I feel like I'm hanging on to my sanity by the thinnest of threads that could break at any moment...sending my spiraling into some sort of mental and emotional quagmire that I previously only associated with mental cases and drug addicts. It's not depression. Lord knows I've been forwarded the symptoms enough...and been subject to enough amateur psychoanalysis...to make me somewhat of an expert on that topic.

It's sort of like being frozen in a moment...unable to move or speak...but watching it play out all around me again and again...and watching the rest of the world rush by oblivious to the existence of this moment that torments me. It's actually two moments. The moment I was sitting on the sofa in the living room and I KNEW something wasn't right. And the moment Alex was delivered and whisked over to the baby warmer (that wasn't even plugged in). I think I'm willing those moments to change...trying to focus all my energy on them so that this will have a different outcome. If I had just gotten my ass up off the couch and gone to the hospital. If he would have just breathed.

I know it's insanity. I know there is nothing to be done to make this nightmare go away. But I can't stop the video feed in my brain from repeating those moments over and over. And some days it's easy to join the whirlwind of activity outside the replay...but others it is nearly impossible to make it quiet down so I can think of anything else.

For my whole life my grandmother's mental illness has been something that has terrified me. Despite finding amusement in her delusional grandeur (she did, after all, invent the lego and Pokemon), I have always wondered and worried. It hasn't been something we have ever talked about as a family, but now I fear I understand her a little too well. It's so easy to disengage and let the insanity take over. It's so easy to slip away and let your demons take control so that you don't have to face whatever hurt and sadness you have to face.

I look at Alex's picture here on my desk and I marvel at how much he looked like his big brother. And I look at Sam's third birthday picture and wonder about all that could have been...and all that might be. I can't even refer to Alex as a pregnancy loss. He was HERE...he was BEAUTIFUL...he was so LOVED...he was PERFECT...he was a PERSON. This is senseless and I'm so freaking angry about it that I can't even describe it to people. It's the kind of anger that eats you alive and makes you a bitter and nasty person. And I recognize that it's there...and I want to deal with it. But more than that, I want to throw a chair across the room and make the images in my brain stop. He's gone...so why can't he leave me the hell alone?!?! I just want some peace. It doesn't seem fair that he gets to hang around in my brain and torture me for the rest of my life...so close yet so far away.

So I take a deep breath, have a good sob, and move on. On to what? That's a very good question. Where does one slightly psychotic, grieving, angry mother go from here? The images won't change, but they will continue to play. I'm guessing they'll never stop...If I'm lucky I can pause them for a short time when I want/need. But for those days when I can't even pause them, I have to find a way to quiet them so they don't drown out the rest of the world. Where did I leave the remote? I know just where to find the mute button, even in the dark.