Another Monday

12.2.13

      Mondays. Mondays are rough. The worst day of the week. I use to not mind them, but these days they are just hard.

     This Monday was no different, except that I got to work with one of my favorite doctors. Doc was the first of my work friends to show up on the day that Kaitlyn passed. This Monday, he had two cases that would stretch into the late afternoon and he asked me if I would be staying to work with him all day or if I had "A more pressing engagement" (he was totally joking). I have a standing appointment with Kate on Monday afternoons, so I told him I needed to go talk about my feelings that afternoon and wouldn't be staying with him all day.

    "I'm really glad you are doing that." Doc said. "My wife was really worried about you. We don't talk about serious stuff that often, but I wanted to tell you that we also suffered two miscarriages. We were devastated. One of them was at about 5 months, but nowhere near where you were. My wife said that she would have found a bridge if that had happened to her."

     I paused for a minute and then I looked at him and said, "Well that would be the easy way out, wouldn't it?"

     Now before everyone starts freaking out and calling Alex telling him I'm about to go find a bridge,  I am nowhere near the point of taking my own life. I am incredibly sad, at times downright depressed, but not suicidal. That being said, death is the easy way out at this point. Death means release. It means not having to slug through the day to day. It means being reunited with my maker and with my daughter all in the same instant. Joy. Death and Joy are now hand in hand.

     But at the same time, death is selfish. Death means that my plans are bigger than God's. It means that I have decided that His plans are not good enough for me. It means that I am willing to add to my husbands, parents, families, and friends pain. It is a complete loss of hope, and losing site of the bigger picture than just the loss of my daughter.

     I am making the choice to hang around and see what God will do with me, Kaitlyn, and Alex. I am choosing to trust in His plan and greater purpose for this pain, even though sometimes I am blinded by it.

     Mid-afternoon, I cut out of work and headed over to Kate's office. I was already hating Monday, and the conversation with Doc didn't really make that better. I headed upstairs as soon as I got to her office.

      "How are you today?" she asked, always the opener to our sessions. "I'm really sad today." I admitted. "I am having a really hard time with Mondays." "Mondays are hard for a lot of people," she replied. "I don't like Mondays because its the beginning of something new. Like time just keeps marching on and there's nothing I can do to stop it. I want it to hurry up and slow down all at the same time." She nodded in agreement.

     "I'm starting to remember things." I said quietly, tears starting to well up in my eyes. "One of my friends is pregnant and she sent me her sonogram. I'm really happy for her, but it makes me so incredibly sad. I miss my daughter. I remember one time in the office on one of the early sonograms she was being stubborn. She had her back hidden in the lower part of my stomach and the tech couldn't visualize her spinal cord, so she kind of bounced my tummy to get Kaitlyn to flip over. She looked at the image on the screen and got the measurements she needed, and then next thing we knew Kaitlyn had flipped back over to how she had originally been laying. The tech bounced my stomach again to get her to turn one more time, and when she put the probe back on my stomach she was looking down at the crown of Kaitlyn's head and that stubborn girl was shaking her head 'No' IN my stomach!" The tears were flowing freely now as I laughed through the last part of that story. "She was SO stubborn. She did whatever she wanted. That's why her dang noggin was always under my rib cage. She wasn't going to do what everybody else did. How can somebody have so much of a personality when they're not even out in the world yet?"

     Kate smiled at me like she always does and said, "The fog of grief is starting to lift on you. Some memories are going to be sharper, and some are going to fade. It takes a lot of time for that fog to lift, but sometimes when it does it can be like everything just happened yesterday. Give yourself grace to feel that. You may not think that you have come very far, but I promise you are doing really well."