I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore .. .. ..

Remember when Dorothy wakes up after her adventures in Oz, wondering if it was all real??

Or have you ever gasped for air, not realizing you'd been holding it without even realizing it?

Friday morning I sat up in bed, looked around and wondered how I got there.  I took a deep breath, a breath that felt like the first refreshing gulp after a long plunge underwater.

People had said after the first year things get better.  People said it wouldn't be so cumbersome, so heavy.  People said and I didn't believe.

Yet, there I sat, feeling victorious.  Feeling free.

I didn't realize how terrified I'd been.  How choked and drowned I was in the sorrow and the fear of the first year. The fear of what things meant - or didn't mean - without Colton.  I didn't realize how much I was suffocating until I began to breath again.

I survived.  I survived his loss, his birth, and finally his burial.  All the days that haunted me in sleep and wake, that tortured and taunted me, threatening to destroy me.

I survived.

For whatever reason my son was taken from this earth, but not from me.  He is alive all around me.  I just have to look and find him and seek out those that reassure me and not those that drown me.  I have to focus on the love, not the loss.  I have to remember I am stronger, braver, more able than even I give myself credit for.  That if I can make it through the first year, I can make it through anything.

Life still swirls around me.  I still feel on the outside looking in most days.  Though I smile and laugh and tiptoe back into the madness.  I find myself excited, hopeful about things to come.  Little things, big things, every thing. 

I realize life didn't lose meaning, I was just too scared to find the sense in it all.  I was too scared to engage because once you do the door is wide open to be sucked in, sucked away, and lost in the twirling circumference around you.

This, however, is not the mother Colton knew.  I find myself ashamed in sorts of the way I've been. I speak of wanting to honor my son by being myself, yet I sat for a year choking in the grief not even realizing I was holding my breath, waiting for something worse to happen.  I think, at times, I really wondered if I'd survive.  If I'd make it.  Or if one night my heart would just stop beating, too.  At times I wished for that.  Just let my heart give out and let me be with my son. 

And then it all snapped.  I took a deep breath, I saw the world around me.  I made it through to the other side.  I have no delusion that everything is fine.  Things will still trigger me, my heart will still ache, I will always long for my son.  But I am here.  I am alive. And I will be okay.

Happy be-a-little-lated Unbirthday sweet Colton.

Happy rebirth to me.

The Eye of the Storm

They say in the eye of a storm everything stops.  The winds are whirling around you, debris ripping through the air.  Yet the spot you are in stays completely still, untouched, numb to the chaos around it.

The world around me continues to turn.  People bustle from place to place, errands to run, things to do.  Work continues to flow all around me.  Children continue to run on the playgrounds. 

Yet, in my little bubble, there is silence.  There is stillness.  I am stuck, suspended in this time, with the chaos around me and stunned stillness in me.

This week a year ago I realized my son was dead.  Tuesday a year ago - today - I confirmed it.  In about two hours will be the year difference in today and the start of meds to induce my labor.  Tomorrow is the actual date - 11-16 - that we confirmed Colton was dead and began the process to release him from my body, which was so desperately holding on to him.  Thursday (last year Wednesday) was a day of blur, a day when I realized that as each moment passed part of me seeped away from myself and into the storm whirling around me, shredding everything in its tracks.  And Friday will be the 18th ... the day Colton's body (his soul long gone) entered this world.  And the last little bit of strength gave like a rope frazzled enough to snap. 

People talk to me, and I hear them, yet I do not process.  Thoughts pass through my mind and leave no footprint for future reference. All I can think about, all I can feel, is the deep loss and desire to have my son with me.

I know, realistically, that won't happen.  I know he is gone and this situation cannot be fixed.  I know, reasonably, that no amount of tears will fill the gaping valley ripped in my heart when I lost Colton.

Yet the tears still fall in buckets.  The sadness still swallows me whole.  The world, if only - hopefully - for these next few weeks, freezes and there is nothing but the emptiness he left behind.

I continue to work. I continue to be domesticated. I visit with friends, I make plans.  I pretend to be normal, to be infused in the storm around me, in the cyclone of life. 

Inside me, though, is a stillness, a silence, a void ... Just like any center of a storm.