Testing

It is funny how things come up once and then right away, there they are again.  Yesterday morning I was at breakfast with two dear friends (and Zach, my 1.5 year old) and we (well, the girls and I, Zach was not really involved in the conversation) were talking about our blogs.  We all want to blog more and were sort of analyzing the things that deter us from doing so.  One thing I have been hesitant about is sharing my real name and information on my blog-what if someone I know reads it and is offended?!  Maybe I will just keep everything anonymous that way no one will be offended.  The problem with that is that getting to know people and working through emotions together as humans journeying down a path is the exact reason I started I Measure Every Grief.  So, it was decided: I will post my real name just as I will post my real thoughts in hope that others will do the same.  Offense be damned.

Then, last night something was said that I really want to blog about.  The problem? Blogging it will put my real feelings out there.  It is not really that I am afraid to show those feelings: they are real and mine and I am not ashamed of them.  What I am afraid of it hurting the feelings of the person who said something that I want to blog about.  What if she reads it and is crushed that she hurt me in the way she did?  Do I even have the right to blog it if I didn't say anything to her at the time?  Is it like a train that left the station: it is too late now to get on, so keep quiet and move on.

Well, all that to say that I don't think it is any small coincidence that the girls and I were just talking about this very thing and then the opportunity presented itself that very day.  I know I need to let my thoughts be known because I want to be real and, in real life, people say things without thinking and sometimes those things hurt.  And sometimes we can decide how to react. And sometimes we can't.  This is a time I could and I think it shows progress.

So, here it goes.  In order to understand what happened, you have to know more of my story than you currently do from my one beginning post.  You may remember I was five months pregnant this past April (2011) and, at a 20 week routine ultrasound, we found out our dear baby Micah had died.  There is so much more to the story, but what you need to know now is that we had two choices: deliver Micah in the hospital (on the maternity ward with all the living babies) or go to Planned Parenthood and have a dilation and evacuation (basically it is what a later term abortion is only our baby was already dead).  Neither choice seemed real.  Neither was pleasant or good or beautiful.  We made the choice to go to Planned Parenthood and we traveled a path neither my husband or I ever thought we'd go down.  We saw and heard and learned things that will never leave our minds, things that changed us forever.  Sometimes I look at our choice and think we chose wrong, but then I realize there is no right in the situation we were in and I think we choice the least wrong possible for us.

I won't go into more details than that for now, but it was the most difficult experiences of my life.  Even now I sometimes can't stop my mind from thinking about that choice: What happened to Micah when they "evacuated" him?  What happened to his little body after? How is it even possible a sane woman would choose to do something like that to her living child? Did I make the wrong choice even though my child was dead?  Did I honor his memory or take the easy way out?

Any way, last night I was together with some dear friends celebrating a birthday.  These ladies have been amazing-they have journeyed beside me through my grief and insanity, they have laughed with me, cried with me, listened to me and supported me no matter what is going on in their lives (including one gal who is pregnant with her first baby-how hard to e traveling that path while your friend travels the one of loss).

Somehow the topic of Planned Parenthood protesters came up and one friend went into graphic detail about a sign a protester held of an aborted baby, describing the horror of what happened to the dear angel's body as he (or she) was pulled from the womb too soon.  It felt like time froze and I could see the two roads that Robert Frost refers to diverging in the woods: I could let my mind be sucked into the sadness and unhealthiness of thinking about poor Micah and his little body and what must have happened to him or I could be strong and I know I made the choice I made with the information at the time, I did what I thought was best for me and my family and that he was not with me any more-his body was just the shell he inhabited for all too short a time.

I could feel myself drifting away from the group of women, my mind disengaging with the present and going into the past, into a world imagining what might have been.  I am not sure how long I let myself go into the unhealthy place, but I know it was not as long as it used to be.  I chose to come back.  I chose to reengage with my friends, to be present and enjoy their company.  And I am glad I did.