Change shows up vs change show downs

Posted on January 26th, 2011 by Van McO

I blogged in December, but I didn’t post it.

The blog was vague. I wanted to talk about something, but I didn’t want to jinx it. So, the blog didn’t really make any sense. It was likely pretty darn uninteresting, as well.

At the time, when I first wrote it, I was pregnant. I was trying to come to terms, in a happy way, with the idea that maybe I could go back to re-planning that whole “married with children” lifestyle. It would be a new version, of course, with my new cake husband, and certainly way better than the Bundy version. Not to mention way better than my previous version, one would hope.

I wrote the blog, and it didn’t make any sense, so I re-wrote it. It still didn’t make any sense. I was trying to say that I was so thrilled to be pregnant, and possibly soon to be engaged, without saying anything about either of those things. Ordinarily, I think I’m pretty good with the metaphors, but I just didn’t have one on those two days of writing. I sent Scott (site editor/creator) an email saying that I would rewrite it a third time. I would get it figured out on Wednesday, the 29th. I had the day off and I would work it out in font.

I felt so tired on Wednesday. I couldn’t get out of bed for anything, I didn’t write a word. Then on Thursday morning I woke up bleeding. By the following Tuesday we knew definitively there had been a miscarriage. Somewhere in the middle, before we knew for sure, we got engaged.

My poor cake. He had been planning on asking me to marry him when we went on vacation at the end of January. The pregnancy gave him a jolt of urgency. He decided to bump up the asking time to New Year’s Eve. Maybe we’re old fashioned, but we were thinking it would be nice to announce the engagement first. He asked me before we left for the party, around 6:00 pm. I was hurting too much to hang, we ditched the party at 10:00 pm, by 11:00 pm I was in bed, in excruciating pain. New Year’s Eve was the height of the most physically painful part of the loss. I was in bed, looking at my ring, wondering how to deal with being incredibly happy and desperately sad at the same time. I’m not sure what he was thinking.

No one has ever really died on me before, unless you count my siamese cat. All the grandparents that were living when I was born are actually still living. (One is so mean, she will probably live forever.) I’ve never been to the funeral of someone that I knew well. Actually, I’ve only been to one funeral. I’ve known plenty of loss, but never really knew from grief.

Now, everyone knows how I bounce. I bounce back on the surface first, but I bounce back pretty completely at some point. I’m pretty effing bouncy. And the whole writing thing usually helps tons. But, I feel like maybe I skipped a step in my bounce this time, because I don’t know how to do this kind of bounce. (Shit, what’s another word for bounce that doesn’t sound all frollic-y? I apologize for my redundancy.) The break-up ritual is: drink with your girls and talk smack about your ex. I guess the death ritual is a funeral (BTW, I want a party). What is the miscarriage ritual? No one talks about it, right? You just pick up and move on?

In my case, so far, I’ve eaten a lot of cookies, and some cheeseburgers, talked to just a few people, tried to get back on the regular “how to merge two lives” track with Mr. Cake- and man, have I kissed and hugged my poor four year old into infinity. I don’t know what else to do. And I’m still so sad, and there’s still so much to be happy about.

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Van McO

Van only writes when things get crazy, she is inconsistent at best. Don't get hooked. She is otherwise busy being a mom, wife, professional tidying maven (yes, that's a thing for which people will pay money), and working at killing the cancer.