The family newsletter I didn't send.

I want so badly to write a funny post, about the family newsletter I didn't send. I'd recap 2008, including the births of Joseph and Frankencoochie - one adorable and wonderful, the other terrifying and still needing repair. I'd talk about anesthesia being the best (and feeling like the only) sleep I've gotten, and the stresses that can be added to a family by the birth of a baby, threat of the loss of that baby only 12 days later to bacterial pneumonia and my concurrent illness. His was 8 days in the hospital, mine was 8 months of antibiotics and two surgeries...with the after effects still ongoing. I want to make jokes, make light.....but the words get caught in my throat.

I want to write that post, but I can't.

Instead, I want to write about my son.

In less than three weeks, my son will be a year old. I'm not having an easy time with this. It was hard when Emily turned a year old, my baby having grown so fast.....but it is harder this time. This year seems to have gone so much faster than her first, and we've all been through so much more this time around.

My son is going to turn a year old, and it will mark the biggest miracle I've ever witnessed. He is on the verge of walking, he's saying some words (Mama, Dada, Hi, Wow, yes, Emmy, yeah, kitty) and he lights up every room he enters. He is such a flirt, shameless. He is healthy and vibrant and funny. He is HEALTHY.

So many times I prayed for his safe arrival, not knowing the worst of the danger would be after he was out. It's starting to get easier to forget (or at least not think about) how he looked with the oxygen tubes he wore for weeks. More days go by at a time without me remembering how he looked, tiny and small in a hospital bed, hooked up to so many monitors it was hard to hold him - but I did every chance I got.

He's going to be a year old, and sometimes it's hard not to feel cheated. Cheated by the time that passed while he was so sick and in the hospital - time that should have been spent nesting with my newborn. Hard not to feel cheated by the time I've spent ill, in surgery, recovering, then in surgery again. I want a rewind button so I can go back and enjoy some of those days, because he will never again be that little. So instead I try to hold onto these days.

Sometimes that means when he cries at night, even when I should let him settle himself, I still go in. Sometimes it means I go in to check on him when he's sleeping - to make sure he's warm enough, to look at his sleeping body and watch his chest rise and fall.

I'm not ready for him to be a year old, but I am more grateful than I can ever express that THIS is my problem, that THIS is what I'm grieving.

If I were to sum up the real message I'd send my friend and family,
"2008 was bad in so many ways, but it could have been so much worse, we have been incredibly lucky and we are grateful to have had friends and family that came through for us when we needed them most."

Just call me Kermit.

Green has always been a good color for me. With pale skin, dark hair and green eyes it usually worked well. This particular shade, however, does not suit me a bit.

My brother's girlfriend is pregnant.

I want to be happy for them. I want to think, "Yay! Another niece or nephew who will think I am super cool." I'm just not there, and I have only a few days to get it together before I have to fake it.

It might be easier if the relationship between the two of them were better, if the girlfriend didn't hold my niece (a few months younger than my own daughter) over my brother as the ultimate bargaining tool, if it weren't for the fact that my niece is the main reason the two of them are still together. It might be substantially easier if my brother hadn't been considering leaving her psycho ass anyway, despite her behavior with regard to their daughter, and now that has all changed. Not saying he should or shouldn't, just saying she is too much like my own mother to be good for anyone.

It might be easier if the girlfriend wasn't giggling over her oops, or making "he just gets near me" comments - according to my sister, who was the one to tell me. She didn't want everyone to show up at my house for Christmas and have it hit me like a load of bricks when I opened the door. Because she is teeny, and 2 months along, and showing.

It might be easier, but I doubt it, because despite my thoughts that I was getting over some of this infertility crap I'm apparently not over it. I'm ashamed to say that as soon as my sister told me, the tears were in my eyes and I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. WHY? My family is complete, there were never going to be more children for me beyond two even if I hadn't had the infection and subsequent hysterectomy. It's not like I was planning/hoping for more children and now it won't happen, and it's happening for someone else.

I'm embarassed to be this upset about it. I know part of it is their lack of regard for the miracle of life and her specific lack of appreciation for the daughter they have. It's only part though. In what feels like being petty, these emotions I'm feeling are mostly about me....and this isn't about me.

It isn't about me.

I keep telling myself and yet I'm the one having the big ass pity party as if it is. Maybe it's grief over the fact that I once deluded myself about having an ooops the second time around, or at least not trying for years.

I have tried to write this so many times, and no matter how I write it, I sound like an asshole. THe thing is, I don't have it in me to write it in a nicer way, and I don't have it in me to delete it again.

It's not easy being green.