Monday 2 April 2012

The Dam

There comes a point where your grief and pain rises up. It swells and expands, it whips itself up, it froths and rages.
You change your routine, you do anything you can to stem up, to calm it, to force the waters back down.
There comes a point where you fail.
There comes a point where your dam breaks and you stop, mid-attempt to stop it and the shaking takes you over and things slip from your hands and your face is wet before you figure out you're crying. And then the tears cover you, drip everywhere, you can't wipe them away as fast as they come and then you stop caring, you stop trying to stop it and just give in to it, hoping it makes you feel better, hoping it helps, hoping it fixes something, SOMETHING broken inside you.

But it doesn't. The crying stops, eventually, but nothing is better, nothing has been fixed, you've achieved nothing but a basket full of tissues and a damp t-shirt from after you gave up on even the tissues.

Crying doesn't fix my stupid broken womb. But neither does tidying, or reading, or laundry, or obsessively organizing bracelets. It might distract me for a day if I keep it up enough, but I always, eventually, reach the end of the book (or series, if the pain is deep) or the bottom of the laundry basket or run out of things to organize, or just the strength to do it with. And then I even run out of tears. And then I really just....don't know where to go.

7 pregnancies, one baby. The cruel, cruel twist being that with each one I want another baby more and more. I wish I could stop, just stop the cycle of conception and waiting and pain and broken dams, but I can't. I'm just too stupid or too self-destructive to give in and admit defeat.

Later, I might write something about the politics of miscarriage (including some of the stupid things people who've never had one say to you) but right now I'm busy trying to hold myself together and waiting for the patches of salt water on my clothes to dry.