Not writing and writing and healing

I haven't written in a while.

This space, while helpful in the beginning of my healing process, turned into another thing that held back my recovery. Not my physical recovery, mind you, but the emotional and psychological one.

Each time I came to this place, I thought I was healing ... until I started writing. I came back here after months of not touching my blog and saw posts that had been started but never finished. Certainly never published.

It's not that I was stuck. Honestly, I had too much going on to be stuck for too long before being pulled out of my thoughts and thrust back into the Mommy Abyss - the tie my shoes, help me wipe, I spilled milk all over the carpet glory that is mothering children.

What was happening was me saying, "This is how I cope." What was really happening was me saying, "This hurts too much. Moving on hurts more than staying here, so I'm just going to stay here counting the days, counting the weeks, waiting for my next round of lab work."

So I stopped.

I stopped counting how many weeks it had been since we found out our baby was gone, how many weeks since my D&C, how many times I'd gotten blood drawn. I stopped counting until a friend due the same week as me delivered her handsome little man at 30 weeks. Then I started counting again. I counted how many weeks pregnant I should be and how many weeks old her miracle was.

I should be 36 weeks pregnant.

But I'm not.

And that's OK.

Sometimes things happen for a reason. Isn't that what I've been saying since December?

I've taken the last five months to reflect on what's happened to my body and my mind. While I don't cry every day and I don't escape to a different room to sob silently because something brings back the pain, I do still feel that ache when I stupidly look at cribs in a store, or baby clothes, or babies. Josie and Charlie fill my heart, but there are two tiny holes where the love for those unborn babies will remain. Those placeholders will never be filled, regardless if we try to conceive again and have one or four or no more children. Those parts of my heart are reserved for the children I never met.

Coincidentally, when my sister was in labor with my niece almost 16 and a half years ago, we had this mantra - Let the pain work for you. I think that's been true in the case of our losses as well.

I was able to use the ache and the pain to finish writing my first novel. I poured the hurt into it. I had to because I was having a lot of trouble living with myself again. The best therapy was finishing Brian and Stella's book and starting Stephanie and Max's story.

Instead of preparing for the birth of a baby around June 13, I'm releasing my book baby on June 2. And I'm scared and nervous and thrilled and blessed ... and pretty sure I'm going to fuck it all up. Ironically, that's how I've felt with each of my four pregnancies and the births of my two girls.

If you're inclined to support a new independent author by pre-ordering the ebook, you can do so for Kindle here.

The NOOK and paperback versions are forthcoming.