Blue

Less than three minutes.  The walk from our new home to the public elementary school the girls were supposed to attend this year takes less than 3 minutes.  That's the number one reason we chose the home, which is lovely and suits us well but we had a perfectly lovely home that suites us well before we moved, except that it wasn't a three minute walk away from the school.  We didn't live in the neighborhood with their would-be classmates.  

Marcos first raised interest in living in the neighborhood surrounding the school during Eden's kindergarten year last year.  I was easily sold on the idea, as I was bussed out of my home school neighborhood starting in the 3rd grade.  I rarely got to go to a friend's house after school, and even less frequently was able to have friends over to my house.  I loved the idea of cooking dinner in the kitchen for the girls' friends once in a while, and being able to walk their friends home down the street.  

Like a fool, I honestly believed we would be returning to school in two weeks - Maybe after Easter break.  As we signed the closing documents on our home, I certainly didn't think we would not be returning to school in the fall.  Sitting on the school campus, reviewing enrollment documents for Delilah with the staff, I believed that this Wednesday, August 12, I would be taking that three minute walk, the girls' hands in mine, to their first day of 1st grade and TK.  

Things aren't going to play out the way I had hoped.  

The school, along with all of the other schools in the district, will be starting the fall with distance learning.  We've made the very difficult decision to withdraw the girls from the public school system for now.  I still find myself vacillating as to whether we are doing the right thing for our children, just as I am sure the people who made this decision for the public schools have wavered themselves.  I don't know what the right decision is this moment, and I know that we will still be seeing the repercussions of today's decisions many years down the road.  My only goal is to mitigate the disruption to Eden's and Delilah's lives.  5 months ago they were abruptly shut out of school and other public places, isolated from their grandparents and their cousins and friends.  The same thing that every other child was going through, except every other child isn't mine - Eden and Delilah are mine.  They sacrificed without being asked if they were willing to sacrifice.  And now I am angry that we couldn't pull together as a community to sacrifice for all of our children and I'm driven now by what is best for them.  

I do understand that everyone's plans for this school year have changed.  

But I'm tired of having to change my plans.  And even more than that, I'm tired of being told I just need to change my plans and roll with the punches, as though the punches don't suck.  

Having my children attend school, just as I attended school and my parents attended school and as we have structured our society for decades now, didn't seem like so much to hope for. 

Having my son live for 11 days didn't seem like so much to hope for.  

9 and a half years ago my dreams for my son were shattered with three words:  "Incompatible with life."  So why should three words, "All distance learning," be so devastating now?  But they are.  Words can't express how defeated I feel right now.  Why can't shit just go right?   That's about all I can come up with. 

This is my annual "Blue" entry.  I usually write this entry in June, around the time of Gabriel's birthday or anniversary of his passing, depending on the time, and when the words find their way to my brain and out through my fingertips.  Two months have passed since Gabriel's 9th birthday, and I still don't have the words.  Every ounce of my brain power goes to my job, which has become increasingly stressful as we still have not been permitted to return to in-person appearances.  Every bit of my creative thought goes into figuring out how to reassemble a  sense of normalcy for my daughters.  Every day I find myself teetering on the edge of a hideous breakdown and wanting to flee, but there's no where to go and so every day I find myself resenting the trap I am in, but knowing that some degree of lockdown is still what the community needs.  I would go to the bar and have a drink and a think on the issue, but, you know. 

I think some people find the response easy:  We definitely should be locked down, or we definitely shouldn't be locked down.  I envy them.  But I think most of us are somewhere in the middle.  I don't know what's best.  I know I worry for my mental health every day.  For as long as I can remember, I spend most days fighting thoughts that I am worthless, and now our culture is largely telling me, "Yes, Andrea, you are in fact worth less than the person who you may or may not infect."  So I tell myself, "They're right.  You're not that important."  Every day, I have to look for a reason to live.  Sometimes the reason comes easily, when I first hear the girls stir in the morning.  Other days, it's not so easy to find, on those days when I genuinely believe the girls would be better off without a mother who has to regularly claw her way out of depression and anxiety.  On those days the reasons may be as big as fear of hell, to wanting to know the judge's decision in a pending trial, to the season premier of The Handmaid's Tale being so close if I could just not kill myself today. I always find a reason and I suspect I always will but my guess is I will always struggle.

So maybe that's why I like a plan.  A calendar of deadlines to keep me from dying so that there's always one more reason ahead of me. 

I was really looking forward to that first walk to school with my girls, and even if I mark my calendar for next year, I'm not sure how I'm going to make it there.  

My Will Surives

Roll over.

Throw the blankets off.

One foot on the floor.

Two feet on the floor.

Walk.

I will myself to start the day, because that is the hardest part.

Soon, the girls will wake up and I'll be too busy to notice that I am grieving, but I will feel it with every step.

Though some days are harder than others, not a day has gone by since this day 9 years ago that I haven't struggled just to keep living.   I wonder daily what right I have to breathe when my son cannot.  I wonder why I simply couldn't take his place and give him, with all the potential of a new life, the opportunity to live.

But I did give him life.  I carried him, even under circumstances where most women wouldn't, and every single day that I carried him I knew he would be something special.  Even when those dreams shifted, even when I knew his life would be short, I knew it would be meaningful, because he was unique, his own person, with his own destiny and his own purpose in life.

Some days those thoughts carry me.  We aren't promised a long life.  Not a day is guaranteed.  It's cosmic.  It's scientific.  It's the way things go.

Other days - today - I can't understand how the world keeps spinning, how the sun goes on shining, why business is still conducted, why people still drive the streets and still drive like such assholes and I hate them all, every single one of them because they dare to be on the road with me on this day that the world ended yet still somehow went on.  How is my heart still beating with this tremendous hole deep inside of it?

Nothing makes sense.  My baby had just started moving; how could he be dying already?  My son has died; why am I still alive?  My heart is broken; how can it still love?  My daughters are healthy and thriving; why isn't my son?  The world ended 9 years ago today; so how is it that life has gone on?

Determination.  Hope.  Gideon.  Will power.  Promise.  Whiskey.  Noelle.  Clients.  Mock Trial.  Marcos.  Eden.  Delilah.  Spring Training.  Love.  Every day I search for a reason, and every day for 9 years I have been able to find one.  I search for the reason, I will myself to start the day, I get through the hardest part.  Life is hard.  It is fragile.  It is unfair and imperfect and sometimes it's short.  So I take every day I am given.  I take every day because my son only got ten of them, and I take every day because I pray my daughters have thousands of them.  I take every day, the weight of Gabriel's death weighing deep in my bones, bleeding from my heart, eased by the hope that I will see him again some day.  That is how I get by in this post-apocalyptic world - Finding the beauty in what remains, and hope in what is to come.

The Couches

One fine day, I reported for an ultrasound.

The baby was not cooperating, and I should go walk around a bit.

"Something's wrong," my child's father asserted.

"You're paranoid."

But actually, he wasn't. A few moments later the tech told me to wait for the doctor and a few moments after that, a doctor who ruined my fucking life brought my world down with three words: "Incompatible with life." In two weeks we would see a specialist, who may or may not confirm the diagnosis.

So I did what anyone would do.

I shopped for couches.

"We're having a baby. We need something to bring a baby to."

With all the moronic faith in the world I turned over the pittance of a tax return, our first as a married couple (and as it turns out, one of only two we would file together), to buy a sofa and a loveseat. 

How stupid of me, to believe. 

It didn't fix anything. Not long after, a specialist confirmed the words of that bitch ass whore slut idiot doctor. My baby had anencephaly. He would die.

I had options, but there was no choice for me. I did the only right thing, and I carried my baby, and I had my baby and 2 days after his birth, Gabriel and I were discharged from the hospital and sent home.  We laid on those couches and lived and cuddled and loved and fought and snuggled and after eight days on those couches, he died. In my arms. On the couch.

I waited long hours on those couches for Gabriel's father to come home, drunk. I crawled from the depths of my despair, some days dragging myself from my bed only to get so far as those couches.  When I was divorced and needed a roommate to help with the rent, I relinquished the couches to a stranger as a part of communal living space.

One day, sitting on the sofa writing thank you notes my baby shower, I became quite aware my unborn child would be born that day, and Eden came barreling into the world hours later.

Those couches were picked up and moved to our new home and the memories of my son were stretched thinner as I built a new home and a new family and new memories of those couches.

We decided to buy new couches, and I could handle that. But the old couches, The Couches, must stay in our living room until we were sure that the new family sectional was a good fit.

So every morning the memories and couches greet me, assaulting me with reality. People live, but people die. My beautiful daughters don't know how every breath I take both rewards and punishes me. They still jump and play on the old couches, unaware how The Couches are haunting me.

It's January. And I'm fucking sad. I'm sitting on my new reclining sectional, plugged in to its power source, with my cocktail in its built-in cup holder, grieving the 9 year old couches in the next room.  Grieving the Andrea who died the day she learned her son would die.

Countdown to D-Day has begun.