No Promises

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I'm listening to The Children's Hour on KUNM fm radio.

John Lennon, singing, "Beautiful Boy."

The monster's gone and Daddy's here....I can hardly wait to see you come of age, but I guess we'll both have to be patient....life's what happens to you while you're busy making other plans....

We can't make promises. As much as a parent's heart swells with love for a child, as deeply as we commit to making something happen, as hard as we wish for it, we can't make promises.

We can, but we can't make them happen, simply by sheer force of will.

He recorded that song right before he was shot down on the sidewalk in front of his home. Wanting things to be so doesn't mean they'll be that way.

I promised Viri Diana that I'd try everything I could think of, not to impose my agenda onto her, but, instead, to provide her with enough options, resources, security and support to find her own way.

I promised her I wouldn't hit her, call her names, play mind games on her, manipulate her or in any way make her my victim, as my mother had done to me.

I promised her I'd always care for her.

I almost didn't go through with the surgery because of that last promise. If she were going to die, I felt, it wasn't my place to kill her. Let nature take its course and kill both of us.

Besides, what would be the point of living, if she were dead?

I never know when something will remind me of my pain, as this song did this morning. I never know when eight years' time will be washed away in an instant, and I'll be transported back to the horror, the self-loathing, the shame, the fury and the grief of her death.

I'm never safe from it. I always forget it's still there, dormant, and that it will resurface whenever the thin veneer of forgetfulness is brushed open. The slightest breeze of association, the most offhanded comment, the tiniest reminder can send me back there, helpless and frantic, blind and howling.

So, I sit in my bed on a sunny morning. And I'm back in the emergency room. I'm alone on that dark sofa, late at night, alone after the surgery, guts ripped open, aching in my shoulders and neck from the carbon dioxide gas they used to inflate my belly. I'm bleeding from my belly and vagina. I'm mute in the overwhelm. I'm frantic to keep a roof over my head, now that the father has abandoned me, when I can barely pick a dropped fork off the floor.

To this day, I don't know if I made the right decision when I had the surgery. I escaped death, true. But I didn't escape life. And life IS what happens while I'm busy making other plans. I feel I've cheated death, done something completely unnatural and forbidden, and I'm to be punished for it from now on.

Nothing changes that. Therapy, meditation, commitment to goals and projects...nothing changes it.

Deep down, it's as though my body, my psyche and the visceral, primative, protective mother animal in me can not forgive me for living after my child died.

It's torture.

Cycles

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After a three month break, I have my menses again. Darn! I was hoping that was over with.

A neighbor had to move suddenly, over in the war zone. She had a bunch of merchandise at her house, to sell at the flea market.

As she was leaving, she hollered out to me that the house was unlocked and that I could take everything they'd left, except the television and the microwave, which went to another neighbor.

I brought home at least two pick up trucks' worth of stuff, including a case of sanitary napkins. I thought at the time they might last me through menopause.

Well, that was about a year and a half ago. I've still got about a hundred pads left.

I literally moaned as I pulled another package out of storage, eyed the few packages remaining, and thought, "I don't ever want to have to buy these damn things again!"

So, maybe the assault to my body from that has weakened me.

I never had any trouble with my menses, not since puberty, anyway. Not until my baby died. Since then, it's been very VERY painful, especially on the left side of my abdomen, where my fallopian tube is missing now.

Every menses since has been torture and a hideous, physical reminder of the loss of my daughter. It's not nearly as painful as the first time was, but it's bad. Close enough.

So, maybe that knocked the wind out of me.