Sometimes they’re good and comforting, providing a way to still spend ‘time’ with my Mom even though she’s not here anymore.  Sometimes they’re bad, never scary and nightmarish but just bad as in upsetting.  This morning I woke up from the first upsetting Mom dream I’ve had in ages and I just couldn’t shake it.  I got up to go pee (again) and starting sobbing in the bathroom.  JP got up to make sure I was ok and I just sobbed.  We went back to bed and he held me and I continued to cry as he tried to get me to think of other things.  Eventually I calmed down and fell asleep again.

But the dream is still with me and I feel exhausted and ‘off’.  Often the dreams bring things up to the surface, how I regret some of the choices I made near the end of Mom’s life.  How I so badly wished I had stayed at home with her and not gone away back to work.  I think it’s that JP was going through papers this weekend.  He found the paper where he’d written down notes he’d taken when he spoke to Mom’s Dr., when I dissolved into tears, about how the end of Mom’s life was likely to happen, and how quickly.  I know that I had no way of knowing it would happen so fast but I still just wish so badly that I had just stayed.  Part of me feels guilty for not being there, for not insisting.   Part of me feels guilty for feeling glad that I didn’t have to watch her be so sick when I went back to work.  Part of me wonders that if I HAD been there to see how sick she was that I might have somehow been able to help her more, to make her go to more Dr’s appointments so that she wouldn’t have died so quickly, so that we might have had more warning, more time to say everything, or anything, or at least goodbye.  I know these thoughts aren’t productive, I try not to think about this stuff most of the time.  I try to focus on Mom’s life, on remembering her, holding on to the good parts.  I can’t change the last few months of her life and it was such a short part of who she is.

But still.

It’s hard.  Losing her was hard.  Missing her is hard.  And I know that there will be many, many more times where I will miss her terribly.   Each milestone that we will *hopefully* have with our little one I will wish she was here to share it with.  There will be countless more times when I will wish I could call her.  When I will wish that everything was like it was when she was alive.

Somehow I will make it through the days and the years without her.  But on days like today it’s just really, really hard.   And it doesn’t help that  we’ll be going on our hospital tour tonight, visiting the ward where I had and lost our first baby. And tomorrow, we’ll be getting an ultrasound (just to make sure all is well) in the room where we learned our first baby’s heart had stopped.  Which will be followed  by getting a breast ultrasound (I found a lump in my armpit), just like my Mom had to find out she had breast cancer.  A tough couple of days ahead.  I will at least try to feel good about having the opportunity to see our little one again and I know that it is unlikely the lump is anything but normal breast tissue changes from pregnancy and will try not to worry unless told otherwise.  Easier said than done of course.

 

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