Frustrated

Lately I've just felt so frustrated and discouraged with this new life of mine. It sucks to literally not be able to make yourself happy, especially when you've generally been a happy person before. I know that happiness is a choice and blah, blah, blah but it's not for me right now. I can't just choose to be happy when I am still just so heartbroken and feel, in a way, as if my choices have been taken away from me. I would never have chosen for Gabriel to die, for me and my family to have to deal with the enormous grief of losing a baby, or any of the other junk that comes with depression and this world of baby loss. I don't feel as if I have the choices to do the things that I want to do because I'm always grieving and depressed and I don't just have a choice to just stop that. Depression is just not very convenient.

There are days when I'm just so ready to be through with the grief, to just be done. It's just too hard and tiring to have to do this day after day. I know I have to go through this before it can get better and I don't have any choice but to go through it. A book I read by an LDS woman whose timing coincidentally paralled mine (due at Christmas time, lost her baby at 18 weeks) wrote this about the stages of grief:

"The third stage brings disorientation and disorganization. This is most severe in the fourth and six months after the loss. Depression hits hardest at this time. We found ourselves wavering between lack of motivation and wanting to work all of the time. We felt like overeating at times; other times we didn’t want to eat at all. We found it difficult to make decisions. I often avoided going out of the house or to family gatherings."

This is where I am...and it's frustrating because everything about it is not me. I greatly dislike the lack of organization in this whole thing. I can't think clearly and I feel like I'm in a constant fog when it comes to planning and deciding things because I honestly don't know whether I'll be up or down when it comes to each moment. I don't feel motivated to do the things I'm expected to do and can't seem to get the desire to do them no matter how much I try. When I do end up doing them, it just makes me feel worse because I feel pushed when I'm just not ready.

One of the things I'm frustrated with is that I'm in this new group....parents who have lost a child....and it sucks to be here. I was finally able to go to a baby loss support group. It was good and it was bad. It was so nice to be able to feel like I could really talk about how I felt and others really understood because they were also saying the same things I was thinking. It helped to know that all the crazy things in my head aren't just in mine. Everyone there had a different story, but we all shared the same loss of our babies and all of the dreams we had for them. It was also good to be able to recognize that I had actually come a long way in my grief. There were those that had just lost their babies and are at such an extremely difficult stage and those that were a year out that were in a much better place, although still having such a hard time. I could see that I'm now somewhere in between and it was good to see that eventually this will get "easier", for lack of a better word. There was something that I hated though. There was a point when I realized that everyone there was just complaining about how much it sucks to be here and the awful thing is that as much as we just needed some time to complain, there is not one single thing any of us can do about it. Our babies are always going to be dead.

I hate that part about me too. I just hate being such a complainer. I'm sure anyone reading this (anybody out there any more?) doesn't want to hear me complain. I don't want to be like this and I know the complaining won't change my situation, but getting it out there also is helpful for me too. I don't want to become bitter about all of this, and yet I feel like there are times that I just can't stop the bitterness from seeping in. I can't help but feel the hopelessness.

There's something that I read a few months ago that I've often come back to:

"When you are compelled to give up something or when things that are dear to you are withdrawn from you, know that this is your lesson to be learned right now, but know also that as you are learning this lesson, God wants to give you something better."

~Elder Enzio F. Busche

That's what I want, the better, not the bitter and yet I often lose sight of how to get to the better. Frankly, right now there is nothing better about this new life of mine. I have yet to find many things that are good about Gabriel's death and the ache I feel with him gone. I keep doing the things that everyone suggests to get better, and most of the time I don't see much progression, yet sometimes I do. I still have a very grateful heart for all of the things I've been blessed with and I think now, more than ever, I take the time to recognize them because I need to remind myself that this is all worth it. I search more for those tender mercies that show my Heavenly Father's love for me. But they're not always the things I want. Spoiled kid, remember? I'm learning that I'm incredibly impatient and the things I want, the better things, may take a lifetime to get to. I think it's harder to even trust that now I'll get some of the things I want. I trusted that we'd have Gabriel and it was such a disappointment when that was taken from us. I know that his death was part of the plan for our family but now it's hard to trust that our future plans won't be filled with continual hurt. Henry B. Eyring said,

“We cannot see the future with precision, but we can know what the Lord intends and what it will take for each of us to qualify personally to participate.”

The word that stands out there to me is participate. I don't feel much like participating right now but yet I so want to participate in that future with so much promise. However, if I don't participate now it will make that future much more bleak. I know I have to keep going and endure to the end. But yet knowing this and getting up the guts and strength to actually do all of the things to qualify sometimes seems so overwhelming, and honestly, completely frustrating.