Sometimes I feel like it was all a dream.
None of it seems real, like I was never never pregnant at all. Like my babies never existed.
And other times...I feel like I am still pregnant and the labor and death never happened.
The first week all I knew was my loss. My only reality was that my son and daughter were gone and I was without children again.
Now? I feel a numbness and a sense that I was only dreaming. It is such a strong feeling. I forget sometimes and think that maybe it never really happened.
And then I absently put my hands on my tummy or look down and realize with a sharp pain, that my belly is gone. I am thrown back into a reality that I could never imagine, let alone understand. The life I saw and felt only 12 days ago has vanished.
Was I ever pregnant with two babies?
That confusion doesn't last long however. There are signs of them everywhere. Signs that I have refused to eradicate. I won't pretend that they didn't exist or that I wasn't anticipating them with all the joy a mother could conjure. I won't erase them.
But this also means that as soon as I start to exist in a moment without the pain of their loss, I am reminded that they are really gone. That they were real and at one point thriving.
There are the flowers, candles and sympathy cards. There is the pile of baby items we collected recently stored in the garage. Their footprints and stuffed bears (that our nurse gave us) are sitting in the living room. I have a pile of ultrasounds in the guest room to be put into a memory book (as soon as I get up the courage). When I walk up the stairs, the first thing my eyes move to is the half put together nursery. And of course, the babies' ashes are usually nearby because I can't stand for them to be alone.
And those are all the things that remind me - at home - that they are gone. When I am out, my body reminds me. The cramps, the blood, the sore boobs, and the pants that no longer fit me. When my body fails to remind me, I have the teller at the bank or someone at work who is out of the loop.
I try to forget when I can. But then, I feel so guilty. We will talk about guilt another day as it's a big, long topic I can't get into now.
I think to myself at least daily...'why couldn't this have happened earlier?' Why couldn't I have miscarried at 15 weeks before I celebrated at my gender reveal party? Why couldn't I have lost them when I bled and had to go to the emergency room at 12 weeks? Why couldn't I have said goodbye to my twins at 7 weeks instead of seeing their heartbeats? What was I supposed to learn from all of this?
Not for one second did I take them for granted. I loved them the moment I saw them as a mass of cells. I wanted them before I even started trying to conceive. I waited and waited for Michael and Alena to find me.
Instead of miscarrying early in my pregnancy, I was given time to grow attached to them and get to know them. My body decided to wait until they were big enough to be delivered to take them away.
And now I am stuck in this surreal limbo. One moment I think I am still mid-fertility treatments and haven't gotten that positive test yet, and the next I think I am still pregnant.
I feel a little nuts honestly.
It's a disorienting place to be when you don't know what is real and what isn't. Granted it's only for small amounts of time, but boy does it throw me wildly from one emotion to the next.
I know that this is all part of the grieving thing and it will feel less dramatic as time goes on. I know that reality will always return to stare me in the face.
But I hate when it finds me, because it's so much easier to dream that they are still with us.
