Wednesday 30 September 2009

Tired

I am tired.

I'm tired of all those little, unexpected things that run up and stab me in the heart. I'm not talking those hairy biggies that you clock the moment they come pounding over the horizon clutching their whacking great carving knives and skewers. The birthdays, the anniversaries, double buggies, any buggy, newborn babies, pregnant women.

Just the little ones. Those are the ones that are doing me in today. Those little ones armed only with darning needles, pins and thumb tacks. They're sneaky, these ones. They scuttle up to you and before you know it, jab, jab, jab, in with the needles and drawing pins.

They don't really hurt me. They can't. I'm tougher than that. They aren't going to make me fall to the floor and cry. Not individually but cumulatively? Cumulatively it is starting to feel like death by a thousand cuts (or 'slow slicing' as another translation has it, courtesy of my friend Mr. Wiki P)

Yesterday I decided to walk to the post office. Between the post office and my house lies the hospital. Not THE hospital. Only the hospital where the girls were born and where Jessica spent a few weeks in the special care nursery. As I was walking past, the light hit the reflective windows of special care at a certain angle and I could see all the monitors shining through. It still hurts to see those monitors. A darning needle to my battered old heart which is already stuck full like a pincushion. Those monitors that I watched and watched helplessly. Willing them to change, to stabilise, to go up, to go down. Someone else watches them now. Someone else wants them to move just as much as I did.

Prayers are answered. Or they are remain unanswered, words hanging in the air. Binary functions. Up. Down. Stable. Unstable. Alive. Dead.
Those monitor reflections are a little jab to my heart.

I live on an estate where all the houses look the same, these are common in the town where I live. So if you go to visit your immediate neighbours you are effectively entering your own house reversed with the taste of another imposed on it. A bit Alice in Wonderlandesque. This also makes me prone to severe decor envy as I know my house COULD actually look like that, if I only had this.

Oh, if I only had this. Except not this. Not my neighbour's. I actually want what's mine.

As I walked past a house, exactly like mine, with a car parked outside, the same make, colour and year of registration as mine, I noticed a sign in the back of the car saying 'twins on board.' I had an overwhelming urge to knock on the door and say "excuse me, this should be my life. You don't understand, this should be my house, my car. Not this strange mirror image house with your twins in it. My girls should be here, in my house." It felt just slightly possible that I had fallen through some strange hole in time and here was my house, my life. I didn't knock though. Perhaps it would have made a good story for the unsuspecting young woman inside? This poor, feeble lady who trails around the housing estate with her one baby always seeking the other. Completely unhinged, batty old thing.

I don't know how I got here. I don't know how this happened. One minute, I had a normal life which I was bumbling through. A little less happy, a little more happy. And then the bottom fell out.

The next time I wake up, a year later, I'm wandering around with a heart full of thumbtacks and pins. It's still pumping but it's oozing blood slowly and surely. And I'm so tired today. I'm tired of pretending that all those little stabbing implements just glance off my internal organs. That gratitude can deflect every single insult aimed at me. I try to hide behind my good fortune and my thankfulness and sometimes I can. But not today, not always.

My poor bruised old heart with thousands upon thousands of tiny pin pricks in it. I'm still yearning, watching, waiting. I miss her terribly today.

But tomorrow, I will put some plasters over the holes in my heart, I will brace myself again to face those jabs and stabs. Both my girls will keep those reinforcements round my heart strong. They will keep my heart beating, stout and sure. I will try again tomorrow because that is what I always do, it is all I can do.

I love my girls.

22 comments:

  1. I'm so sorry it's not your house and your car with the 'twins on board' sticker. It's so heard to put our hearts out there and go out, only to have it pricked and stabbed all the time. Thinking of you and your girls.

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  2. My God, that mirror image house. Catherine, I re-read that paragraph about 10 times. I wish for nothing more sometimes than for someone to say 'I'm so sorry, there's been a mistake. Your baby is still alive and you can come and collect in 10 minutes'. There was a storyline on Eastenders a couple of months ago where that very thing happened. One of the main characters discovered that the daughter she thought had been stillborn was actually alive and now grown up. I don't normally watch the show but I did that time because the daughter character was played by someone I know.

    And the holes in your heart... Oh Catherine. SO much love to you xxx

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  3. Oh Catherine, I want so much to say something profound in response to your beautiful writing but I just feel wordless - and tired. I understand the tiredness, the relentless shielding against things that are seemingly insignificant but, of course, aren't. Because how can anything that remotely connects to our daughters be insignificant?

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  4. This. Yes.
    "I don't know how I got here. I don't know how this happened. One minute, I had a normal life which I was bumbling through. A little less happy, a little more happy. And then the bottom fell out."
    Riding the bumps with you Catherine. Wishing we could step back in to those lives we were supposed to get.

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  5. Your precious girls are the hands holding your broken heart together... They always will be.

    I dont know what I would have done if I'd seen MY car in front of MY house with a sign like that on it. Maybe I would have knocked and said "Excuse me, you're living MY life..." God, I really dont know...

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  6. Catherine, as soon as I started reading this, I thought of paper cuts. Painful little cuts that over a long enough period of time could cause such pain and bleeding and constant agony. So absolutely yes to death by a thousand cuts, that's it exactly.

    I'm so sorry you had to see that sign, had to be reminded of what could've been and what isn't. It's so cruel to carry this constant thought of how life should be, how it was, and where it all went wrong.

    Sending big hugs and soft plasters to help patch you up. And loving your girls right along with you. xo

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  7. Ditto to Jill, profound words escape me, but just couldn't pass up the opportunity to leave you a note of love and support - if only to help bandaid the jabs just a bit.

    Much love to you...

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  8. I find myself weary often, too. It IS the little things that wear away at us. And yet somehow the little things that save us most days too.

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  9. I feel very very tired too....old wounded and very tired.

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  10. Dido to everything everyone else wrote. I want my 'proper' life back. The one that was meant to be, not this one...

    xx

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  11. Hey Catherine, I want to send you love and a box of magic plasters, the ones when you put them on your broken parts everything mends instantly and you are feeling serenity, peace and calm.

    For you, for Georgina and Jessica.

    We are strong and we are together and we will live and we are the richer in our loss. Your Georgina if only for a fleeting time makes you so much more beautiful than the woman down the road.

    lots of love
    Ines

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  12. Beautifully, sadly, poignantly apt. You've captured the sadness and pain so eloquently. Thinking of you and both your girls. (((hugs))) We babylost mummas all know you *have* twins. You've shared with us your angel girl's story and I'm very grateful you have. I wish she were on your lap, but thank you for sharing her with us.

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  13. This reminds me of driving past my neighbors house last January and seeing her "It's a Girl" balloon happily floating just above the mailbox. It should have been my helium inflated balloon tied to my mailbox. I wanted to get out of the car and deflate it but thought better of it. Even though we moved from that house, I still see her now and then out with her jogging stroller and her little girl and wonder if I will ever know what it's like...

    I too want to send you love to fill those wounds - even if it only helps for a moment.

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  14. "darning needles, pins and thumb tacks" - oh, yes. I don't know when or if this eases, or if we're supposed to grow calluses on our hearts, or what, but these little things can be exhausting.

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  15. Catherine: I've come back here today after reading this yesterday to read your exquisite words again, even if in some measure this was hard to reread, because it hit so close to home. Such an exhaustion of its own, un-understandable. And the way the world keeps reminding us in the most blindsiding of ways as we try to attain some measure of healing, makes everything that much more tiring.
    Sending a tiny bit of salve in saying I understand and hear you and am sorry.

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  16. death by a thousand pin pricks. you're so right.
    I'm so tired, too.
    How do we do it?
    You're so strong-I know you don't want to be, you don't want to have to be-but you're so strong.
    I can't think of anything else because I just read this 3 times over again. Your words are beautiful.

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  17. Oh Catherine, how beautifully you express your feelings! I'm not sure whats worse, feeling the jabs and pokes, or becoming hardened to them, as I feel is happening to me. About every 7-10 days I get hit with a Ginsu Knife or Samurai sword, but for the most part, my heart feels turned to stone, with small spots reserved for a select few. I see twins everywhere too, and also think how that should be me. My life should be the chaos of the life my friends with 3 children have and sometimes inadvertently complian about, not realizing they are contributing to that slow and painful slicing, as your "friend" so eloquently stated. I hope you can find a sheild for those pin pricks and pokes, perhaps you'll still feel them coming at you, but maybe they won't hurt so much.

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  18. Oh Cartherine, this post hits so close to home for me. Our new next door neighbors recently had twins and it is so hurtful to me. I have not met this couple, but I can't even bear to look their way. I drive down the street and see empty diaper boxes in their trash cans. I just don't understand why they get to live this life with their twins, yet I don't get to live with mine. I don't understand why they had to move RIGHT NEXT DOOR. Why not two houses down, or on the next street. It is almost like someone is taunting me. Thank you for putting these feelings in these beautiful words. xx

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  19. oh, that house. i'm so sorry. most of the time i think i know what's going on, but then something little, seemingly insignificant, happens and i feel like i'm in some parallel universe and going crazy. it's hard to accept reality when it's SO WRONG.
    XO

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  20. you write so well.. i can feel the agony. i wanna knock on people's doors too and tell them how they're living my life. the life i was SUPPOSED to have.

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  21. I want to swear Catherine. I know why I haven't been on here blogging for a while- because I feel so worked up and frazzled and like I'm about to explode with tears and fall on the floor in a heap......I have felt that way too about other mummy's of twins. God dammit. I didn't acutally get any further than that in your post because immediately I was full of venegance........what is happening to me????!!! God it hurts. WHY do other people get to keep their twins??? WHY do their twins never get sick? WHY WHY WHY.

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  22. Of course you do. They know it, too.

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