Monday, May 9, 2011

The blog post i almost didn't hit "publish" on.

Blogging is weird right?
Of course it is. It's like an open diary just waiting to be read. Blogs are sometimes really boring. Sometimes they are entertaining. Sometimes touching and sometimes, well sometimes they belong to your ex boyfriend and can be both fascinating and nauseating.

I suppose the question of who i write for has been raised a few times since i started this blog. The conundrum about anonymity. I kinda always figured that i would be 100% honest but then never say who i really am. But then of course, i have friends who read this blog, I know my mum checks it and I follow my sisters blog which is sometimes linked to her facebook account. So i suppose, people who i know, or even just kinda know, may know me a whole lot better than i realise. Friends of friends, workmates, even my ex in laws are all potential readers. So how honest should i be? How much truth should really find its way onto this blog? How open should my book be?

These are all questions i have been grappling with lately because of something i wrote last week but didn't publish. The problem is, i cannot keep blogging until i blog about this because this particular piece of truth is impacting on everything i think, feel, notice or create lately. God, I've made it sound bad haven't I? Just keep reading :)

So without further ado, i give you The Unpublished Post:

When she died, i never thought i would feel happiness again.
Time literally ground to a halt and i was so present, so aware of the situation i had found myself in, that I could not see the forest for the trees. Fuck, i didn't even know i was in a forest. It hurt so much and i was so blind sided that i didn't know how i would recover.
I was young. Too young to be married and too young to be touching that sort of grief. Of course people go through worse everyday, every second. Just watch the news or Oprah or actually listen to peoples stories and you'd know that trauma bites into people's lives all the time.
But this was my nightmare. My little piece of personal hell. Our wedding anniversary, a suicide note, a husband who would never recover from the shock. This was my story and for a little while there, i wondered how i could come out of it intact.

Well, now i know.

You just keep going. It's as simple as that. I never could envision that my future would look like this. I could not ever imagine that I would fall in love again. I remember crying to my sister on the phone saying that i was broken, that i was changed, that my heart was no longer capable of love. She told me i was wrong. Promised me, in fact that I was mistaken. Of course she was right. But at the time? God. At the time I was a fucking wreck. I always thought that you were my lighthouse but now i see that you are the rocks i wreck myself against.

And then i met Welsh and the whole world changed again. Where there was grief, there was joy. Where there was darkness, suddenly, there was light. My silver lining. My second chance. Loving him didn't save me. Being able to love him showed me that i had already saved myself. After a year and a half of feeling numb at best, suddenly I was alive again. We fell in love. And i was so surprised, so astounded that I had met him that i forgot to keep looking backwards. Forgot to be careful. Forgot that i was someones ex wife and started being someones girlfriend instead. Girlfriend! Even now, that word seems so girlish. So innocent and sweet. Instead of feeling like a constellation prize after a failed married, I had the feeling that i had dodged a very dangerous bullet. That i had almost missed the chance of meeting the love of my life.

And i get it now. I understand what it was all for. Life really does go on. Time really does heal. Life really is what you make it. You want to know how i know all this stuff? It dawned on me on my third day in Wales:

We are seated in a darkened room. Well, Welsh is seated, i am half reclining on a bench like apparatus. We are clasping hands. It's no understatement to say that i am absolutely shitting myself. We are staring at a screen and i am questioning my relationship with God. If i don't believe in him, why do i keep saying his name in my head? Soft, warping circles move across the TV, like a lava lamp, and all at once i see a tiny little vibration of static. "See that there?" the sonographer asks in her thick, curly, sing-song accent "that there is the heart beat."

And just like that, it is all worth it. The grief, the pain, the loss, the fear. The sleepless nights, the agony, the tears and the terror. Because this is all that matters. This is all that has ever mattered, i just didn't know it. I would walk through a thousand lifetimes of the last few years, just to find myself standing in this exact spot. I look at Welsh and he looks at me and suddenly, we are three.

Welsh is grinning and I am bawling and they hand us a little print out which we clip to the dashboard of the car. The sun is out as we leave the hospital parking lot. It's unseasonable warm for this time of year in Wales. Maybe we will call the baby Sunny or Summer. Maybe we will choose a family name like Nelly or Gwen. Maybe it will be every name of every person who ever led me to Welsh in the first place.

Or maybe, we will just call her Hope.




And what the hell, while we are at it, I may as well completely blow my cover. Here's a photo taken a few days after we found out i was pregnant.

2 comments:

  1. Wow - that's amazing - congratulations x

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  2. So EXCITED to meey Hope/ Nelly/ Gwen/ Sunny/ Summer xxx

    ReplyDelete