Baby steps, right? I know I am not ready to go to the place that fiction and soul searching takes me. Each time I lose someone who has been close to me, it seems to take me about 5 years to get to a place where I can deal with my feelings head on. Even make-believe ones necessary for fiction. But, blogging was my friend once when I was pregnant for the second time in my life, 9 years later, with a different baby-daddy and finding it hard to find anyone close to me able to empathize with the ups and downs of my hormone-laden feelings.
It's not that I liked being subversive, but I felt I just was. I was going to have a son. I had a mother-in-law that not only didn't know her place, but seemed hell bent on convincing me that "this time it would be different" and that "that other time" wasn't a real baby. This one was her son's blood. I watched my daughter shrink sadly to the corner when I felt she should be shining. She used to ask me, why doesn't my Gramma love me? It would break my heart. I didn't know how to tell an innocent girl that through no fault of her own, she would always be inferior and barely good enough for the odd urge that MIL got to fulfill of dressing up a living doll in charming dresses. Instead, right or wrong, I told her that Gramma had only had experience with boys in her life, since Daddy was an only child, and that it was just easier to relate to her grandson. She'd smile sadly at me, and wise beyond her years she'd nod and quietly return to the shadows.
It was hard. I knew I was conflicted. I knew it wasn't right the way I felt, but I felt I had to love the sunshine in my life twice as much for what she was lacking elsewhere. I was sad. I wanted to love my new arrival as much as I loved my first born. I wondered, is this just because he is Secondus? That Primus somehow held a more powerful, supremest position in my heart? Was I experiencing some kind of postpartum depression? Was I crazy for getting angry when everyone (seemingly) was telling me what it would be like to have a newborn and I'd bitingly reply I was already a mother?
Anyway, my point is, it made me find a lot of friends. I speak with many of them to this day on facebook. I exchange Christmas cards with some and the occasional special piece of mail or a heartfelt personal email. This meant so much to me in bleak times where I was trying to find that elusive light at the end of the tunnel and chasing dangling carrots all the way to nowhere.
I am healing. I am going through a very different part of my journey now, but there is just the faintest glimmer of light at the end of this path. I like to imagine, that that light contains friends and love and self-acceptance and contentment with where I am and what I have. I am hoping that my erratic postings to this blog will be the vehicle that gets me there.
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