In A Lonely Place

I guess I've been MIA. I've been busy, we've had company, I've been getting out with the girls and having family fun. All this joy and fun and yet I'm in a lonely place and I'm isolating. I'm rarely interacting with anyone lately with any substance and I think I've been doing it to avoid some of the feelings I've been having that I don't really want to deal with. I'm at a crossroads in my life right now and I don't know in which direction I'm headed and it's scary. The last two years feel like a dream. A drugged out crazy dream. Since stepping out from beneath the haze I've had a couple of harsh reality checks and I'm feeling like I'm just not happy. I need more in my life....but more what? I need more acknowledgement of Calvin and his loss for one. That's a huge one. And something I'm just beginning to realize now. It's been almost two years and I'm still in unbelievable pain. I'm still in disbelief. I'm still wondering why and I'm still angry that it happened to us. My son is dead. To me it's the most horrifying feeling in the world to be walking around with all this pain, afraid that one day you'll start screaming and never be able to stop. And yet I don't talk about it. I don't talk about him. About a month ago I got rip roaring drunk with some girls I went to highschool with and we ended up sharing a table with a bunch of guys at the bar. We talked with these guys for quite a long time around the table and when the subject of drugs came up I ended up in a frank discussion with two of them about my painkiller addiction. When I was asked why I had become addicted to painkillers, Calvin was brought up in the conversation. My friend was horrified that I would discuss my dead baby with strangers and she made it perfectly clear that she was embarassed and that the topic was "inappropriate". My liquid courage fortifying my defiance at her attempt to shut me up, I deliberately and in more detail described why my life was so fucked up that the only way I could cope was to numb the pain with pills. It made me angry. It also shamed me. I felt like I had pissed on her parade by bringing him up and for the first time since Calvin's death I experienced outright how unacceptable it was for me to discuss my dead child. Most people are so subtle about not wanting to discuss him. Their subtlety comes disguised in avoidance. Avoid us, avoid the topic, avoid serious discussions. I feel like I'm dancing through life in a minefield. Tip-toeing to avoid embarassing people, making them uncomfortable, making them sad, ruining their day, their high, their nite out. So I've been avoiding. Avoiding talking about him, avoiding making plans for my future, avoiding having deep conversations with anyone, avoiding facing my unhappiness. I'm lonely. I have such a shitload of stuff I need to dump, questions I need answered, decisions I need to make and yet I've gone MIA and avoided forming any sort of connection that would help me through some of this. Why? Because it hurts. Because life isn't always pretty and there aren't always happy endings. I know this. My head knows this. My heart is afraid of going there again. But in a way, it's been there all along. The wound of losing my son hasn't even begun to heal yet and it's been almost two years. It's something that people can't even begin to comprehend most of the time, thank God, but it makes it sooooo difficult to get any compassion. The world of people who have never experienced the loss of a child can't begin to understand the ripple effect, how in my case, Calvin's death has affected absolutely every area of my life. I'm not the same parent to my other children, not the same wife to my husband, not the same friend now that my life has been irrevocably changed. I'm different. I don't know if I even want the same things out of life anymore that I did before we lost Calvin. It sucks. I'm here and it's such a devastatingly lonely place to be. And I'm wondering if I will ever get out...