Fallout

It's been a dark few weeks. I've been sick - with a flu, then a cold, then another flu, and another cold. My throat has been sore for a few weeks. My chronic headaches remain and they're unrelated, but add that to illness, an incredibly sore throat, kids that are sick, miserable weather, and a broken tailbone, and it's just too much.

In trying to sift through the stress to find a cause to the headaches, I've had to revisit the dark places of the last two years, the dark that's been squeezing my heart. 

I was so sick when I was pregnant. I was able to escape having a picc line thanks to taking Zofran every day, a chemo drug, but before I had that I was throwing up 30 times a day and I lost ten pounds in one week the week the vomiting started. Even now I'm embarrassed to say what my house looked and smelled like when I was pregnant with Charlotte because I was so insanely sick. I've spent two years crying my eyes out - first for a pregnancy that tried to kill me, then for a stillborn baby, then another horrendous pregnancy - and the realization that I have ONE FRIEND. I had no husband then, just some angry dude that lived here in the evening and on weekends. He should have come home at lunch to care for Rachel and Andrew - if not me, then them. He didn't. I had no husband. No parents. No siblings. No church. No neighbors. 

I had Zofran. I had Netflix. And I had pretending. I pretended. I made myself look better than I was. My oldest was no help and it was best when he wasn't even at home. He spent the entire summer that I was pregnant on the computer.

I was only able to shower once every six weeks when I finally willed my broken body into the water. My kids were only bathed once a month. Andrew never had clothing on, he was naked except for a dirty diaper all day with snot streaming down his face and he had full run of the house. By God's grace he's come out of it seemingly unscathed and content to play on his own. 

The lowest point of all happened at the end of April 2015, a huge fight between Trevor and me culminated with me curled up in the fetal position on my bathroom floor sobbing, pleading with Trevor to help me, begging for him to see that I was too sick to do anything more than what I was already doing. He left with Grant, telling me that he wished he had never asked me to marry him. Through my tears I took Rachel and Andrew and stayed in a hotel that night, where if I didn't have the presence of mind to not leave them motherless I would have taken mine and my unborn baby's lives. That baby, my little Charley, passed away about a week later, although I wouldn't know until more than a month after that. 

It started exactly two years ago. The fallout continues. Things are a million times better with Trevor. My house is cluttered but it's a normal sort of messy now, the kind you expect with four young children. But there's the emotional picking up the pieces bits - PTSD talk is common on the HG forums. The total abandonment I felt was real. There's always a million things I think I maybe could have done differently but at the time I didn't feel like there was anyone I could ask for help. Even the words couldn't form in my mind.

The biggest fallout now seems to be catching up on missed dental work for the kids and me. I've caught up on getting them clothes that fit (I think) but they've all got cavities. 

I've reached the point where I can look back and acknowledge the dark, scream out the injustices that I never asked for. Maybe even face them long and hard enough that the headaches will stop.

But if you see me crying at the dentist, or I say my barely four year old has a hundred cavities, now you'll know why.