Never Cry Over Spilled...Pickle Juice

I won't lie.

Haha, why do I always throw that in?  I am more open here than I am anywhere else.  But I digress...

It's been bad lately.  Really, really bad.  I can't get up the motivation to do basic daily chores.  I cleaned the toilets recently purely because I had no clue on God's green Earth when I last did it.  (Yes, I know that is gross and once you are done dry-heaving, I encourage you to come back and read.)  It had gotten to where we were all having to step over clutter, toys, piles of papers, etc., in order to get through our living room.  I bought groceries enough to feed Jeff's drill unit for a full weekend, but have yet to make any meals from the things I bought.  I hate it and it makes me feel like such a slacker, no...a failure.


I saw the psychiatrist today for a follow up.  I mentioned all of this and was replied to with four words: Delayed Grief and Avoidance.

First off, I'd like to thank God that I'm normal and not just slowly losing my mind.  Snicker if you will, but I truly have thought I was slowly slipping away and going to end up in a jacket where I hugged myself for long periods of time.

*NOTE: Not everyone goes through the grieving process in the same order.  Many of these will be revisited many times, some skipped entirely.*

 The typical "numb" period after a traumatic loss is 3-6 months depending on the individual person involved.  For me, that would have ended about the time that the holidays began.  This was both a blessing and a curse.  It was a blessing in that I was able to have positive distractions around me to help me to push forward and keep going.  It was a curse in that I didn't deal with emotions and feelings that I needed to deal with at the time and always had a reason to put it off until a later time.  Once the middle of January hit, there were no more Christmas parties to attend, no decorations to gaze at, and life as "normal" would have to go on.  Once that hit, I ceased to know how to function.  It's gotten progressively worse as each week has passed and this week, Jeff pointed out that all I really do is sleep, sit in silence, or get angry.  To be honest, the only feelings I REALLY feel anymore are anger and apathy.  A friend asked me today how I felt about losing Kaidi now; was I still angry?  It felt strange, but completely true, to tell her that I felt nothing.  It's like it never happened.  But then, as fast as it's like it didn't happen, everything comes crashing down again.

Case in point: Sunday morning church service.  I had the thought cross my mind of, "I need to clean out my closets this week."  I then started to think about how one of the shirts a woman from church had given to me, I last wore at Kamden's birthday party last spring.  That party marked 1 month before I have birth to Kaidi.  I was still pregnant.  I remember reaching down in church and feeling of my belly and the next thing I knew, they entire day, night and three days following Kaidi's death replayed through my mind in vivid detail.  Who would have though that clothes = flashbacks?

Now...to address the topic of my post.  My main venue of avoidance is sleeping.  I don't sleep at all because  I am tired, but simply because I do not have to address what's happening around me if I'm asleep.  Jeff had a night class tonight, and not long after he left, I dozed off on the couch.  Kamden had been quietly entertaining himself but I suddenly realized he was in the kitchen and had gotten quiet.  Any parent knows this is a BAD combination.  I told him to get out of the kitchen and he had until the count of 10 to do so.  He made it out by the time I got to 5, and I could tell he was carrying something but wasn't sure what...until I heard the glass shatter.  He had picked up our one-gallon pickle jar and was trying to carry it into the living room.  There was one lone pickle left in the jar in about 3/4 of a gallon of pickle juice.  Thankfully he didn't get cut, but the pickle juice covered a good 12sq ft of tile and carpet by the time it was all said and done.  I'm trying so hard to let him grow and be independent, but days like this make me want to velcro him to a chair and make him let me do everything for him.

I'm pretty sure I won the mom of the year award between the shards of glass, the pickle smelling carpet and the level of yelling I did.  Thank God tomorrow is another day.