Waves of Blue

The hang nail on my right thumb is elusive to me. I have tried over and over to gnaw it off, but I have been unsuccessful. Maybe something is wrong with my teeth. Maybe they aren't sharp enough. My entire being is flawed, my teeth probably are too.

The funny thing is, I never noticed how much I neglected my self care before. Before the birth.

Baby boy's birth was the most frightening time of my life. I don't mean because I was giving birth, which can be frightening in itself. I mean because it wasn't even supposed to happen for another three months. Something wasn't right.

Yet there I was, laying on the birthing table, legs spread, delivering a human being so small his chances of survival were thinner than a strand of hair.

Pregnancies don't save people. Pregnancies don't save marriages. But yet I was pregnant for the fourth time, my marriage on the rocks. Sitting at home all day every day was becoming boring, even exhausting at times. My mind was full of thoughts. Thoughts of freedom, success, even love. But I was being held back. It was like the dream we have all had of running away from something or someone, our legs submerged in quicksand. We are running like we have never run before, and yet we are not moving. At all.

I hadn't been living the life I knew I wanted. I was short-changing myself. I was stuck in a dead-end marriage that was forced on both of us. Because of a pregnancy. I was on auto-pilot for the duration of it. I wanted out, but I didn't know how to get there. Or maybe I did and I was just too scared to do it.

Now, after my precious baby passed away, I had an overwhelming feeling of hate toward myself. What could I possibly have done to make my baby die? Why was I careless about taking care of myself? I guess even God thought I was ugly and worthless and was not deserving of the beautiful soul that was my son.

Everything about me made me sick. So many people treated me like I was inflicted with some sort of plague, and after hearing it for so long, I just decided that it was who I was.

Looking in the mirror disgusted me. I saw something unattractive, ugly. Even homely. I had been called that in high school, and honestly I could see what that horrible boy saw. He saw homely from miles away. He saw the thin strands of fly-away hair that never looked combed. He saw the old, tattered, hand-me-down clothes that I was forced to wear. And he saw the obvious gap between my two front teeth that I flashed innocently at the world, unaware of the ugly mocking happening right in front of me.

The tiny fragment that was my marriage died with my child that day. It was never a fairy tale to begin with, but now it was as if I had completely detached myself from him and wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. Was this what marriage was supposed to be?

It was difficult enough having the sadness and uncertainty flooding my brain, but my body had been through hell and back, and I needed to recover from that before taking care of any other problems suffocating me. My breasts were engorged, the rest of my body was in great pain, and I couldn't stop crying or sleeping. I felt helpless. Not only had I suffered a devastating loss the morning my son was born and died, but I knew deep down in the depths of my heart that there was no hope for my marriage and it too would end.

It was time to put a plan in motion, to save myself before it was too late.

I still had a few fragments of hope for myself. My existing children would be my motivators to rise above everything that had previously brought me down and tried to destroy me. Even on the days I felt like I wouldn't survive, I knew without a doubt, I had to. For them.