Been a bad few weeks.  Lots of panic attacks and uncontrollable crying.  I feel like hurting my back has caused a major backslide (pun only slightly intended since I made it unintentionally to someone a few minutes ago but it is still the best word choice).  I feel like going back to spending my life in my bed.

One thing I never really talked about here with the strain this year has put on my marriage.  Well, the therapist took this week to be away.  A few weeks ago not even she was convinced there was anything here worth saving.  I am starting to wonder if losing Gabbi was the beginning of the end of my marriage- and that now we are well into the middle.

I was doing great there for a bit but now feel like I have gone back into a very dark place.  Maybe I will start to feel better again after the anniversary at the end of the month.  Meantime, thoughts of suicide are back and running through my head, but nowhere near the point where I would consider acting on them.  More like daydreaming about being a famous movie star or something- a pipe dream that runs through my head at random moments.  Don't worry.  I'm safe, just sad.

I finally figured out why no one back home gets it.  No one saw me pregnant.  No one saw me during my breakdown.  To them, it never really happened.  She was never real so losing her was never real.  Something that isn't real can't really be all that bad so I should just consider it part of life "most women have miscarriages sooner or later" and move forward.

I think I am even more upset now that I understand it.

Today I was back at the centre of my own personal little piece of hell.  Back at the hospital where it all happened.  Same places.  I though I was going to end up in emergency- not because of what I was actually there for, no that  was not a big deal at all.  The place itself brought on a panic attack worse than I have had in a long, long time (and that was with having taken a full dose of anti-anxiety pills for the first time in a long time). I got off the elevator and the world started to spin.  I thought I was going to pass out then and there.

I made it.  I am totally emotionally drained. I mean totally and completely wiped.

But I survived.  I did it and if I need to I will manage to do it again.  I just hope I don't need to.

To those who pray, wish, think happy thoughts, or in general have their own way of sending good wishes, I would really appreciate it over the next little bit.  To those who know or understand, Lord do I hate this roller coaster ride.

It seems to be a month for steps forward and steps back.  Last week we had shabbat guests for the first time.  This time we went to a friend's house who was pregnant at the same time I was and had a healthy baby after we lost our little girl.

I was so scared to go.  I was not sure how I would handle the baby.  This baby who was suposed to be younger than my little girl.

I actually took it a lot better than I thought I would.  I was pretty high strung the whole shabbat, but when she was crying I even managed to hold her for a few minutes when no one else could get to her.  I went to my room after and cried, but not for long.

We are coming up on the one year mark of losing my Gabi.  Am I ever going to be able to look at a baby without crying again?

Will I ever go back to being able to seeing friends without constantly bracing for "good news"? I know 100% this is a flaw in my own head. For my whole life I have hung out and spoken with friends and only an handful (by comparison) of those interactions have had anything I would now consider myself needing to brace for. Now how do I get my brain to remember that people actually just enjoy spending time with me or no particular reason once in a while?

Since going off the medication I have generally been going and doing and a lot happier.  Last night was my first breakdown in a long time.

I had a nightmare about being back in the hospital in the detailed ultrasound room and getting the news.  Over and over and over.  I woke up crying and fell off the wagon and took one of the anti-anxieties.  All I could think of was her birthday is coming up soon and not a person in the world outside of this apartment will care.

So much for "you'll be pregnant in 6 months and this will all be a bad dream.  Stupid, know nothing doctors who decided my body was suddenly just going to go into normal mode after 13 years of infertility.

I like to wish I will get good news for her birthday, but I know better than to ask god for favours and hope he grants them.  I am not getting my hopes up.  Even if I ever do get a yes, something I doubt more and more with each passing day, I doubt I will get my hopes up until I have a living breathing baby in my arms- then I will take it home as quickly as possible- hospital policies be damned.

I place a lot of blame on Hadassah.  IF my ob was not lying and there was still a heartbeat, albeit low (and I am not sure I believe her), when we left RBS, and it was not there when we got to the hospital, there was none, it could have only been a matter of minutes.  They dafka made us wait 4 hours to have the c-section.  I think it was time they were waiting to make sure there was no chance of resurrection.  I have, since then, seen quite a number of papers and studies about Israel's (and Haddasah in particular's) numbers of "full term/very late stage "spontaneous abortions" and it is ridiculously high for a developed country.  Seems that if there is a chance of anything being un-perfect about the baby doctors will occasionally "help" nature to get rid of mistakes.

I would also like to thank a certain doctor in Toronto who tried to make me feel like because I was less likely to have healthy pregnancies/children and thus this was partially, at least, my fault.  It has been floating around in the back of my head since I got home.  Makes me really hopeful and upbeat about trying again.  I don't care how much you "know how intelligent I am and just want what is best for me".  I hate you.

Tonight I managed to put into words something that has been rattling around in my head since I lost my Abba 6 weeks ago.  I could not figure out why I came home so much more at peace than when I left.  In the last 6 weeks I have gone off all the anti depressants I was taking.  All the anti anxieties- and even while I was at the funeral and shiva I never took any extra doses for anxiety attacks and I would have assumed that I would have needed more than normal not less.  I took my bare minimum dose to avoid withdrawal while I was gone.

I think I said before that there was something about finally being able to grieve, for both people I lost (even though only one was "official") had a cathartic effect.  But as I get a little further away from that week, and my brain starts to clear from the drug fog of the last 10 months, I realize it was not being allowed to grieve.  It was the prescribed process for grieving that did it.

When you first hear of a close death it is like a sharp punch to the gut.  You can't breath.  The world starts to reel and, even if you knew it was imminent, it feels like the most unexpected news in the world.  I felt like I had just had the floor pulled out from under my feet.

I cried the entire plane ride.  Then I saw my family and I cried some more.  Sobbed my way to through the funeral and was so numb during the burial I barely remember it.  I remember going back into the house and feeling like I would never be happy again.

But through shiva we were kept busy.  I look back at it now and I realize slowly we went from crying to laughing.  At first it was the delirious laughter of emotional relief when have just been too sad for too long, but eventually it became real laughter..  Remembering the good things.  Relaxing.  Numbing.  Not forgetting, but letting all the other people help you find a way to put the sad into a box in your head you could hide for a bit.  Not for very long, but long enough to know that you were not going to keep over from it.

And that is the thing.  I looked up at the end of shiva and could not believe it had been a week since that first horrible pain.  I had made it through a week.  Now I needed to concentrate on getting through the next stage.  If I could make it a week could I make it a month?

We got to the one month point and again it was marked by family and friends.  I still burst into tears at random.  But it is not that kick you in the stomach and pull your heart out of your chest pain all the time.  when I first start to cry yes, but it quickly moves back to the dull ache with happier memories.

Leads to believe that those who set out the rituals of mourning might have known a thing or two after all.  But then how was I so let down in February?

I am no rabbi.  No talmid chacham or even lay leader.  But I am a woman in the 21st century who buried a child at birth.  And, while it was once common, it is thankfully not anymore.  Seems to me that halacha dealt with life as it was understood at the time.  Losing a parent was tragic.  There was a need to prescribe a set ritual to deal with that loss.  Losing a child at birth was common.  Getting over it quickly and getting pregnant again was the only ritual needed.

The more I think about it, the more it seems true of most halacha.  what was common at the time is dealt with- mostly fairly well.  But somewhere along the line Judaism got stuck.  For whatever the reason somewhere after the great rationalists and men of science like Rambam, the Abarbanel, and their ilk, halacha stopped keeping up with modern science, medicine and technology and just froze.  Whether it had to do with a (often very justified) fear of the outside, or more of a needing to stay the same or risk being lost among the nations, or both for that matter does not really make much of a difference.  For whatever the reason halacha just seemed to stop progressing.

It seems to me that it was this that created the eventual backlash that started with really started Shimshon Refael Hirch and led to splitting Judaism into it's more modern streams in an attempt to forge ritual that included modern knowledge.

We all know I follow the rules.  All of them.  Most of them even in private.  I am not sure if it is out of habit or comfort or what, but I do.  On the other hand I have seriously questioned my belief in God over the past year.  I think I am starting to lean towards a comment I heard once, "It is not God I hate, it is some of his interpreters."  What I don't think I believe in anymore is a community that is so insular, so scared of secular society that it stops progressing and because of that leaves people effected by modern advances stuck in the dark.

Does this way of thinking automatically take me out of "Orthodox" realms?  I have no idea.  It might.  Frankly I live in a city where various groups claiming to be "Orthodox" are the lunatics running the asylum.  But just because they claim to be as orthodox as it comes does not mean they are.  If orthodoxy is about lighting candles and keeping kosher than I am in and so are they.  If it is about thought, ideology, progression, etc. than I am not sure any of us really fit he bill.