E-lli, E-lli lama azavtani.

Can someone out there please explain to me how people who have experienced a pregnancy loss can complain about a healthy and thriving pregnancy. Most people don't complain to me thank goodness, but for those who do not think every minute of a healthy pregnancy is a miracle to be treasured despite every ache and pain, please remember how you felt when it was not as healthy and thriving.

Another failure.  FET this time.  And I can not even meet with my doctor until after the chagim in October so there is nothing to keep me hoping over the yom tovim.  I aam not going to make it.  2 years ago erev yom kippur I found out I was pregnant with my beutiful miracle angel who was too good for this world.  Last year I was still so far into my depression I barely noticed the chagim.  This year it is just a hot searing pain.

I am going to go insane.  My facebook wall is full of people halfway through their pregnancies, if that, saying "I'm done".  Really?  Really?  You want to be done?  I can assure you that you do not want to be done at this point.  I am pretty damn sure you do not want to deliver a 20 or 21 or even 32 week baby just to get things over with.  If anyone really feels that way then for the love of God give that child to someone less selfish who wants what is best for that child and not what is easiest for themselves.

Great.  All the miracles of assistance of modern medical marvels and I still don't have a newborn and my gerbils are popping em out paw over tail!

I took on a chumra to keep the year of aveilut for my stepfather.  From the time I was 5 years old he was the man in my life- as such I am choosing to keep the year the same as his other two children.  Tonight I missed a wedding I really wanted to go to.  We had spoken to our Rabbi and he had said that since I had taken it on as a chumra, I could just as easily "let myself off the hook for the night" so to speak.

I felt like I could not let myself do it.  I accepted this on myself, now I am going to see it through.  What sort of honour is it to him if I let it go because there is something I would rather do more?  Our Rabbi was, apparently, surprised not to see me there.  Either he does not know me as well as I thought he did, or he has never come across anyone quite as stubborn.

Please Abba be davening on my behalf in shamayim.  I know I am doing my very best to show you the kavod you deserve, and I  *may* not have always showed when you were alive, down here.

Tomorrow a friend of ours is doing probably one of the most selfless and amazing things any human being can do.  He is donating a kidney.  If there is ever a case where a person is doing the closest thing he can to emulate God, to live his life b'tzelem Elokim, this has got to be it.  He is doing what God did and using a piece of himself to breathe life into and to revitalize another human being.  How can I complain about what I lost when he is giving up a piece of himself, a piece that he might someday need, to help someone else.  I guess the only thing that I can say on the topic is kol hakavod.  You never know where life is going to take you, and obviously for this young man life is taking him to be as close to God as possible.

I was thinking about where life takes you.  You never know what bad luck will turn to good, or, as I know all too well, good will turn sour.  We never know where luck is going to come from.  The man donating the kidney was brought into my life by a friend who had a friend who was going to be in Israel and needed a place for shabbat.  Eventually, she chose to stay, met and married a lovely young man, and now here they are- they may not yet have children of their own, but they are certainly busy with helping to keep the world's Jewish population going in the right direction.

I wish them every single bracha in the world and then some.

Help. I feel like I am going backwards fast.  I am doing all the right things to try to stay above water, but I am feeling like I am drowning fast.  My rabbi said my life lately is not a roller coaster- it is such a steep up and down it is more like a yo-yo.  I am not doing a very good job at holding on.  My headache is becoming unbearable, all I want to do is sleep.  I am forcing myself out of bed to do *something* each day (normally work on getting Channah's room in order for school) but other than that I just can't seem to bring myself to do anything.

I am not doing anything stupid like overdosing or mixing medications with alcohol or anything else stupid like that so there is no need to worry, just feel like it would be just as useful to the world if I were to just hide in bed and cry as it is to do anything else.  I have spoken with my therapist, I am taking my medication.  I promise I am not putting myself into any sort of danger.

I just feel like I am standing on the very edge of a cliff that is crumbling all around me and there is no safety net.  Truthfully I have no idea what is bringing it on this particular time, but it just seems to be the way it is.

My apartment is an epic disaster which never helps.  I feel like I am living in Oscar's can, but try as I might (and right now the mighty effort is going into Channah's room which means I am years behind in laundry and my kitchen looks like a Hell's Kitchen exploded.  My room is beyond all hope of redemption.  I fell on a pile of laundry trying to get to the shower last night.  My toes are so bruised now I can hardly walk on them).  I can barely keep it together to go for things I absolutely positively MUST do that anything more than that falls by the wayside and makes me feel worse.

I need cleaning help, but as it is not in the budget it is not going to happen.  I need to get out more to do things I enjoy but with the whole aveilut thing that is not happening either.  Also the fact that I live in freaking RBSA and there is nothing to do and no one who really wants to do it (especially in this heat) does not help. Everyone has their own lives filled with jobs and kids and responsibilities.  Me?  I work when I want, my kid takes care of herself, and my brain has put itself in charge.  Heck the only reason I love running the books swap so much is that it gives me something to work on.  Most of the time now I am too out of it (no, not drugged out, just miserable) to read half of what I find anyway.

This is going to sound like a stupid and self centred question, but does anyone out there know if there is a chessed programs with girls to just help me get my life back in order to a clean slate?  Not a forever thing, just a few days to help me get my brain around the blockage of there being more to do that I can possible surmount   Right now it feels like trying to climb mount Everest with no shoes and a polar bear on my back.  And a broken toe.

Sorry for the depressing post.  Just how it is today in the life of the depressed nut job.

With all the pain that came with the last 18 months, sometimes I forget to remember the good.  Someone told me once that "you never get this minute, this moment in time, back again".  Tonight we took my 8 year old out to get a real "big girl" desk and desk chair so she has a real spot in her room to do her homework.  We rearranged her furniture to take it from the room we designed for a 4 year old in kindergarten, to a room meant for an 8 year old going into the third grade.

She is getting so big!  There are times I look at her and can't believe how many wonderful moments I will never have again.  Her first smile.  Her first day of school.  I really try to remember that no matter how sad I feel for other things, she is my light and my joy.  Every cuddle and snuggle is worth all the diamonds in the world.  Every smile is more precious to me than my own life.

She has been my rock and my light in getting through the last 18 months.  There are times she is the only reason I get up in the mornings, and often the only reason I can find to keep breathing.  She is growing up so quickly I feel like I need to find a way to slow the clock to squeeze just a little bit more from every minute.

With the early loss of a potential pregnancy coming as it did so closely to Tisha B'Av, I found myself once again feeling real grief on our historical day of mourning this year.  On doctor's and Rabbi's orders I was not fasting- well, at least I was not supposed to be.  I didn't eat or drink because the thought of doing anything normal was to painful to contemplate.  So I fasted.  And I thought.

It has been a long while since I lost my precious little girl, and in that time, somewhere between losing my mind, and starting to find it again, I had a lot of time to think.  To think, and to wonder about all of the "truths" I had been taught in my life.

When I was a child truth was telling my mother I broke her mirror.  When I was older sometimes truth was telling my mother I broke the mirror even when I didn't.  When I was a child truth was that sooner or later everything worked out to be "fair".  As an adult, I learned that is rarely the case.  As a child I learned that God sees and knows and keeps accounts of everything.  As an adult, I find myself wondering just how true that is.


Where is God?

I remember when I came to Israel for the first time (that I remember.  Being here when I was 10 months old does not count for this case) the first thing I wanted to do after we dropped our overstuffed bags was go to the kotel.  I had spent so many years learning about God, studying God, trying to decipher what he wanted from me.  We got on a bus, bought a cartisia, and headed in totally the wrong direction.  Eventually we made it to the old city and I was enamored by the history all around me.  The walls echoed with generations of my ancestors calling to me.  The streets were worn smooth with a millennium's worth of footprints from every corner of the Earth.  Surely this was the place where I would find the answers for which I had been searching for so long.

I walked the long narrow alleys of the shuk, and turned right into the remains of the Roman Cardo.  Incredible!  I was actually standing where people who had been coming to the Beit HaMikdash itself would have stood with their fruits or their animals.  I could feel excitement rising within me like a crescendo in a grand score.  The Jewish quarter with it's restaurants and shops narrowing in as we approached the massive main steps to the kotel.  I went down the steps, through security, and all of a sudden it was there in front of me.  I looked at it.  I looked it up, and I looked it down.  It was a wall.  A very old wall, but all the same, just a wall.

Where was my God?

We spent that shabbat with one of my husband's rabeim from his yeshiva years.  He asked me what I thought of my first trip to the kotel.  He smiled when I didn't answer, and he said to me "God was not there when you looked for him was he?"  He continued "he hides a lot, but don't worry, if you look for him he is easier to find then Waldo".

I held that comment with me for a very long time.  God hides.  Why would he create a world full of such intense good, and hide so that such evil can take control?  Where is the the God of mercy, of rachamim?  The God who remembers the good for thousands of generations?  How many of his creations have cried out over thousands of years "God, where are you?  Why have you deserted me now?  Why have you left us to die?  To grieve?  Why have you taken from me the one thing I want most in the world?"

It is only recently that I have started to consider the second part of the Rabbi's comment.  That "if you look for him he is easier to find than Waldo."  Believe me, I have seen lots of places where god isn't.  In an operating room with a dead baby.  At a funeral of a father taken far to fast and too soon.  In an old forest burned black, or in pieces of a bus mixed with the remains of those who were riding it.

But I am starting to wonder if I am looking in the wrong places.  Or rather, looking in the right places but not seeing.  In the operating room there was my husband looking at me with such sorrow in his eyes, yet such love for the little girl he held even though she never knew it.  There was so much love for someone who never opened her eyes.  That had to come from somewhere.  The kindness that came out of the woodwork when I thought my life would end had to come from somewhere.  The gaurdian angel who showed up when I really really needed someone had to be sent by someone.

When I looked around at the funeral and shiva for my father and saw just about everyone I knew who came out to pay their respects to a man who had a kind word for strangers, food for beggars, and truly greeted every one with a friendly face.  A man gone to soon but who forever changed the lives of even casual acquaintances with a love of life that was contagious.  A man who knew how to use a temper very effectively to make sure his children grew up to be people I like to hope he would be proud of.  And you knew God was there, in the heart of every man and woman in that room, remembering a man who believed in his traditions and his faith.

The old forest that burned made way for new trees.  There are angels in yellow vests who care so much about every person on that bus they crawl on their hands and knees to make sure they are returned to their families.  In every evil, someone good is doing their thing.  Quietly.  Discretely.  Making room for God.

On that same trip to Israel we spent a different shabbat with a different rebbe- a musician.  We were sitting at the shabbat table late at night, there was literally no sound.  "Do you hear that?"  he asked?  My husband and I looked at each other like he was insane.  "Do you hear that" he said again, this time more emphatically, "It is the sound of Hashem.  You hear him in the stillness of the night.  You need to listen very carefully, but if you listen you can hear him singing".

I have never been particularly good at the "Where's Waldo?" books.  But music is in my blood.  I could have sworn that night, at that table, that I heard the music.  Maybe it is not that God is hiding.  Maybe it is that we are so caught up in our trials and tribulations that we have not left room for God to show himself.  Maybe he is right in front of us and we just need to take a step back and make room for him to fill the space.

Maybe this is all just the random passing garbage from a woman trying to deal with grief as best as she can.  A woman who needs to believe that God has not abandoned this world and left it to fend for itself against all evils.

But maybe if I am up really late one night, and the apartment is really quiet, maybe I will try listening for a few minutes just to see if I hear anything.