Sometimes, before dawn....when my brain is still cloudy... I hear his feet slapping down the hall in dinosaur slippers. Sometimes, before dawn, when the door creaks open, I see him standing there, curls disheveled and rubbing sleep from his eyes. Good morning, he says... or I'm hungry... or I wet the bed...or any thing at all. His shirt is always bunched up above his belly button. His Raggedy Andy is always shoved under one arm. The other arm hangs on the doorknob and he waits for my smile before crawling into my bed. Sometimes, before dawn, I see him there so clearly in that one second between the door creaking open and swinging wide that it is as if an entire lifetime is lived. An entire lifetime of... Two years. Ten months. Three weeks. Three days. One thousand hugs. Ten thousand kisses. So, I know him. I know it will be him. And when it is someone else, it takes my breath away. My heart swells with pride and love a thousand times a day. It breaks. It bleeds. It sinks to the floor. It turns to stone and then it melts and then it starts to swell again. They say that one day I will get used to this cardiac roller coaster ride. They say that one day I will tune it out like the hum of the refrigerator. I believe them. I just wish that day was today. How can I mourn for a boy I have never met when I have golden ringlets and hazel eyes and pure love right in front of me every, single day? I do not know the answer, but They say one day you learn to live with the guilt.
I don't know if I buy that one. Maybe it is because Once Upon A Time, I carried a boy under my heart- a boy that would crawl into my bed before dawn in dinosaur slippers. He was growing and becoming and then one day he just wasn't anymore. In one moment, the future was rewritten ...like dominoes falling. What was I doing the moment he was stolen? Was I sleeping? Laughing? Eating a sandwich? And some of Them say that it was always meant to be and some of Them say that the only disability is a bad attitude and some of Them say that my grief paints disability as tragedy and it is damaging and I have no right to these feelings at all. Maybe they could just tell the feelings that and they will give up and go away. The doctors say it is like cult-a-sacs in the brain. The blood just didn't make it down a few of those one way streets. Or something. They don't really know. After tests, and tests, and tests, and tests.... It is all essentially a really expensive shrug. But they say the thing about the cult-a-sacs.... and I picture my boy, in his dinosaur slippers, wandering the suburbs. Lost in a sea of mini-malls and beige split-levels. Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky... He is lost there and he can't find his Mama... And I spend my days mourning him and looking for him and falling in love with the fairy child that replaced him... and then missing him again and then not missing him at all and then catching glimpses of him in a cheeky grin or a car seat tantrum and then being angry that I don't get to see him more... and then thinking how silly it is to miss someone that never was.... and then wondering.... Could I find a pair of dinosaur slippers that would fit over AFO's? And this is what it is now. I don't know when it will be different or if it ever will or what They have to say about that... But today a bunch of specialist tried to make my baby do things that he can not do for a couple of hours and it hurt. In a month he starts school and it feels like losing something and maybe gaining something too. Twenty minutes ago, I caught him ripping up a book and he threw his hands in the air like a bandit and belly laughed and it was perfect. And I ordered an extra wide pair of dinosaur slippers online.
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WHO AM I?
I am Michelle: a wannabe hippie in love with a bonafide geek. We also spawned. I spend my days with our four wild, beautiful boy children and I overshare about our life online because I am a Millennial and that is what we do.
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