Fucking Feelings

I’ve been reading over my previous posts.  If you haven’t recently done this I suggest you do so as soon as humanly possible because I, for one, find myself to be a delightful combination of charmingly brutal honesty, home-spun wisdom and shockingly creative uses of the F word.  What struck me the most, on my recent perusing of past entries, is how fucking full of shit I am sometimes.

I’m struggling these days and none of my words, past or the ones rattling around in my head right now are of any comfort to me at this moment. 

Gabriel had an eye doctor’s appointment on Monday.  Another surgery…another lens.  Nothing nearly on the scale of last time, minor surgery just to toughen up the cornea on Gabriel’s non-zombie eye in preparation it for a prosthetic lens.  I knew this was coming.  It’s absolutely the right thing to do and the right time to do it. 

As we left the doctor’s office I was joking with my Little Dude about the interesting looks he could sport once he’s double lensed.  He could have bright green eyes like his current hero, Harry Potter.  He could  have chocolaty brown eyes like his father or freaky grey ones like me.  He could get black light responsive ones for parties in clubs when he’s older…the possibilities are endless.

I have to say these things. 

I have to make it ok for him, but those careless words burned my throat like acid which was good because they had to bore through the lump of unshed emotion that descended on my chest as I realized that this is the absolute end.  There is no more hope, no 8^th day miracle, no FDA approved robot eyes that are going to allow my little boy to run and play, just like all the other little boys.

I have known this for 8 years. 

My brain has accepted this, studied it extensively and molded it into a paradigm where blind is the new normal.  To the world I present the picture of a proud, confident (all be it a bit disheveled) parent like any other.  But the sad fact is, my heart is broken and while I’ve learned to live with it and the joy of watching my incredible child grow has mended it, it will never really heal.

The five stages of grief as defined by the Kubler-Ross model are as follows: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and finally Acceptance.  In my personal experiences with grief, I have found this to be pretty much spot on accurate.  I went through it with the death of my mother, and then years later with my father.  However, as the mother of a fucked-up* kid: I’m starting to think that this particular grief process  is more like a revolving door…you never really know what you’ll be stepping into.  You can flirt with acceptance but there’s never really any final closure.  It’s a situation that just goes on and on.  Much like Sonny and Cher said of the beat.

I’m a little depressed. 

There, I said it.  That feels a little better.  I’ve been berating myself for the way I’m feeling and trying to shake it off like I usually do because nothing really happened and things are good.  Life is pretty sweet these days.  I have absolutely everything I need and most of what I want…where the hell do I get off feeling depressed?

I received confirmation from the doctor, of something that I already knew was going to happen and it depressed the hell out of me.  In that one moment all those feelings that I try so hard to deny came crashing down on me like a tidal wave.  All the anger and guilt and pain I have ever tried to run away from caught up to me and dragged me down.  The most difficult thing is: I can’t let it.  I have to be ok, because my kid HAS to be ok.

I am his primary parent, his teacher and his role model in ways that he’ll never appreciate unless one day he has a child of his own.  I can’t cry for him, because that will teach him to cry for himself…but you know what, you guys?  I want to.  I want to get in bed with some chocolate, some booze and a pack of adult diapers (walking to the bathroom seems like a drag) and stay there for a week.  I want to scream and throw things in a spectacular tantrum of temper that would put even the unruliest 3 year old to shame.  I want to wrap my sorrow around me like a Jedi cloak and lurk in dark shadows pondering the collective works of Edgar Allen Poe and Nicholas Sparks. 

I want to feel my feelings.

But I can’t, I don’t have the luxury of being depressed and though it doesn’t feel like it right now, that is a very good thing.  There is a difference between feeling your feelings and letting them run your life, and I’m not going to be a back seat driver in my own existence as sadness takes the wheel.

I gave myself this morning.  I skived out of work early, wrote this and am now going to get in bed with some chocolate for an hour (probably not enough time to warrant the use of a diaper) and just let myself feel bad, but while I’m doing that I’m going to hold on to my happy thoughts so that when my hour is up, I can go get my boy from school and do something fun with him to celebrate the weekend.

I tell you all it will be ok, and it will be.  It will be more than ok, it will be better than you can imagine.  But sometimes it will feel really bad.  And I guess that’s ok, too. 

*yeah, yeah…special needs, my ass.  My kid can’t see and that’s fucked-up.