Halloween...

Halloween was hard for some reason. It all started off perfectly well - the children had a ton of candy and went completely nuts - D puked...

Actually that's an even worth diverting the course of this post slightly for. D managed to cram his little tummy so full of sweets that by the time he'd reached Grandmas house he was fit to burst. There were some girls from some kind of organization coming up the garden path, and before Grandma had chance, D had turned and spewed into the full bowl of candy... Needless to say, he wasn't very happy about it and neither was Grandma at the time, but it was classic nonetheless and we all laughed about it later on - how could you not? Mind you, perhaps we won't raise that one with him for a few years...I think he was pretty mortified.

Anyhow.

I, three weeks after the cesarean, dressed up as an Egyptian queen. I felt it would be sensible, given that Egyptian queens are supposed to be very strong, powerful women, and here I was, attempting to be strong and powerful. I felt better in my costume than I had all day - maybe because it gave me legitimate reason to pretend to be someone else..someone a little more fun than I had been. The heavy green eye makeup really helped with the disguise and I suddenly wished I could be transported back about 3000 years, to the time of the ancient Pharaohs, where stillbirths were commonplace and the babies were mummified just like the rest of the human population...gently laid in sarcophagi of gold and never referred to as fetuses.

I remembered the little white coffin that Josie went into the ground in, and thought how much nicer it would have been if she'd had a gold sarcophagus like the ancient Egyptians. How much more majestic that would have been to lay her to rest like that. But then, I remembered, we had buried her with various artifacts including a picture of all of us together as a family, and, I supposed, that was similar.

Harry dressed up as leatherface and scared all the local children. There he is, hiding at the side of the house. I'm absolutely certain he was responsible for some enormous nightmares that night!

My mother dressed as a witch and had a splendid black pointy hat to go with her costume - she had found it in a store the previous day and was very pleased with her find.

We stayed in for the most part and gave out candy, which was fine with me because I certainly didn't feel like socializing properly - I had nothing to say to anyone - I really hadn't since Josie had died. With me, it's always "if you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing" and I didn't have any good news to share with the general community all of a sudden, which led to me really not wanting to share at all.

In the end, we went to bed pretty early. But I couldn't sleep. I stayed awake and got progressively more and more upset. I got out of bed at about midnight and sat in the chair next to the bed - the chair which until recently I'd affectionately referred to as my "nursing chair". I sat there under a blanket with a box of tissues, getting more and more weepy until I'd surrounded myself with snotty tissues. I felt so pathetic and very overwhelmed. This was the night the two worlds would be closest, and I was spending it in tears instead of in spiritual rapture. I missed my Josie so much that night and would have given anything to reach across the veil and take her back - but that was impossible and I knew it.

I got angry then - so angry, like a tiny child with no public emotional control, screaming and throwing a fit on the floor of a large store. I made raging noises among my tearful sobs, red faced and growling like a dog. I could have taken the pillows off the bed and ripped them into pieces, feathers flying everywhere.

In the end I went out of the bedroom, took my big body pillow and sat on the sofa in the living room with another box of tissues just sobbing so hard my body shook. I turned on the TV because the silence was frightening me. despite my best intentions, by 2am I was still completely awake and getting even more upset, so I made a decision and went to get the bottle of percocet I hadn't taken any of for almost two weeks. I got some milk and two Oreo cookies, and swallowed two percocet for the express purpose of being knocked out. Tears just ran down my face - I felt so weak - such a failure for having to take narcotics to knock me out. Like a hysterical 19th century woman in a tight corset being tranquilized by worried family members.

Mind you, it did the trick. Perhaps two pills were more than enough though, because I ended up waking up partially about an hour or two later, feeling as though I had been removed from my body and was floating about a foot above it. I heard my own breathing and wondered who the hell it was. Nevertheless I was calm, and went back to sleep on the sofa ther until about 6am, when I finally crept back into bed, feeling wrung out and mentally exhausted.