Oh boy… We’re due for a blow up.
Yea. This was the last straw.
I won’t pretend that I’ve had a great month:
- I was supposed to come home from Maui pregnant, and I didn’t.
- The Hubs is working out of town, leaving my mid-week with WAY too much think-about-my-personal-shit time.
- The month of May brings with it Mother’s Day. Eff that noise. I tried to be positive about it. I really did. The day itself wasn’t that bad, but gearing up for it was.
- I found out about a gazillion other people are pregnant, and I’m feeling like, WAY behind.
- This last weekend was Memorial Day Weekend, which was Shower Weekend 2012 during our pregnancy with Hudson.
Two big celebrations from last year came and went this year and I did a pretty good job of suppressing/diverting my attention away from my grief and loss.
Don’t think about it and it won’t hurt so bad. Reframe it so that you can function without people giving you pity-faces all day.
And then, yesterday happened. We got home from our Memorial Day camping trip with the Dubs, all stinky and greasy and unshowered. The trip was uneventful as far as emotional breakdowns are concerned, but I did find myself thinking (more than I ever have before) about what this trip would have been like with Hudson in tow.
Sweet, chunky, ferocious, hilarious, smart, wild-haired, ten-month old Hudson.
Bouncing around in the truck as we hunt for good spots for Morels.
Giggling by the fire.
Getting passed from grandparents to aunties and back again.
Sticky and dirty from her first taste of marshmallows
So I’m getting ready for bed and I think, just briefly, about the Hubs’ Aunt C, and how this was the first time she’d seen me since Hudson died, and how she gave me the “How are you doing?” that means more than just “How are you doing?”
And I got so damn mad.
I’m so tired of people feeling sorry for me. I hate having something in my life for people to feel sorry for me about.
I got so mad I cried.
So then the Hubs needed to know what was wrong, and the floodgates opened, and this morning I awoke with puffy eyelids for the first time in a good couple of months.
Damn.
But I recover. I function throughout the day. I even allow myself to watch the video my good friend (who had her baby boy the day after Hudson was born) posted on Facebook of her son taking his first steps, and only fleetingly did I think:
Hudson could be walking by now.
I get home from work and I go for a run and I have a generally mundane little lonely evening and then I go check the mail and you know what?
ToysRUs can suck it.
I’ve complained before about how little “market research” is being done by Big Retailers as far as child development goes. They caught wind that I was pregnant and now they are assuming that I have a “Someone Special” who will be “turning one”. They never did get the memo that my baby, my perfect precious daughter, didn’t live to come home with us, and that she will never turn one, and that I’ll never get to throw her a birthday party or sign her up for “Geoffrey’s Birthday Club.”
I’ve gone this whole 10+ months without writing an angry letter. ToysRUs might just end up at the ass end of one. Their marketing tactics are invasive and they aren’t even that good. Haven’t they noticed that I haven’t spent a dime there since June of 2012? Have they not seen my uncompleted registry lying dormant for the past 10 months? Did their research department not realize that hardly any parent can go 10+ months without buying at least one ridiculously overpriced “Baby Einstein” toy?! I’m going to give those incompetent, unobservant market researchers a piece of my mind, dammit.
Of course this isn’t all ToysRUs’s fault. I have been walking a tightrope of emotion, compartmentalizing all of my worries and sadnesses and frustrations and rages. I’ve been hyper-aware of “what’s appropriate”, of “keeping it together”, of not being somebody that you have too many reasons to feel sorry for, of not breaking down or giving anybody reason to side glance or whisper about me. ToysRUs and its giant, brightly-colored postcard were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But eff it. They are going to hear from me anyway.
Sometimes when you’re angry, you just need something to point it at.
I’ve got a cartoon giraffe with a stupidly spelled name in my sights.