In our society, December is often a time of connection. We spend more time with family, get together with friends, and some of us even send real mail! Since my HELLP experience/ birth trauma in December of 2007, I've struggled with my sense of connection to others during this time of year and especially around the winter holidays. I've really turned into a Grinch, actually, finding it much easier to dismiss the parties, cards, shopping and gift-giving scene as a parade of superficiality rather than to be really honest with myself and see that my dismissal of these things is related to my own struggle with connection during this time of year.
Probably the last time I can remember feeling connected in December was the first Christmas after I had my son, just days after leaving the hospital. We were having holiday dinner with my husband's family and my mother-in-law asked us to go around the table and say something nice to the person to our left. It was a sweet thing. When it was my turn, I sat frozen, hormonal and sweaty, with a squirming pink newborn on my lap, a nursing cover awkwardly placed over my shoulder, and looked over to the person on my left. My husband. My partner with whom I had just shared the scariest time of our lives. The days leading up to that moment flashed in my memory like a train passing too fast, and too close. I looked at Brian. The person who stayed by my side for 30 hours of labor, who feared for my life, and who mothered our son on his own for the first 7 hours of Gavin's life. Only to sleep on a thin mat on a hospital floor for the next 6 nights, never leaving his wife and son. The man who wore a handmade necklace of birth beads over his scrubs while our baby was lifted from my lifeless abdomen in the next room. Who ran, scared, with the nurse down the hall with our minutes-old baby, pushing his cart to the nursery, barely aware if we'd had a boy or a girl, let alone how many fingers and toes there were to count. The man who fought tirelessly to recapture any of our intended birth plans, bringing a breast pump into the recovery room where I wasn't yet out of the fog of anesthesia, pumping me as best he could on his own, trying to get precious mother's milk from my body... I just sat at that surreal Christmas table, with its casseroles and cheerful garland, looking at my husband, with his whole family watching me, and waiting to hear me say something nice. "Something nice" would never capture the way I felt about him in that moment. Connected by our souls. By this indescribable experience we'd just had. By this tiny baby who had survived. All I could do was cry. I cried and cried right there at the table, the only expression of the deep love I felt for him. He held my hand. I held our baby. I couldn't even talk. That's the last time I remember feeling really, really connected around the holidays.
This year my disconnection was so blatantly obvious for Christmas that I actually forgot to bring gifts, both purchased and made, to my mother-in-law's in Oklahoma City. Even with a three year old just starting to get the whole Santa concept, I couldn't muster any holiday spirit. I let myself make an excuse, yet again, for why I would wait to send holiday cards until the new year. It's just been easier that way.
But I know it's not good for me. I am usually a very connected person. The whole rest of the year I merrily reach out to others and seek connections and nurturing relationships. Because I am so connected the rest of the time, I can feel the negative impact that my December disconnection has on me. Starting this blog in the first place was a way to connect. I crave it. I thrive on it. I think all of us do. So it's only fitting that the first monthly theme in this new year is Connection.
More to come...
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