After All

I should really be sleeping right now, because the baby is, and because I'm gonna have to get up again in like, an hour or 2 when she starts crying and needs to be brought to the "Milk Bar" and get fed again. But my grief is keeping me awake. It's raining outside, which I like, but definitely brings emotions to the surface (not that they were far below the surface otherwise.) Thanksgiving is lurking behind me with an aura of impending doom. I don't want to celebrate. I should be, but I'm not feeling very thankful. I miss my sister and there is no Thanksgiving without her.

I remember last year at Thanksgiving we were at Jill's house and Emily was pretty low affect and depressed and Lena and I announced our upcoming wedding. She didn't seem happy for me, honestly. She just seemed sad. Which I understand. I imagined the upcoming year, 2013, would be much different than it actually has turned out to be. I imagined my sister would be here. I imagined *I* would be the one getting pregnant and giving birth. I imagined being my same self, married and a parent, sure, but not this deeply wrecked person I feel I've become.

When am I gonna feel happiness again?
I imagine it's inside me somewhere, a low flicker of a flame, and that it can grow again if given appropriate room and oxygen. When, though, I don't know.

Fucking Thanksgiving. MIL will be in town and I just want to be able to get out and go shopping at Bay Street with my cool, stylish sister who loves me. I don't know where else to escape to. Or who.

Had some little fantasies about jumping on a plane to go see Nora, the closest I have to a sister on this physical earth. But now that I'm a parent, I can't do irresponsible things like that. I'm tied down. And tonight it was feeling like, it's a good thing this baby is tying me down, tying me to the world and to life, because otherwise I would have even more sick fantasies of stabbing myself in the chest and turning the knife clockwise. I know I have to live this fucking painful life I've been given, or that I've chosen, and not only that, but I have to live it WELL, for Tavi's sake. And for the sake of Baby #2. As Dar Williams put it, "'Cause when you live in a world, well it gets into who you thought you'd be. And now I laugh at how the world changed me, I guess life chose me, after all."

Here's the whole song:

Go ahead, push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold
Once upon a time I had control
And reined my soul in tight
Well the whole truth
It's like the story of a wave unfurled
But I held the evil of the world
So I stopped the tide
Froze it up from inside
And it felt like a winter machine 
That you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

And when I chose to live
There was no joy
It's just a line I crossed
I wasn't worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found

And if I was to sleep
I knew my family had more truth to tell
So I traveled down a whispering well
To know myself through them

Growing up, my mom had a room full of books
and hid away in there
The father raging down a spiral stair
'Til he found someone
Most days his son
And sometimes I think 
My father, too, was a refugee
I know they tried to keep their pain from me
They could not see what it was for

But now I'm sleeping fine
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
I am the daughter of a great romance
And they are the children of the war 

Well the sun rose 
So many colors, it nearly broke my heart
It worked me over like a work of art
And I was part of all that

So go ahead, push your luck
Say what it is you gotta say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it'll push right back
And there are worse things than that
Cause for every price
And every penance that I could think of
It's better to have fallen in love
Than never to have fallen at all

'Cause when you live in a world 
Well it gets into who you thought you'd be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me
I think life chose me after all