The three of you lounge around in bed for the next several minutes - you and your husband pointlessly grasping at some additional close-eyed moments, your 10 month old daughter amusing herself with the Roku remote she found within seconds of rooting around in your covers. There's one culprit responsible for your poor quality of sleep lately: You keep watching Netflix shows late into the night, your husband snoring next to you for hours. You try to turn off the TV, but ten to fifteen minutes in the silent darkness is usually about all you can stand of the memories that inevitably consume your grieving mind and heart. Since you are far from mastering the art of turning your attention to something else, anything else, you try to do what your therapist has recommended: lean into the memories, unafraid to connect your heart with your father's, absorbing the beauty of the love that still exists between the two of you, possibly in an even more perfect way. And while it is an emotionally exhausting endeavor, it's not exhausting enough to get you to fall asleep. It's anxious exhaustion (definitely the worst kind of fatigue). So to calm your nerves and relieve the pain you turn the TV back on. Try to lose yourself and numb your reality with endless episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, FRIENDS, or some other comedy with or without a laugh-track that makes things seem less serious. Sometimes you attempt the opposite viewing experience: some show that highlights fictional characters' pain far worse than yours. Neither genre seems to work.
You don't lift your head from your pillow and neither does Husband, even though he knows he needs to be getting ready for work if he has any hope of leaving the house on time to pick up his carpooling coworker, and you know you need to be getting up to prepare the baby's bottle if you have any hope of heading off her morning hunger shrieks. You've already blown your chance of making your own breakfast, showering, or getting dressed in any sort of ensemble that resembles put-together or well-groomed by not making sure to be up before her. (To be fair, it's 6:00am and you only finally fell asleep around 1:30am for a few hours of heavily dream-laden sleep.) When she hits you in the face with the remote, that's when you decide it's time to get up.
You peel yourself out of bed and attach Baby to your hip as you shuffle into the kitchen and switch on the Keurig before plopping her into her highchair and buckling her in. You sprinkle a handful of Cheerios across her tray - which always makes you think of sprinkling fish food over a tank - and hand her a bright yellow sippy cup of water. You hope this will keep her occupied at least for the three minutes it takes to mix her formula (though lately it seems to upset her if you even just disappear into the pantry for a moment or run downstairs to throw in a load of laundry). You reluctantly dismantled the breastmilk factory for good about a month and a half ago when you decided that you were ready to have your regular-sized breasts back, if not your regular life. You figured Baby was eating solids well now and before long she would be able to drink grown-up milk anyway, but you still felt guilty about cutting her off. When your dad died, you figured you'd be able to let yourself off the hook, but it was still an emotional challenge laced with Mommy guilt and ambivalence. Not to mention, weaning made you remember that your body, though ten months postpartum, is still a walking chemistry kit. Your hormones are still in a state of flux, and now that you're no longer breastfeeding you feel like you're back in the first trimester of pregnancy - acne, fatigue, occasional nausea. There's a depressed mood, too, which you've read can occur. But you're also grieving, so who knows anymore. It's too painful to try to suss out what's going on emotionally.
As you pop the bottle into the bottle warmer and swiftly loop a bib around Baby's neck, you listen to the sound of the water running in the bathroom as Husband takes a shower. You are simultaneously jealous and anxious - jealous that he gets to tend to his hygiene and then walk out the door to work, and anxious that shortly you will be alone with the baby and your grief. To stave off the emotions you focus on brewing your coffee. In the thirty seconds it takes for the cup to fill up, Baby decides Cheerios aren't going to cut it; she wants that bottle NOW. Whiny crying episode #1 commences.
So you take the bottle out of the warmer a few seconds early and add an eyedropper's worth of Vitamin D to it as her crying escalates.
"I'm a bad mother."
It's the first time the thought enters into your head today, but it won't be the last. It's involuntary; you don't intellectually believe you're a bad mother but there the thought appears anyway, half-baked but distressing all the same. When she cries like that, it feels like she's voicing all the angst and chaos in your own head. Overemphasizing all your most upsetting feelings and confirming your most troubling doubts. At least when you were still breastfeeding, you could point to that as a tangible sacrifice and unmistakable act of love for your baby. Now you're not sure what you're really good for anymore. You feel like you're just screwing it all up at this new stage in her life. You resent the fact that you're being forced to learn how to mother and grieve simultaneously.
You whip the tray off the high chair and cart Baby and bottle into the living room to rock in your glider. She's at the point where she can feed herself her bottle but it helps to recline her a bit (sitting upright she ends up sucking down a little too much air in addition to milk since she hasn't totally mastered the tilt), but she is so distractable at this stage that you need to constantly supervise and redirect her when having her bottle - even when she's starving and clearly wants the milk. So you situate the two of you in the glider, and then get up and re-situate three more times as you remember to go get her binky for when she's done eating, her blankie, your book for when (if?) she falls asleep on you and you are bored stiff...
You start to rock her as she drinks, and so you are presented with your first daytime grief challenge (already... doesn't really seem fair since you just got through the night which was hard enough): having to be totally quiet for however long it takes her to finish her bottle and fall asleep. You know all too well that even if she is happily devouring her bottle, she will not be cool with you flipping through your novel. The second you even reach for the book next to you she will stop drinking on a dime, discard her bottle (dripping its contents on her blankie) and reach with her tiny hands for the pages that are just begging to be torn. You also have the remote and your smartphone next to you, but you know that turning on the TV or scrolling through Facebook will produce a similarly distracted and squirmy result. So even though it pains you, you rock back and forth in grief-filled silence. You try to just gaze at Baby's gorgeous face and embrace the serenity of the moment, but it is so hard to avoid the raw feelings that come up as you face yet another morning of mourning, knowing someone you loved so much is gone from this world. There is guilt, knowing you still have so much to be grateful for. Knowing you prayed for nothing more than the chance to be a mom. But you never thought you'd have to give up being your father's daughter at the same time.
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