Letting go

It’s Diabetes Blog Week! Thanks to Karen from Bitter~Sweet Diabetes for coming up with and coordinating this exciting annual event. It’s a great chance to discover other diabetes bloggers from around the world. Here’s my third entry for the week!

Last week, as I skimmed through the topics for this year’s #DBlogWeek and saw Wednesday’s prompt, I gasped. It was an involuntary, sharp, sudden intake of breath and, somehow, it felt painful. I knew what I would write about. I knew I needed to write about this. It’s not only about diabetes, but then, it is, because everything when it comes to my health and my body is intrinsically linked to diabetes.

You see, it is time to let go. It is time to somehow acknowledge that I need to say good bye. It is time to release the pain and the hurt and the ache that, although it will to a degree always remain, is suffocating me in many ways. I need to unfurl it from the tight, protected ball that is so deeply placed inside of me and liberate myself from the hold it has.

Even though it is time to say goodbye to the pain, to the loss and the grief, I don’t want to. It’s not that I am bidding goodbye to the baby that, every day, I think about, or to forget about the loss.  But it is time to farewell the dream. 

It has been time for a while now, but I have held on stubbornly, resolutely, fiercely because I feel so sad and like I failed this little person before they could come into the world. By not letting go, I’ve somehow kept them alive and safe – at least in my heart and my mind. By feeling the pain, I have found a connection that was lost. 

And I’ve wanted to hold on to the dream of what could have been, and to spend daydream-y chunks of time each day imagining and wondering of little faces with long eyelashes and tiny heads of hair and miniature fingers wrapped around mine and the deep, even breathing of a sleeping baby. Because the baby was mine – was made from me, of me – and I didn’t get to actually see his face, brush the hair from her eyes, feel his fingers gently squeeze mine, hear and count her beautiful breaths.

I’ve held on for reasons that are confused and confusing and selfish and tied up with my very being. It makes me question everything I know of myself. Is this giving up? Is letting go giving up? Is it dishonouring the memory of my son or daughter? Have I stopped caring? Am I admitting defeat? Or acknowledging my shattered, damaged, broken body has won?

I don’t know and I will work through that over the next few months – with the some professional help.

But it is time. So. I say good bye. And it is time to start to forgive myself.