Back Home Blues

It's hard coming back home. When you're on a vacation, it's so easy to pretend your someone else. I think that's half the reason why we go on vacations in the first place. When you are away from home, you distance yourself from your "real" life and become a part of where you are. You are able to pretend that the place where you are vacationing is your "real" life because it is, for that short period of time. It makes it easy to forget about all the life events that brought you there because you don't have any daily reminders. Everything is new. And for someone like me, that's a good thing.

I still cried everyday while we were in New York but for that whole week, I didn't feel nearly as awful as I normally do. I was able to fully immerse myself in my vacation reality and, in a way, forget about my real reality. I got to be another person, one without the troubles, burdens and baggage of my real life.

But coming back home puts everything in perspective again. I am no longer some carefree person roaming around the city. I am returning to my life as a mother whose child died. That is my reality and, unfortunately, my identity now. I will never not be this person. I can take "vacations" from my reality but it's something that I always and forever come back to. This is who I am now and I hate it and can't escape it.

I can completely understand why people run away and completely change their lives after experiencing a loss like we did. There I times when I really wish we could just pick up and move away and start all over, away from all of the reminders - the house that we planned to make her home that now holds a room whose door is permanently closed, the hospital where I gave birth to her, the Target where we took her on her only outing that didn't involve a doctor's office, the cemetery that hold her remains. It sucks because I was actually happy with my life before. She made it absolutely perfect. Now, it all just reminds me of what I'm missing. Of what's gone and never coming back. I would love to run away because everything in my life is a painful reminder of what could have been. And it sucks. And it hurts. And it's draining. And it's hard to pretend that it's not - which is what we now do in our new reality.

I need a vacation.