Finding My New Normal - A Year On

Wow, I can't believe I've been blogging here at Finding My New Normal for a whole year now. Well, actually it's been a year and two days. The actual anniversary was on the 5th of November but I was on a plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean and was unable to post. I could have pre-planned something and have it scheduled to post on that day but I've been away visiting family and am not nearly that organized.

When I first started this blog I was a broken woman. My son had died and I was overcome with grief. Frozen in a lot of ways. We were getting ready to go home and visit the family. A trip that we did every year, except that this year was supposed to be different. We were supposed to be bringing our new baby for everyone to meet. But life had other plans for us.

Instead of bringing our new bouncy baby home, we were bringing his ashes home in a tiny urn. I still remember that feeling when I got the suitcase out of the closet to get ready to pack for that trip back home. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't pack for 2 people when I should have been packing for 3 people. That empty suitcase prompted my first ever blog post. And thus, Finding My New Normal was born.

It was rough going in the beginning. I was a total rookie to the world of blogging. Looking back I can see that I struggled to find my voice. Partly because writing down my thoughts was new to me, and partly because I just had too many thoughts to sort through. I was deep in the trenches of grief and filled with raw emotion. I can see it all in my early posts. The sadness, the anger, the devastation. It makes me cry to even skim through some of those early posts because it puts me right back there.

I've always written this blog for me, and in the beginning that's who was reading it,,,, me.

I didn't have any followers at first. For a long time I figured I wouldn't ever have any. I mean, who wants to read a blog about a dead baby?? If I had not lost my son I know I sure wouldn't have. But amazingly, this new version of me was hoping there were other women out there like me. So my search began to find some other BLM's (although I didn't know that's what we were called yet).

It's not easy to search for blogs,,,, did you know that? Especially when you have never read any blogs before. So my task was not an easy one. But somehow I managed to find a few women who were struggling like me. I stalked their sidebars and comment sections for others. And soon I had found a group of amazing women who were trying to move on with their lives after losing a baby. Women who understood how I felt. It was so nice to know I wasn't alone out there. I started following them, and to my surprise, they started following me back.

I have found so many amazing bloggers on this journey. In the beginning I connected most with women who had suffered a loss like mine. As time went on I reached out to my fellow infertiles for support as well. I have also connected with bloggers who aren't like me at all. Because we all struggle with something, and we all need support at times. I've found an amazing community here in bloggy land.

After a month or so of blogging I knew I was hooked. Inside my head all these emotions were flying around that I didn't know how to deal with. It was when I sat down to write that I was able to make sense of them.

It's almost like I have to take them out of my head and put them down on paper (or the computer screen) in order to sort them out. As a non-writer this concept amazed me. Not only was I able to figure out exactly how I was feeling, but I also got feedback from people who have walked in my shoes. I wasn't crazy,,, I was just grieving. I can't tell you how much that helped me.

A year on I am sitting in such a different place. A place I couldn't have even imagined a year ago when I was buried in the fog of my grief. I am still grieving my son of course. But it's not the overwhelming burden it once was. It's forced it's way into my life and found a way to fit in with everything else. I am able to feel joy and happiness again. I am able to have good days where I don't cry. I am able to understand that some days I still need to cry and that's ok too.

I am pregnant again. Wow, that brought out some tears,,, give me a minute or two to compose myself.

I am still in total shock about being pregnant again. It's still very early days and one thing I've learned is that a positive pregnancy test does not ensure a healthy take home baby. But I'm hopeful which is something I wasn't sure I could be after my loss.

So have I found my new normal yet? That really was the intended goal of this blog. To help me figure out what to do next. To figure out who to be next. To figure out how to live a life without my son.

I suppose in some ways I have. In other ways I've still got a long way to go. But life is about the journey, and this blog is