The evening of my birthday (Saturday) was really hard for me. I wish I could realize I'm getting triggered at the moment I'm getting triggered, rather than trying to get to sleep with all these horrible thoughts running through my head and for hours feeling like "why is this happening to me?" till I figure out what happened. Three people (my mother, my aunt and my husband) said things to me that hurt at the time but I blocked it out almost immediately after I heard it, and then at night when I have all this time to cry I realized their big fat mouths were the reason I couldn't sleep. It just feels like I've slipped a little further down the "crazy trail" though, and it bothers me that nobody is concerned about it, like my husband, kids, husband's family, my family, and even my counselor are all just observing me like they're watching some funny TV show!
Anyway, that night I tried doing the handkerchief thing my counselor taught me (where you mentally take one problem you're obsessing on and wrap it in a handkerchief mentally and then mentally put it in a box, so you can quit worrying about that because it's safe in the box till the morning - and you keep going through your list of stuff and putting them in handkerchiefs and putting them in the box). One thing that was bugging me, I was thinking if I could gather my parents, my sister, the doctors, Claudia, and my counselor in one group and let myself say whatever I wanted, I would love to be able to say to Claudia (in front of all of them), "I'm sorry I didn't protect you." Just so the doctors would feel like crap for hurting her, and my parents and sister would feel like crap for hurting me, and my counselor would feel like crap for not seeing that I'm still hurting. I did protect her for 12 weeks when I kept her a secret and I also truly believe I WANTED to be her mother! I never once said, "Oooh, I'm pregnant, I need to get rid of this."
Another thing thing that was bugging me that night because I was so triggered was remembering during the Rachel's Vineyard retreat memorial service, I had to put my hot-dog-shaped cloth "baby" in this big cradle. When I was thinking about it Saturday night, I cried so hard from confusion - why did we put the babies in there? What was that supposed to do? I knew the cloth baby represented MY baby Claudia so here I am in real life clenching my fist like I'm holding this baby because I missed it so much and I missed what the cloth baby represented (my real baby). I knew I had to do a handkerchief thing for the cloth baby I was obsessing about, and it was making me really mad because I didn't want to let go. Then I remembered that I always imagine myself giving Jesus the mental box to hold for me all night and finally I realized I could just give the baby mentally to Jesus to hold directly in his HAND (without putting her in the box). So that's what I did. And then I thought it was funny that I was jealous that this mental cloth baby got to be held in Jesus' palm.
This is copied from an email I wrote to my counselor earlier this morning (and I believe the dream came out of me worrying about the stuff that happened on my birthday):
This morning I woke up with my stomach all clenched up like I was waiting to be punched but it felt like a continuation of the dream I was having because I remembered what happened in my dream! I was dreaming about the abortion clinic and everything happened just the same but in my dream I could talk, and the whole time I kept saying that I didn't want to do this and I wanted the baby. And when I woke up my stomach hurt so bad and in a way I'm kind of relieved because it showed me I did try to protect Claudia the whole time even if in the real story I didn't protest/say anything and it basically showed she was stolen from me. Anyway, one thing that really happened that got revealed in my dream was a nurse gave me two pills (I think valium?) after I signed in and I'm betting it was supposed to make me forget everything that happened but the only part it ever made me blank out on was the point where they called me back to the O/R to get undressed till the point the doctor came in.
Anyway, mostly I'm just writing this so I don't forget what happened over the weekend.
