What’s Wrong With Me?

I’m feeling so sad and I don’t even know why. Everything I try to do to make it better makes it worse. I feel like I can barely breathe. Like I can breathe into my stomach but there’s this spot in my chest that just locks up. Am I just afraid I’m going to puke again? Or is this really some deep sadness or exhaustion that just won’t let me move on. What am I even sad about? Is it the sadness of pain and fear I couldn’t feel while I was sick? How do you feel that well enough that it stops hurting inside you. I really thought I was going to die there for a minute, and Willow too. But everything was so awful for both of us that I couldn’t even feel it or it would literally make me vomit. It hurt so much though. I was in so much pain, so humiliated, so disgusting, so tired and weak, hungry and miserable. The world was spinning around me and I shook freezing cold. Willow was so sick too, she almost had to go to ER for fluids and what’s worse is I wouldn’t have been able to go with her. That thought hurts my heart so much. I was so afraid I was going to go into early labor and this baby would die because I was sick, or that because we hadn’t gotten the flu shot Willow and I were going to die. I need to be on Facebook less, I’m getting all these anxieties I never would have thought to have. It was really hard. It only makes it scarier for me that there is worse out there. There are women for whom this is almost daily in their pregnancy. I’m afraid to be them and I’m afraid for them. It is terrifying to be in that much pain. I don’t really know how to express the crippling feeling I have now. All I know is it hurt and it was scary and I’m still scared and it still hurts or rather the memory hurts.

I think part of why I have such a hard time with the little things is that I am so terrified of the big things and everytime the little things happen I am haunted by how bad things could get. I always feel melodramatic for it, but I really did think she was going to die, and me too, and not in a I’m kinda nervous way, in a “ok this is the moment where I just accept it kind of way.”

There was a missile alarm in Hawaii today. They said it was a mistake, nothing was ever wrong, but we have stories of mothers and children hiding in their basements, praying for help. Hurricanes and monsoons and floods and fires are only getting worse every year. Some say there is no climate change, but we have people dying and homeless who are suffering at the ends of something. I am so scared, not just selfishly that these things will happen to me, although that too, but at the fact that they happen at all. How can we live in a world where in one moment everything is ok and peachy and the next minute we are dead, or dying, or wish we were? What kind of a world is this?

Or worse, at the risk of blasphemy, what kind of God is this? Let’s forget for a moment the terrifying thought that some of it may be our own fault, horrifying evils performed by humanity or by their neglect. What kind of God allows the death of a baby inside a mother? Is there anything more horrifying than a mother crying in agony about a baby she never got to touch? What kind of God forbids anything when He knows His people are lost and desperate and the last thing they need is guilt? What kind of God allows the things that are our fault? If you knew, and I mean, really knew that throwing away a can would kill all the baby seals, would you do it? Or is it the sense that what I do doesn’t matter?what difference do I make unless I find a way to do everything, and I can’t do everything so what’s the point of even a little?

I tried to put my babygirl to sleep tonight and she just screamed louder and louder. I felt so helpless. How can there be days when I know exactly what to do and others where she wants nothing more than for me to go as far away as I can get? Am I just selfish wanting to hold her when I thought she was slipping away so recently? How do we live in this world where things could be taken away so quickly? How do I live in a world where this beautiful life inside me could suddenly be gone and I could go through the worst human pain imaginable and never see her face? (Please God protect my baby, I’m just asking) Women have held their lifeless children in their arms. I never held my first and I never will. Women suffer untold horrors to bring life to the world, and horrible things happen to people just minding their own business. But why? It hurts. The whole earth bleeds with our own mistakes and and injuries. Why?

I don’t understand how some people can hear the trite “God brings good out of everything” or “God has a plan,” and think that somehow makes it ok. What plan could ever excuse Rachel crying in the wilderness, or the moment I screamed in my husbands arms about the death taking place inside of me? What plan excuses the children in pain all over the world from starvation or abuse? What plan excuses powerful men who would rather see vast amounts of people die than share a country with them? I pray often that God doesn’t strike me down because I just don’t understand, and I’m afraid I’ll go to hell for saying it. But there are times when the cruelty of the world is suffocating me and I have to say something.

My grief is that of the whole world. (She said arrogantly) I feel the death of Samson for his worst mistake, I feel the sin of Judas and his desperation for forgiveness. I feel the fear of the children in gas chambers, and I feel the anger of a young Adolf denied his chance to speak. I feel the pain of those who have hurt me sometimes more than my own at being hurt, until my own ability to feel rises and comes into my own throat to shred me into tiny bits like carrots in a shredder. (It’s a crass comparison, but that’s the point) I will never be a good enough Catholic because I feel the faith of the Buddhists, and I feel the anger of the atheists, I feel the abandonment of those who would give anything for just one thing to believe in, but can’t.

I guess I know what my sadness is now, but what do you do when your sadness is everything evil that exists? When the fact that pain is an experience that happens is the most painful part of being? When you can’t get air into your chest because something bad will happen to someone in any given minute? How do you stop feeling everyone else’s pain and your own? Is it just forgetting and moving on until something else bad happens and you remember again until you are paralyzed, and then you have to learn to breathe again? Maybe the idea is that I just don’t have the answer and never will, or maybe this is why people go to therapists. Will my counselor teach me how to live with knowing we all die and grieve before we do?