pulling it out

The most painful thing I ever had to do was to pull out my living self when my son was born.

When my husband and I were first getting involved, he described me as being in an “altered state”–after the overdose, after the state hospital.

I had one foot in the grave–that would be an easy way to put it.

Then I got pregnant twice and for this reason alone I had to have an abortion. For physical reasons I had to anyway.

Then I got pregnant with Ian and for physical, psychological, and spiritual reasons, there was so much death going on in my still literally living being–and the child’s–that my condition was extremely evil to even think about having another abortion. No way. It just couldn’t be. I didn’t even know about the abortion when I was thirteen. That was the cause of all of it.

I had to wake myself back up to the world at large; go to the supermarket; take my infant son to the pediatrician.

It was just right that I was in Buffalo, a city of graveyards. I talked to the secretaries at the pediatrician’s office about ghosts in our lovely, ancient wood-floored apartment with bay windows on Kenmore Ave.

It was so beautiful but so terrifying.

It was so incredibly hard to make up the formula bottles every morning. I could count on my body for Ian’s needs when I was pregnant and I was counting on being able to count on my body for breast-feeding but I was too weak and so was he. Also, I had to take medication.

And now I have to do it again. I am back in the mode of dying. I don’t think I have long to live. But so long as I am living I have to be here for Ian’s needs. He has some health issues and I don’t think that there is anybody else who can appropriately address certain aspects of his situation at this time. I have to pull myself of the slumber of the Lamictal overdose and be living again.

I do this for you. It is like Seminole again. Here I am pulling an all-nighter for you. Like when I was blogging here late into the night in the 2000’s. I felt living then. Dissociated but living. Right now I am largely reassociated but this Lamictal overdose has had me for 6 years and I don’t think I am going to beat it.