The Night It Rained

We lost our firstborn on her birthday. On the day she was to be born via home birth, she came into our world through emergency cesarean section. The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.

All seemed to be going well, as well as I could tell, anyway. You see, this was to be my first child. She would be Heather's third, and this prior experience was paramount to the smooth 42 weeks we had enjoyed, thus far. I had been so elated the first time I placed my hand on Heather's belly and felt a little tiny kick in response. Once or twice I even played "Shave and a Haircut" on my wife's swollen tummy and would laugh out loud as "Two Bits" would kick back from the babe within.

We had stockpiled clothing and diapers. We had shopped for toys and car seats. We had already picked a name, Clara Edith Webb.

So sure we were that nothing would, or could, go wrong. What fools time makes of us all, when pride blinds us. I mean, surely, after almost a full year of life on the road, pulling together what funds we could to get by, this gift from God was a herald of change for our family... wasn't it? What God would let this suffering worsen? What God would hold such joy and hope over us, only to snatch it away? No, this was meant to be, this was meant to happen. A reward for our faith and patience. And all Glory unto Him for this blessing! Amen...and all that jazz.

After much worry and waiting, 42 weeks had come and gone. The decision was made to seek aid from the hospital. And we, two smiling idiots, sent the girls to visit family, loaded up in our friends' car and chugged across town to the hospital, joking all the way. Grinning like a pair of Cheshire Cats driving a minivan across Wonderland.

And, why not? I was about to officially be a daddy! My life was about to change. I would finally get to have a taste of those years I had missed while my stepchildren were growing up. And they would be there to enjoy watching little Clara grow. This was right - more right than anything before had ever been!

My high school girlfriend, who had finally become my wife, and I were going to have a family together. Clara would heal any hidden fears from Heather that I would just decide to leave some day. She would show our parents that we were self reliant and capable. She was our salvation and our reward.

It all crumbled when, upon checking for her heartbeat (on the delivery table, no less), it was discovered that she had passed on from within her mother's womb. Her umbilical cord still attached. No words can ever describe the agony of hearing your smiley nurse saying to the attending physician that she can't find the pulse.

I will never be able to lessen the dark image of her limp body being popped from my wife's open belly. Her still pink flesh, covered in a thin brown fluid and traces of her own mother's badly infected blood. This will forever be frozen in my darkest memories.

Her ashes sit in a tiny urn upon our bookshelf. A picture of her eternally sleeping form, framed in pink, rests to the left. To the right, a small silver keepsake box sits mostly empty.

Behind this stands a small statue of a mother and father holding a tiny statue baby, gazed upon by two statue girls. This shrine to such a love lost stands to remind us that she lived, if only for a moment, and was, indeed part of our family.

 Heather's sister came into town in August, bringing her two infant children. She asked us to watch them for her one night. I had found myself rocking Clara's cousin, Avery to sleep. I sang to him the only lullaby I could find in my fractured heart. It was "Silent Lucidity", and somehow it felt right. I think I even felt my heart healing a tiny bit. Maybe.

Slicing up my soul into a hundred little horcrux's over the years in my career as an artist never did fight mortality, as I had hoped. However, I am working on more popular works, lately.On Twitter, I am peaking at nearly 300 followers. If I'd said that in a zombie flick, I'd be soooo screwed. Wish they all would buy something... Zombie or not, I'm not running a damned museum.

Pulse

When born months premature, with a collapsed lung and tacicardia, the doctors put my life expectancy down in hours. As I lay in an incubator barely alive and isolated from human touch, my breaths and nourishment were supplied through a tube. I was a shivering mass of fat and bone, wired and tubed into machines designed to keep my defective body from failing me. I survived by luck, prayers, and the sweat of strangers. I would have several more heart attacks in the following days as my heart grew tired of its beatings.

My father was plagued by an undiagnosed and untreated clinical depression which he would only become aware of years after my exodus towards an independence which never became fully attained. And he was a parent who fully believed in controlling his children through the church guilt and with leather belt bruises. My only want was for his approval and respect. I knew two men in my father, his public mask and the angry, unhappy man beneath it which no one but us, his blood, ever had the displeasure of riding in cars with. Once, his foot found my kidney while I scuttled about to gather fallen condiments from of the kitchen floor. A shelf had prooven too weak for the sudden opening of the refrigerator door and, so released its contents across the room with a crash. He had taken this moment to vent his anger at the world upon me. As I rose in defiance and felt the winds of change, my heart was tired of its beatings.

My mother lost her youngest brother to a drunk driver one early morning. My uncle was a light upon my gloomy life. His joy and his thick skin had taught me how to hold my head up against the storms. His chiseled features gave me a link to my long departed grandfather, a man I had never known but had respected greatly. He was my own Lincoln monument, cast in flesh. He had been a lifeline when I was drowning in sorrow. And, I awoke to his sister, my mother, wailing the sorrow and disbelief of his parting at three o'clock in the morning on a Sunday. At his funeral, my cousin, his son, was in shock. I invited him outside to play and talk, as we had always been good friends and I felt it my duty to lessen the blow. I received a blow to the face from my own father and scolded for my disrespectful actions. My heart was tired of its beatings.

I have watched the sinking of the Titanic family yacht, after the senior members of the crew were out on their own ports of call. The iceberg of divorce hit and everyone scrambled to save their own butts. My lifeboat with my mom was crowded and short of supplies. When, for instance my birthday came around, she took me shopping... On my own credit card. A card I never used because I couldn't afford to pay back anything I bought, until my mom offered to get me a new pair of jeans and pay back what I spend on them. Once there she talked me into a whole new outfit to go with the jeans, a debt I would never be able to pay on my own. And, never have. Or the college tuition I payed out of pocket with the intention of claiming back on my taxes, but could not after she had claimed it on hers. She never repaid any of it. And, after having helped her for years only to be asked to move out;after learning that her mother molested children when I was prime target age and under her mother's care; after living with untreated mental disorders for years, I began smoking cigarettes and pot. Soon followed by cocoa bean, pain killers, and pretty much any drug landing in my hand. You see, I saw this as a slow suicide.

And, after all my heart was tired of its beatings.

Welcome to the show!

My first dive into blogging waters, and I hope I don't drown in my own honesty. I am hopeful that this endeavor will prove fruitful in my own growth. Be forewarned that I intend to be open and honest about many aspects of my life... Sometimes harmful honesty, in the wrong eyes. The names are changed, places also. However, the face of my life will remain as chiseled and hairy as my eyes can describe.

For those who will read this as a passing fancy, I hope you will enjoy. As for those who itch to be the first to cast stones, go swim in tar. Anyone seeking insight into their own hearts, feel free to peek into my own. Anyone seeking insight into me may find themselves lost in translation... Don't know more to say... Enjoy the show!