I am in a daze. Having all your expectations turned upside down, and then life marching on exactly as before is incredibly disorienting.

I have told many friends and family that I never really believed I was having a baby. Like somehow my whole pregnancy this baby I was madly in love with was a figment of my imagination. It was just too far-fetched. It had just been too easy after years of firm conviction that I did not want children to change my mind and just *poof* be given a baby. Then Joel was born and there was this baby that people were giving CPR and oxygen to, and there were a host of paramedics in our house and I was laying there praying frantically and crying and my mom was crying and Leo was ordering people around and that baby was still just laying there so cute with oxygen in his face and fingers pumping his little chest and then he was gone. Now comes an ambulance ride and hospital and this just has to be a bad dream because I have never ridden in an ambulance and I don’t go to hospitals and now they are going to take that baby somewhere else and do I want to see him first? He is still just as cute as before and I touch his little hand and this is my baby? Are you sure? Because I wasn’t going to have any babies and yes, we really, really wanted a baby, but I had a baby? Are you sure?

Now comes the NICU and the flood of doctors and nurses and bad news and people and crying and more bad news and something this awful just can’t be true, and people calling and praying and family at the hospital and getting wheeled around and then…

Alysse hands me that baby.

And tears pour out of my eyes, I don’t know where they came from.

And that baby is laying naked on my bare chest and he is my baby.

Stop.

Everything. Just. Stops.

But everything will start again. The chaos and madness of decisions and tests and medical personnel and night and day and pray, pray, pray. And there are moments of peace, those wonderful moments where I can believe I had a baby but it’s almost too awful to believe because he isn’t going to stay with me. Yes, I had a baby and I have to let him go. Then it’s easier to be in the fog because it just can’t be real, it’s just too terrible to be real. So let the haze roll over you in waves as the chaos and madness continue.

We leave the hospital without that baby, we won’t be going back. Because even if I could believe we had a baby I certainly couldn’t believe that he is gone. He is in heaven. What does that even mean? It means more people and arrangements and do this and do that and then it’s back to work and the laundry and maybe I should make something for dinner and walk the dog.

I still find it all very hard to believe. I look at pictures, I go sit in the nursery, I pick up all the little t-shirts he never wore. None of it registers. Most of me thinks it is because those moments of clarity are so acutely painful that my mind stifles them, and with it reality. It is all still this bizarre, mixed up, terrible, comforting daze.