Once upon a time I really really enjoyed my spare time. I enjoyed it by doing nothing. I slept. I ate. I read and watched TV. Most of the time I really didn’t want to do anything at all.

That has changed. Now when I have days off I start to think what I can do to fill those days. Time to myself is all well and good, but unless I have something active to do I start getting antsy, anxious… I start going over the same things again and again.

This morning I baked a cake, then went to work. I left work mid-day to go to a BBQ (to which Den had brought the cake). We spent several hours there, sitting in the shade in the backyard, eating, talking and relaxing. But after a while I found myself looking around. My brain was just turning over thoughts and ideas. This tree, that plant, the grass. Soon I didn’t really want to sit there any longer, I needed to get my hands into something.

When we got home at 6pm I went out back and started weeding pathways in my garden. I planted flower seeds along my fence, just for fun.

In that once upon a time past the thought of doing all that in one day would have exhausted me. Now that’s the norm.

Part of it is that I have a lot more energy than I used to have. Better sleeping and eating habits, more vitamins, and being up and moving really helps me not settle into the fatigue that I used to have (and still sometimes do). But some of it, I know, is that I don’t want quiet time to think. I’ll think about my house, my pets, my work… but I do not want to think about my cycle or my baby or how quiet it is in our lives and our hearts. I prefer to be busy, with my hands in the dirt or the laundry or the clutter.

I prefer to keep moving forward, because I stop I don’t know if I’ll ever start moving again.

I am just trying not to think too much about this cycle at all. There is really nothing I can do – no appointments, no numbers, no nothing to analyze. Just counting down time. And every time I do that I start to get a lot of anxiety and my mind kicks into overdrive about all of the things that I have no control over. So I said screw it, I’m going to do the same thing I did last cycle: just ignore it. I’m filling my days with everything and anything else.

Except anything baby-related. I’m avoiding the baby talks. I’m even somewhat avoiding the cycle buddies, because that again just makes me think about my own cycle and starts the anxiety up. I’m not thinking about due dates that may never happen. I’m not thinking about who I may be pregnant with or what the spacing between kids might be or seasons or any kind of plan at all.

To be perfectly honest I’m trying not to think about the future at all. Planning for the future – whether it’s 5 years or 5 months – almost always rests on whether or not I’m pregnant or how far. I can’t make vacation plans, because I might not be able to fly. I can’t plan out my next year without knowing this crucial piece of information. When will we have a newborn? When can Den go to that training class he has to go to? Can we go to my friend’s wedding? Can we plan a trip with relatives to Vegas? When can we go visit my parents again? I can’t answer any of it. I don’t fucking know. And if I’m not pregnant, it means I’m cycling, which means dates become even less dependable.

I can’t even put into words how fucking frustrating this is to me… this not being able to plan anything. I’ve always been a 10-year-plan kind of girl. It’s just what I do. I love to sketch out house plans, and I love to outline life plans. So I just don’t think about it. A wall comes down in my brain every time my thoughts wander in the planning direction and I say to myself, I’ll figure that out later. Later, later, later, always later, never now.

I guess I finally figured out what living in the moment actually means, just out of necessity. I know when my next appointments are. I know where my garden and house is at. I know what I’m doing for the week. Heck, I may even have figured out where we’re going for our anniversary (though I haven’t figured out when).

I’m okay with doing this for now, but only with the requirement that someday soon I do get to figure out the rest of the answers. I can’t live like this forever. I’m not even sure I could live like this for very long. But I can do it for the short-term and just keep my head in the sand for a month.

To illustrate the insanity, we currently have 7 – no, wait make that 8 – home improvement projects ongoing. Some of them are out of our hands (we’re waiting on people who know what they are doing), but a lot of them are all ours, baby. We’re trying to get what we can done while we have nice weather. Are we crazy? Yes, yes we are. I don’t really expect we’ll be able to cross everything off the list this year, but I’d really like to make a good effort for it.

I used to hate this house. Hate it. Ask Den, he’ll tell you – I would have huge crying fits over how I was stuck in this old, ugly, wretched house. It needed SO much work it was just overwhelming.

But today I realized I’m really quite grateful for this huge, ongoing project in my life right now. If it was all done what would I do with my time, where would I put all this energy and planning thought? It is so nice to have all these things to work on, and to see real progress. I’m starting to feel some pride in this house, and that is a fantastic distraction from everything else.

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Today my little girl, Zoe, is 4 years old!! I really can’t believe she is 4 already. She was such an adorable little puppy, and she grew into such a beautiful lady. Still crazy and missing some marbles, but that just means she fits in with this family.

Who knew that this…

… would turn into this?!

I made the mistake just now of flipping through her puppy pictures and I’m getting all teary now. Happy birthday, baby girl.

Yesterday at the support group we talked about things we put aside and put off. For me it was the gravestone. For all the grieving I did, for all the ways I actively jumped in and tackled things, we still have not gotten a gravestone. Once we had driven to a place, but it was a weekend and they were closed. We drove away and never went back. Too busy, we said, can’t find the time. Which, when I look at it, is more or less bullshit. We just felt more comfortable putting it off.

Today I had time before work and among my errands I drove myself to the monument place. It was quiet. I let myself in and no one was there. I almost turned and left, but I heard a noise… the owner was there, in the back. I hadn’t thought to bring the paperwork from the cemetary that gave instructions for headstones… thankfully he was able to look it up in his book. 14″ by 8″ – that is all we are allowed. That means no design on the corner, and very limited space for wording. I got a price and left.

And now I’m at home, looking up epitaphs for babies and realizing why I’ve been putting this off for so long. It is gutwrenching, heartstopping. I am tearing up at these verses – and not much makes me tear up anymore. Many are lovely. But how in the hell are we supposed to choose?

I was never a fan of graveyards before. I didn’t understand it at all. Why would you want to be buried in the dirt? And all those headstones, it was just creepy. And then Devin died and as I sat in the hospital bed, still pregnant but making arrangements, I suddenly understood. It is a form of permanence. It is a way of inscribing his name on a great wall that hundreds, thousands of people will see… that, many many years after I have gone, people will look at his grave and know that he existed, that he was loved, that he is missed.

It is that thought that holds me motionless now, frozen in indecision. What do I want to tell the world about my son, about his life and death and the hole that exists in our family, that can be said in just three or four words? Is that even possible?

Etched into stone for the world to read. I search for the words I want to make so permanent… but I fear I may not ever find them. Maybe we just have to choose something that seems close enough.