I am feeling a lot calmer after some tears and angry writing and a few hours at work. Still struggling with the frustation and anger and a good dose of helplessness, but I’m trying to just breathe and stay calm and see the positives here.<\/p>\n
A good part of my panic and frustration was because I immediately recognized that, while it would be physically<\/i> possible to replace the tree, I just can’t do it emotionally. Entertaining the thought makes me feel incredibly guilty and panicky. For better or worse I have invested my feelings towards my son in this tree; from the moment we brought it home it was Devin’s tree<\/i>. Replacing it would feel like such a betrayal… it would just be wrong in my heart. Even saying “it’s the wrong tree” sounds terrible.<\/p>\n
I guess that’s why I was so upset. I realized early on, when we were selecting a tree, that it would be important and not something we could change (though I don’t think I knew it would be this bad). So this morning when I stood there staring at that one white bloom all my panic overwhelmed me as I realized it was too late<\/i>. Too late to change my mind, too late to fix things. My OCD need for everything to be perfect<\/i>, a need that is especially strong when it comes to anything for Devin, was overwhelming. I had to fight the urge to rip the bloom off the tree in anger, like ripping a page out of my diary after I mis-spelled a word. It’s not right, it’s not right, it’s not right.<\/i> My son died, shattering my belief that anything in this world would ever be right again, and yet here I am having a panic attack because the tree is the wrong color… still clinging to an attempt to make things right again.<\/p>\n
I’m really really trying hard to reason my way through my OCD. The tree isn’t perfect – but neither would Devin have been. He would have had flaws, he would have acted out, he would have made choices that I didn’t agree with. I tell myself it’s okay that the tree isn’t the way I<\/i> envisioned it, that the tree is for Devin, not for me – it is how it is supposed to be. And I need to find a way to find the beauty in what it is<\/i>, not what it was in my head. I lean on my photography, in a way – photography, in my eyes, is not about changing the object, it’s in finding a beautiful way to look at it. Anything can be beautiful if you look at it through the right lens, the right angle, the right lighting. So I put myself behind my lens and find the beauty in this tree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am feeling a lot calmer after some tears and angry writing and a few hours at work. Still struggling with the frustation and anger and a good dose of helplessness, but I’m trying to just breathe and stay calm and see the positives here. A good part of my panic and frustration was because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[76,69],"class_list":["post-1113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ivf-3","tag-loss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}