Sighting

When Randy is out of town, I usually move the decorative pillows onto his side of the bed, making it seem as if someone is there.  Because of this, and the fact that I hadn't made my bed on the day this happened, I didn't have any reason to suspect that anything was about to happen.

It was near bedtime and I was exhausted.  I'd been running around all day, and just needed to take my shoes off and get into my comfy clothes.  I came out of my bathroom and sat at the bottom of my bed, when all of the sudden I felt a jostle.  Confused, and a bit scared, I turned around to see Caden Tyson in my bed.  He'd crawled into my bed while I was in the bathroom, and snuggled up close to Randy side of the bed to try and scare me.  It worked, but not in the way he imagined.

Oh, he thought he was so funny.  But, truth be told, it really hurt.  I have never really seen what so many people have told me: that Tyson looks just like Caden.  But in that minute of confusion and fear, I truly thought I saw Caden.  For a split second, I was elated.  And then it hit me-- it will never be Caden again.  And I was crushed.  Devastated.  Overwhelmed with my grief.

Since the beginning of the year, I've noticed my grief has taken a turn for the worse.  It's as if my sub-conscious mind finally caught up to everything when it realized that we just had an entire calendar year without Caden, that it's "still real," and it can't compute it properly.  It truly is as if I have two minds, and they're confusing each other and kind of arguing.  In trying to explain what is going on in my head sometimes, it's almost as if my sub-conscious had amnesia and just "woke up" to find that Caden died while it was "asleep."  When asking my conscious brain about the missing parts, my sub-conscious says things like, "Oh, yeah, well if Caden's been gone for an entire 16 months, why has it only been hurting this much for 2 months?"  And then I start to wonder if I was really feeling anything at all in all of that time, and I start to feel like a bad mom because maybe I wasn't mourning my child properly, and that maybe because things were getting a little easier 14 months later that I was forgetting him, and how can a good mom forget her dead child?  And on, and on, and on.  I don't know how else to explain how much I'm struggling in my mind in regards to Caden, yet how everything else in my life is just fine.  There is so much chatter between my two minds (I know that I don't really have two minds, but that's how it feels right now), I can barely keep my focus on what's happening around me sometimes.

So when I thought I saw my Caden again, with his happy, mischievous grin, even for a moment, it hurt so, so, so much when it wasn't him.  Even now, at 3:21AM, one week later, I still can't shake the feelings of sorrow for Tyson's "joke."  And then I feel like a bad mom because I was sad to see it was "only" Tyson.  What kind of mother looks at the smiling face of one child and wishes it was the smile of another?  Is even sad when it wasn't the smile of the other?  My sub-conscious is having a field day beating my conscious brain about that one.

It is now past 4:00am and I feel as if I may not be making much sense.  Honestly, though, that's how my life has felt since the first of the year-- nothing makes sense anymore.  My mind is one big jumbled run-on sentence, and I am stumbling around trying to understand what's supposed to be spoken.