Dreaming of You

I’ve had a bad last couple of days. I had dreams about Ayden, when he was on life support, with tubes and tape all over him. I still feel guilty about not spending more time at his bedside, but seeing my baby in a coma, machines keeping him alive; it was heart wrenching. I couldn’t spend a lot of time in the PICU anyway, because there was crying. Crying still bothers me, but it shredded my soul during Ayden’s time in the hospital… I knew from the beginning I’d never hear my son cry again (the way I knew his birthday would be 9/28 and I’d have a C-section from the very beginning of my pregnancy, I just had this feeling). All I wanted was for him to cry, he never did, and he never will again. I was told by nurses that some mothers can’t go into their children’s rooms, not that I was leaps and bounds better, but I was in there; I did the best I could. I barely left the hospital, but being in Ayden’s room was the hardest place to be. Sometimes in my dreams Ayden will wake up, years older and I wake up feeling guilty about our decision to take him off life support, wondering “What if?”  But most of the time it’s just like the ones I’ve had the past couple of days,  Ayden in a dark, shadowy version of his hotel room, so small in the big bed. I just stand there looking at his forced, machine-assisted breathing, the tubes, the tape, drowning in the feeling that this isn’t my baby anymore, my baby is gone, and then my knees buckle. I wake up and the guilt, the crying, the what-ifs swallow me whole.