Searching For Normal

For twenty minutes this morning, I searched the attic. My fingertips are frozen. I'm searching for the baby toys that I packed up in a grieving rage not even a year ago. My memory is spotty at best, in regard to certain events surrounding that time period. I'm starting to have flashbacks.

It's fourteen degrees outside on March 17th. As if I don't hate trips to the attic anyway. It's a tomb of baby boy shoes. In it are baby boy shoes that I watched unsteadily plod along uneven terrain in search of Easter eggs. There are rain boots that sloshed through mud in search of frogs.

When I was pregnant with Gabriel, and blissfully unaware of his diagnosis, I would go in the attic and hold Jack's shoes in my hands. I cradled them in jubilant anticipation of another little boy running around in them. "Not yet" I would tell myself. "It's going to be many months before I hear the pitter patter of these cute little shoes running around." Then I would slip as much of my hands as I could into those shoes and tapped them on the attic floor imagining what he'd look like in them. And then July 8th, 2010 came. It came like a grim reaper and it took away the dream of seeing those chubby little feet running around in Jack's old shoes. April 10th, 2013 brought  the same horrible news. Worse, actually.

Here comes April tenth again. It's like a bad neighborhood you have to pass on your way to the park. If only there were a way to circumnavigate that date. Jack asked me to chaperone his field trip on April tenth. I'm also supposed to see a doctor on April tenth. It's like some cruel trick that I have to be put in public on the anniversary of something so utterly horrible. I'd rather be put into a coma until that date passes.

So today in my attic when I climbed up there, I glanced at that dusty bag of shoes and cried. I searched and searched for the toys when a memory like a vague dream flashed through my mind.

It must be true, I thought. I must have actually gotten rid of that box of baby toys. Shortly after last April 10th,  I packed up anything related to infancy. Amos asked what I was doing. "I'm not going to NEED baby toys!" I screamed. "Because I'm not going to have a baby to play with them!"

I think that no matter how hard I look, I am not going to find what I'm looking for. Not the toys anyway.