All the little things.

I always wanted a baby.  Even when I was running around acting like nothing matter to me, I still wanted a baby deep in the back of my mind.  I wanted everything for this baby.  I wanted the perfect life for it.  I wanted to be the mom with all the answers and the mom who knew how to make anything.  I wanted to have a husband who could be home before dinner so the ball could be thrown out back while I put the finishing touches on the perfect meal.  I wanted so many things for my child that I did not have.  Everything but one thing that sadly I think my perfect child has.

I can remember the first time I "felt" something.  I'm sure I had felt it before, but this is the first memory I have of it.  A man walked behind my mother and I.  To most he looked like a man who needed a shave and possibly some cleaner clothes.  He may have just gotten off work or maybe he was a bum.  I don't know.  We were in Wal Mart though, a very open and public place.  A place I had gone many of times with my mother and father.  This time however it was just my mother and I.  When that man walked behind us it felt like I caught a glimpse of this thoughts and I wasn't something I ever wanted to experience again.  I was little, it was scary, and I didn't understand it.  For some time, it was quiet in my mind.  No more weird feelings or thoughts.  But then my Grandmother died.

I didn't get to know my Grandmother like my sister did.  My mother and sister lived with my grandparents at one point so she had a wonderful relationship with our Grandmother.  I was always with my father's mother.  I honestly cant remember why, but she was the one I had a strong bond with.  Well my Mamama was sick one day, as was I, and so my Grandma came and picked me up.  I wanted to go over to her house since lately I had started to get closer to her and found that I loved being around her (she also had awesome cable and allowed me to watch Rugrats until my brain was ready to explode).  Anyways, I spent a great day with her.  I remember playing in this huge box and blowing bubbles inside.  I was still sick a few days later, but went to my sister's basketball game instead of going to my Grandmothers.  My Grandparents were suppose to come to the game but never showed.  When we got home there was a message on the answering machine.  I remember my sister and I ridden with our mom home from the game and stopped to get ice cream while our dad went home.  He was waiting for us at the door.  He told my sister and I to go upstairs.  We sat on the stairs and listened to him telling our mother how our Grandmother had been rushed to the ER earlier in the night.  They went to the ER and my sister and I stayed home, not really sure what to think.  It was a rough three days.  She had a heart attack then a stroke and had a blood clot in her head.  I wanted to go in and see her, but the nurses said I was too young.  My sister and I sat out in the waiting room as they took her off the ventilator.  It was weird, but I felt like she was there with us, wrapping her arms around us as we both cried and stared out the big glass window in the waiting room.  A few weeks went by and life slowly returned to normal.  I was laying in bed one night with my sisters Pug Peanut and felt someone sit down on the edge of my bed.  It was a water bed.  Peanut had been passed out moments before but was not suddenly barking like a psycho path.  I needless to say ran across the room to turn on the light.  Nothing was there.  I slept on the couch for days.

Slowly more things like this began to happen.  Some times it was little harmless things, other times...it wasn't.  The TV turning on and off, Peanut going insane, barking at thin air, the downstairs door slamming and then the sound of someone running down the stairs.  All these things I told my mother about and she simply told me it was in my head.  My sister said she saw a man standing in her doorway one night and my mother said you are just dreaming.  My sister was more inclined to believe her, I however just stopped talking about it.  I learned to ignore it.  If something caught my eye I didn't look.  The hair stood up on the back of my neck, I'd keep the same pace and tell myself God was with me. 

I met my husband.  He was a very interesting man from day one.  Funny, annoying, and insanely good looking.  He was one of the few men I have ever met that I could actually talk to and tell things too.  It's funny, but we both had the same "deep dark secret".  I can still remember the day I told him.  He said "Na uh that was what I was going to say!"  It was cute.  I felt like I could trust him and so I told him about the things that had happened to me.  I was surprised when he told me he had some of the same experiences, yet relived to know I didn't have to go threw this new dark world alone.



The day he left I was fine.  Slowly though, things started to happen again.  It got so bad that I couldn't sleep.  I would go days without true sleep, only sleeping during the day and insuring the TV was on all night.  Finding Nemo became my new best friend for the nights Samantha slept outside with my fathers dog Mattie.  I felt like I was slowly losing myself and my mind.  Again I turned to my mother.  She told me I had to close that door, the door that seemed open to things most people don't even realize are there.  She also told me that she too had had things happen to her, though nothing like mine. 

Finally the knight returned and we began a new life together.  Of course we would have to get the one apartment that had something lurking around in the second bedroom.  We slept in the living room while we waited for our furniture to arrive.  He would get up to go to work at around 5 and I would throw the covers over my head with the portable DVD player sitting under the sheets with me.  Something was always watching me from the stairs, though it barely made an effect to bother me.  Here and there threw the two and half years we lived there, it would open the back door or brush against my legs, but other then that it was pretty civil.  The nights my husband was away I would cuddle with Samantha in bed while Finding Nemo or Monsters Inc. played all night.  We didn't have cable for a long time, so they brought comfort to me. 

When I became pregnant I was beyond thrilled.  We had tried for over a year and a half with not even a true maybe.  He left for deployment and I left for my parents.  At first I was worried especially since I was doomed to sleep in the basement for a few months.  Samantha was banned to the outdoors with our pit bull King.  He and my father didn't see eye to eye.  Nothing even happened though.  Eventually Samantha became an indoor dog again after a horrible incident that left me unable to keep King around her safely.  After being alone outside for a week she decided she needed to be indoors with me and chewed threw a chain link fence.  Yeah I know my dog is pretty bad ass.  Anyways, I moved upstairs finally and life was pretty peachy.  I had one awful experience while pregnant.  It was when my Great Aunt died.  We were in the elevator heading up to her room after receiving a phone call from the doctor saying she wasn't going to make it threw the night, when it hit me.  It was this feeling of dread.  At first I thought it was because I was pregnant, but I deep down I knew it wasn't.  As we left the elevator and headed towards her room it took everything I had to force myself to keep going.  The nurse met us at the door and told us she had died.  I almost passed out.  After finding a chair a few rooms down, the air felt clearer and I could suddenly breath.  Later while standing in the hallway preparing to leave, someone brushed up against me.  I turned around to see who it was, but no one was there.  I almost threw up as it happened again.  I almost ran out the front doors demanding air as my father asked me what I was doing.  He thought (or so I thought) that it was pregnancy hormones rearing their ugly heads again.  The next day the house was empty.  I could feel it pressing down on me when I left the living room.  But thankfully I was left alone.

My sister and I were arguing over those creepy shows she loved to watch were they go to haunted places and find things.  She told me I should watch them, I told her she was nuts.  She then told me how her now husband was a lot like me and how certain family members were like him too.  She said it ran in the family.  I didnt believe her though because she didnt have it, nor did our mother.  They both have had things happen, but nothing like what I have.  Things leave them alone.  Then it occured to me that we dont share the same father...and that maybe, just maybe, my father had become a really good actor.  Turns out I was right. 

Sadly that's the moment that I realized what my husband and I could see and feel would be passed down to our child.  I prayed it would simply cancel itself out.  I hoped beyond belief it would just skip our children and theirs as well.  I prayed it stopped at us. 

Being the way I am, I tend to talk to God.  Maybe not as much as I should and maybe not when I don't need Him, but I do talk to Him.  I pray He protects my husband who is thrown into dangerous situation because of his job.  I pray He protects my father who doesn't have the best heart anymore in his old age.  I pray He gives my mother strength to pull threw since she is always there for everyone.  I pray He keep my sister safe and gives her the love she has always needed.  But most of all I pray he gives back what I have passed on to my child.  I'll gladly take it 10 fold to keep her from ever having this, even though I know she does, already she does.  All I can do now is teach her that there will always be someone there for her, even if she thinks shes all alone. 

I love my child, she is all I have ever wanted.  I will do anything for her and when I am gone, I pray that I have left her with enough to know there is always someone there to keep her safe and wrap her in His arms, when everything else is creepy around in the dark.