How about some renewal and rebirth?

It is Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and a time of the year that I truly love.  On the Jewish calendar, the New Year actually falls in fall, as opposed to winter.  The idea of renewal, of rebirth in the autumn has always instinctively felt right to me.  The crisp air, the leaves starting to fall off the trees, the seeds burrowing into in the earth,  it's all very tangible and invigorating. 

This is now the second year in a row that I am emerging from a miscarriage in the fall, around the Jewish High Holidays.  I've noted it before, I'm not particularly religious, but I think the traditions of my faith will bring me comfort and perhaps, some sanity and grounding. 

I am not sure that lots of folks are getting up in the middle of the night to pen two week wait haikus.  This whole week I have felt incredibly nervous, twitchy almost, and at a risk of having some reader out there attempting to track my identity down and have me committed, I have felt ill-at-ease with my ability to function the way I like.  Sleep has been elusive.  I can't think of one day where I haven't regretted saying something to someone around me, it's as if my brain is on a strange malfunctioning auto-pilot.  Walking around in a constant state of distraction, well, it really makes you question your place in the world and your abilities.  To hold down your job.  To make a lunch your niblet will eat.  To be someone that people would genuinely like to be around.  And it certainly makes me question my abilities as a mother, a wife, a friend, an employee.  To sum this week up, I am just getting life wrong. 

It's a cop-out to pin this on lingering miscarriage sadness, and I really didn't sit down to write intending to post a pity party.  So it's with some real hope that I welcome the high holidays.  I want a new beginning.  I don't believe you can or should ever wipe a slate clean, we are the sums of our experiences, after all - our joys, our traumas, our loves, our sadness and our mistakes.  But I am looking forward to this new year, I am really looking forward to the heavy day of atonement and repentance that's coming next week, the Jewish big cahuna, Yom Kippur.  Last Yom Kippur I said a mourner's prayer for my lost little cluster of molar cells, my cancer baby.  This year I will do the same, but the timeliness of it all is hitting me harder.

I hope to emerge from all of this in a better place, renewed and reborn.  A place where I'm not twitchy and antsy and afraid and mucking things up.  Where I'm a better and more thoughtful person.  Where I'm less impulsive and more considerate.  Where I show more empathy.  A place where I'm comfortable and at peace with the idea of being responsible for a new, living, breathing little human.