For just one day, maybe even an hour, I want to quit being me.

I don’t want to be a bereaved mother. I don’t want to be a woman who had a baby at only 24 weeks gestation, only to lose him to cancer at three years old. I don’t want to spend my life mourning his loss. I don’t want to struggle each and every day with this fate.

I don’t want my peaks and valleys of challenge to continuously feel like climbing Mt. Everest. I want to only worry about making it to school and work on time, meeting deadlines, and the cost of pay-to-play school sports.

This is a terrible mentality, and one I try so hard every day to avoid. But right now I just don’t want to be me. I want a hiatus, a sabbatical, from my life, my grief. I work so hard. And I need a minute. And I don’t know how to get relief.

Is it possible for relief to ever come? Sure, I can take vacation, I could travel or distract my brain from some of the heartache. I could let others help me carry my burden, because lord knows I have so many amazing people who are more than willing to do it. But that’s just not the way it works. No one can take it from me. They can share in my sorrow and they can empathize.

But no one can take away my grief. No one can remove the hurt of missing my baby.

That hurt, no matter what I try, will never go away.