Once more, with feeling

Well... Um. Well.


.

This is hard. I am overjoyed of course,  but this is really, really hard. Pregnancy books are written for the naive and innocent; for people who still think two lines on a stick automatically and inevitably results in a perfect, take-home baby nine months later. If you are reading this, you, like me, know first hand that that is not true. There is no chapter in those books for trying to keep your hopes up; no chapter on how to manage when you are about to shit your pants from fear. You're on your own. I'm on my own...

...with a passenger. A passenger who (please, Oprah, Ellen Degeneres, George R. R. Martin, Kevin Spacey, anybody, please please please) is due March 2, 2015.

Mother's Day.

Mother's Day has come and gone. My best friend called to check on me and wish me a Happy Mother's Day, and my husband said it, too, although he had to be prompted (he misunderstood my desire to hide from the world that day as a desire to pretend it wasn't happening, even with him.)

Other than that? No one said a word. Not one single person.

....but wait!  I'm not a mother, right? FALSE. And if you're reading this, you probably are one too. I may never have had a living child to physically take home with me, but for 8 weeks, I had my child with me everywhere I went.  I may not have any children living, but I did once, alive in my belly. I may never have labored and borne a living child, but I did bear my child's remains. (Actually, though it may not have been the labor of a full term birth, there was labor of some kind  involved).

From the moment she was conceived and attached to me, she was my child, and I was her mother. When I chose not to have a margarita at dinner with friends for the benefit of my child, I was her mother. When I chose not to have caffeine for the benefit of my child, I was her mother. When I chose to take my prenatal vitamins and eat as well as I could manage for the benefit of my child, I was her mother. She gave me nausea and breasts so sore it often hurt to move or touch them at all. She gave me morning sickness in the form of diarrhea, and made me so unfathomably tired I could hardly do anything. Worst of all, she gave me a significant (and, unfortunately, lasting) increase in chin hairs. And yet, with all of these unpleasant things happening to me because of her, I loved her and cherished her all the more. Because I was I am her mother.



My poor, sweet baby. I hope you know that you were wanted. You were not, as so many of us were, conceived by some idiot/s who reacted to the news of your existence and imminent arrival with panic and fear. When my home pregnancy test was positive, no one cried. No one panicked.  Your very being was intentional.  The news that you were in there was cause for great joy for the very first second. You were (are) loved beyond words. Every single moment of your life was filled with my love for you.

There are so many bad things about you not being here. So, so many. I will never see your smile or hear your voice or your laugh. I will never know what you looked like, or who you looked like, or who you took after. I will never get to hold you in my arms. You will never lay in my chair with me and make me read the same book over and over again. You will never be as real to Daddy as you are to me--I will never see that moment on his face when you become real to him, too. (That one is hard.) It is likely that no one will ever feel you were really a baby--really MY baby-- the way that I do, not even your father. I don't care; they are wrong.

I hate that you are gone. I hate it every second of every day. I have hated every single second since about 10:00AM, January 3, 2014. Had you not died, I would be around 27 weeks now. You'd be kicking me, and I would be reading Pride and Prejudice aloud to you.

I would give literally anything to get you back, but since I cannot, I have to take whatever comfort I can from your short life. While it does not make the loss of you any easier, I can rest in the knowledge that you did not suffer. You were never away from me. You were never cold, lonely, hungry, hurt, sick, frustrated or embarrassed.

I can rest in the knowledge that you will never be humiliated, molested, attacked, or mocked.
You will never bite down on a gross hard thing in your hamburger.
You will never get your heart broken.
You will never miss me.
You will never have one of those days where you're super cranky and you're being a ridiculous asshole, and you know you're being a ridiculous asshole, and it makes you feel worse, but you're so cranky you just can't snap yourself out of it, and you're just a guilty, frustrated asshole all day.
You will never feel the sting of a good friend's betrayal.
You will never be scared.
You will never be trapped in an awkward conversation.
You will never scrape your knee.
You will never have one of those weird, tickly boogers that you can't seem to dislodge, so it just sits there and bugs you all day.
You will never worry about money.
You will never be mugged in a dark alley.

Your absence is a great screaming, frozen chasm in the very fabric of my soul. I feel the lack of you with every breath I take. I can't find the words to describe it, but rest assured, my baby-- it is so much more than missing you. I will not ever be the same after having become your mother, and I will not ever be the same after having lost you.

 I don't pretend to know what goes on before we're born or after we die, but if you see your siblings around, look out for them. (Death might save you from gross things in your hamburger, but it apparently it can't save you from babysitting.) Wherever you are, I hope you know that your mother loves you.


Happy Mother's day, Internet.

Mother's day can crawl into its own ass and suffocate

Hi!

 Perhaps you are here on some long distant date, brought here by google or whatever people are using in the future.  As you click on a new post, and then another, you are probably beginning to to expect each click to lead to a happy pregnancy announcement. It's only natural, it has been 4 months, after all.


Welll....guess what?

You thought I was done, didn't you?

Yeah, so did I . We were both wrong. Before I continue, let me warn you there is some major, major, icky TMI ahead and may be triggery for some. Read at your own risk.

**************************************************


I should be 19 weeks right about now. I should have been feeling my baby move, not begging the universe to let me ovulate so I can try again.

I finally had a period March 9th. On March 12th, I used the restroom and felt a pop, then a small gush. This is similar to what I felt when I was passing blood/baby/matter/tissue during my miscarriage. Blorp.  That's not really a word, but that's what it feels like to me: Blorp. I wiped, and there was a fair amount of blood (not menstrual blood, blood) along with...I don't even know. You don't want to know. Let's just call it tissue.

If you're doing the math along with me here, that's 9.5 weeks after the miscarriage. Nine plus weeks later. Still. More shit.

Um, I might also  mention here (because I don't think I ever have before) that one week after the miscarriage, January 10th, I had an ultrasound at which the tech said it was done and I was all clear except for one bit of tissue that looked like it was basically on its way out. I then passed something Jan. 29th.

What I passed March 12th was bigger. It was not the same. And there were two...things. What? I don't know. And no, it wasn't a new pregnancy.

I was terrified and called a nurse, who told me to go to the ER and take the junk with me. They did a pelvic exam, an ultrasound, a blood test, and some kind of testing on the junk. The pelvic and ultrasound came back perfectly normal. Blood work showed no signs of infection, and HCG had finally, finally fallen to zero. No one has ever called me about the testing they were supposed to have done on the junk.

So, basically this has all been super fucking fun. Am I done now?

Meanwhile

I've had my HCG quants done twice: once at 4 weeks past miscarriage (404)  and again at 5 weeks post miscarriage (105). That's a drop of 299 in a week. Sweet, I thought. Excellent. At this rate, I should be HCG free inside of a week. LOL FUCKING NOPE! I'm now at nearly 7 weeks post miscarriage, and still getting very faint positives on pregnancy tests.  MAKE. IT. STOP.

And guess what? Meanwhile, everyone everywhere in the history of everything is pregnant. Women on my favorite non-pregnancy related message board are pregnant. My cousins are pregnant. Women in every other commercial on TV are either pregnant or carrying a baby around. Acquaintances who probably shouldn't be pregnant? Pregnant!!!11!1!!1 Oprah. Lindsay Lohan. Richard Simmons. Eleanor Roosevelt. All pregnant. Hell, I'm pretty sure my own grandmother is pregnant at this point. (The dead one. Also the live one.)

WHY WHY WHYYYYY. If I can't be pregnant, can I just not be pregnant now? Is that so much to ask? I had to have the awful, shitty luck to land with a miscarriage-- could not the universe or Shiva or Baby Jesus or Oprah or someone have mercy upon me and get these mother fucking hormones out of my system?!

I'm 29 (getting very close to 30), and when I told some family members about the-baby-that-wasn't, there were some murmurs of "hur hur, about time," and so on. I am just fucking WAITING for someone, anyone, to make a comment along the lines of, "when are you going to have babies already," or maybe make some "hur hur, about time" type comments when we have a "rainbow baby" to announce, because I WILL TEAR THEM THE FUCK DOWN.

I feel like an angry two year old, full of impotent rage, unable to stand it any more, screaming from the hideous injustice, fully aware I'm unable to do anything about it. It's tearing me to pieces. The loss isn't enough, apparently; I also need to sit through a prolonged getting-back-to-normal period. I feel like somebody wiped their ass with the fabric of my soul. I just feel worn and shitty and ragged, with an ugly, gaping hole in the middle left by my baby.

Fuck.

Say my name, say my name

Hi. I'm not okay.

It's coming in waves, I think. The grief. The waves were so far apart this time I actually thought I was kind of okay. I was wrong. Actually, I think what is happening is my brain kind of shuts parts of itself down for a while. Like, you know, the grief processing part. I think it ceases operations for a little bit to give me a break, and starts up again when I'm ready to process it some more.

I find myself sitting at work thinking about her. Little by little, this image of who she was, or would have been, is forming. Image isn't the right word, it's more of a sense. Probably this is a psychotic delusion of some kind, in which my imagination runs away with me. Either that, or her little spirit is somehow sending me subconscious messages. (I am spiritual, but not religious.) Who knows? Maybe she is. She is/was/would've been the kind of person I'd want to be friends with, for sure. I try to stop this kind of thing, but I can't really. It's not conscious. I don't go, "Gee, I bet she'd be xyz," I just know. I feel like I know her the way my body knows it needs to breathe, or remembers to pump blood even when I'm asleep. It just...Is.

Sometimes I sit and write her name. Daphne. Daphne. Daphne. Daphne Clara. Write it fast and sloppy, like I write most things. Write it neatly. Write as if she'd lived and borne this name and writing it had become habit. Write it in cursive. Daphne C Lastname, attorney at law. Dr. Daphne Lastname, DDS. Daphne. Daphne. Daphne. Kat and Mr. Kat invite you to share in their joy at the wedding of their daughter, Ms Daphne Clara Lastname, to Mr/Ms Blah Blah... Daphne.

That is probably weird. I don't care. Okay, I did not write out the wedding thing, or any titles. I thought it, though. Just her name, again and again, all over the sheet of paper. You want to know the best part? For all that I'm so attached to it, that would not have been her name had she lived. Mr. Wise doesn't really care for the name Daphne. It was one of my favorites. I told him I felt she had been a girl and asked if I could call her that, and he said yes. He chose her middle name after one of his grandmothers. He would never have let me have it for a living child, though. For all my "XXth president of the United States of America, Daphne Clara Lastname" daydreams, that wouldn't even have been her name.

I would have been 14 weeks today. This is about the time we would have been announcing on Facebook and so on. Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck.

in memory

I'm pretty sure no one has even seen any of this, but never the less I thought I'd share a couple of little things I've acquired to kind of memorialize my baby.

I ordered a heart from A Heart To Hold about a month ago. AHTH is a non profit that makes weighted hearts for families who have lost a baby or a pregnancy, hence "a heart to hold." The hearts are provided free of charge. When ordering you can put in the exact weight (or estimated weight, as in my case) of the child lost. Obviously the baby I lost weighed almost nothing. Mine is in effect just a small heart pillow, but it is sweet, and I'm going to sleep with it. It's a bubblegum pink fleece and they included a card with my baby's name on it.

Okay, this one is kind of cheesy, I admit it. This kind of thing is not at all my usual style, and I have no desire to begin a collection of such things. (My husband describes them as "modern-day Precious Moments for grown-ups.") But...I don't know. I saw it somewhere on the interwebs within days of my loss, and it just struck a chord. If it does the same for you-- or if it doesn't, but reading about other women's experiences helps you-- you might be interested in reading the Amazon reviews on it. This sits next to my bed now. 

 

I also bought a handmade ring on etsy.  It was very inexpensive, just about $30. On one side, it bears my baby's name. On the other, it has a heart. I can turn it so her name shows, if I want it to, or keep the name on the inside and let the heart show. On the inside it is stamped with the date of my loss.

It's something tangible, something I can see and wear and touch and have on me at all times, but it's so extremely simple and understated that it may very well escape notice 99% of the time. I love that it is so simple, both stylistically, and because it will be easy and inexpensive to replace when I hopefully have a rainbow baby's (or babies!) name to add to it. I'm really, really glad I bought it.

I also have a kind of decorative wooden craft box I bought with intent to paint it, so I had something better (and prettier) than an old shoebox to keep my few Daphne-specific baby items in. A memory box, I guess. Unfortunately I have been unable to get the sticker off the top of the box to paint it! I am working on it, though.

And this blog. I guess this counts.

To some, all that might seem like overkill; but to me all these little things to help me memorialize my baby. So many remembrances help me deal with my grief and process it, rather than trying to stuff it down into a dark corner of my mind somewhere to fester.