Friday Friday Gotta Get Down On Friday!

  Absolutely nothing exciting going on this weekend. If the weather cooperates I plan on dragging the hubby on a bike ride:) it’s currently the perfect temperature outside and fingers crossed it keeps up. Today was spent (so far) exchanging bathing suit bottoms at H&M. I cannot believe the size 10 is what I need for bottoms. The rest of me is a size 4. Apparently I gained a large butt. Thank you my child for the extra 10lb that went STRAIGHT to my butt. Regardless I thought I deserved a new suit, it’s been years since I bought a new one. Now I can wear this one when we go to Hawaii next month!!!! I am on countdown. After Hawaii I think Hubs and I are going to try again for a baby. Granted that will be the most terrifying 9 (hopefully) months of my life.

Hunger Games!

It’s not fair. Sometimes it still hits me that I don’t get a baby in 5 weeks. I won’t have a little person to look after. It’s over. Done. Dead. Sometimes I can function entirely normally. But enough about all the sad things.

The Hunger Games. Hubby surprised me on Tuesday by showing up at home at noon with plans to take me out on a ‘hot date.’ Granted his plan was delayed when he arrived to find me in my underwear working on the computer. A quick shower and clothes change later off to the movies we go. Anyone: Go see it. I take that back. First: read the book. The book is ALWAYS better (that is a post for another time.) 

IF you have read the book the movie is great. If not I imagine it’s quite confusing. Because Hubs and I read it (before there was a movie idea... I know. I'm a book snob) we knew all the inner dialog and plot points they couldn’t include and still have you leaving the theater the same day.  Make a date of it.

This Is The Happiest Story In The World With The Saddest Ending

 An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir by Elizabeth McCracken

After our son’s death I read everything I could get my hands on written by and for people like me: Childless mothers. This book I read and reread, and then went back through again to the parts that resonated with me. “For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We'd been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.”

It’s the story of a writer living in living in a remote part of France with her husband waiting for the birth of her first child. Her baby died a week after his ‘due date’ and this book is her experience, interjected with dark humor and reflection. She wrote this book a year after the death of her firstborn, and when she safely has her rainbow baby in her arms. 

In her book she explores her reaction, the reactions of her family and friends, and the inevitable ‘what-ifs’ any one goes through after a tragedy. I read this a little more than a week after my child’s death and was surprised that her candor pulled a laugh out of me several times while reading. I also identified with exactly how she was feeling and how alone you feel right after. She says “That is one of the strangest side effects of the whole story. I am that thing worse than a cautionary tale: I am a horror story, an example of something terrible going wrong when you least expect it, and for no good reason, a story to be kept from pregnant women, a story so grim and lessonless it's better not to think about it at all."

The terrible thing about loss is it’s a solo journey, besides my wonderful husband, I felt alone. That’s why I went looking for stories of women who were in my boat, so I could feel like I wasn’t fighting a storm alone. And it’s true, "All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch the lost children, in this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of a sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.” Case and point, my new friend Ali. Met through a grief forum and one of the two-three people I tell things to. My best friend doesn’t want to hear I cried over my period, she doesn’t understand. Ali on the otherhand…does. People who haven’t lost a child don’t know how to act around me. The people that work downstairs in the restaurant I work in wouldn’t meet my eyes or talk to me right after. And 6 weeks later, I am in no way over it, but I am recovering and semi normal. “Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.”

She also summed up my feelings about people around me being pregnant, "Babies born to mothers who'd been pregnant at the same time as me hurt a little. I didn't mind hearing about them, but I didn't want to meet them. That puzzled me since it wasn't logical, and even in mourning I liked to think I was logical, but it was an unhappiness that rose up in me....

Even now I have a hard time with the babies born to friends around Pudding's birth. It is not logical, and yet there it is: this one is one month older, this one is three weeks younger. But mostly I just missed my own child." This perfectly describes how I feel about my sister in law, about everyone who seems to be announcing pregnancy right and left. They suck.:( Basically I'm jealous...

No Happy Ending

EVERYTIME we have gone to church since our baby died, I have teared up over everything. Songs, verses. EVERY OTHER PREGNANT PERSON or their baby. After the sermon the pastor called everyone to the back in prayer groups to pray for things they need or are struggling with... A stillborn is not something that you can just bring up with someone you don’t know. (This is a new church). So we went with the more general “we want to be better Christians.” I hate that it isn’t something people talk about, death. Especially a baby’s. I want to shout it out when I meet new people, wear it on a shirt. Open up conversations with “hello, my son died last month.” I haven’t figured out how I am going to answer “how many children do you have” or “do you have children?” Saying no or none feels like an insult to the very real part of our life he was. But people don’t actually ask because they care about the answer, they are being polite and a dead child is kind of a killjoy.  I think I’ll still add him in anyway.

My period started for the first time again last week. I would have been 34 weeks pregnant. Instead I have to go and find wherever I left my supplies 8 months ago. Having the extra hormones is dangerous when I already have emotional instability. It keeps hitting me, I don’t get a happy ending, and I don’t get a baby. Instead I have a flat stomach, cramps, and a memory box with pictures and footprints. Especially hard is my sister-in-law is pregnant too. She is due three months after I would have been. And she has a son. Whenever I see her child, I am going to be reminded, for the rest of my life, what I am missing. How old my son would have been and at every milestone that he should be there too. I haven’t seen her and her bump yet. Frankly I don’t want to. It’s painful. She has what I want more than anything.  I can’t face it yet.

When Three Became Two

Starting a blog. Something I have done many times, yet never stuck with. Hopefully this time will be different. I’ve been toying with the idea for a month. I need an outlet. I need to be able to put all my thoughts and feelings down, rather than hold them in because they are sad and a reminder of everything. Nobody wants to hear the 28 sad quotes that encompass what I feel. However in blog-land, you are an anonymous captive audience with no choice. 

A little more than a month ago our son died. He was born still at 27 weeks due to what the doctors assume was Amniotic Band Syndrome.

To backtrack a little… I had a textbook pregnancy in the beginning. I was lucky, I didn’t have morning sickness, I didn’t have cravings, and I started feeling my little kickboxer early: at 17 weeks. We went in for our ultrasounds and got all clears from our doctors until our 19 week scan. That one we went in and the tech didn’t mention anything except that he was a boy, but sent the first wave of problems to our doctor to tell us in person. (techs can’t tell you anything). After Christmas we went in and our doctor told us it looked like our baby might have a cleft lip or palate. We thought it was an isolated event. That we could handle surgery for him and be ok. We weren’t even sure, the tech didn’t get a good look at his face he kept his hand over it. (now in hindsight I know the tech was desperate to see his lip, I had thought at the time that because it was taking so long, she just wanted us to be able to look at him longer and she wanted to give us pictures.) We were scheduled to go in to see a perinatologist within the month to confirm the diagnosis and put us in touch with teams.

It took us a couple weeks from being shell shocked to come to terms and start looking at next steps. By that point our happy-pregnancy bubble had been burst and we were no longer naïve parents who expect all rainbows and unicorns with their babies.  But a lip we could handle. We could even handle a palate. I wore treads in google and cleft forums looking for good doctors and paths. I had been mourning my ideal baby daydream, and had pretty much said goodbye to breastfeeding without a bottle and started acclimating to scars and surgery.

One day, the day before his big appointment, he just stopped moving and I knew. We went in expecting the worst. It was confirmed when the tech put the wand on my belly and then after several seconds asked when the last time he moved was. From there it was straight to the hospital to induce and deliver our tiny little man.

It’s been almost 6 weeks today.

“If I had lost a leg, I would tell them, instead of a boy, no one would ever ask me if I was ‘over’ it. They would ask me how I was doing learning to walk without my leg. I was learning to walk and to breath and to live without Wade. And what I was learning is that it was never going to be the life I had before.” -Elizabeth Edwards