April 2010
2 posts
Hollow
Lately I haven’t felt like crying when I think about all the flavors of my grief; I feel like imploding. It literally hurts my heart to look at the belly holding a baby due the same day as mine. After the first loss I thought I’d be scared to be pregnant again. Turns out I wasn’t too scared, just cautious. Now I’m fucking terrified. I feel like it would destroy me if I lost...
Bad Week
Some weeks my grief is covered pretty neatly under other layers of my life. I work, love my husband, maintain the logistics of life, and feel pretty normal. But other weeks it’s like my grief is hanging right behind a very thin veil, the tears are always right at the back of my throat, and I’m not sure I’ll ever climb out of it.
And I’m still stuck. There’s another...
March 2010
2 posts
Dread
The idea of living through my first due date in May fills me with dread. I’m trying not to stress too much about my desire to be pregnant by then, but oh my goodness I hope it happens. But it’s only two months away and even if I am pregnant again, it won’t mean that I’ll be able to have that baby. When I think about that time my heart jumps into my throat and I can’t...
6 Days
For six days we tentatively allowed ourselves to get excited that we’d maybe be having a baby in November. I had a good feeling about this one. I prayed so hard to have the opportunity to meet and raise this baby, but instead I now have two anonymous angels.
The loss is different. It’s so very early, instead of relatively late like the last one. The physical symptoms were here and...
February 2010
3 posts
Baby Showers
Since I lost the baby I have missed the baby showers of my sister, two for my friend Monica, my friend Sarah, my friend Norah, and just got an invitation to my friend Mary’s, which I will probably decline. The only one I actually wanted to go to was my sister’s, but of course I ended up with strep throat and couldn’t go lest I infect the multiple pregnant ladies in attendance,...
Magical
My good friend and coworker had her baby last week. Yay! I’m so happy for her, and her baby is lovely. But one of our other coworkers keeps asking me about her and how they’re all doing. Also fine, I guess, because I’ve seen them a couple times and can update the people who are really curious. But said other coworker keeps steering the conversation to how magical and wonderful...
Sad Week
I had a rough week. I’ve been coming down with a cold and having some monthly hormonal upheaval, so that hasn’t really helped the emotional state. This morning I read on Facebook that YET ANOTHER friend of mine is pregnant. I’ve been feeling deeply sad. Like I said before, I was genuinely relieved that I didn’t get pregnant last month, but nonetheless it’s still been...
January 2010
3 posts
Hard To See
There is a lot that has gotten easier for me, but I still can’t stand looking at ultrasound pictures. That’s the only way I ever saw my baby, and what they showed us was something bad. I never got the good one that everyone posts about, announcing to Facebook whether it’s a boy or girl.
I took a negative pregnancy test yesterday—which actually works out fine because it...
No Results
I’ve been waiting for almost 12 weeks for the pathology results from my D&C. I finally got my ass in gear to try and track down what happened with them and why I hadn’t heard anything yet. Apparently my midwife practice was sent a letter about two weeks ago; not sure why they didn’t know what when I talked to them… but I talked to the doctor who performed the D&C...
Unexpected
I had some really sad days over the holidays. Jed and I both found ourselves slogging through constant reminders of the unfairness of our situation, as only “happy” occasions have the ability to bring up. I was supposed to have been 20 weeks pregnant on Christmas Day, and would have had the opportunity to find out the sex of my baby, as I was so viciously reminded by my...
December 2009
3 posts
Again
Three times this week I’ve talked to friends who heard I was pregnant but didn’t know I lost the baby. It is so not fair to have to update them over and over again. Two of them were good friends that I don’t see that often, and it was over email, so I guess it was a little better, but one of them was a coworker from another branch that should have heard from someone that...
Mixed
I’ve got a lot going on in my head this week.
I’m still having trouble with the whole “everyone I know is pregnant phenomenon.” I don’t want to hear about it. But pregnancy has been one of my favorite subjects ever since I hit adolescence, so I’m really conflicted about it.
Yesterday I had another good moment of finding unexpected comfort and solidarity in my...
No Longer Happy News
I just found out about yet another friend’s pregnancy, bringing up the total to, oh, almost everyone I know. And it kills me that my first response is to get sad and cry. (This was not in person, by the way, but over email. I don’t know what I would have done in person. Probably a wan congratulations & a forced smile. And she would understand.) It’s not that I don’t...
November 2009
10 posts
Nervous
I’m starting to feel nervous and impatient about getting the results from the chromosomal testing. Tomorrow is 4 weeks since the D&C, and they told me that it might take that long to get the results back. I know it’s going to be really emotional to have to be in that place, where we find out what was wrong with our poor baby. Especially because we will probably go in to the...
Comfort
I have a coworker with whom I haven’t always had the easiest of relationships—but she’s one of those people who never has an easy relationship with everyone, so I think everyone else at the workplace could say the same thing. She has been a generous source of comfort since everything started happening—letting me know that she didn’t need me to talk about it with her,...
Knife
So you know what a knife in the gut feels like? When your sister-in-law, who’s due date is the same as yours was, posts as her Facebook status: “Feeling flutters already.” Even better? Reading it at work.
Inadequate
I noticed a new feeling today: I’m feeling inadequate. I failed at having a baby. It didn’t work out because something went wrong in my body. I failed at getting all the way to the end of a healthy pregnancy. I failed my baby by not being a good enough vessel for him/her to grow and develop properly. I don’t understand why I don’t get to be a mom. Why we weren’t...
Blindsided
When I was about 9 weeks along, a particularly annoying (friendly, but annoying) patron who is always very jovial & calls me by my name, guessed I was pregnant. I must have been super bloated that day.
Tonight he was in the library, and I set about avoiding him. I was terribly unsuccessful. He came to the desk, stood there and waited for me while I helped another patron with a rather long...
Numb
After Monday, where I cried over and over again, I haven’t really cried since. I’ve gotten choked up a few times and shed a tear yesterday, but that’s about it. Maybe I’m starting to heal. It’s only been 9 days since the D&C. Each day I’m farther away from it. The feeling of constantly being on the edge of crying has been replaced with an odd numbness, like...
What Not To Say
In my family and work lives, people have been remarkably compassionate and understanding. Not everyone responds to this kind of thing in the same way, and not everyone feels the need to approach me and directly give me their sympathies. It’s a rough thing that not everyone’s comfortable talking about. I don’t fault anyone for their reaction of lack thereof.
I do fault one...
Empty
After we left the hospital, I told Jed that I didn’t feel the sense of relief that some people feel after the D&C. I just felt empty. The next couple days I was pretty focused on managing the pain and staying distracted. And then I realized, I suppose when I was ready for my brain to go there, that there was nothing left but to be sad. No next steps, nothing else to wonder about or...
crying, crying and more crying
Yesterday was a little tear-heavy, but really not that unusual in terms of how often I cry these days. Here’s how it went:
I went to the midwife for a follow-up after my D&C. I guess not realizing that this wasn’t a regular prenatal visit, they called me up to have me pee in a cup & ask if anything had changed. Well, I’m not pregnant anymore, I told her. She got really...
Over
This morning we saw our baby for the last time, laying peacefully in my womb, no heartbeat. Three hours later, he or she was no longer a part of me and we were on our way home, empty. I miss my baby. The physical pain is a distraction, but so inconsequential to this pain that I’m positive is going to be lifelong.
October 2009
4 posts
Suspended
I keep catching myself in “preparing for parenthood” mode—bookmarking an article about librarianship and parenthood, making note of the book about treating common childhood illnesses at home, realizing my new shirt will also make a good maternity shirt. Telling a coworker about how we thought we might dress up our 5-month-old as an acorn next year. Falling silent and trying not...
Scary Vocabulary
Cystic Hygroma
Omphalocele
Thickened Nuchal Fold
Fetal Edema
Chromosomal Abnormality
Fatal
Protective
I kind of hate the ultrasound tech who first identified our baby’s problems at my midwife’s office. While objectively she seems to have sort of a distant/cold personality, compared with the midwives who are so warm and personable, I know that isn’t it. I wonder if someday I’ll have the same, unreasonable but instinctive feeling toward people that don’t like my kid.
Revised
When I joined Tumblr, I was newly pregnant. I was making a space for my house blog, and thought I’d maybe also create a little space for a more personal blog, to talk about my experiences with preparing for parenthood. You know, document my symptoms, our anticipation, and eventually our experiences when the little one entered the world.
A little over a month later, that world fell apart....