No News

It seems as though whenever I start to feel like things just might be a little bit okay the other shoe drops and I'm back to being an utter disaster.

The other shoe is always dropping.  The rug is forever being pulled out from beneath my feet.

The surprising thing is how surprised I am every time it happens.  I should know better.  And I do, in my head.  But it's my heart I have to worry about, it just doesn't seem to learn.

More bad news, you're thinking.  Someone's hurt or sick or dead or in trouble and the meager footing I've found isn't enough to keep me balanced in the face of more tragedy.

If only.

Just another baby on the way.  There are so many, always on the way, always fine, often unplanned or unintentional but a wonderful surprise every time.  Right?

But that's where I fall apart.  This good news not ours cuts me to pieces and then I crumple at how awful that feels.  

These days, I can handle bad news much better than good.  I'm like the welcome committee to Disaster-Land. I hear bad news and I'm like oh let me help.  A friend lost her father suddenly and it was the easiest thing in the world to ring her right away and share tears with her and hold her close and make sure she knew I was there for her if she ever needed anything.

I'm good at bad news now.  I can be sensitive and strong, caring yet practical, forthright and easy with the most difficult and painful of subjects.  But throw a little happiness at the people I'm close to and all I want to do is crawl away and hide.

We don't get to do that happiness thing anymore and that empty space where it should be swallows me whole.  It swallows my dignity.  It swallows my hope.

Everyone else but us.  Here we stand, frozen in the long, sad moment of our son's death, unable to achieve the only thing we want as everyone just zips on by, their lives moving forward with new children and new hope. 

It's the heart/mind divide all over again.  I'm thrilled for them in my mind, but inside my chest my heart cracks open and falls to pieces and I almost follow suit.

I want to be happy.  I want to be happy for them totally and completely.  I want to be psyched and loving and everything correct, but I'm not.  I'm twisted and shriveled.  I'm bitter and disgusted with myself and once again way beyond the edge of tolerable limits.

I thought the worst was behind me, literally.  I thought that the worst possible thing had happened to me and that from there it could only get better.  But instead it has been an endless slog through deep, smelly shit.  Obviously nothing is more painful than losing Silas but the problem is that we lose him over and over again in a million little ways.

The ripples of our loss continue to radiate outward from us, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.  Our tragedy causes pain in the people we love the most and prevents us from sharing in the happiness of those around us.  That is so ugly and revolting I can barely stand to be in this skin.  But there is no where else I can go and nothing else I can feel sometimes, besides sadness and anger and loss and grief, especially when the phone rings and it's good news at the other end of the line.

If this is a test then we are failing.  We are not excited when we get the wonderful news that someone is pregnant, and that just sucks.  The ring of that call is always a little shrill in our house.  So here's the deal, all of you that are currently pregnant now, you're all good, but after that it has to stop.  The rest of you, no more hanky-panky until we give you the okay.  We're up next.  We've been up next for so long.

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

So what are your tips to help us get pregnant?  Tinctures?  Chants?  Meditations?  Roofies? And don't even think about telling us to just relax and let it happen because that's just not going to work.  Unless there's wine involved.  Should there be wine involved?

losing it. perhaps literally.

“She’s got such a pretty face. It’s too bad she can’t do something about her weight.”

This remark can be attributed to a member of my own family. One I’ve secretly never forgiven.

My love/hate relationship with my physical self started very early. I have a crystal clear memory of being on the school playground in the third grade being called fat by a friend who was angry with me for one reason or another.

I spent high school in a fog of self conscious, shirt tugging anxiety, never happy with myself. Not until someone fell in love with me did I feel remotely confident. That helped, as did the roughly 30 pounds I lost over the summer following graduation. It wasn’t a conscious effort; I simply worked on my feet and rarely stopped to take a breath. Even relatively thin I dressed conservatively for someone my age, feeling as though other people shouldn’t have to be exposed to any more of my body than necessary.

Fast forward, past more than ten years of student and office life spent largely on my arse and I was back to where I was at 15; softer around the edges and thicker around the middle than I’d like.

And pregnant.

By the time Sadie was born at 42 weeks I had gained just under 60 pounds. I was comically rotund but somehow I loved every stretch-marked inch of myself. Even though my knees creaked when I climbed the stairs and I couldn’t get out of bed without rolling out, I felt better than I had ever felt before. My mind was as clear as my skin. Months of clean eating and plenty of sleep had made what I thought would be an indelible impression on me.Within two weeks of Sadie’s birth I had lost 20 pounds. Four weeks later she was gone.

If I’m being honest, I completely lost interest in caring for myself the morning we said goodbye to her.

I’ve spent the past year eating and struggling and drinking and feeling excessively. I joined a gym and went sporadically for two months before abandoning it altogether for three. I suffered from random insomnia and popped pills in all moments of weakness: hangovers, backaches, constipation, and depression. Rest certainly hasn’t come easily for me since her death, not without some sort of help. Whether that was a glass or four of sauvignon blanc or a couple of herbal sleeping pills, it was always something. Like many parents here will understand, it’s when the lights go out and I’m left along with my thoughts and memories that is most painful.

So much for my body being a temple. At the moment it’s barely a lean-to. I can’t decide if I enjoy punishing myself or I don’t believe I deserve to feel good in the first place. Whatever the case, I feel as vulnerable now as that third grader in the schoolyard.

Less sensitive people have been asking us whether we’ll try again for months. Others have tactfully left it to us to bring up if and when we’re comfortable. I have often wondered if Sadie hadn’t been our first, would we be where we are right now. I am doubtful and terrified that my abused old body may not even be capable of making a healthy child. Am I strong enough, physically or emotionally, to try? Am I too far beyond repair to risk it?

My husband has lost more than 20 pounds since Christmas; regularly pounding out God knows how many frustrations at the gym. It wasn’t until he started annoying me with a daily ‘calories burned’ report that my latent competitive streak was roused. Then it got even worse: the bastard started shrinking (damn those men and their superior metabolism). I’ve literally had no choice but to get off the couch and pick up my sneakers.

I’m not making any promises, least of all to myself.

If I were brave I might ask myself why I’ve let the idle lifestyle go on so long. Knowing I won’t allow myself to get pregnant again without being in suitable physical shape first, I might also ask if there is a chance I’ve been using my body as an excuse to put off trying again. But I’ve never been much in the bravery area.

How has your body image changed after pregnancy, and after your loss? Have you ever knowingly punished your physical self, it be with neglect or otherwise?

This post is a part of The Body Shop at Glow in the Woods -- a month of themed reflections and memes that explore what we do in an effort to occupy these physical selves with grace after babyloss.

replacement

With our surrogate, Kyrie, just a few weeks away from what we hope will be the safe delivery of our son, I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between this possible new baby and the twins we lost a little more than two years ago. Of course, this new child can't be a literal replacement for the twins. But there's less to distinguish them than one might think.

 Part of that is simply the mechanics of IVF. One afternoon in April 2006, on the third floor of a big hospital in the Northeast, ten embryos were coaxed into being. Curled in their petri dishes, cells dividing, the embryos, from my point of view, were interchangeable. I hoped that at least one of them would grow to be my child, but I didn't care which one and I didn't give much thought to what would happen to the others.

The doctors chose two embryos -- call them A and B -- to transfer and froze the rest. A and B became the twins and we all know how that turned out. So, in April 2008, they unfroze embryo C, which is now, at least theoretically, the baby due at the beginning of January.

Although the selection of which embryos to transfer wasn't entirely random, chance clearly played the guiding role. Right now, I could just as easily be mourning the loss of embryos D and E or cautiously celebrating the impending arrival of F. And that cascade of contingencies make it that much harder to attach significance to the individual identity of any of them.

Moreover, over time, the twins themselves have become mostly an abstraction. I have almost no actual memories of them -- a positive pregnancy test, a dozen increasingly ominous ultrasounds, a month or two or flutters and kicks. What memories I do have are really about myself, my hopes, my wishes, my painting an imaginary future in pastel shades of pink and blue. And, though much more hesitantly, I find myself now thinking almost the identical thoughts, transferring the old dreams to this new child and wondering whether I can see this child -- at least in some non-literal way -- as one of the twins returned to me.

Because I tend to think in metaphors, and extended and heavy-handed ones at that, let me put it this way. Imagine you're looking into a series of lighted kitchen windows at dinnertime. In one lucky house, all the chairs at the table are filled with cheerful family members. In the house next door, there are chairs with no-one sitting in them, but you notice that they're drawn close to the table, still part of the family circle. In yet another house, the table at first seems full, but if you look in the next room, you'll find the unused chairs carefully, lovingly stored away.

And then, in the house I hope one day to live in, there's a chair that, in the manner of Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously occupied and empty.  And in it sits a little boy who is at once here and, well, absolutely elsewhere.

Your thoughts on the concept of the replacement child? A dangerous or unfair idea? An understandable rationalization? Something in between?

What does your dinner table look like?

from a distance

The raspberries are almost over, but tomatoes are still green and it seems quite possible that the beginning of January will never get here. Our surrogate, Kyrie, is 18 weeks pregnant. I didn't really think we'd get to this point and it's hard to imagine that we'll ever get beyond it. 

There's a certain air of unreality about the whole thing. At least physically, it's nothing like last time at all. There's no morning sickness, no paneled and pouched maternity clothes, no flickering quivers against my stomach, no dull leaden slug lodged under my ribs. I don't turn sideways in front of mirrors, pulling up my shirt to let my hands play up and down the pale convexity of a belly become a gibbous moon. Right now, I'm sitting on the back porch, and the only thing I'm considering is whether I should pour myself a second glass of cheap white wine. 

It doesn't seem to count. It doesn't seem like it's really happening. Unlike last time at this point, I haven't told anyone -- not my coworkers, not my family, not my friends. I've been to the appointments, but I don't look at the ultrasound screen and I never talk to the doctor. It's like it's happening to someone else. It is happening to someone else. 

I don't really have any negative feelings about the concept of surrogacy --maybe because, long ago, I had a successful pregnancy or maybe because I know that the odds are overwhelming that any future pregnancy of mine would end the same way the last one did. And probably that's why I sometimes forget that surrogacy is, for a whole variety of reasons, fairly unusual and quite controversial.

But I've been wondering what you all think. Comment honestly (and anonymously, if you'd prefer). You're not going to upset me or hurt my feelings and I realize that there are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides. What's your view on surrogacy? What limitations (if any) do you think should be placed on it? Should it be available to someone like me who, theoretically, could carry a baby to term, but runs a high risk of another death or a catastrophically premature baby? Would you consider working with a surrogate? Could you imagine being a surrogate? Why or why not?

Time and again

Last time I was this pregnant was the day my baby died. It was a busy, crazy day that turned into the evening our after started. Our son was born the next day. That was exactly eighteen months ago.

I want to say something profound. Dates, numbers, coincidences. I also want to say that it's just a day, it holds no power. (Right? Right?) The boy who is still alive in me is no more or less likely to die today than any other day. But today I am unmistakably more anxious than yesterday. 

He looks like his brother. We know that from the ultrasounds. It started with the nose. I saw it on the anatomical scan, and almost gasped. A had this weird nose that nobody else in the family has. Of all things, I didn't expect the nose. Since then we have seen the cheeks, which are not surprising-- they are my dad's, mine, Monkey's, and A's. Other features are less clear, but the time before last the ultrasound tech pointed out his big hands (A had long fingers) and that he had some hair. A's hair was curly. 

Is it just that were he to be born today, I would know what to expect? What he would look like, what his weight would feel like in my arms? He is smaller than A was, but not by much-- half a pound or so, likely. That was the thought I was working on this weekend, as the doctors worked to stop my preterm labor-- that I may, in a matter of hours, again hold my son in my arms, that were that to happen, I would need to let myself be in both places at once, simply because I don't think I could stop myself from going back.

The birthing rooms in my hospital are pretty similar, though the beds in some face one way, and in some-- the other. The rooms where I had given birth to my two children so far happen to frame one side of the same wall of rooms-- Monkey's right up by the ORs, and A's down the other end of the hall, where there would be minimal interaction with the world of live babies being born, where they could then walk us out through the back door, so we wouldn't have to run into any happy people. The room where I was this weekend, fittingly, I guess, was half way down the hall between the rooms where Monkey and A were born. This room was set up the same way as Monkey's, with the bed in the room facing the bed in A's birth room. If I peered really hard through the walls, and through time, I could see us in that other room. Monkey's birth was behind me, has been for over six years now. A's, in some way, was, and still is, in front of me. 

So tell me, please, if you have had a subsequent birth already, how did it feel? How did it go? If you are still hoping for one, what goes through your mind as you think of it? Or do you give that part any thought at all? If you are not going to get one, what does that do to you?

this cup pass from me

I am carrying a child who is almost precisely the gestational age her brother was when he was born.  And when he died.  And this is scaring the shit out of me.

26 weeks, 1 day is actually pretty decent for a micropreemie.  They told me Finn had at least a 75% chance of survival without major complications, statistically...even if he was a white male fetus, that most vulnerable creature of the species.

I have learned, more viscerally than any professor could ever have hammered through my skull had I actually braved such a subject in my studies, that statistics lie.  Or that only fools believe they will come out on the positive end of them, at least.  He did have major complications, ones that proved insurmountable, fatal.  Despite steroid shots, his lungs collapsed.  One so severely that they tubed him directly through his skin, through his tender, papery flesh and the tissue of his tiny ribcage.  I do not even know if there was anesthesia...I was ten rooms away, trying to recover some feeling in my legs and a blood pressure reading high enough to qualify as alive, to prove to the nurses that I could stand so that they'd let me hop in a wheelchair and go to him.  When we finally won that fight and were ushered to his incubator, the wounds of his own battle were already vivid upon him.  His little fingertips and toes were blackened from lack of oxygen, and his chest had been cut, his throat tubed.  Before his mama ever held him.  Before there was ever a gentle touch or a voice that spoke his name.

Then we did hold his hand, and he squeezed our fingers, and we stroked his little feet and marvelled at him, and in the end hours upon hours later when the outcome of the battle was undeniable we surrendered and unplugged him and held him and tried to fit a lifetime of love and comfort into one last hour, before he was gone.  We were lucky, beyond measure, to have that time. And he was medicated, probably more than I even realized, so I do not think there was pain for him at the end.  I allow myself to think that.  I need to think that.

But for the longest time the rest, those brutal early hours, were something I simply did not allow myself to think about at all, because there was this primal cry that would rise in my throat and choke me.  Because my baby, my tiny baby, had been born to a shock and suffering that even now I know I only know the half of.  Because that was the first of his brief hours of life.  And because it was me who enabled it to be that way, me who made the decision, at 26 weeks exactly, that we would rescind our previous "no heroics" designation and go all out to save the baby I believed by then could be saved.

I don't exactly think I made the wrong decision...that's not why I lie here in a cold sweat before dawn some mornings.  The odds were that he might have survived and thrived.  I would, I think, have felt worse had we done nothing and lost a baby who might otherwise have come through okay.  And I don't exactly feel guilt, because I made the decision without guile and on the basis of the best advice I could get at the time.   But owning that decision and the pain that it - that I - caused that tiny boy will sit with me, part of me, until the day I die.  It is, if I am honest with myself, the cruellest thing I have ever caused to happen to another human being, no matter my intentions, my investment, the depths of my love.  And what wakens me in the thin light of 4:30 am these days, heart pounding, is the fear that sometime in the next week or two I may have to face it again, to choose again.

Choice is often and in many ways a privilege.  When you have no real control over the outcome of your choices, though, it can feel like a mockery, like a bitter joke.

They ask me if I want the steroid shots and I say, i don't know and I cast my eyes around the room like a trapped animal, wondering hell, do i look like i'm writing this story, like i'm in charge here?  The truth is if my cervix is showing significant weakness of course I want them NOW and if it's not I want to wait because they are most effective when given within two weeks of delivery and preferably after 28 weeks but sometimes it's weak and soft and sometimes it's not, that tricksy cervix.  The truth is these same practices have taken far less significant decisions out of my hands in the past, in the crises of labour, so the fact that they defer to me on this Big Thing just leaves me wary, puzzled.  The truth is they don't know what's going to happen and I don't know what's going to happen and I don't want control of Big Decisions in this liminal boundary zone because I know it is a fool's game. 

I am chickenshit, burnt crispy.  I want to abdicate.

The little life that hangs in the balance...for my own sake, sure, I want her at all costs.  But for hers?  That is the road I do not seem to know how to walk this time, the road I wish I could close my eyes to and ignore until it is safely past and I get to believe, maybe, that I will not have to choose again whether or not my child's brief life will be one of pain and machines and invasive procedures, until we reach a place where I can breathe and hope that I will get to play mother this time, not hapless, impotent god.

I whisper, please.  give me a few more weeks, and i'll happily pretend that I'm bossing you around for the rest of my life.