BL/AD

As you may or may not know, I've been trying to sort through this anger and jealousy about how life is unfair and how that leads me to have thoughts like "I hate everyone I know (and don't know) who is pregnant."

I have been trying to figure out when and why I first started having these feelings, because a few years ago when I felt like I was really ready to meet a man and start a family, I was also kind of jealous of women who were already there where I wanted to be. I would sometimes think about the guy I met when I was 28, and how he ruined everything because he turned out to be a real dick. I moved in with him, moved to a new town for him, and although I did end up really loving that town, it was only a matter of weeks before I realized the move was a big mistake and the relationship was doomed. And I would sometimes rage at him in my head, usually when making a long drive by myself, thinking that I had been ready then and if he had just been the right person or at least not a dick then I wouldn't have been in the situation of being over 30* and trying to settle down with the New York City men of Match.com. It's HIS fault I met Chris--who turned out to be VERY MUCH like him--and went on to have a dead baby. But my point is that I was sad and angry before I lost Blue. But it wasn't such a sharp pain. The jealousy was softer, more like an "oh, I wish..." before I would realize that I didn't have "..." because I had made other choices, other choices that I really liked. Even if I experienced some sadness or depression during the times I was living those other choices, it wasn't like I was stabbed in the heart every time I saw a pregnant woman or heard about a friend's pregnancy, birth, or newborn.

As I've been thinking about all this, I realize my jealousy, anger, envy and sadness exist on the babyloss calendar as "Before Loss" and "After Death." Everything feels different in the new AD world. And when I find myself with generalized feelings of just-plain-feeling-shitty because, e.g., someone I know is pregnant (again), I just miss my BL life more than I can comprehend. I just want to go back to being that person who didn't rage about things she couldn't control. (Ha! See preceding paragraph. No, but I would rather be the soft-jealousy-feeling kind of person than the one who hates everyone sometimes. At least that soft jealousy can serve to remind you to pursue the things you really value and want for your life. This other kind just wears you down beyond the nub that you already are.)

The funny thing is that after I thought about this, I felt a little less pressure to get pregnant again ASAP. I mean, I KNOW that other people's pregnancies don't mean I have a reduced chance for having another baby...but I finally have started to feel that way too. In casual conversation I learned that a friend from high school just had her second child, a daughter, recently (I had known she had an older son but did not know she was pregnant), and I wasn't stabbed in the heart. I was aware that I could have been stabbed in the heart by the news. Which is another AD experience, but not as bad as the actual stabbing part.

*Lying about your age to represent that you are under 30 is a double-edged sword. Trust me.

. . .

On to other topics. Let's talk about my dear Aunt Flo. Feel free to stop reading now if you don't want a play-by-play of my vaginal discharge of the past two weeks. To continue, scroll down. :)








A little over a week ago I noticed some very light pink, very light spotting. In the initial moment, I was so thrilled to be getting my cycle back! Something was happening! Something that could lead to my getting pregnant again soon!! Then I was sad, thinking, "haven't I been having enough sex to have skipped the period part and gone straight to being pregnant?" Then I searched the Internet obsessively for posts about implantation bleeding. Over the next few days I had more spotting, mostly light and brown in color. Similar to what was described as implantation bleeding. So of course I peed on a stick. And of course I am not pregnant. I didn't really feel pregnant anyway. More sadness, mixed with some general crabbiness. The bleeding continued for a few more days and never got heavy and never really got red, though there may have been a few patches. So, I have now convinced myself that even though my period took 14 months to return, I had an anovulatory cycle that was discharging some old blood as a result of the light cramping that occurred as my cycle was getting back into gear. That makes sense, right? And I almost went out for OPKs, and almost started having sex on a daily basis...and then I realized that I want to just CHILL OUT about this for a little while and see what happens.

I don't know where this falls on the AD calendar...maybe somewhere around the Renaissance?

I Don't Know Your Story

I wrote the paragraphs below last summer, and never published them as a post because it seemed incomplete. I am slowly creeping out of a fog of heavy grief. I am trying to focus on the positive within myself, and trying not to  compare myself to others I think "have it better." Or who are lucky enough not to have a dead baby in their past. Sometimes, though, I admit it feels better to compare myself to someone I think has it worse. Did I write that I already or only think it? I think it so often, I cannot tell the difference. Not exactly evil, but not exactly nice. I don't know, maybe it's just a variation on the theme of thinking of those less fortunate, and being grateful for what you have.

I was never good at being grateful, or being present, and I am no better in the long, broad wake of baby loss.

Compare and compare and compare I will, but I don't know your story...

And yet I imagine I do. And I hate you because your story is not complicated like mine. It is not grief-ridden like mine. You are young and if not beautiful then you are cute and sweet-looking. Your husband is young and tall and he carries your son, not yet two or even one, on his shoulders. He holds your daughter's small hand and you all walk slowly together. Your daughter is not yet three. You are pregnant and your belly button is slightly sticking out under your blue cotton dress. And I fucking hate you for having these three kids, because you will have your third child without complication, I can tell by the sweet look on your face.

I am 35 and anxiously awaiting the arrival of my second son, hoping with my entire being that this second son will live. The thing that caused his brother's death cannot cause his, but in the world where I now live, lots of different bad things can happen to babies before they are born. And so I freak out now and again and have days of grief and anxiety and moodiness. I think that this isn't fair, why can't I go back to being oblivious? Like you.

But I don't know your story...

I suppose there is a woman watching me, thinking that I look so happy, so glowing, so ignorant, the blissful kind. Maybe she's tried for years to get pregnant and yet no pregnancies. Maybe she's had multiple--or even just one--early miscarriage. She's never felt a baby move from the inside. She's never talked about her baby or strollers or night-feedings with strangers. Maybe she hates my pregnant guts.

...and you don't know mine.

To Wean, or Not To Wean?

I need help, you guys!

LLL lady says to keep nursing through cold and flu season to keep giving Sprout antibodies and comfort if/when he does get sick. I could take herbal supplement (chasteberry) to help bring back my period. I am not exactly sold on the stuff. And it's contraindicated in pregnancy, so I would be obsessively testing, and that could get expensive. Speaking of expensive...I just looked it up and it is not expensive, so that won't help me decide.

A few mornings ago, Sprout was crying when he got up and after I changed his diaper I set him down for a moment to rinse the diaper and he just stood, crying, staring at me and waiting for me to pick him up to nurse. Two days later he woke up happy and I played with him briefly and just got him breakfast right away and he didn't seem like he needed to nurse. The next day he was really asking for it again. But, that was some progress towards baby-led weaning. I'm just not sure I can hold out the whole way...I REALLY want to try to get pregnant again. I mean, have I mentioned that at all yet? Ha!

I made a plan to nurse--we're down to morning and night, as of this weekend, actually! No daytime nursing yesterday or today. OK, cool!--through the holidays/end of year. Then in January I would scale back to once per day, either morning or night, not really sure, I guess eliminating night would be nice so that I can be out during bedtime on occasion (probably like never, but a gal can dream). Then I imagine that my period will return immediately and I will have another October baby. I was just saying a gal can dream. Ideally I would skip the period and just catch the first egg. Or two. Twins would be nice and give me more hope for having four kids instead of just three. So far my kids only have a 50/50 chance, so I am not about to start counting any chickens! But anyway, that was a recent thought but I still am not sure.

I would keep nursing if I could pregnant at the same time. What would you do...wean now, and maybe force it? Or wean later, when Sprout is ready, maybe after cold/flu season, but continue to wait to try for the next bebe? When I sit in a quiet room and close my eyes and try to really think this through, all I get is tick tick Tick Tick TIck TICk TICK TICK!

It's Worse

There is no reason to compare pregnancy loss to the loss of a child, but today I did anyway and I think I have my answer. Losing a child is worse.

I was bored at work this morning and f'ing around on Facebook when I came across a number of condolences messages to a friend and ex-boyfriend from college. We had not kept in touch right after college but, thanks to Facebook, had more recently reconnected and exchanged a few emails. I would say in the past year or two. Actually I just checked my Facebook messages and got sucked into a rabbit hole of reading old Facebook messages. Wow. My friend and I were in touch back in 2009 for the first time since college. More than a year or two ago.

I will get right to it: his 6-year-old daughter was hit by a car and killed on Monday. This is unbelievable. Apparently she walked out between parked cars; there were no allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the driver. He and his wife have an older daughter who is 9, I think. This is just so sad. I cried and wrote something on his wall and spent the rest of the day being really out of it and unfocused at work.

I also told one of the secretaries and we talked about loss for a few minutes. Her sister died of cancer last year and she is a pretty understanding person. She is also known as the office gossip, so I figured after the fact that she was a good person to tell because she would tell other people what happened to explain why I was out of it (if anyone actually noticed). Later that day a card was being circulated for sympathy and condolences for one of the partners who works from home. I don't know her very well is my point. I signed the card, writing simply "my condolences," thinking about my friend and his daughter and whether or not I cared at all about whom this partner lost. I asked the secretary and it was the partner's uncle. On the day I found out my friend's 6-year-old daughter just died, I have to sign a card for someone-I-don't-care-about-at-all's elderly uncle? After that it was late enough in the day that I just chatted with another associate and then left.

But anyway, as I was reading the condolences on my friend's wall, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to try to find a status update, I was thinking what could it be? He had come up in my news feed quite a bit lately and I was pretty sure his wife wasn't pregnant. He is an only child so it wasn't a sibling and it didn't seem like parents and then some posts mentioned his wife and one daughter but not the other. As I was thinking was it the loss of a pregnancy or of a 9- or 6-year-old child, I just knew in my heart that losing the child at that age would be devastatingly...worse. And I was just speechless and sad and I wish this never happened. 

2-2-2-2

My Lilypie ticker is aligned in 2's today. Is that good luck, like when you look at the clock at 11:11?

I have so many plates spinning in my head. This will generally be a logorrhea post. Or should I say blogorrhea? Of course I should! (Sorry.)

Well, I've been thinking about Blue a lot lately. And I'm not sure why that should surprise me. I guess I am surprised at how often I still cry about losing him. I cry about different things, like the way I felt getting the diagnosis or even when I found out both of us parents were carriers. I cry about how Sprout is here and Blue is not. I suppose this is the 2-year anniversary time of when everything felt so utterly hopeless. Then I am amazed that I could have a 1-year-old today. These extremes of emotion are very strange, almost childlike in the way that I can go from sad to happy to sad to happy in the matter of moments. So, I still miss my boy, that's not news.

So here are the things I have been pondering as of late. First, I wonder if there is a moral obligation, not simply a justification, for having an abortion when the baby is unwell. I think about this a lot because medical advancements have allowed the life expectancy of cystic fibrosis patients to soar into the mid-30's. There would seem to be a very good reason to give the chance of living to a CF baby. He could die before age 2 (or earlier), or he could die in his 40's. If you knew you would live to 40, you would still want to live, right? But what if you couldn't live without spending two weeks out of every four in a hospital? What if you couldn't live without dedicating hours a day to "percussive therapy"? What if you couldn't live without taking 40 pills a day, just so you could extract nutrients from the food you were eating? I mean, you would do it, once you were alive. So that is the moral question--if you know what kind of life a person is destined to, and we can all agree that that life is nobody's first choice of how to live (understatement), then is there an obligation to spare that life? Put more simply: you will live a life of physical pain, because you will struggle to breathe; one thing in your life will be certain, and that will be your mortality. If you are not permitted to live, you will never know of it. If you are permitted to live, you will live with the knowledge that your parents knew what pain your life would bring you, but brought you to your life anyway.

Obviously, if you don't know the child's condition until the child is born, then you are absolved of this responsibility for giving the life of pain. I know the problem with this analysis is that we can never know the severity of a prenatal diagnosis. And we can never know what that child would want. Which was the absolute worst part of making the decision I had to make--I would have done what Blue wanted. It was his life. But I was in charge of it. Dammit. . . . I don't wish I hadn't had the abortion. I only wish he were never sick and I never had to make that call.

I have also been thinking about how when you have a medical termination, you have this window of time in which you know your baby is going to die, but he hasn't died yet. I spent a week and three days like this. I remember how Chris stopped thinking about Blue as is if he still existed, but I still felt his every move. One day I was lying on the bed on top of the covers, having already gotten up for the day, and I was just staring at the wall and sobbing. Chris was down the hall in his office, and he came in to say he was trying to work. I don't give him much credit because he doesn't deserve it, but he did not say this unkindly. He took me outside for a walk. There we were in stark contrast--he working, while I was just trying to breathe. That time between knowing what is going to happen, and the waiting for it to actually happen, it is at once agony and a gift. The chance to say goodbye.

As I write this, I wish more than ever that I had held him after he was born.

...to be continued. Mr. E is out with friend tonight and I need to go watch Chopped or something.

Yes, it's been two years, two months, two weeks and two days since we said goodbye. But who's counting? It doesn't really get easier.

October 15

The day has come and gone but I am just now getting the chance to blog about it.

Last week we were in Oklahoma City for a horse show. I may start calling Sprout Sport, because he was such a good sport about getting dragged around to restaurants, the fairgrounds, the bombing memorial and museum, and about celebrating his birthday on the road.

He was so perfectly born 10 days ahead of schedule, on October 15. We ate cupcakes in Oklahoma, but I baked a rainbow cake for his celebration with friends and family at home the Saturday before we left town. I'm not going to be making any frickin' more rainbow cakes, it was so time consuming, but I am glad I did because there is nothing more perfect than a rainbow cake for your rainbow baby on his first birthday. Proof:

I can't believe he is one. I still look at him sometimes, thinking that he's really here and he's really all mine. He is starting to wobble around on two legs now, and today walked across the whole living room to greet me when I got home from work.

True to his nature, he appears to be back on track from the traveling, nursing to sleep before 8:00 tonight, but last night he awoke early enough into the night that it was painful to get up. There is one big difference between getting awoken at one or two--Mr. E and I can't agree as to what time it was--and three or four or five. He no longer gets up to nurse back to sleep, so my only trick is gone. Last night I put him back in his crib when he started squirming around in our bed, and I don't even know if I fell asleep again or not before I trudged back to his room to bring him back to our bed to try again. That time he nursed to sleep and I got to cuddle with my baby for a few hours. He is not as cuddly anymore as he gets more mobile and more curious. And I was thinking today how cuddly he was and has been and that even in utero I think he liked to cuddle. When I was pregnant with Blue and would lie on my belly, he would move all over the place, back and forth and back and forth. But Sprout would be still when I did the same. I had wanted him to move more like Blue did, but I am so happy to have had a cuddly baby. But all good things must end, and I think we are getting to the end of cuddling. i.e. and nursing. I am so torn about whether or not I want it to end! I have made it no secret that I want to get pregnant again ASAP, and nursing is still interfering with my cycle. But when I think about just stopping it seems an overly dramatic reaction to Sprout's turning one. He actually bit me a few times last week, and has been slapping and pinching for quite some time but when he's not generally beating me up I guess I really still love it. But I did wear an old B-cup bra today after realizing that my nursing bra had gaping space between it and my breasts. So, I think the end is near. Then I think how nice it will be to know when I can (theoretically) get pregnant. Or, in the alternative, how nice it will be to be neither pregnant nor breastfeeding for a little bit. Then again, I thought I would quit pumping at 8 months, then 9, then 10, and I didn't do that, so we shall see.

Anyway, that is my update. I lit those two birthday candles on October 12, but I didn't light a candle on October 15. Every day, though, a flame burns for my Blue.

Help!

Well...for a variety of reasons. But really because I added the Lilypie ticker and it's cut off and now my name in the sand photo does not fit on the gadget bar either. Can anyone tell me how to fix this in the most loss-maintenance way possible? Love ya's!