Battle fatigue

We waited for seven months after George’s death before we started to try and get pregnant again.  It felt much too soon to me at the time, as if by trying to have another child we were somehow betraying our firstborn.  If not for fear of the encroaching title of ADVANCED MATERNAL AGE I probably would have insisted upon waiting longer. Fear can be powerful motivation.

If someone had offered me the option of a medically induced coma for the duration of my subsequent pregnancy I would have given it serious consideration.   It wasn’t just the emotional aspect of another pregnancy after a loss and all its possible complications that gave me pause but also the pure physicality of it.   My pregnancy with George was brutal even before things went sideways.  Hyperemesis lasted for nearly twenty-three weeks and then, one week after it resolved, I was in the hospital being pumped with enough cardiac medication to make me long for the days of vomiting only every hour.  Of course, then there were the IVs and the constant blood draws and the headaches and the jabs to my stomach with epidural needles.  By the time I went in for the emergency C-section to deliver our boy I was nearly fifteen pounds lighter than I was before I got pregnant. 

As it turned out I survived the next pregnancy with most of my sanity intact by doing my best impression of an ostrich.  I simply pretended, as long as I could, that none of it was happening.  I assumed that my state of pregnancy was a temporary one and went about my life as if everything was the same as before.  All of those things pregnant people are supposed to do like glow and beam and make plans for nurseries and have baby showers I did none of.  What I did do was take my prenatal vitamin every day, avoided the laundry list of foods and drugs that I was supposed to and I continued to grieve the loss of my son. 

Everyday I was pregnant I fully expected it to be the last.  But somehow my luck held out and after 277 days I gave birth to a living, breathing baby girl.  The moment I held her for the first time the uncertainty of those previous 277 days became completely insignificant.   It all seemed worth it.  I would have chosen to do it all again for twice as long in a single heartbeat.   Perspective is everything and if fear is a powerful motivator than love even more so.

Eighteen months after she was born we looked at our daughter, growing up at the speed of light, and thought that it was time to do it all over again.  She needed a sibling and we needed another baby.   So we took another deep breath, crossed our fingers, and with eyes wide open made that leap of faith. 

It did not come as a shock to me when a few months ago, at 12 weeks, I had a miscarriage.  A routine office visit and an absent heartbeat, it was a scenario I had envisioned happening many times in the years since George’s death.   Then, just last week, a variation of the same story; positive pregnancy test followed by spotting and then heavy bleeding.  An early miscarriage, they say.  Part of me, the part that will be forever in that hospital room holding the still body of my son, will always expect the worst and be surprised when anything other than that happens. 

 

I could rail against the unfairness of it all or shake an angry fist at the universe.  Lord knows I did all that when George died.  I wailed and screamed and cried until I thought I would shrivel into a dried husk.   It was what I needed at the time.  To be angry and indignant was important.  

It has been three and a half years since I began this journey and it has been a battle the entire time.  Four pregnancies later here I am with one son gone away and one amazingly thriving daughter who is currently singing a song about boats.  I don’t feel angry or indignant anymore.  I recognize how lucky I am to have made it this far with one living child.   Yet I still long for another baby and somtimes even dare to dream about a son.  But I’ve grown weary of the battle and wonder when is it time to finally stop fighting.  Is it now?

If you have had more than one loss in what ways has it affected you differently than your first loss?  Was your reaction to it as you expected?  What is/has been your motivation for trying to have another child?  Have you made the decision to not try or to stop trying?  How did you come to that decision?  

This time, again

Those five weeks between when we found out he was sick and when he died exist outside of time.  They accordion out behind me as one infinitely long moment and then compress back to simply Before George and After George, the contents reduced to the width of a single piece of paper.  I alternate between being surrounded by memories, smells, tastes which bring me back to those weeks and real disbelief that The Horrible Thing actually happened at all.  

The more time that passes the more I seem to have difficulty grasping the core of what his death has really meant.  I tell myself that I can't regret what happened in the past because my present is filled with love for my daughter, who in a very honest sense only exists because her brother doesn't.  I fortify myself against the reality of his death rationalization by rationalization.   I am a master at trying to soften the edges of his death.

Then March comes around the corner, always unexpectedly, to knock the breath out of me.  The ether of emotions that normally fog my brain crystalize and it is all suddenly so simple again.  I gave birth to a baby in the cold sterility of a surgical suite.  I held his small sick and dying body, kissed his head, whispering to him I loved him and that I wished he could stay.  Then I simply waited for his tired heart to stop its battle to keep beating.  In March I can distill all the regrets and justifications and apologetics that I conjure up during the other eleven months of the year into a simple elixer of love and heartbreak.  

I am a mother to two children.  One who lives and thrives: a marvel in front of my eyes.  The other dead and gone: a shadow in the periphery of my vision.  But for a few weeks in March, when the world around me is waking up from its wintry slumber, that shadow feels a bit more substantive.  Almost as if I can reach out and hold him again, kiss his head, whisper him I love him, and that I wish he could have stayed.  

 

Do you rationalize the death of your baby to ease your pain?  When the anniversary of the death of your child approaches does it change your perspective on the past or make you feel closer to the one you lost?  How do you feel (or think you will feel) about milestones or anniversaries?  Are they intensely personal events or do you feel the need to share those important dates with people in your life?

a hard talk

It is my distinct honor to  welcome our newest regular contributor Brianna from  Daily Amos.  In 2010, her first son George was diagnosed with heart failure caused by supraventricular tachycardia at 24 weeks gestation. Over the next four weeks, the doctors tried to slow his heart rate down with medication. After stopping treatment, Brianna developed Mirror Syndrome and had to have an emergency c-section. George died shortly after birth. Brianna brings her wisdom and sharp insights to Glow in the Woods. We are grateful to have her. --Angie

When I was a kid one of my favorite books was Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.  I often imagined myself as Max (and what child who has ever read that book has not done that same exact thing) throwing off the shackles of parental subjugation and escaping to a place where I was beholden only to myself.  To this day I still love that book and get a thrill every time my nearly eighteen-month-old daughter asks me to read it to her and yells, “Max!” as we flip through the pages.  There is something pure and honest in the way Sendak writes about childhood that is completely unique to him, which is probably why his books are beloved by so many people.  Maurice Sendak died last year at age eighty-three having written and/or illustrated hundreds of pieces.  Given the subject matter of what he wrote about I was surprised to discover that he never had any particular fondness for childhood and was more than a little preoccupied with his own death.

During one interview Sendak explains what he believes to be at the root of his morbid obsession.  He tells a story of being a small child, about the age of four, and seeing on the front page of a newspaper a photograph of the remains of “The Lindbergh Baby,” the twenty-month-old child of the famous Charles and Anne Lindbergh who was killed during a kidnapping for ransom attempt.  Sendak goes on to recount how profoundly the image terrified him and that his parents never really adequately addressed his distress.  His parents, in fact, denied that such a photograph existed and insisted that little Maurice must have fabricated the entire thing.  It wasn’t until many years later, long after Sendak’s obsession with the Lindbergh baby had matured and developed into the fixation he had about his own death, did he actually get confirmation that the photograph he claimed to see on the newspaper did actually exist.

I don't know why his parents chose to ignore their son’s obvious difficulty processing what he saw.  Maybe they really believed their four-year-old son had lied about the photograph.  Perhaps they thought convincing him that the entire incident never happened was the best course of action.  I assume they were doing what most decent parents do when faced with uncomfortable situations like these; the best they can.  But whatever the reason behind their decision, the result, at least in Maurice Sendak's mind, was that the little boy grew up to be fixated on his own death.

Watching Sendak recount what a traumatic experience he had with his first encounter with death made me think about the first time I learned about the concept myself.  It was when one of our cats died and I must have been six at the time, maybe seven.  She was a tortoiseshell beauty we called Puzzles, name owed to the interlocking swatches of orange and black fur on her back.  She had been sick and my parents sent us down the street to play at a neighbor’s house while they took her to the vet.  At the time I was not aware that they were taking her there to be euthanized.  I assumed they were taking her to the doctor’s office to get medicine in the same way they did when my sister or I was sick.  They returned later that afternoon, driving on our street past where we were playing outside.  I knew something was wrong when I saw my dad in the passenger seat and that my mother was driving, an unlikely sight in our family.  My sister, four years my senior, must have also known something was wrong as I don’t remember her saying anything to me the entire walk back to the house.  When we arrived we found my dad, with a grim look on his face, along side my mother, waiting for us at the front door.  “Puzzles was too sick to get better,” they told us, and that they “had to help her so that she would no longer be in pain.”  They explained that they had her put to sleep, that she was not going to wake up, and what exactly all that meant.  There might have been talk about heaven and what happens after death but I honestly don’t remember what was said mainly because I don’t think that part of conversation was as jarring as the idea of actual death. 

They brought Puzzle’s body back from the vet’s office so that we could say goodbye by having a funeral for her.  I realized that was why my father had been sitting as a passenger instead of his usual place in the captain’s seat: he had been holding on his lap the body of our much-loved cat, wrapped in plastic and placed in a cardboard box.  Later that day my dad dug a hole in the corner of the backyard under a tree where we said our goodbyes.  It was about as gentle an introductory experience as a child can have to death.  I don’t look back on that memory with any fear or resentment but rather with an appreciation to my parents for making the hard choice to talk to us frankly about such a difficult subject.

In an ideal world the introduction I had to the concept of mortality and death is the one a child should get about such a profound subject.  The introduction should not happen by being faced with a black and white photo of a stranger’s murdered child, or by the death of a sibling, or by watching mama come home from the hospital without baby brother or sister… Sadly though we don’t live in an ideal world.   We live in a crazy, often beautiful but just as often fucked-up, world.   Sometimes children do get murdered and sometimes babies do die.  Some of us do not get to decide when and how our children learn about death…for some of us circumstance chooses for us.

Since George died Leif and I have had frequent conversations about how and when we are going to tell his sister about him and why he died.  I guess in a way we are the luckier ones in the spectrum of unlucky baby loss. He was our first child and so we have the luxury of deciding when our daughter learns that she had a brother. Still I can imagine that no matter how or when we do it I will always wonder if we irrevocably damaged in some way her impressionable young mind.  When she is fifteen and painting her nails black, listening to her generation’s equivalent of The Smiths, I’ll be certain that it is a result of my failure as her mother to adequately address her brother’s death.   When she expresses any hint of anxiety while being pregnant with my grandchild, I will have no doubt that it is because she is convinced that her baby is going to die just like her mother’s did.   I don’t think it is possible to escape those kinds of doubts or, if there is, I’m still trying to figure out a way to it.

The truth is that I am not afraid of telling her about death and mortality, per se.  What does frighten me about explaining to her that her older brother died is the part where I have to expose her to ideas like sometimes bad things happen to good people and that there are not always good reasons for why terrible things happen in life.  I worry about having to explain to her at some point that occasionally even our best efforts are not rewarded with happy endings.  I don’t know how or when as a parent you tell your child these things as it seems to me it must at least partially steal away some innocence, and there is such precious little time they get to keep that as it is.   What I do know for certain is that I will tell her about her brother George and that he died even though we wanted him so badly to stay.  I will do my best to give her honest answers when she asks questions about him, as I know that she inevitably will.  I will make sure she knows that no matter how scary this world is that I love her and her brother so very, very much.  Maybe that is all she needs and the rest will work itself out.  

What are your thoughts on discussing the topic of death with children?  Have you had to explain the death of your baby to his or her sibling?  How did you do it?   If you haven’t yet had to address the topic, how will you or how would you do it?  Or maybe you won’t address it.  Tell me why.  What do you wish your parents had told you about death?