Two weeks from today, on May 7, around 12:30pm in Los Angeles, we are scheduled to meet our third child, a boy, who if anything like his older sisters, will be long and thick and blue eyed and full of hair.
We have a name picked out for him. We have a few things ready for his arrival; an old car seat, some hand me down articles of clothing, an aqua colored swaddle blanket and a scattering of other necessities, like baby soap and a sealed bottle of whiskey. Barring any unforeseen calamity or early entrance, he will come into the world after spending thirty-eight and a half weeks inside his Mother, the same amount of time his sister spent in utero before dying.
Seventy-five weeks of pregnancy has come down to this.
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We are dancing more and more these days. My three year old and I run around the house singing wildly off key to the vibrations of Florence + The Machine, cranking the volume during the “loud parts,” as Stella refers to them, and pumping our fists and spinning in circles and group dancing with Momma, which involves an awkward three person and one belly swaying hug.
We have been doing this sort of tribal dance ever since Margot died. It was always a brief respite from the agonizing grief, a tangible way for us to contrast the sadness surrounding Stella’s life with some joy. But something feels different now. As the song ends and we throw ourselves onto the couch in exhaustion, the sadness that once lingered after the dancing is now replaced with anticipation, the light at the end of another long pregnancy tunnel, the hopeful gift of a son, out of the ashes of his sister.
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I have been growing a beard since we entered the third trimester because I don’t know what else to do for my son in utero, because it’s the only outward sign of hope I can think of, because the simple act of not shaving feels like something I have control over. It is thick and black and surprisingly vigorous after two months. And it’s mostly awful looking, something my partner says “doesn’t look bad or good.” But it’s there, growing simultaneously with my son, exuding love and hope every time I pick food out of my mustache or my daughter yanks at it in laughter or I itch it at work or gently pull at it while I’m thinking or reading.
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Thirteen months and one day ago, as my partner bled and bled with no clots in sight, we were twenty minutes away from a hysterectomy.
Thirty-six and a half weeks ago we got lucky, damn lucky, that the cells of a tiny egg and a tiny sperm entered into a union that has, up to this point, stayed the course. There is gratefulness in abundance.
Mostly though, there is this inescapable feeling like our lives are hanging in the balance, like we’re standing on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a rugged coastline, waiting to be pulled back or kicked off the ledge.
I don’t know how we could go through this again.
I really, really, don’t know how we could go through this again.
It’s damn near impossible to keep myself from looking over the cliff, from imagining the free fall should this little boy not make it. The fear, which introduced itself early on in the pregnancy, as if on cue, has successfully set up iron gates around my hopeful heart, holding me in a perpetual state of doubt, my gaze nearly fixed on the rocky coastline below. The emergency run to labor and delivery at thirty weeks didn’t help. Nor have the poor non-stress numbers, the abnormal blood work, or the two dozen times we had to get the doppler out to see if he was still alive. The only relief from the fear and worry is that it’s persistence has become commonplace.
And then there is the hope. Hope that this baby will live, and keep living. Hope that I will hold him in my arms and look into his eyes and tell him that he is my favorite boy in all the world. Hope that I will get to introduce my three year old to her live sibling, to see the two of them together, a dream of such vivid beauty I can hardly even think about it.
Hope that in two weeks time, we will pick up what’s left of ourselves, step back from the cliff, turn around and walk back towards home.
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If you have had a subsequent pregnancy, what was your experience like? If you haven’t had a subsequent pregnancy, how does it feel to read about other members of the baby loss community who are pregnant? Is it hopeful? Diffiicult?
My department's administrative assistant is a very, very nice woman. I chat with her almost every day when I come into the office to check my mailbox or to pick up what I sent to the printer. Last Friday towards the end of the conversation she mentioned that she'd just been by to see her niece the day before, and that it was because the niece is due any moment. Not my favorite conversation, but I made a supportive noise. "And you know, the cord is wrapped twice around the baby. So they are going to take the baby on Tuesday if she doesn't go before then." I felt my eyes go wide at the "twice." It's an involuntary response, and it comes with the throat tightening. I am pretty sure my blood pressure jumps too.
I am, though, by now able to remain at least outwardly calm. I asked if they were planning induction or c-section for Tuesday, I nodded to her saying that the niece might go earlier as she'd already lost the mucus plug. I didn't jump in with horror stories, mine or anyone else's I know. Because in truth I know that nuchal cord occurs in a relatively sizable percentage of pregnancies, and that most times it presents no problems at all. And because this is not the way I want to tell people about A. The administrator, she doesn't know. It sounded like the doctors were aware of the risk and managing it. So I stayed mum. I thought about them on and off through the weekend. And Monday I made sure to stop by "to check my mailbox" even before dropping my stuff off in my own office. Because as rational as I am trying to be, taking pregnancy and birth related things for granted is just not something I can do. The niece is fine, by the way-- she had a healthy baby on Saturday.
It's not that I am a mess about every single pregnancy I am aware of. In fact, it's a lot harder to expect bad pregnancy-related things to happen to other people than to myself. When my sister was pregnant, she was a lot more nervous than an average bear. Understandable, as she was so very present for us, and in fact was the only person other than my husband and myself (and hospital and funeral home staff) to have seen A. But me? Not until one of the nurses called a doc about the heartbeat strip looking a tad too regular during delivery that I really really worried that something horrible may befall her too (it didn't, my nephew was just taking a little nap amidst contractions). I don't mean I assumed she'd be fine, but I didn't have the horrible pit in my stomach for her the entire time.
I think I assume other people's normal pregnancies will go normally. (Other babylost mamas are the exception, of course-- I worry there. But then none of our subsequent pregnancies are really considered low-risk, are they?) But throw in a hint of trouble, the barest, tiniest hint of trouble and this person, whether a friend, acquaintance, a blogger I just heard about, or a complete stranger begins to occupy a large chunk of my thoughts. I don't want them to know what we know. I don't want them to have a reason to google in the middle of the night. I don't want them to become one of us. Nothing I can do about it, of course.
Or mostly nothing. I once made a pregnant friend call her OB's office when we were on vacation. The friend had a stomach bug, and I was pretty sure the office would send her to the nearest hospital for fluids and monitoring. They did, and when we got there, her dehydration was so severe that there is a good chance getting there when we did prevented at least a bout of contractions. And I think that if I heard of someone who sounded like they were not getting good care or not reporting important symptoms, I would likely raise an alarm and try to get them to do something. But for more minor things I have now trained myself to stay out of it.
It doesn't take a shrink to know why signs of trouble in even complete strangers' pregnancies bug me. I mean, I had a pretty busy weekend, and I still thought about this niece I've never met more times than I've thought of most of my own friends. And because living in my own head is what I do, a lot, I also think about how it is that I react outwardly, and why. Five years on, many conversations are still not very comfortable to me. The "when" the baby comes ones are particularly not my cup of tea. But in most situations, I just look for the shortest or most graceful way out. Early on I was more likely to think of these conversations as a way to tell A's story. But now it's almost as if I am afraid that a pedestrian conversation might be beneath his memory, might get the dust of trivial onto the sacred.
It's weird, I know. One thought that used to drive me bonkers in the early months and years was that most people in the world don't know he existed, and never will know. That as important as he is to me, he is nothing to them. They can go on about their business unencumbered by the thought of him, of all this promise gone, of all the potential not only unrealized, but never even hinted at. And now I don't want to use his name in vain. It's not that it doesn't bother me anymore that others don't know. It still does. But now I don't want to shout about it from the rooftops. I want to tell, I think, in a way that gives dignity to his memory and to him.
A friend once said that she doesn't always know how to speak of A because, she said, "he is your pain." "No," I replied, "he is my son." This, I think, is why I don't talk about him every time I could-- I want him thought of primarily as my son, rather than that very sad thing that happened to me. So when I hear of a pregnancy complication, I don't want to brandish A's story (or any of the other babylost families' stories). I think I worry it would be seen as a prop. I don't want to get attention that way. But I still worry.
Have you been in a position to discuss someone else's risky pregnancy? How do you react? Do you tell everyone about your child(ren) or are you selective about it? Has that changed with time?
Laying flat on my back on the couch surrounded by the darkness in my heart is how I have spent many bright days and long cold nights over the last three years since Silas died. I was not new to the idea of sadness and loss and hardship, but it was a revelation to be consumed by it so completely.
After all, there is nothing as completely devastating as the loss of your son or daughter. We know our parents and grandparents are not immortal, but it seems like a given that our children will outlive us long and strong, healthy and true.
But now I know.
Silas's death transformed my guts. I used to shit perfectly. Once in the morning, once at night. Solid, honest craps each of them. But now I'm erratic. Sometimes the toilet sucks, and I know I'm not good when I'm not looking forward to that daily event.
Do you know the gurgles? When laying flat on said back completely annihilated by how painful it is to miss my son I feel the slow crawl of tension mixed with terror sleazing through my innards in the dreadful, lonely night. Lu is next to me so I'm not alone but the loss is endless. Like the night will never end. Like the gurgle slip-slithering through my insides will never end in a solid shit.
It is the gut-pit we all know.
It seems clear to me that all the sorrows of all that is known can fall endlessly into the despair that parents feel for the loss of our little ones.
Based upon my own experience, it really is that fucking bad. You can't hyperbole the shitiness of this shit.
Our arms are made to hold them close, even when they are not here.
Here he is, though. Absolutely present in my life. My son Silas. He exists more concretely in the typing of his name than in his physical existence. I held him briefly hooked up to tubes and then later when it was only us, but I've held him even closer in the way I think about him, the way I write about my life without him.
I've learned to think in a certain way that seemed invaluable to survival. Music was my first refuge. I fell in love with music that made me feel Silas's absence with crystalline clarity. After music it was laughter. My brothers helped to remind me that bitter laughter is better than none at all. And if I could find my way to open my mouth to speak or yell or maybe even laugh, then food and drink would surely find it's way in.
Look at me! I'm a normally fuckitioning human. Yeah that's right. Fuck you functioning. Good as fucking new.
Slowly I re-learned how to present a relatively normal facade, but always at the center of our focus was creating Silas's sibling.
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I write to you now from the other side. Stop reading if you are angry about not having a child, or if your loss is so fresh everything is enraging. Read that top part again, and keep fighting. Don't let anyone stop you from being exactly who and how you need to be. Do not stop. Do not stop. Get up, stand up, throw those fucking hands up. Push out the night. Hide from the daylight. Embrace your endless, enraging tears for your child, your daughter, your son, your big sticky stinky shitting fucking life.
It's true, it really does suck this much, and it always will. Always always always. It will always suck exactly this much that you and me and my wife and your grandparents and our siblings lost a life that was going to be amazing.
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Stop reading if you're not pregnant yet with your next child, of if you're in your pregnancy and are freaking out all the time like we were. Stop reading if you're me a year ago and I couldn't stand to read about the next, bright part of people's lives.
I'm on a futon in the living room and Puck is digging his furry, feline head under the folds of my sleeping bag. The detritus of baby surrounds me. In what used to be my bedroom: my wife, the other cats, my second son Zephyr, all sleeping & feeding & crying & pooping as babies do, and sometimes moms and kitties, too.
I stopped believing in hope and now it's my full-time fucking job. I hope he's okay. I hope that rash is no big deal. I hope he's not crying because he's deathly ill. I hope I get to see him more tomorrow.
I have to hope, and I've trained myself to stop that silliness and deal instead with exactly is right in front of me. Except now, what is right in front of me, in my arms, is a son I feared to hope for.
The gurgle is in my heart, now. The gurgle is in my brain when I see Zeph's little-old-man-new face staring back at me, absurdly alive and utterly clueless to how powerful he is. He has annihilated time. It reminds me of when we first lost Silas and day or night meant nothing at all.
It is so much better now.
I didn't want to write this part. Lu thought it was necessary, though. She wanted people to know that there is still always hope of some kind. We were the worst kind of unlucky to lose our son Silas, but we are profoundly fortunate to have Zeph with us now. She never let go of that possibility while I continued to prepare for exactly what was, every day, over and over again, no matter how shitty.
She's in there right now using her breasts to feed and grow our son. I'm out here on the futon writing about our insanely brutal and beautiful and sad and hilarious lives as Airbag blasts from little speakers, my toes tucked into the sleeping bag and Chumby our cat curled up on the couch. I will sleep tonight completely enraptured by the endless darkness of Silas's absence and the now-ever-present force that is my other son Zephyr who is brilliantly alive and utterly confounding. How do we do this now? How does anyone?
Okay, I hear tears. Maybe time for a diaper change or midnight dance-party. Different day, better shit.
What physical aspects of your life changed when you lost your child? What have you reclaimed since then, what is forever altered? Has the lack of physical connection with your lost child forced you to find other routes to feeling close to them? What are they? What else do you want and how will you get it?
Sometimes, when I am holding my husband in bed, I worry that lightning will strike us. In those moments when we are so intensely in love, so happy together—still, despite our loss—I think we are asking for trouble. I expect a tree limb to crash through the roof of our bedroom right then. I picture a horrible cancer suddenly taking hold of one of our organs just as I am kissing him. It scares me. So I end the kiss, I pull away, thinking crazily that this might save our lives.
The same terror runs through my body sometimes when we put Lilly to bed. Will this be the night that the dryer lint catches fire? Will she wake with meningitis in the morning? What if the tree limb falls on her bed instead of ours? What if something happens to Brian, and she is taken away from me?
I love my husband. I love my stepdaughter. I don’t want whoever is running things "up there" to see the unbroken parts of my life, for fear they will be broken too. So I have become superstitious.
photo by winthrowBlythe. That's how I was before the death of my baby. Even having seen my parents’ long and bitter divorce, my own quick and dirty divorce, a series of unsuccessful career starts, a few personal tragedies among those I love, I still felt immune, protected, special. I still didn’t know. You know?
It’s probably for the best that I had my bubble burst. Nothing about my daughter’s death is for anybody’s good, but at some point I did need to come down to earth. To learn suffering, compassion, humility, and my own unspecialness. I hope I am less of a brat now. And moments of happiness have become so dearly precious to me. The people I love, so much more valuable.
I worry that they will be taken away from me. What if this lesson in humility does not have me on my knees enough? (Lessons in humility don’t really make me humble. They make me humiliated, which makes me mad.) What if I haven’t been sufficiently broken yet? What if there is more to "learn"?
Feeling happiness is a dangerous prospect these days. I used to avoid it, because really, who wants any of that when your baby is dead? But it has crept in. It has persisted. If I claim it, will someone see and take it away from me? No, no, that's not for you. Not any more. Should I love in secret, to protect the objects of my affection?
Shining and contented moments used to make me feel in tune with and supported by the Universe. Now I’m not sure the Universe is on my side. Now when I feel happy, I feel it defiantly. My burning love for my man, my stepdaughter, my gorgeous little nieces and nephews—it hurts. It could break my heart. I think out into space, Please, don’t take them away from me. Or sometimes, Screw you, Fate. We are still here. Then I hush myself. I don't want to attract attention.
Maybe it is safer to pull away from happiness, safer not to chase it. But this summer my husband and I will don wax wings and try to fly to the sun: we will do IVF. Fate will probably be too tempted by this. We should keep our dreams small and quiet, but I’m angry, as well as scared, and not ready to give in. My wings will likely melt right off. My husband? He thinks we’ll soar, and that’s fine with me as long as he doesn’t say it too loudly and maybe throws a pinch of salt over his shoulder, too.
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What is your relationship to happy moments (or the future prospect of them) these days? Do you have any quirky habits (of thought or action) that help you to cultivate a sense of safety in the world since your loss(es)?
We moved recently. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Moved. One breath gets it out.
Though isn't it one of the three biggies of upheaval (in the course of a normal life, that is)? Getting married, changing jobs, moving? Yes, I believe it is. So not a small deal for anyone. But to me... to me it was a huge deal.
We found our first house right around the time I was finally pregnant. Two years after tossing the birth control pills, and nearly at the end of my fucking wits, finally pregnant. Not for long, though, not for long. A miscarriage, a fucking bloody mess. By the time we signed for it, some months later, I was pregnant again, just a touch further along than the gestational age when the miscarriage happened. On progesterone this time, pretty sick, but cautiously optimistic. We didn't move in for a few months still-- the old owners rented from us for a bit, and then we renovated. And then we moved and had no furniture, and my family came for the first Thanksgiving in our new place, and Monkey kicked in a way that could be felt from the outside for the first time the day before they showed up, so JD got a day of it all to himself before the hordes came and wanted their turn. It was good time. Busy, crazy busy, but good.
We hosted New Year's at the new house too. And I spent some hours of that night in my office with a couple of friends giving me tips on the thesis defense presentation I was preparing. And then my parents came again, and I defended, round and needing to use the bathroom, and I passed, and I was a PhD. And the next day I bled bright red in the mall and ended up in the hospital on bed rest. Partial placenta previa. It was scary again a few times, but in the end she was born safe and sound on her very due date, and we went home two days later.
The house was never huge, but by the time I was pregnant with A it was starting to feel cramped. That Thanksgiving, our sixth in the house, we moved Monkey out of the tiny baby room into what was previously a guest bedroom. We painted and bought her a bunk bed. She was looking forward to her baby brother's arrival, and she wanted him to share the room with her just as soon as he could. So I spent some time agonizing over whether to buy the girly bedspreads for the bunk beds or more neutral ones, and a friend told me to go with girly because I can always switch to neutral when he moves into the room, or even let each have their own. We painted our bedroom then too-- a lovely deeper green. I was very proud of choosing both color schemes.
A's room didn't get painted until a week before he died. It had to be painted, you see, because light purple and yellow that Monkey had in there didn't look boyish enough. The same friend (my best female friend from college, my color guru, and a few other things besides) helped me pick the blue and the new shade of yellow.
When we got home from the hospital, empty-wombed and empty-handed, I shut the door to that room. The morning of the funeral, before walking down the stairs and out of the house, I opened it, and cried in the doorway. I shut it again after, for a few more weeks. We didn't use that room much until the Cub came to fill it more than eighteen months later. But at least after a while I could walk in there.
What did change though was my feelings about the house. Where before it was starting to feel cramped, now I couldn't imagine leaving. This was the only house in which my son lived in me, the only house my son was ever supposed to live in. This was the house that stood ready to welcome him. I couldn't leave that house now.
Three and a half years later I still couldn't think of leaving. But by then the house was really starting to put a squeeze on us. Toys were everywhere, and the moment you didn't pick up and put away one little thing, a pile of things big and small grew around it. And yet, I couldn't think of leaving. Then one day a house down the street, literally three doors down, went on the market. And then JD asked wouldn't it be cool if we could buy it and move there and have my sister and her husband (and their baby on the way) move into our current house. Turns out that was the only way that I could really deal with leaving-- if we were not entirely leaving. Things went very fast from there. We saw the house, we liked it, we put in an offer. Two weeks and much negotiation later, we had a deal.
It was logistical insanity, pure and simple-- trying to move us and then my sister before her due date, in the middle of my first semester of solo teaching, in the middle of trying to apply for other jobs. It was insanity. But now it's mostly done, and I am typing this in my comfy chair in the family room of the new house. Neither we nor they are completely unpacked, but my nephew is here, and we walk to each other's houses. Which was the whole point. But not the whole story.
When we first saw the new house, one thing was very clear-- the room that was to be Monkey's would have to be painted. It was pink. And not the kind of pink that is a bit off white. The kind of pink with conviction. One wall in particular, but the other three only slightly less so. And Monkey was by then years past her pink phase. She wanted blue, and by rights couldn't possibly be made to live with pink (and neither could I, so it's all good). But we thought that was the only room that would need painting-- some of the other colors in the house were not my favorites, but certainly not something that needed to be fixed post haste. Even the baby room, the one that would be Cub's, when we first saw it looked like it was a nice subtle shade of forest green, and we thought that was kinda nice. But when with a few weeks left to closing we went to measure a couple of rooms, the owners have started moving out. And without the crib and blankets in the room it turned out that the walls weren't forest green-- they were dirty beige.
Suddenly I wanted to paint that room. And the minute I knew I wanted to do that, I also knew that there was only one set of colors I was interested in-- the very same blue and yellow of the room that was painted for A nearly 4 years back.
I thought I would be fine, see. We'd be just down the street, and family would still be in that house, in that room. His cousin now, like his brother before. My dad was coming, to do a bunch of work on the house for my sister, but they weren't going to paint the baby room. That warmed me up, made me grateful-- all of our boys, see, they would all have that room, those colors in common. And I thought that would be enough.
But it wasn't. I knew now I wanted to take those colors with me as well. I knew how to get that done too. We weren't going to use the same kind of paint this time, but I had high hopes for the awesome powers of color matching computers. The way paints are mixed in the stores is by adding correct amounts of primary colors to white and mixing. You know, in those giant paint-mixing drums they have. And the way they match any color you want is by scanning a sample and having their computer figure out which primary colors go into that one in what proportions. So we brought the cans with leftover paint to the store and asked them to match. I am sure the nice men in the paint department that day had not a clue why I needed to match the colors so very precisely. But I spent a long time there, checking and rechecking and checking again. In the end, I had my new paints. I thought the yellow might have turned out too bright, but the blue was spot on, and somehow of the two that one was more important to me.
And even then, with hours spent in the paint store, even then I thought it was mostly about how yucky that beige was. With some amount of bravado I told my sister about the new plan, and added that she didn't need to psychoanalyze this decision-- I knew what I was doing, and I wanted to do it anyway. It turns out, I was only half right--what I didn't know was how desperately I wanted to do it.
The way I found out was that JD suggested not taking down the border previous owners had in the room-- it was kinda cute if rather monochromatic, but it did have elements of blue, and JD thought it would work with our colors. And I felt my throat close. Anxiety. Cold, shaking anxiety. I walked around with it for about a day and then told him no, I can't handle it-- the border has to go. No problem. The border went. And I exhaled, a little.
My dad painted the Cub's new room, like he did just short of four years before for A. Just like he laid the hardwood in the Cub's room while we were in NICU-- because I wanted there to be a change between the boys, but a small change, and changing the old yucky carpet for (fake) hardwood fit the bill. I saw the room take on the colors, and I remembered that when A's room was first painted, the yellow looked too bright too. I smiled.
A while ago I told Angie in the comments here that because of the peculiar dynamics of my family, I couldn't wish for A to hang around my house, that that would feel like tying him down, like making him comfort me. But what I realized in the process of moving and painting was that I wanted to feel like A still had a home with us, that if he wanted to, he could hang around our house. And I know that has nothing to do with whether we kept a space that was recognizably his, but somehow it makes it more tangible if we do.
Our first night sleeping in the house, I lit one of my giant candles in the jar, and I thought "Welcome home, little one."
Of course, in a sort of funny throw-your-hands-in-the-air coda to the whole thing, when my brother in law went to touch up the baby room in the now-his house, he discovered that time isn't often kind to paint, and that nearly four years will sometimes do uncool tricks. The touchups were so clearly seen on the walls, especially on the blue, that it no longer looked like the same room. We showed it though-- dad used leftover paint from the new house to put a layer over those touch ups. The colors were matched after all. So now the cousins, have the exact same shades in their rooms. All sorts of fitting, no?
Do you have signifiers of awaiting your baby in your home? What are they? Have you moved since the death of your baby? Are you thinking about it? Have your feelings about a potential or real move changed? If you are firmly in the same place, can you imagine leaving it now?
I was lucky. I've said it before, and I will say it again. I was lucky to have had the level of care I did in my pregnancy with A. I was lucky to have had Dr. Best then, and for the subsequent pregnancy too. I was lucky, because in the end I was left with no guilt. I was worried a lot in that pregnancy, and Dr. Best took me seriously every time. Every time. There was nothing we could've done. Nothing anyone could've done. And so when A died, when he was born, when we went home without our baby, we were sad and we were crushed. But I didn't feel guilty.
I can't tell you anymore whether I appreciated the significance of the not feeling guilty right from the get go. I can tell you that one of the first things Dr. Best said was that it was not my fault. He was very emphatic about that, though I told him I couldn't find fault if I wanted to. I understand now that he has seen too many women blame themselves, and I love him all the more for trying to care for me in this way even as I lay there still pregnant with my dead son.
I can tell you, though, that once I was functional enough to find the keyboard, once I found the world of bereaved blogging, I knew. I knew how incredibly lucky I was every time my heart broke for another mother feeling guilty. Guilt over the betrayal of one's body. Guilt over decisions. Guilt over listening to medical professionals who turned out to have been speaking out of their asses. Guilt over a stray remark, over thoughts. Guilt, guilt, guilt. I wanted to take it all away. I knew I couldn't. I didn't know how they did it-- the grief was terrible, overwhelming, heavy enough. To think about others out there having guilt piled on top of the whole shit pile? But it seemed cruel. It seemed too much. I know, and I knew then, that we all carry what we have, that we do it because we have to, because there is no other way. And yet I still feel sad for anyone having to carry the extra burden. If that is you, I am sorry. I am so sorry.
We talk about fears often. There is a good discussion happening on our discussion board now on that very subject. Sometimes we call our fears our crazy. Nothing wrong with a good shot of crazy, if you ask me. But see, I don't think of my biggest fear as crazy. I think of it as a very rational response to my experiences. Can you guess what it is? I bet you can. It's not a thing, really, it's a feeling. I am afraid of guilt.
When I became pregnant with the Cub, I told Dr. Best I needed to cover my ass. I needed to know that every little thing was been checked and rechecked, that everything humanly possible and impossible was been done. Before I was pregnant, when we were gearing up to try again, I told Nurse Kind that I didn't think I was broken exactly, but that another loss would break me. By the time I was pregnant, I knew that wasn't true. I would live and I would function, because, DUH, I'd have to. But please, oh please, I didn't want to think about having to lift the guilt too.
We got lucky, and the Cub came home with us. Though the aftermath of that pregnancy is still messy and complicated and still doing a number on my head despite over a year of therapy. But even in the here and now, in the non-pregnant world of mine, my biggest fear, I think, is still guilt.
I shudder to hear of a death of a child. Any child. Anywhere. And I'd be lying if I said I never think about some stupid ass accident or some horrible disease taking one or both of my living children away. Or my husband. Or my sister. Or my parents. Oh, I'd be lying. But I'd also be lying if I said those were my worst fears.
Last year JD had a whole load of business trips, some on the long side. His business trips mean various things for the family schedules at different times, but they nearly always mean having to get Monkey from gymnastics at least once right around the time of Cub's bedtime. Which means having to take him with, and can mean him doing a command performance as one of his favorite characters-- Crankasaurus or worse, the Drama Prince-- upon our return home. There's exactly one escape hatch from Drama Prince bedtime, and that is if he falls asleep in the car on the way home. Unsurprisingly, driving back I tend to glance into the rear view mirror, trying to see whether we have liftoff.
So this one time I saw Cub losing his epic battle with the sleepies just before the light where we hang a left, not two minutes from our house. He wasn't out yet, certainly not out enough to be transportable to bed, but it was a matter of minutes. So I drove the long way around. Straight through that light, left at the next, three blocks up, back on the parkway, around the roundabout, take the fourth street, straight, left, and finally right onto our street. You know what I was thinking about the whole time I was driving the extra oh, I don't know, 2-3 miles? The whole barely five minutes of it? While also, I note, having a conversation with Monkey about, I think, her new and improved bar routine? I was thinking, see, how stupid it would be if we got hit by a drunk or sleepy driver while taking the little detour. I wasn't, notice, thinking that while I dragged the Cub with me to pick Monkey up, even though had JD been home, I would've gone by myself. But for that tiny little detour? Yeah, baby, I was. I decided it was because the extra drive wasn't strictly necessary. I didn't have to be there-- I was doing it for convenience. And sanity, but you know, mainly for convenience.
A couple of months ago I was trying to catch up on my reader. I'd fallen hopelessly behind, but now I was trying to come back to blogging (again... sigh). A few weeks before I did the "mark all as read" thing, but since then the reader began accumulating posts again, and so I was trying to scan through those. One caught my eye, a post from a bereaved mother about an acquaintance of hers, and I read every word of it. I could tell from the start it wasn't going to end well-- can't tell you exactly what it was but my spidy dead baby sense was tingling like crazy. Sure enough, it ends with a dead baby. Dead toddler, actually. Which would be horrific any day of the week. But the toddler, see, she died in a bathtub accident. And the thing that made that story so horrific for me, so completely devastating, was the thought of the guilt the parents must now be feeling. Whatever actually happened, whoever was supposed to have been watching the toddler, you know the parents would in the end feel responsible. How could they not? For days I thought of that story, for weeks even. Chill, every time. Frozen horror.
In the world of dead babies on of the horrid things is that we know not very much about our dead children-- likes, dislikes, the sound of their voices, their laughs, often not even the color of their eyes. Not knowing makes the void seem somehow more cruel. Toddlers, they have personalities, adorable little bits of shtick, a sense of humor. To have all of that taken, snuffed out-- must be horrible. But that wasn't what was making me cold and clammy every time I thought about it. I wasn't maniacally hugging the Cub, wasn't imagining what I would do if he was gone. No, I was trying to comprehend how on Earth you get up and make breakfast for your older kids when you should be making it for all of them, and when you don't have to think very hard to feel guilty over her absence.
This is also, I believe, why I was obsessing over that detour-- to differing degrees these two scenarios are about the what if of not being able to escape the blame in my own head. I've told so many bereaved mothers that they are not at fault. And I know had we been hit while taking that detour it would've been the fault of the one doing the hitting, but I also know it would've been hard to convince myself I had to have been there for them to hit.
So I own it-- I am afraid of guilt. I am afraid of the unfixable being my fault. I am used, now, to the weight of grief. I recognize it when it reminds me of its constant presence, when it pokes me in the middle of what had seemed like a harmless conversation at work, at the park, at a store. I recognize it and nod back-- I know you are here, I know you will be here, it's ok. Perhaps I lack imagination sufficient to see myself in that kind of a relationship with guilt. Guilt seems uglier to me, more demanding, it just seems like more. I know we all do what we have to do, and carry what we are given. But I am lucky, and boy do I wish to stay that way.
What is your relationship with guilt? Is it part of your grief or have you too managed to escape it? What is your biggest fear? Is it something you think about a lot or something you do your best not to think about at all?
glow in the woods
Bereaved parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion, and the other side of getting through this mess called grief.
Parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion we learn for others, having been through this mess — and see it reflected back at you, acknowledged and understood.
Thanks to photographer Xin Li and to artist Stephanie Sicore for their respective illustrations and photos.
