New Year

It is almost the new year.
New year, new start.
New hope.
I love the idea of making resolutions, of a new start new possibilities. The idea that all your problems can be fixed by making a list and everything will be better.  I think most people like the idea.

me and my sister in 1992

Most people end up breaking there resolutions before the first full week of January. 

Still, I have hope that 2011 will be better.
I am going to work on myself on doing things that I have stopped doing.
Doing more creative things: art, writing, crafting; working on the house; finding peace in my life.
Finding organization for things.
Organizing my chaos. 
Be happy that is the biggest most important resolution of them all.

Good news

Yesterday I went in to the doctors office to get a blood draw and a check up. Good news, iron levels are back up and I'm no longer anemic. It's nice to have something go well. One less hurtle to face.
The only bad thing is the doctor was saying that we should wait 6 months till we try again.
 I don't know if we will wait that long, but we may wait a little longer than we had planned to just to make sure.

We have been going to the pool and I've gotten out the work out dvd's out. My new years resolution is to work hard get getting healthy for baby to be. I just feel like I owe it to both babies (our son and  baby to be) to take this seriously and work hard getting as healthy as I can. It wasn't like I was lacking when we got pregnant last time but there where moments that I slacked off.  When I didn't follow the Brewers diet, didn't go to the pool. I know that this time there will not be that sort of "oh lets just have pizza, and skip the gym" moments. Gone are the high fructose corn syrup, the ingredients that are hard to say, we've even given up the lotions and things that go on our skin that don't get a good score on skin deep a great website that rates products based on how safe the ingredients in them are.

Family

I am lucky, my family is amazing, they have been supportive. They get it, as much as anyone can.
My husband called my mom, and my mother-in-law from the waiting room of the hospital while I was in surgery. I can't even imagine what that phone call was like, to make or get.

My mother in law drove down to our house, with a packet of information on miscarriage, and flowers. She talked to me, while Rob slept, I was so hyper from the medications, that I couldn't sleep. That weekend my mom drove the 6.5 hours from Portland to Moscow to be there when we buried our baby.

We had put our baby in the freezer, later I took the hospital receiving blanket that my MIL brought and cut a small corner of it and wrapped our baby up, my mom knit a blanket that we wrapped him in as well.
 Its very surreal to go shopping for a box to bury your baby in. We went to a major shopping center and bought a plastic container and then to another store where we found a wooden jewelry box that the 1st box fit in.

When we buried our baby,  my sister in law and her family came. Other family members reached out telling us how sorry they where, supporting us. I cannot imagine what it would be like to go through this with out having a family that cares. I feel lucky that we have all this support. That is what I am thankful for this holiday season.

disappointment

Story of  my life,   I think that I have things figured out and then I get smacked down by life.
The job would have been perfect. I didn't get, they hired someone before they even interviewed me. Which bugs me more than interviewing and not getting it. At least interview me when you said you where going to. 
So I'm stuck in a job I am growing to dread, with no real out,  I feel so stuck and was so upset yesterday the dog hid under our bed.
I know that things will work out and that what happens is what happens. I can only control how I react.
Can things just start going well, please, I honestly don't think that I can handle anymore hard life character building. Can't I get some of that happy life character building, please?

Waiting

Yesterday I posted about the mounds of paperwork and stress that we are buried under. Today we had our interview and now we just have to wait to see if we get approved. Later this week I have a job interview and so we are stuck in a purgatory situation for a while.

  I hate waiting, I have no patience for anything, I want it all right now, It drives Rob crazy that I want to know what I'm getting for Christmas, what the surprise is, everything this minute. This year the whole Christmas seasons lost some of its bubbly excitement. Our tree is up, our house is decorated, but not with they same flair and excitement that I usually have. I'm ready for it to be over, ready to take down the tree, pack away the decorations and move on. Sad really, I feel like I'm on holiday auto pilot. I lack the proper amount of holiday cheer and no amount of sugar cookies or twinkling lights is going to fix that. So I am waiting for the holidays to be over and the sugar high of December to give way to broken resolutions, and gloomy depression of January.

paper work

I have no insurance, which means on top of all the stress and emotional stuff from losing our baby, we have to deal with the stress and paperwork of assistance.
I've been told I don't qualify because I'm not pregnant, because my husbands part time, minimum wage job pays to much, now I have to give them every piece of paper I have touched in the past 6 months, go to an interview and may be, just maybe, they can set up some sort of payment plan. Chances are tt would probably have us paying the hospital for the next 40, 50 years.
It just sucks.
 The hospital can treat you like dirt for not being insured and charge you a huge amount of money to do it.
Medicaid is the worst, why they would punish you for trying to be a good person, for having a job, paying your bills, and then suddenly being hit with something huge. Its not like we don't want to be insured, its just not that easy to find a job with insurance.  Hospitals get to make up what ever amount they want to charge because, really what choice do you have, it leaves us stuck.

Hopefully the meeting goes well they help us, and later this week I have an interview for a new job, I am hopeful that things will work out.

Thrift Shops

Don't you just love thrift shopping?  The thrill of getting something really cool for practically nothing. I am a thrift shop queen. I find things, good things, things that new or of eBay would be very expensive, for great prices.

Just today I got this  chair.  for 3 dollars! It is missing the cushions, but those are so easy to make. It will match our 1960's coffee table very well and it is about the same color wood as our dinning room table so it will tie together the dinning room and living room haves of our house well.  We needed a sitting chair to make our living room a little more user friendly. I'm thinking that it is a Danish modern lounge chair, not a outdoor chair as the thrift shop labeled it. I love the Danish modern style and its a pretty popular vintage style right now, Type danish lounge chair into Google shopping and they are all above 100 dollars, so I think I got a great deal.

Mommy

I have written a little about the fact that I'm a nanny. Baby J was 2 months old when I started watching him he is now 2 years old. Today he was at our house thundering around yelling "mommy" at  me. "mommy read this." "mommy sit" He has always called me "mommy", and I have always called him "baby". Just around the time that we lost the baby he started calling me Carlie occasionally but for the most part its still mommy.  It's bittersweet we have a bond, but now having him call me mommy makes me want to cry. I cuddle with him in our bed read Pajama Time, rocked him and sang 'I've been working on the railroad' (it is the only lullaby that works) and put him down for a nap in our bed under a lime green hippo blanket, theses are things I should be doing with my baby come March and won't.

When we 1st lost the baby, the kids mom kept calling asking if we needed anything, saying they could just swing by. I didn't want to see baby J. I dreaded seeing C and  F, didn't want to go into the whole where is the baby conversation. It took a few days before I could see them, could deal with going back to work, when I did go back things where OK, different but OK.

In heaven, under the ground

When our dog died in 2009, the kids that I watch, discussed where Bear had gone in the way that 3 and 4 year olds do. "He's in Heaven under the ground." was the consensus. When someone dies they go to heaven and they get buried.

We had gone for an ultrasound to check on the baby and they had stopped by afterward. C's mommy told her that we had gotten pictures of the baby. C gave us the look you give someone who's trying to pull a fast one and said that you can't take a picture of something in your tummy. Then she said. " Could you hear the baby crying?"
I didn't see them again until after our baby died, C asked me about it on the car ride home one day.

"You had a baby in your tummy." she said "But now there is no baby in your tummy."
"That's right" I told her, "Our baby died because he came out of my tummy too soon and he was too small"
"So, he is in heaven under the ground." She said, "Why did he die?"
I told her that babies have to stay in their mommies tummies for a long time and that our baby didn't stay in long enough and he was too little. That he was in heaven under the ground and that we had buried him at his grandmas house. 
"But my mommy had babies in her tummy and we didn't die." She said.
I told her that  that was because when they where babies they stayed in their mommies tummy until they where big enough to come out.
It is probably one of the hardest conversations to have, how do you explain the senselessness of the whole thing? a specially to a child. It isn't something anyone should have to do.
A few days after we had this conversation her older brother F said "Your baby died."
I told him "That's right." 
C said "He's at his grandmas house"

a Hobbits Life

Not the fuzzy footed guys obsessed  with jewelery, rather the secluded recluse locked away from the world. There is a part of me that feels I could quite happily disappear beneath my comforter and never come out. Even now there is part of me that flickers with jealousy and darkness when I see pregnant women or brand new babies.
After our baby died I just wanted to disappear. I didn't want to write the facebook post saying our baby is dead, didn't want to tell the Bradly class we didn't need to come anymore. A lot of people jump back into work, but my work is babies.
I work as a nanny for three kids F who is 5, C who is 4, and babyJ who just turned 2. Kids who where excited that their was a baby in my tummy. Kids that I was dreading having a conversation with. I have gone back to work, but it's not the same as it was before. Its much easier to take care of someone else kids when you think that having your own is easy.
No matter how much I want to disappear, hideaway from people, it's not practical or healthy. So I go out and pretend to be normal and try and act like the babies, that seem to be everywhere, don't make my heart stop for a second. Maybe there will be a day that I don't have to act anymore when I will feel like a normal person and not have to just act like one.

Late

Waiting, debating the possibility of  two pink  lines.
What would it mean to be pregnant again? To be due in August.
Are we ready to do this again?  To potentially end up without a baby again.
What happens if the little lines appear what happens if we have to go though this again?
I could go out and get a test, I could take it but then, if what happens if its positive?
It's interesting the 1st time we were so excited there is a innocence that we would get pregnant and nine months later we would have a baby. This time we know a positive test doesn't mean a baby doesn't mean anything. We are jaded.  Guarded against the pain.
I wrote the first bit a few days ago and the second today
We aren't pregnant, won't be having a little Leo baby. Which is a good thing. We aren't trying, aren't ready to tackle the emotion that would come with being pregnant. We want to wait until January. New year, new baby.

I was worried about how I would react to not being pregnant as much as how I would react to being pregnant. The 1st period was hard. I Thought it would be a relief that it would be one step closer to getting better. It was horrible, I was an emotional wreck, it was a shocking realization that it was truly over. This time however its easier, aside from being very late,  I feel at peace with it all.

Decaf

I ordered a coffee at our local coffee shop and said "oh make it decaf please," The barista eyes lit up and she whispered across the table "Can I ask, are you pregnant?"

To my knowledge I'm not pregnant. It is just the first time around, I gave up coffee months before we were ready to start trying to have a baby. I don't want to go back to fully caffeinated and then have to go cold turkey. Its hard enough to be an emotional wreck from pregnancy hormones with out adding withdraw to the combination. I love my husband and so I've started giving up the caffeine now.

I was talking to our friend J and Rob about how I wasn't that crazy hormonal mess when I was pregnant. J was kind enough to remind me of the time I threw my coffee cup at Rob's head.
I'd forgotten about that. So to make every ones life a little easier that is no more caffeine.
The coffee shop is just one more reminder of how different it is when everyone knows that you were pregnant. Its a reminder that everyone eyes are on my mid section watching to see if it grows in the direction of a baby.

grief food

Can you smother emotions with cookies?
Oreos are grief food.
When my dad died, suddenly and with out warning when I was thirteen, people filled our house with groceries. It was amazing the kindness and compassion the people in our neighborhood had. The only issue was that, it was highly processed and almost all of it contained milk. Both my mom and sister are allergic to milk. Which meant that the only person who could eat all the Oreos was me. Nothing like stuffing myself  with cream filled cookies to deal with grief. Filling the void with double stuffed chocolate cookies. Its been years but Oreos still hold the connotation of death and grief.
When my baby died I had to have Oreos. I told Rob that we needed Oreos. I gave myself a weekend and a lot of cookies, an attempt to fill a hole that had once held a baby. I reached a point when I didn't want any more Oreo cookies, the creamy filling was not as satisfying as I wanted it to be and the hole was still there. 
It was a significant moment when I looked down at my cookie and said I'm done.

You can only wallow in self pity for so long before it is unhealthy, tinting life with a dirty film of resentment.  I gave myself a week and a lot of Oreos to feel bad to lay in bed and soak in my pity. Then I brushed the cookie crumbs off the duvet and moved on. Not finished with grief but finished with the pity. 

Secret club

Everyone is so happy for you when you get  pregnant.
When you miscarry suddenly you start hearing whispers, women pull you over and tell you that they have been there. Low voices offering words of understanding. You can know people for years without knowing that they had their heart smashed into pieces.
A secret club of the lost babies, society is so adamant that miscarriage is something talked about in whispers, if  you have to talk about it at all. It makes people more uncomfortable than the death of a living person, or even the death of a pet.
Even women who have had a baby seem to forget  how attached you get to the person growing inside you. Pain of miscarriage is dismissed. It is to hard, I think, for people to look directly at it. Maybe its the senselessness of it, the destruction of an event that other wise should be pure joy. For whatever reason people have been given the wrong idea that telling someone that their baby was deformed/bad makes the pain lesson. "It probably would have been disabled. This is a good thing." "It probably had something wrong with  it, it was a bad baby" As if a mother can see her child as anything other than amazing, as if a disabled baby is worse than a dead one.
Statistically speaking early miscarriage can be from a problem in the dna. Late miscarriage is usually something else. My miscarriage was a placenta failure, my baby was perfect. It was my body that failed him. I failed him. The anger that bubbles up when some well meaning person says you must have had a deformed baby is hot and blurs my ability to take people for their intent. 
If the secret club would stop having to whisper, would stop being secret, we would all have to alone a little less.

A Pregnancy in Fruit

from a poppy seed to an avocado 
There is a popular website that has a pregnancy ticker in produce. Starting with a poppy seed.and getting bigger each week. For 16 weeks 6 days my life was defined in produce. Each week I watching the fruit ticker get bigger from apple seeds, raspberries, and ending on an avocado. 
Contextualizing in food is something I understand. I could hold a blueberry in the palm of my hand and say "this is how big my baby is." I never really got into the pictures of fetuses drawn like bad fishy aliens, but  I liked the fruit. If I was still pregnant our baby would be a an eggplant, 26 weeks. Instead, I just ended up somewhere between an Avocado and an Onion.

Oddly appropriate onions have always made me cry, and I've never been a huge avocado green fan. I wonder if there will be a day when I can look at an avocado with out thinking of holding his little body in my hand. A day with out thinking about the impossibly small fingers and toes, those little fingernails. I don't think I will ever be able to look at guacamole the same.

Tired

I'm tired of being in this state of impending grief. I never know when I'm going to be hit with it. One moment I'll be fine and then suddenly I'm over come by so much emotion I  have a hard time remembering to breathe. I miss pregnancy the most. May be it is the fact that with pregnancy there is hope, potential. 
We have to wait 3 months, stuck in pregnancy limbo. Stuck desperately wanting to get pregnant again, to have that hope. Potential of having another baby. The waiting is unbearable every where I look are babies, pregnant women. Even the season is overflowing with images of Mary heavy with child.  So instead of posing for holiday photos 7 months pregnant, I get to be the person at holiday parties that people look at with a deer in the headlights look. Nothing puts a damper on holiday spirits like a woman who lost her baby. 
The think is that they don't get it, they don't understand. I think most people are thing that I should get over it and get pregnant. That if it matters so much, if I wanted a baby that badly, I would get pregnant. It after all has been almost 2 months since I miscarried. I hating stuck in pregnancy limbo until January, but with the New year comes new hope.

Propaganda

Positivity, I try to force feed myself a  line of propaganda of happy thoughts and positivity. I may be baby-less but I can drink caffeinated coffee. The only problem is that I'd give up everything to have that baby.  Propaganda is hollow. I feel so empty holidays family time. My family is missing one tiny person.
So I'll bake the turkey and make the pies and watch the parade and smile. We'll talk about being thankful and yet, there will be something missing.
The closer we get to the holidays the harder I know its going to be to buy into my own propaganda of thankfulness. Because if I'm honest I don't want to be thankful for how I'm  handling things and the only thing I want for Christmas is my baby.
But I'll suck up my pity tantrum and blast the propaganda and maybe, just may be, it will drowned it out.

Giving Thanks

This week thanksgiving the 1st holiday of the season, a season that I was supposed to be hugely pregnant and  now not so much. I was looking forward to the holiday with baby bump. I feel deflated. Today Blizzard conditions Broken water heater, furnace not working, and pushing J. car in front of our house. I walked miles today though the snow, moved heavy boxes. I would have been able to do none of this stuff pregnant. I am thankful that if my world has to come crashing down around me in a lot of cold water that I am able to withstand it.

This is also the 1st thanksgiving that we will be having people over, with a real blizzard brewing outside, the stranded many are coming to our home for the big feast and that is exciting.

Baby things

When your pregnant the list of  things "that are absolutely necessary for a baby" is long. We had been working on getting everything ready for our impending bundle of joy. We had bouncy seats,tinny socks, onesies, and a crib.
Suddenly we where a little lacking in joy and had an overabundance in baby things. It took me a while to be able to put our baby things away, clearing out my dresser of all the maternity clothing, packing up the baby's things. At the bottom of our closet is a pile of nursing pillows and a whole  lot of defeat. I know  that sounds mellow dramatic.
I managed to get everything put away, with an exception of the crib. It has been sitting in our bedroom.We had set up since before we got pregnant. Now I'm dismantling it, putting it in the basement.
Its a good thing clearing the baggage the baby gear and the emotional. All though is sad putting it all away unneeded and unused. Its slightly liberating. Maybe in a few months we will have a reason to pull it all out again. That idea makes me a little excited.

Implosion

Implode, look it up in a dictionary and you find; to collapse inward violently, break down or fall apart from within see: self-destruct. My life imploded, quietly and without warning.

Caught in the trappings of newlywed life, the shiny new kitchen aid mixer, the table setting for 12, and the baby bump. I like my job, loved my husband, and was happy. My life felt grounded. Pregnancy was amazing. I loved everything about been with child, my world was shinny, sparkling with hope and possibilities. A little baby, planning the things we would need; cloth diapers, strollers, breast pumps. Planning the things that we would do with our child. Suddenly, at four months when the swell of my impending motherhood was evident to people I didn't know, it was gone.
No longer pregnant.
No baby.
Implosion.when your world explodes people notice. It is special is enough for them to take note of. They recognize that your life has been reduced to rubble.
Unlike an explosion which is loud and messy,  when your life implodes, it happens quietly, suddenly. dazed and confused standing in the ruins of what was my life.
When your world explodes people notice, it is special is enough for them to take note of. They recognize that your life has been reduced to rubble.
When it implodes, there is no big rush to comfort, no rush to validate the trauma that has self-destructed a life. Like a soap bubble bursting quietly, if you're not watching you don't know exactly when it went from being a iridescent floating orb to nothing.  When they do notice, they say they are sorry, the way you would comfort someone when they stub their toe. As if what has happened is a  short and sudden pain that last momentarily.

No one wants to validate the loss of a child. It is a medical mishap, that leaves your life demolished in millions of pieces, shards of a life, scattered at your feet. You'll have another one, they tell you as if one baby is as good as another. Then they move on with their lives, expecting you to do the same.

Left alone childless, filled with anger, sadness, and more emotions than can fit in one deflated person; this is the story of how I took the pieces of my imploded life and stuck them back together.

1st comes love, then comes marriage, then comes ...

You don't think about having a baby being a hard thing to do. When you are young, newly married, happy it seems natural that the next step.

I took the job seriously stopped drinking coffee, started working out, eating right, taking prenatal vitamins. I read every baby/pregnancy book I could get my hands on.
So many of the books talked about how hard it could be. Little windows of time, basil temperatures, low sperm count, charting, three month average. It was a little daunting.

We where lucky the first month we started trying we got lucky. At our wedding we where 6 weeks pregnant. It was exciting to get to share the news with all our family who live so far from us.
I loved everything about being pregnant. Morning sickness, swelling baby bump. Everything was wonderful, everything was going well until I started bleeding.

They tell you don't tell anyone that you are expecting until after 12 weeks. once you get to that second trimester your past the danger of miscarrying, the probability of a late miscarriage is low.

At 13 weeks I started bleeding, which can be nothing. Our baby's heart was beating strong, on the ultrasound the Dr. had a hard time counting it because our little wiggle worm was all over the place. Good signs.

For the next few weeks I couldn't lift, had to take it easy, the bleeding turned into light spotting.
At 16 weeks (4 months)
I woke up in pain my water broke. I was in labor. A few hours later our son was born. a few hours later I had emergency surgery. A few hours after that I was sent home.
No longer pregnant, no longer expecting.

The placental just peeled away separated from the wall until my baby couldn't breath anymore.
Physically I'm lucky, the hospital was horrible, I'm lucky i didn't die. In a few months we should be able to try again. There is no reason to think anything bad will happen.
I am lucky.

Before...

I have never been one of those people who "gets it." I'm always a step behind just a little bit different and slower than everyone else at just about everything. When I was a preteen I made this list of things I needed to be a teenager. Enough shades of nail polish for each finger and toe, posters on my walls, lip gloss. I kept adding to the list because as I fulfilled each requirement I didn't feel closer to being a real teenager. I still felt like I was playing a part.Grown up life has been like that too, I spent so much time thinking about what it meant to be a grown up. A house, car, job, husband. That sometimes I feel like I missed a step. Their is that point between living at home with your parents and having your own house that I glazed over.Here I am at married, with a house, a car, job, plans to start trying to be someones mommy and I sometimes feel like I must have missed something.
I love my life, I love my husband, our house, my job. Its an amazing dream life, that I never truly thought I'd end up getting. I feel so lucky to have all that I have. It is an amazing sense of security and grounding support that has allowed me to grow in so many ways.
For the 1st time in my life I feel that I don't need a list. I don't need to watch other people and try and copy what they have. It is an amazing feeling happiness.
A happiness that was intensified by being pregnant.

Curling up with a good book

The 1st snow has dusted our little town. It's cold. Which always makes me want to pull on a cozy robe, get a huge cup of coffee, a good book and Read. I love reading. Books can take you away. I enjoy lighter books, dubbed Chick lit. As if they are some how  not as worthy of being read or books as books written about or for men. That said I'm picky. They have to be well written, the characters have to be engaging and good. 

Marian Keyes: an amazing author Irish, quirky, her books have real life issues, and are touching. Anybody Out There?, The Other Side of the Story

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Jane Green: another good author  her books can be hit and miss but they are good. Bookends,  Babyville are two of my favorites.

Anna Maxted: Amazing author her books are good griping, I stumbled across her books by chance and each new book I cannot put down till I get to the end. Tale of Two Sisters is one that is next to by bed right now amazing and sad. I cannot wait for  her next book to come out.

 I have to say there is nothing a nice as a warm place to curl up and read a book. 

Going green

I have the worst case of Green Guilt.
I have always lived a Eco-friendly life. Growing up we lived in a tiny little house with a garden where we grew our own food. We walked most places we started a composting program in schools, helped with starting recycling in the town where we lived. Years later the way I was brought up is still a huge part of how I live.
Now I am living in my own home with my own family and we do a lot. We compost, use cloth napkins, have a garden (small), try to eat local/organic, we have the right light bulbs, we buy in bulk, buy most of our stuff second hand. We are very Eco-aware but it never feels like its enough. It seems that we are being bombarded with demands to live better, books about people who are going the distance, Companies are layering on guilt a lot of the guilt is misplaced companies telling us to buy things that are "Eco-friendly" when consumerism is not what we should be doing to be green.
I think that guilt can be a good thing, guilt for getting a to go cup at the coffee shop, for driving instead of walking, with out that guilt, I think, that  we would do theses things more.
There is another side to green guilt the Eco-smugness which comes with being the person who is  pulling out there reusable bags, or lugging locally grown, organic, vegetables home on foot from the farmers market.  Maybe that is what will make more people become over to the green side.