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.

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.

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.

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.