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"

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.

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.