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.