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.