Battle fatigue

We waited for seven months after George’s death before we started to try and get pregnant again.  It felt much too soon to me at the time, as if by trying to have another child we were somehow betraying our firstborn.  If not for fear of the encroaching title of ADVANCED MATERNAL AGE I probably would have insisted upon waiting longer. Fear can be powerful motivation.

If someone had offered me the option of a medically induced coma for the duration of my subsequent pregnancy I would have given it serious consideration.   It wasn’t just the emotional aspect of another pregnancy after a loss and all its possible complications that gave me pause but also the pure physicality of it.   My pregnancy with George was brutal even before things went sideways.  Hyperemesis lasted for nearly twenty-three weeks and then, one week after it resolved, I was in the hospital being pumped with enough cardiac medication to make me long for the days of vomiting only every hour.  Of course, then there were the IVs and the constant blood draws and the headaches and the jabs to my stomach with epidural needles.  By the time I went in for the emergency C-section to deliver our boy I was nearly fifteen pounds lighter than I was before I got pregnant. 

As it turned out I survived the next pregnancy with most of my sanity intact by doing my best impression of an ostrich.  I simply pretended, as long as I could, that none of it was happening.  I assumed that my state of pregnancy was a temporary one and went about my life as if everything was the same as before.  All of those things pregnant people are supposed to do like glow and beam and make plans for nurseries and have baby showers I did none of.  What I did do was take my prenatal vitamin every day, avoided the laundry list of foods and drugs that I was supposed to and I continued to grieve the loss of my son. 

Everyday I was pregnant I fully expected it to be the last.  But somehow my luck held out and after 277 days I gave birth to a living, breathing baby girl.  The moment I held her for the first time the uncertainty of those previous 277 days became completely insignificant.   It all seemed worth it.  I would have chosen to do it all again for twice as long in a single heartbeat.   Perspective is everything and if fear is a powerful motivator than love even more so.

Eighteen months after she was born we looked at our daughter, growing up at the speed of light, and thought that it was time to do it all over again.  She needed a sibling and we needed another baby.   So we took another deep breath, crossed our fingers, and with eyes wide open made that leap of faith. 

It did not come as a shock to me when a few months ago, at 12 weeks, I had a miscarriage.  A routine office visit and an absent heartbeat, it was a scenario I had envisioned happening many times in the years since George’s death.   Then, just last week, a variation of the same story; positive pregnancy test followed by spotting and then heavy bleeding.  An early miscarriage, they say.  Part of me, the part that will be forever in that hospital room holding the still body of my son, will always expect the worst and be surprised when anything other than that happens. 

 

I could rail against the unfairness of it all or shake an angry fist at the universe.  Lord knows I did all that when George died.  I wailed and screamed and cried until I thought I would shrivel into a dried husk.   It was what I needed at the time.  To be angry and indignant was important.  

It has been three and a half years since I began this journey and it has been a battle the entire time.  Four pregnancies later here I am with one son gone away and one amazingly thriving daughter who is currently singing a song about boats.  I don’t feel angry or indignant anymore.  I recognize how lucky I am to have made it this far with one living child.   Yet I still long for another baby and somtimes even dare to dream about a son.  But I’ve grown weary of the battle and wonder when is it time to finally stop fighting.  Is it now?

If you have had more than one loss in what ways has it affected you differently than your first loss?  Was your reaction to it as you expected?  What is/has been your motivation for trying to have another child?  Have you made the decision to not try or to stop trying?  How did you come to that decision?  

So Glad You Were Mine

Every summer, as the days went from wet-warm to dry-hot, the anxiety would begin to bubble inside of me as we approached the August 1st anniversary of Roxy’s birth and death. I wouldn’t even recognize what was happening at first. I’d just be irritable and jumpy, mad at the sun. I compare it to a long-standing pain one might have in their spine… an injury that never left. You forget about the pain. In some ways, you get used to it, but it darkens your mind.

Terra and I established a tradition of escape beginning with the first anniversary of Roxy’s death. We would go to the tree that was planted in a park in her honor, tie our balloons,  lay down our flowers and then we’d swoop up Mason (and eventually, Lila) and run away from home for a couple of days. We’d avoid everyone and everything. We’d stay distracted. It was strategy. We’d survive our grief the best way we could.

As year 5 approached in the summer of 2012, the pattern remained. The heat triggered the slow, silent, terrible build inside me. A 2-month crescendo, ending in collapse with anger and terror tangling further into the fabric of my heart until there was no room for anything else.  The pattern was becoming exhausting. I wanted to change it. With Terra’s blessing, we planned something slightly different.

Our extended families met us in the park at Roxy’s tree. For the first time, we brought Roxy’s photos. I have been viciously protective of these pictures in the past. I was always concerned someone would see only a dead baby, and not the stunningly beautiful daughter that she was to us. Some days, I didn’t even trust myself to look at them for this reason. I was filled with fear heading to the park, but we desperately, finally wanted this day to be about remembering and honoring our daughter and not just surviving our own grief. Or, at least, we wanted to give it a shot.

I could not have foreseen the magic that was coming.

Mason (age 9) very sweetly asked to see Roxy’s pictures and very sincerely wanted to participate in what we were doing.

When we talked to Lila (age 3) about Roxy, she said “was she a girl or a boy? Oh I think she turned into a tree. I’m going to look for her."

We had found and brought several copies of her birth record with her hands and feet printed on them, which took everyone’s breath away. We gave copies to the grandparents and aunts, and it felt so good to be able to give them a piece of her.

We brought helium balloons. We wrote messages to her on them and let them go into the air. Right as we released them into the sunlight, a dragonfly swooped down in front of us. Dragonflies were the primary theme in which Terra had decorated Roxy’s bedroom. I don’t believe in angels or ghosts (well, maybe ghosts), but there was something of her that felt really, truly there with us.

For the first time, I felt grateful for it all. Grateful for having been Roxy’s father. For having gotten to hold her, meet her, even if she had already departed. I finally felt that there was more than just pain there, in my heart where she continued to live. She was more than just pain, and I was so glad she was mine. When I got home that evening, I wrote this song. (I apologize, it’s kind of a rough mix.)

SO GLAD YOU WERE MINE

There were no birds on their branches
And there was nothing in your eyes
I’m so glad you were mine
Your skin was cracked at the elbow
And your blood was the reddest wine
I’m so glad you were mine
I meditate with the spirit
And I’m sheltered in her vines
I’m so glad you were mine
The ritual that brings you comfort
Is the lion that eats you alive
I’m so glad you were mine
August never offers mercy
And September never comes on time
I’m so glad you were mine
The wincing has gone fishing
And now I miss the knife
I’m so glad you were mine
There are no waves upon this ocean
It’s unkind
And the stillness of the water
It is nothing compared to mine
There are so many ways to suffer
And so many ways to die
I’m so glad you were mine
There are so many ways to suffer
And so many ways to die
I’m so glad you were mine

What kinds of ritual(s) do you have in place to remember the child or children you've lost? Have those rituals changed over time? 

the other way

Some scientists say there are parallel worlds, realities stacked side by side like books on a shelf, or piled high in an old, dusty attic.  That seems obvious to me now that I have a whole other life hidden in my head.

The day went smoothly, the birth long but ultimately raw and right and beautiful and true.  Those first insane and breathtaking days when Silas was in our arms and screaming in our ears and staring into our eyes seemed to pass instantly and slowly, all at once.  The uncertainty of new-parenthood was a knot of fear and hope and determination in the core of my being.  I was positive I was the happiest person in the entire world, but then I'd look at my wife Lu as she breast-fed him, and I wasn't quite so sure.  Maybe the happiest man on Earth, I thought, settling for that and into the couch next to their bonded bliss.

Weeks turned to months and already a big baby, he grew fast on mom's milk.  I learned to change diapers, to hear the language of his wailing cries in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the everything.  The middle of everything, that's exactly what he was whether he was awake or asleep, or whether I was, too. He slept well.  He was ahead of the curve.  Naps were long and pleasant.  He weaned easily and ate everything.  He learned to talk early and told us things I could never imagine.

On it goes, that impossible world, each day we didn't live that way seared into my mind as time pressed on.

The not-so-funny-part is that I had to make it all up before Zeph came along, but now I know exactly, specifically, precisely every single fucking detail of everything that we missed and everything we won't have. That parallel world I first inhabited wasn't just a figment of my imagination, it was the only salve to my damaged soul.  Simply accepting this world with all of its not-Silas-ness was a physical impossibility. I fantasized that whole other way as I cried and drove or lay stewing wide awake deep in the night, not hearing the wails of my dead son.

For years I was a shadow of myself, a projection of what I should be, even as half of me was gone within, wading into the deep deep deep waters of grief and anger, of loss and pain, of utter and complete rage that the midwives had failed us, that this is how the Universe rolls, and that it had just rolled right over us squashing us to nothingness and drowning us in tears.

But when Zeph was born, everything began to change in that parallel world.  Instead of feeling split in two, divided equally between the what-is and what-should, I had to focus strongly on the life in front of me.  Silas as his three year old older brother was harder to see than the baby we never had, and now the baby we did.  As Zeph grew day by day and the fantasy vision of Silas's life was shattered on the shrieks and laughter of an actual baby, I felt that other way slowly fade and dissolve, merging into the single path we now tread.

It is a relief to be whole, even with the hole.  Living halfway in a hope that could never be was maddening and exhausting.  Silas is gone.  Zeph is here.  In order for Zephyr to have the joyful life I want him to have, the only thing I can do is to be here with him, all the time.

But that other life is in me, still.  Still I grieve.  Still.

~~~~~~~~~~~

What do your parallel worlds look like?  How much time do you spend there?  Is there a certain time of day or part of your life where you feel the life you never had more strongly? How do you reconcile what you wanted with what you have?

Mirror of Erised

She was a very pretty woman. She had dark red hair and her eyes – her eyes are just like mine, Harry thought, edging a little closer to the glass. Bright green -- exactly the same shape, but then he noticed that she was crying; smiling, but crying at the same time.

I reread the first book of the Harry Potter series last week. It’s been a long-long time since I first met The Boy Who Lived. I’ve been trying to remember exactly how old I was then, and I can’t put my finger on it. Young, incredibly young, is the answer that matters. Funny, because I do remember that when I first read it, on my sister’s recommendation, I had to tell myself that it was ok for the much older person that I was to read the children’s/young adult books. You know, because they are good, and they just happen to be being written when I was no longer a child or a young adult. It turns out the definition of “young” changes a lot as one ages. Go figure.

I first read the book in the American edition, but by then I already knew that Sorcerer’s Stone was the weak tea Americanization of the original British Philosopher’s Stone.  I knew about Philosopher’s stone—learned about it from some adventure stories I read when I was actually a bonifide kid growing up in the Old Country. And I remember that the words sorcerer’s stone kept bugging me in the text, as did the references to soccer (because, you know, the rest of the world calls it football) and a few other things. I tell you this because this time I read it in the Old Country Language translation—we got it for Monkey, but as a responsible parent I had to check out the translation, don’t you think?

It’s a good translation, with less than a handful places where I thought the translator didn’t appreciate an idiom or a standard turn of phrase, and as a result, produced a clunky sentence that didn’t read like it belonged. I’ve forgotten some of the plot points, though they all came to mind easily at the first hint of each in the text. The cleverness of descriptions delighted me again. Uncle Vernon wishing hearing Harry’s name to be a figment of his imagination, despite usually wishing to stay far away from imagination and its figments—that made me laugh. 

Monkey is eleven now, the age the protagonists are when the story starts. I realized, reading it this time, that when I first read the book, I imagined them younger. What I am saying is that I knew they were eleven, but my conception of what an eleven year old is was off. And this time the question my close friend raised some years back about whether Slytherin house and kids entering it are too easily stigmatized was close to my mind as I read.

I tell you all of this to emphasize that this time the reading of this book was a much richer experience for me. I knew the plot, but I was seeing it a little bit anew. Reading in a different language made it more of a 3D experience, if you will—it made the language stand as a bit of its own thing, in addition to the story. Reading this time was an experience joyful in a way that stretching is pleasurable after sitting too still for too long. I felt my brain delighting in the multifaceted work it was doing—the “oh, I remember why I like this” and the “yeah, still got it”-- much like I imagine a runner sidetracked by an injury might feel during the first run back, sensory memory of joy in the doing coming back alongside the here and now sensation of her muscles responding to the familiar challenges.

I was on the reader’s high, if you will. Which high carried me straight into a dark room with an ornate mirror resting on clawed feet.  

The tall, thin, black-haired man standing next to her put his arm around her. He wore glasses, and his hair was very untidy. It stuck up at the back, just as Harry's did.

Mirror of Erised. I remember that when I first read the book I liked this mirror as a plot device a lot. I liked that Ron sees what he sees, and how Dumbledore uses the mirror in the end. I even remember being affected by the description of Harry looking at his family, and appreciating the extra punch the mirror packs precisely because Harry has never even seen a photograph of his parents before.

But this time there was something else. This time there was a hard gulp of knowing exactly why Lily Potter in the mirror is smiling, and why she is crying. Lily Potter got to do the one thing many of us have at least once said we would’ve liked to do—she got to trade her life for her child’s. Lily in the mirror is not real, but the mirror shows Harry how she would’ve reacted if she was. Lily in the mirror is not real, but to me she is recognizable.

Because I met my first son only after he was dead, much of what little that I know about him is about what he looked like. I know that my younger son has the same nose as A, for example. But my younger son’s face has changed so much over the years. I have to admit to myself that I have no idea what A would’ve looked like as a six year old.

Once Harry understands what he is looking at, he is searching the faces and figures of his family in the mirror, delighting in recognition. If I got a glimpse of A as a six year old, as an eleven year old… Even if it wasn’t real, I’d drink it in too.

On a related note (it’s related, I promise), if you’ve ever talked about the day your child was born dead or the day your child died as both a happy and a sad day, what reactions did you get? Because I think most people just don’t believe us when we say that. There’s the look of genuine incomprehension that people get. The look may be followed by kind words, the right words. Or it may be followed by a platter of platitudes. Or by nothing at all. And those reactions tell us a great deal about the people who utter them. But the first bit, the incomprehension, I’ve come to see it as a very honest and very human reaction—what people hear in the story is the death, the finality of it, the horror. And they get the sad day part. But I think it takes an extraordinarily wise soul to also get that the very finality of it takes away the luxury of separating the joy from the sorrow—this is the day, and this day is all we get. So we rejoice in the beauty of our children, in the family resemblances, in whatever little things we manage to carve out. Mostly, we rejoice in them having been here, in them being our children.

The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness.

Erised is desire spelled backwards, as if read in a mirror. The mirror shows us the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. Lily and James and the rest of the Potters are in the mirror because Harry desperately wants to know them. The story of The Boy Who Lived inverts our stories. Or maybe I should say it reflects them. Harry doesn’t get to separate the joy from the sorrow either. With the mirror he has more than he’s ever had before—he can see where he came from, he can see that he was loved. And that is a lot, and it brings joy. But these people who loved him, they are still dead. In a weird way, because they are no longer abstract ideas of mom and dad, because now they are this mom with green eyes, and this dad with unruly hair, maybe they are actually a little more dead now.  And no matter how many days or nights in a row Harry might’ve come to the mirror, the glass remains, fragile, but as always, impermeable. And the people who loved him remain dead.

And that recipe for a powerful kind of ache is just too familiar.

Have you ever encountered your grief reflected in an unexpected piece of art—a book, a movie, a play, a painting, a photograph? Or tell us what you think you would see in the Mirror of Erised. 

strength.

I refuse to become a seeker for cures.
Everything that has ever
helped me has come through what already
lay store in me. Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong
across my heart.
This is from where
my strength comes, even when I miss my strength
even when it turns on me
like a violent master.
--Adrienne Rich

The early days, my tenderness scared me more than the realization of my mortality. Death never scared me, rather the desperate need I felt to be comforted; to have someone fix my grief; the desperation to have my daughter's death and life acknowledged; to be held, cooked for, and tended to; the pure vulnerability; my inability to control my emotions; my hyper sensitivity; the pure, raw, screeching insomniac grief--that frightened me. It meant the pain would continue, perhaps indefinitely, because of the unchangeable fact that my daughter died, and I could do nothing to prevent it, change it, or make it right. This strong, capable, forgiving person had been permanently transformed into an angry, bitter, grief-stricken beldam without kindness in her heart. That scared the crap out of me.

I thought I knew what grief was before Lucia died. Extreme sadness, longing perhaps. I had no idea that grief is forgetfulness, self-centeredness, anger, moodiness, wanting to be alone when in a group and in a group when alone. Grief was hungry and desperate and pulling hair out from discomfort. It was fear. Times ten thousand. It is the feeling of shrinking and starving. Grief is obsession and living in the past. Grief, unadulterated and unwieldy, seeks a cure. I sought a cure.

I never admitted this to anyone except for in my writing on the internet, where I edited and pruned and plucked out phrases that sounded poetic and raw, but never managed to make my grief sound nearly as ugly as it felt. In person, I remained relatively staid, at times, even gracious. When asked how I was, I said, "As well as can be expected." When people saw me with my two year old, they saw an involved, present mother. Perhaps I forgot that they couldn't hear my inner voice saying over and over again, the mantra of grief, "My God, the baby died. I can't believe the baby died. The baby is dead." Over and over and over. I was so tired of my own voice, and yet could hear nothing else.

I waited for words of comfort to come, but there were none. I waited for someone to see through that veneer, but they didn't. An exposed nerve, I buzzed with irritation. I reached beyond my skin for something to protect that vulnerability. I drank too much, wrote too much, cried too much, complained too much, self-pitied and directed all the kindness I couldn't extend to myself to other grieving mothers, but it still wouldn't change. And because that vulnerability is so cold and uncomfortable, and the grief is so demanding and relentless, I shifted and adjusted. I shoved that tenderness deep down. I thought the ability to hide my vulnerability kept me alive for many years. Maybe that is true, or another in a series of lies I told myself, but nevertheless, I shut down. Shut out. I found something that was much more comfortable than vulnerability. I wrapped myself in unforgiveness, another layer of anger, marked it with the stamp:

JUSTIFIABLE ANGER.
DO NOT REMOVE.

That tenacity, roots tangled in the craggy sides of an uninhabitable place, desperate to find measly drops of water, just enough to survive, became the illusion of strength.

"You are so strong," Random, well-meaning person would say.

 "I don't know how else to be." I would look away.

Not you too.

You have mistaken my anger for strength.

I am a hurt animal.

A wild thing, baring her teeth at everything, waiting to heal, trying not to get eaten.

I need you.

Think like an animal.

Bite the scruff of my neck.

Make me cry.

I am dying of loneliness and grief.

I am dying of vulnerability.

Strength, I had nothing of it. I wanted nothing of it. It was another way for me to be Other. A noble, grieving mother-angel, not a person filled with rage and self-loathing. People said, "Stillbirth, it's the worst thing I can imagine." It isn't the worst thing I can imagine, and the truth is they truly don't even know the worst of it--the shitty, horrible mess in my brain. That the best of it was that I spent time with my dead baby, the worst is leaving her in the hospital to live the rest of my life. They cannot imagine how ugly I was inside, how dark I became, though I thought they could smell it coming off me. I behaved badly after all. I was dying of my own poison. It must have seeped out my pores. I kept going, but nothing I did was strong, noble or sacred. I just kept going. That did not seem like strength to me. It seemed like stupid stubborn obstinance.

"Oh, but that is strength," the wind whispers. "It is knowing you have nothing left and still going on."

The wasteland that lies between what I feel and what is true is frozen and dark, and at night, the ice weasels come. When I traversed that land, I saw that my anger froze all my landscapes, fear killed the plants and overreaction drove away all the people, I grieved all over again. Like it was the first day she died, and I had to live with the reality of my own creation. When I reached out, I could not mend the fences tore down, the bridges I had burned, the wrongly placed words I rejected. I lost my daughter, and gave away all my friends, simply because I was not brave or strong enough to trust them with grief. But when grief came again, it broke open the hard shell that encased everything I had ever believed. Something humble, damaged, but beautiful emerged. Even as it was happening, I saw it emerge, leaving the guilt of who I was behind. I did the best I could with what I knew. That is perhaps the saddest part, that that person was absolutely the best I could be with the knowledge I had. But this new, delicate being emerging searches for meaning again in the trees, the moss, the full moons, the rocks of a thousand shades of healing. My walk through the tundra of anger saved me nothing. It gave me nothing. It served me not at all. Except that it happened, and from it, I emerged. 

Was grief what you expected? How was it different? Did you embrace your vulnerability or your strength? How do you feel when someone calls you strong? In what ways has strength helped you? How has it turned against you like a violent master?