i went crazy
On the day I'm to introduce our last new writer, Jenni of Demeter's Feet, I go to her blog and the first thing I see is this:
"Today is peaceful. I am writing. I am remembering. I am tending my baby's strawberries. I am sad, but I had my meltdowns earlier this week. Distractedly burned a giant batch of nachos one night, sobbed over pasta and sauteed zucchini the next. Have been by turns irritable, angry, quiet, exhausted. All the usual stuff. All the normal stuff. It doesn't worry me anymore. It's just how it goes..."
And I have all I need to in order to make the welcome. This is why we're all here, is it not? We're honoured to have Jenni's kind soul among us as a regular contributor.
~ Kate
On Route 28, a few blocks from my house, there is a drinking water dispenser. It's wedged into the corner of a shopping plaza between the Natural Food Mart and Plaster Fun Time. Its bright blue awning advertises "Pure Water," and a sign states that it has been U/V filtered seven times to remove all chlorine, bacteria, and impurities. It costs 25 cents a gallon, and you have to bring your own jugs.
After our loss, I got obsessed with this water machine. When I drove down 28 I would pull into the plaza, get out of my car, and stare at it. Was this water really pure? Was it really healthier than my tap water? Who put it there? How did I know it was really filtered seven times? What if it was dangerous?
I asked in the natural food store, but they didn't know anything about it. Google and the Plaster Fun Time people didn't know anything either. A notice tacked to the machine indicated it was regularly inspected by someone, but the last signature was dated several months earlier. In fine print was a phone number, which I called but got no answer.
Meanwhile I was drinking my tap water at home. With every glass I wondered, Am I making myself sick? Too sick to carry another baby? Is this water what killed her? Would the water machine be better? Or is it a scam, unregulated, unhealthy?
photo by calignosus
That blue awning became my Zoltar. In my mixed-up grief brain it held some answer, some clue to my fate. I wanted it to grant my wish of perfect, fertile health. But I was skeptical. I began stalking it, doing slow drive-bys, squinting at it out the car window, going out of my way to cruise past the plaza. Once, seeing a car there, I wheeled into the parking lot and flagged down the elderly couple who had just loaded up their jugs and were trying to back out.
Excuse me, I'm sorry, but do you know anything about this water?
Well, we've been drinking it for years, and it hasn't killed us yet!
What should my follow up question have been? Do you think tap water killed my baby? Do you think the Zoltar water will keep my next baby safe?
The notion that a person can go mad with grief has been around for millennia. And there are images in literature and film of mommies who go mad after losing a child. So, I knew this was a thing. I just didn’t expect it to look like this.
Weeping? Wailing? Throwing stuff? Sure, I’ve done that. But that’s sadness, not madness. It’s sadness, and helplessness, and anger, and even though it makes me feel so separated from “other” people, I know it is normal. A really normal response to my baby dying. That’s not crazy.
It’s the other stuff that worries me. Finding a bag of books in my closet and having zero recollection of who gave them to me. Looking down at my dinner plate to find I have been chewing on processed ham slices after years of being a near-vegetarian. Avoiding the gym because too much exercise can cause miscarriage or start labor (while being not at all pregnant). Stressing about a family paddle on a very small pond, because I keep picturing everyone drowning. Waylaying the elderly in parking lots. Fearing the tap water. Did I lose my mind as well as my kid?
It’s been about year since my last Zoltar drive-by—eventually I got fed up with myself and bought a Brita filter. And I’m sitting here now wondering how I’m doing. There is no babyloss measuring stick to gauge a return to sanity, a return to functional personhood. It’s been 17 months since goodbye, and this week, in a perfect world, she would have turned one. Today my mind is calmer but still thick with grief. So I have to wonder, what crazy thing am I doing now?
We still don’t know why I went into labor at 20 weeks. According to the doctors, there are ten reasons, and there are no reasons. And isn’t that enough to make a person nuts? But we do know it wasn’t something I drank.
* * * * *
What does your crazy look like? Does it scare you? Is it an ally, giving you permission to act outside the box? What do you do with other people who think you are crazy? What elements of grieving have made you feel most isolated and separate? What elements have made you feel the most normal, human, and sane?
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I am crazy in an anxiety-laden way. Crazy with thoughts of mad men breaking into my home and killing us all. Or for example, the other week I was obsessed with dry drowning, worrying my daughter had inhaled water without me knowing it, and was bound to show no symptoms but slowly drown in her sleep. I stayed up way too late checking her breathing. It is the obscureness of the death that obsesses me. I think it is because we were told that Lucy's death--healthy baby at 38 weeks die for no discernible reason--was a one in ten thousand type of death. Was the MFM just saying that for effect, or is it really one in ten thousand? I have no idea. Once you are on the shitty end of statistics, it really feels like the one on the end of any statistic is directed right at you.
In the begining, I was so utterly sad and depressed that I couldn't imagine being anything more than that. Slowly, over time, it has progressed to crazy. When I became pregnant with my daughter, I planned her funeral. Right down to the very last detail. It would have been beautiful, had she died. When she didn't die, I threw myself into planning her first birthday convinced that when we got past that 1 year mark she would be mine to keep. When she did, I became obsessed with things like being carjacked and her trapped in her car seat. Or the car catching on fire or plunging into a lake and not being able to get her out. Just last night I imagined someone breaking into my house and me running out the back door clutching my daughter. I imagine my funeral, her funeral, my husbands funeral. I imagine my dog dying. Like the pp, I'm obsessed with dry drowning (I thought I was the only one!). When my husband and I go out alone, I'm consumed with the fear that we'll die in a crash and she'll be left parentless and afraid. I worry constantly about childhood cancer and the pain that it could cause her *if* she were to get it.
I would consider most of the things that I do now to be crazy. Thankfully, I have a very supportive husband that listens to my crazy and diffuses it when he can. When he can't, he listens anyway.
I deeply blame myself for the loss of our sons and it seems that I do everything to avoid something bad happening to my daughter. I would have done anything to save their lives so I do everything (even crazy!) to save her's.
But on to the topic at hand. Oh my gosh - seriously other people worry about dry drowning?! Wow, I really thought I was the only one. I also now worry constantly about all sorts of very unlikely, but really bad, things happening to my family. I mean, you never know what can happen, right? Like Angie said, once you're on the shitty side of statistics...
But my own personal slice of crazy right now is sleeping with a baby blanket at night. A baby blanket nobody has ever even used (well, except for me, I guess). It would have been my son's if we had been able to bring him home and even though I can step back and see how crazy it is, I still sleep with it every night and sometimes even carry it around with me as I go about my day. I would never admit this to anybody in real life, except hubby, but I imagine it's okay to fess up here.
My baby died of a cord accident at 36 weeks. My beautiful and perfect little girl, our second child, and the cord was wrapped tightly around her leg. I don't know the actual statistics, but I know it's rare, and heartbreaking.
Anyway, assuming bad shit WON'T happen is what helps me feel better right now, at 6 weeks out. I'm okay with a little crazy, and have a strong desire to reclaim my happy life.
I could have done with your post months back. It would have taken so much of the pressure off. I have been so preoccupied with NOT losing it that I have managed to have my first anxiety attack ever and my first migraine from the sheer physical effort of trying to be normal. That said I did find myself nearly spitting at a woman today when I was doing the groceries, for having the audacity to be happy (and actually laugh) when I was feeling like a menstrual witch.
I'm becoming more resigned to crazy I think. The yawning gaps in my memory - missed appointments, finding my shoes in the laundry basket, and various other sundries that are NOT MY FAULT are helping me accept this new me is here for a while....
I have a very hard time, still, calling people on the phone. I've never loved making phone calls to people I don't know well, but now it is ridiculously hard and it's sometimes part of my job which makes me feel a little nutty even on days when I'm otherwise doing well. Sometimes it's hard to call even friends and family.
And even though I love gin and tonics, I will probably never drink another one. Tonic has been associated with diaphragmatic hernias in mice in some tests someone did, somewhere. I know enough about science to know I'm being ridiculous, but still. So I'm grateful for the existence of Scotch.
And like Erica, I also have a hard time calling people. I used to be fairly chatty and social, but now I come off awkward at best in most social settings. And don't get me started on running for the hills and avoiding at all costs baby girls (or most babies in general) born around August 08.
On some level, most of my grief has made me feel isolated and lonely, because I don't really know anyone else who has lost a child and certainly not in the way I did. I guess I feel less alone when I come to places like this. I feel normal and accepted here, and that means a great deal.
Sooooooooooo glad you're in this space now Jenni. You are the perfect fit. Just so sorry you have to be here.
xo
My husband wants to use chemicals to kill the weeds that are taking over our grass. I won't let him, and it keeps coming up as the weeds spread. And he asks me, "Do you really think it makes a difference?" And I say, "They can induce CDH in fetal sheep by injecting the placenta with an herbicide. 90% of the time." I only know this because the head of neonatology at the local children's hospital happened to tell me in a job interview when I shared about my baby. Unlike the millions of other things I now know about CDH, I did not learn that on Google.
So is that crazy? Sometimes I wonder if it is crazy, that I actually worry about this kind of thing. But then it keeps coming back to me: 90% of the time they can induce exactly what killed my baby with a chemical that's in the stuff that kills weeds. That's not crazy, that's being smart. Isn't it?
In short, Calla's death has amped my paranoia off the charts.
I am afraid of becoming that annoying, hovering, over-proective parent. I'm afraid of turning into someone who cowers through life, seeing disaster at every turn. But mostly I'm afraid of being the only one who remembers, leaving everyone else to wonder why I'm so crazy.
monique - i do that too, review all the possible reasons, still carry a lot of guilt. i've had so many people tell me it is not my fault. i think it is really hard for other people to understand that this isn't your average kind of guilt. this is guilt tightly wrapped up with a true sense of responsibility and a powerful need to protect and nurture a child who is gone. it's a complicated guilt and difficult to let go of.
gal - i am so with you. i know that my behavior about the water machine was crazy. but is worrying about my drinking water really crazy? because our food and water supply just isn't what it used to be. i don't know. you have this piece of information, and you live in a world where these chemicals are used. how could you not worry about it? i think your comment gets to the heart of these worries about how we can live productively while feeling so unsafe in the world....
sally - infection played a role in my loss too. i did the exact same thing - went crazy on the antibacterial hand soap and the probiotics. ugh.
NK - thank you for sharing a piece of your story with us. i'm so sorry to hear that your experience after losing your baby girl was so complicated. i think your comment is very relevant. i almost didn't write this post, because i don't want to sound dismissive of very real mental health issues that so many people suffer from. "crazy" and "madness" are words that describe subjectively what i was experiencing internally - yet i would hate for anyone who struggles with mental illness, in whatever form, to feel that i was using those words cavalierly or making an unfair comparison. i hope, if you ever feel ready, that you will write more about your experience. i do wonder how common experiences like yours might be, and if it is a part of the babyloss experience that remains silenced and hidden.
I certainly had my equivalent of your Zoltar water. I ran through lists of what I had put into, or on, my body during my brief pregnancy trying to find the item that had been my daughter's undoing. Food? Drink? Caffeine? Make up? Detergent? Everyday items were all objects of suspicion, at least for a time. And it could well have been one of them that was the guilty party, I'll never know.
When that list failed to provide me with a satisfactory answer, I started itemising my 'bad deeds', looking for the point at which I had done something to deserve this. The selfish thought, the pride, the greediness in me that needed to be corrected. I still have an occasional flick through that list even now.
I also bought antibacteral soap and hand gel in bulk. I have the remnants of my crazed purchasing, stashed in the cupboard under the stairs.
After we had been in the NICU for a couple of months I started to have some rather strange thoughts about the hospital. That it was all a flimsy stage set and the medical staff part of some elaborate set up. Some sort of test that I had to pass. It sounds utterly ridiculous when I write it down now, a wild conspiracy theory. But it was an idea that pulled at the edges of my mind for quite some time. And if can halfway believe something like that, I might have to ask that question of myself 'what crazy thing am I doing now?'
That, and the memory loss, probably made me feel the most lonely. Because even my husband, who had been there throughout, couldn't understand why I would believe something so absurd and why I couldn't remember events he knew I had witnessed.
And I wish that I had never found out about dry drowning. Ignorance was bliss.
Acording to the person I lve with, AKA DH, my crazy looks like dead. Nothing. Empty. Which I can see now that it's been ever-so-gently explained to me. But I thought my crazy looked like how I look. A physical appearance I would never have allowed. A presence in public that for the old me, would have been a night mare. But I guess that's just an indication of the greif. The Idon't care about hardly anything, especially myself.
My crazy also looks like the hypervigilance for my living child's safety. Im sure at some point, when he's older, Ill really embarrass him, and probably myself. But If anything ever happened to the one thing keeping me going, I fear I would cease to exist.
I mostly feel isolated because I feel I'm the only one left grieving them. That the one-year has passed and the general public feels I should be back to normal. As do some of my family who dare to open their mouths. There are probably more who don't.
I wish I could say something about this griefmade me feel normal or sane...