Grief Aches

I don't cry a whole lot anymore. Once every day or two I'll get teary eyed for some reason or another. Yesterday it was walking around Lambertville seeing so many happy families and wondering about what could have been. Finally a tiny infant passed by me in the arms of a smiling dad and I actually gasped outloud. Longing. Or sometimes at work when I'm on a conference call with my boss and I can hear his young son cooing in the background, I get teary eyed. There are some good things about being alone in my office for these calls. Beyond damp eyes, though, I haven't lost it much lately, haven't wailed.


Instead of tears I mostly feel grief as a second resident of my body. Grief has chosen to come and live with me, and apparently the guest room wasn't good enough. It got so carried away with the desire for closeness that it's come inside my body, and I have no choice but to carry it around with me. It's lodged in the middle of my chest. It aches. I feel it underneath my breasts and down to my stomach. It aches. It feels like it's settled in for the long haul. It aches. I wonder if I'll wake up some morning and find that I have my body to myself again. Maybe grief will go away on vacation for a while and return only for visits. Until then it just aches.

It's much like having a cold. I'm sick, but not so sick that I can't get up and go about my day. People who ask how I'm doing seem surprised if I don't immediately express pure health and contentedness. Perhaps to them it doesn't seem like I feel all that bad. Or they just don't want to talk about it since it might be contagious. Maybe they think I'm a whiner if I mention that grief is crowding me out of my own body. But I'm sick enough that the joy of life is missing, and I'm just trying to make it through every day. There are some good times but mostly it just aches.

Colden

I have just one actual picture of Colden, of his body. We didn't think to take any ourselves so I'll never have one of me holding him or of Brendan cradling him in his arms. Instead, I have a single image that the hospital took after he'd been taken from our room. He looks really dead in it and while I am so grateful to have it, I haven't wanted to share it with anyone. If I had an electronic copy, I would post it here because I know you guys understand, but among the non babylost, I'm much too afraid that someone would say the wrong thing. I doubt that I would ever forgive them and I might literally rip their heads off. Because he was beautiful. And he's mine. So all I can do is protect him in this tiny but ferocious way. So I'm really glad to have this beautiful picture of the beach all the way around the world as a way to remember him connected with something so beautiful and peaceful. I think I'm going to frame a copy for our apartment. Thank you, Carly, for giving me something beautiful related to Colden.

Hope

Today I feel a little hope. Perhaps it's the sun shining in the window or the romantic weekend at the beach that we just got back from. I don't know. But I feel a tiny flickering light of it, and I want to find a way to feed it. I want to ignore the possibility that it might instead be self-delusion, and hang on to it anyway. So if you hear a crazy neighbor outside calling for her hope rather than her kitty, don't mind me.

I never wanted a phd in sadness and loss studies.

My talents have generally been academic in nature. No one wants to be around me if I'm in the mood to sing--tone deaf doesn't even begin to describe it, but school came really easily to me. So easily that I slacked off a lot. 100s on the tests, 0s on homework generally averaged to Bs and Cs through most of HS. It wasn't until college that I got it together and "lived up to my potential" as my parents were constantly pestering me to do. There I still didn't really study much. I could easily look at the syllabus, skim the book, cram some for the test, and just quickly get what it takes to get the A.

I guess I never realized how much that drive to find the quick way has influenced my life philosophy even beyond my school days until last night, when Brendan and I went to our second SHARE support group meeting. It was a much smaller group this time. They're all sweet, comforting, and real, but I felt a little uncomfortable. Brendan was the only guy and all of the women were much farther out from their losses, from two to eighteen years ago. It scares me to see how actively and deeply they are still grieving. I love Colden beyond words, but I can't have him back so I don't want to spend the rest of my life sad. It's too damn exhausting.

When I'm around these women I feel like I'm staring at my future and it looks grim. I guess I'm looking for the shortcut, the quick A. Why can't I ace grief and be done with it? Maybe that's why I've so quickly read multiple books, gone to so many blogs, looked ahead to see what I might have to deal with at 6 months, 1 year, 5 years out. But this is one class where being ahead with the material doesn't to seem help at all. All of the issues that we talked about at the group last night, I've already read about and considered, but it doesn't seem to help. I still have to feel it. This is one class where being ahead with the material doesn't seem to help at all.

GITW 7x7 response: my relationship with my body

Here are my thoughts on the questions up at http://glowinthewoods.squarespace.com/6-by-6/2009/4/1/7-by-7-april-2009.html. If I answered tomorrow, I'd probably go off in a different direction but it's a good topic.

1 Give us a few words you would have used to describe your body, your health or your sense of physical vitality before the experience of babyloss—and a few that you’d use to describe it now.

Before: strong, sustaining, not exactly content but certainly competent, at times frustrating but at least I can work with it.
Now: flabby, apathetic, downtrodden, likely to disappoint me.

I know that if I had a live baby, my body would feel reasonable for someone who recently gave birth. But because he’s not here with us and because I have to think about another pregnancy much sooner than I would have wanted to otherwise, my body just feels like a disappointment. I’m too overweight, too weak, too flabby. Ugh…

2 What do you do to take care of yourself? Has this changed?

I’ve always been up and down with my motivation level for weight loss and physical fitness. I get going for a while and then backslide. That seems to still be the case. In the past I was very into outdoorsy pursuits, especially rock and ice climbing. Climbing was good for both my physical and emotional well-being. Now it seems draining to even drag myself out to the cliffs. And because I am so weak and overweight it is frustrating once I get there. It’s hard to produce a sustainable level of motivation.

3 Give us one or two words to describe sex or physical intimacy before, and then after the loss of your baby.

Before: fun and carefree
Now: necessary, deeply connected, difficult to escape into

4 Has loss and/or grief left a physical mark on you (a scar, a chronic condition, insomnia, a tattoo)?

I have a flabby belly that I never had before pregnancy and a desire for a tattoo that still hasn’t materialized yet. I never wanted a tattoo before, never had anything that I wanted permanently marked on my body before. Heck, I don’t even have my ears pierced. But I feel the need to have something about Colden be with me permanently. Oh and I can’t sleep without medicating myself.

5 Do you medicate or control your emotions with food, wine, altered states, prescriptions? Without judgment, what have you gravitated towards in an effort to heal, and how do you feel about it?

I read a book on grief that said not to rely on alcohol or sleeping pills and all I could do was laugh. You mean there are other coping mechanisms? It’s a rare day that goes by that I don’t have at least one drink, but I’ve been much too afraid of losing the very tenuous control I have over my emotions to actually let myself get drunk.

I haven’t slept through the night unaided by sleeping pills since the 3rd week or so after I delivered Colden. Without them I wake up for hours in the middle of the night. Part of this is the stress of my job as well.

6 Was physical healing important for you in the first year after your loss? What did/does physical healing entail and how did/do you work towards it? If physicality hasn't been a priority for you, what do you do that makes you feel stronger or more able to cope?

I’m approaching the 4-month mark this month so I can’t yet say what the whole year will bring. Within two weeks of delivering I started going to the gym, but I am so on and off with that. I long for the mindless time that comes to me with intense exercise, but I lack the consistency to stick with it. Beyond that, I am ever cognizant that I should be planning for another pregnancy. Feeling ready physically for that would be a good start on physical healing, I suppose.

7 If you could change anything about your body and/or health, what would it be? What would it feel like to be either at peace with your body, or at peace with this babylost state?

I’d go back in time and take better care of my teeth. As far as peace with a babylost state, I hope that comes to me eventually. It seems impossible at the moment, like saying I hope to discover the secret to long-lasting world peace.

Our World Changed in an Instant

I was looking through pictures on my computer looking for one of me and my cat, Toby, when I stumbled on pictures of me heavily pregnant. Man I was huge. They were pictures from my shower with my family that were taken just after Thanksgiving. I hadn't seen these pictures. Brendan must have loaded them on without mentioning them to me. The one was even named Toby and Colden. They hit me so hard. I just sobbed. Just when I think I'm not having that many days when I cry, something like that happens. I never know what it'll be or when it'll hit.

I look at these pictures and almost don't recognize myself. The "before" time feels so distant. I can clearly remember the day our world changed so drastically, but it's somewhat hard to remember my emotional state, the innocence I had before that day. I have always considered myself a pessimist, but I don't think I had ever seriously imagined something really bad happening. Now I can't really imagine a positive outcome from a subsequent pregnancy. And I am more afraid in general. The other day we went for a hike and Brendan was so close to the cliff edge. I had to look away because I felt so sick to my stomach. I hate the way our world has changed, the way I have changed.

Motherhood Limbo

In January I went through a period where I tried to plan all sorts of outings to do and classes to take. I kept thinking “well no baby so I’ll…” Thus I’ve been taking a Spanish class on Tuesdays and a sewing class on Thursdays. Of course I signed up for the courses while I was out of work and by the time they started, I was back working again. So every afternoon I have to wrench myself away from a job that’s utterly overwhelming me most of the time and cart myself off to class. I’m in the final session of sewing class tonight and working away at my apron when the subject of children comes up among my classmates. They’re all a bit older than me and have either grown children or pre-teens. Their jobs, their potential to drive cars, their friends and their temptations, these are the subjects of conversation. I wasn’t actually asked if I had children. I dodged that bullet, probably by having talked about making this or that for my nieces.

These women in sewing class don’t really know me, don’t know my history. And although inside I stew over saying something about Colden, about my sadness, I don’t. This much is clear to everyone though: I’m not part of the club. The mom clique. Mothering (at least in my distant understanding of it) is an intensely physical activity, the actual act of diapering, feeding, soothing, cuddling, loving. It’s something you know over a long period of time, through many stages. I did the first bit of it but never got a chance to do all the later parts. And so I feel like I’m looking in the window, staring in at all the other moms casually talking about their children, their fears for them and their accomplishments. I am their worst dread come true so I don’t tell them how bad it can get.

What does it mean to have carried him but never really known him, never really mothered him? It’s motherhood limbo. Half in, half out.