packing

I've packed up Colden's room, and I gave away most of the big baby things on freecycle. The basinette, the crib, the high chair, the changing table, toys and dolls, all gone. My mom offered to come and do it for me, but in the end I wanted to do it myself. I fondled the tiny baby clothes that I had pictured him wearing and tucked all the books I had bought him into a box. I think I made some expectant mothers very happy with these donations, but it's so wierd to walk by his room and see the door open when it's been closed for more than a year. Then I peer in and it's barren and empty.

Most of these items were hand me downs to me anyway and we don't have that much storage in our new place in Boston. And it seemed ridiculously hopeful and jinxing to move it all anyway. We've only rented this place through August so we'll move again before we could ever have another baby. I did keep a few items though, a few boxes that we'll be taking with us in a week and a half when we pick up and move. I wonder when and if I'll open these boxes. It's hard to picture the future and what it might be like.

Years ago I picked up the habit of jumping into the new year. We stand up on the couch or chair, hold hands, and try to jump off at just the right instant so that we're actually in the air at the stroke of midnight. Most of the time we have no idea exactly when midnight is, but I like the gesture of it, like the symbolism of jumping into the newness of a fresh year together.

I can't decide if moving and starting over is fundamentally a hopeful gesture that the future will be brighter or if it's really just about running away, avoiding the here and now. Either way, I'm happy to see the end of 2009 and be jumping into something new.

today

I feel like I must have some kind of dissociative disorder or something because I look back and I don't even recognize my former self. Part of it is that I have a really bad memory in general. I tend to think that's a good thing. It softens the past for me, the details slipping away so easily and gently that I scarcely feel their loss. Maybe it's that one loss outshines all others.

It's nearly impossible for me to remember "before" in more than still-picture mental imagery. I can see myself posing in front of the freshly decorated Christmas tree on December 16th of last year, the time I think of as the last happy day, but I can't really remember what it felt like. I can't bring myself back emotionally to the time when it was a done deal, just a matter of time, before I held my son in my arms. Back to a time when I wouldn't even have thought to qualify that statement with the extra, oh-so-important qualifier, living.

Instead it feels like it was always destined to happen. That I am just that girl, the one with the dead baby. Part of a club of so many others who've experienced the same thing in one fashion or another. Someone who functions so effectively most of the time but who also holds a deep, dark pain inside.

It's been so long. The grief has settled in, deep within my being. So much so that it feels almost like it was always there and he was always not. I look at his picture to see that he was really real. He was a beautiful baby. He looked like us, like us together. How could he have been so sick inside me and I have been so clueless? How can it have been a whole year since I held him?

This song plays a lot in my head:


I have found no wisdom. I am not a better person. Nothing good has come from him not being here with me now. That was one thing I took away from the retreat weekend. It was a wonderful experience spending time with other women who are fabulous people and who also have been through very similiar losses. But there was no collective wisdom that transcended what I had already learned. There's no grief book or therapist waiting to be discovered that can give me the answers because there are no answers, no higher meanings beyond what we make for ourselves. There's camraderie, statements of commonality and understanding, and that is a lot.

pieces of me drifting in the wind

I've been looking for a new job in a new area and the search has been a good distraction for the last two months. Now I seem to be getting closer to an offer, a decision, a move, and I wonder how I will be able to handle it all. Colden's room is still shut tight. I wonder what I'll do with all of that stuff. Move it with hope in my heart even though we haven't even decided to start trying for another baby? Get rid of it all and start fresh? I wonder how I will handle sadness amongst a new group of coworkers. My workplace may be utterly disfunctional, but I know its disfunction and it knows me. My coworkers understand me pretty well and excuse my snappish behavior on occassion. It's exhausting to even think about these issues and yet they swirl through my mind most of the time.

My friends, also know as the people I used to think were my friends, I wonder if any of them will remember Colden's anniversary. I doubt it. That will strengthen my resolve to no longer think of them as friends. Now I waver, make excuses for them, feel needy and otherwise turn inward. I fantasize about moving away without mentioning it to anyone. One day, months from now, they'll call me and I'll say, oh, I didn't realize you didn't know yet.

I went for my final pre-conception visit to the perinatologist today. I had put it off for months and months. We discussed chromosomes. No problems there on either side. Final cause is still infection. The doctor, a new one, asked me why we weren't trying again yet. I'm lucky enough to have an answer to what happened to Colden and it's unlikely (how unlikely they have no idea) to happen again. Why can't I move on, at least in this one way? I don't know. I feel mute, fake, incoherent even with those who try to understand and help me.

Unrelated tragedies have been eating at me lately. Other babylost moms who can't get pregnant again even though they'd be fabulous parents, four cops in a coffee shop shot dead on a quiet Sunday morning, a caver with a young baby and one on the way killed in an accident, my grandfather's diagnosis of agressive prostate cancer. Each one hits so hard. I imagine the pain too vividly, put myself there. I ache for them all.

As I try and write this, try to explain myself to myself, I am sobbing on the couch. It could have happened yesterday. It can't have been nearly a year. I don't want to have survived that long without him.

Babylost Mamma Retreat Weekend

My attempts at writing my own post about this retreat keep getting thwarted by my new-found inability to cut and paste, but if you don't know about it and wish to learn more go to my dear friend Angie's blog: stilllifewithcircles.blogspot.com.

We hope you can join us for what will surely be a powerful weekend.

The Good and yet the Bad

I'm awake early. On the couch reading blogs and listening to the new U2 album for the first time. It's my husband's birthday, his 30th. He's four years younger than me. I threw him an elaborate party Friday night, and most of his family came from across the country. I gave him an expensive gift yesterday, trying to forcefeed him happiness. I have wished him a happy birthday. And yet in the back of my mind I know that any happiness is also tinged with a heavy dose of sadness. I think about how young he is and why he has to walk this path of grief. Why so much sadness amid so much that is wonderful?

I often think about the strange mix of good and bad things that each individual experiences in life, seemingly at random in many cases. Sure, we make choices that direct aspects of cause and effect. And yet. Sometimes an instant of poor timing, bad luck so to speak, can wreck a life. Cause the death of a loved one, a permanent injury, heartache.

When I created this blog I was obsessed with the feeling of unluckiness. With the statistics. I thought of myself as unlucky, deeply so. Colden's death was the only thing I could see. I was looking at my life as a single event, an n of 1.

It's harder now. I can see both good and bad things in life, shades of gray, pink and orange. I know that as absolutely awful, gutwrenching, and life changing as his death was, is, and always will be, that it could be worse. Much worse. And yet there is so much that is good. We are in love, financially secure, reasonably healthy, and with loving family and friends. We live largely without the fear of physical danger.

I don't know how to navigate this juxtopisition of amazingly good things and terrible sadness. I don't want to feel sorry for myself or forget the depths of pain. I don't want to wallow at home and yet the rest of life feels like moving on, moving past. It feels like living. I often don't want to. And yet.

Not Okay

"It's okay."

Somehow I ended up uttering these words seconds after telling someone, a stranger really, that my baby died. It's the kind of thing that makes me believe that next my head is going to pop off my neck with a clean sucking plop and roll off my shoulder onto the floor.

I tutor high school students from time to time and I recently started working with a new girl, a friend of a kid I worked with last year. I expected the question about my baby, expected that they would have heard from A and her mom that I was expecting last year. But the question didn't come during our first appointment so there in the last minutes of our second appointment I was caught off guard. And there was no way this poor mother could have ever guessed she was about to stumble into a morass that would leave her babbling like a crazy woman.

I handled it pretty well. She asked about my baby and without tears in my eyes I managed to get out the awful words that he died. She panicked. A look of horror and embarrassment crossed her face, she mumbled something that might have been an "I'm sorry," and I said without thinking, "It's okay." Then she launched into a subject change so abrupt and rambling that I stood there listening for 3 or 4 minutes before I could jump in and make my escape.

Of course it's not okay. I was just trying to soothe the situation. They were just careless words intended to make her feel less embarrassed and panicked, but I still sat in my car shaking. I felt like I must sound like a horrible person. A person who could coldly discuss the death of her baby and brush him off with statements that imply that it's not a big deal, not a horrible, gut-wrenching, utterly devastating loss.

Today it's been 8 months since I held him in my arms the only time, and while I am here at work, functioning at least well enough to fool people, it is not okay.

Trying Again

I'm paralyzed by the thought of another pregnancy.

While in the hospital after giving birth to Colden, I said to my husband that we should try again immediately. A month or so later, when my mom said gently that she could understand my OBGYN's recommendation to wait 6 months, I got very upset and told her that she just didn't understand. At 3 months, when I went to the perinatalogist, I asked pointed questions about why we needed to wait 6 months to a year and what benefits that wait would provide. I was so impatient. I wanted to pretend like none of it ever happened. I wanted to replace him. I wanted him.

Something changed. Now it's been 8 months since I delivered Colden, and I am in limbo. I'm unable to seriously think about having another baby, especially unable to imagine either me or the baby surviving it. And yet I can't stop thinking about it either. I am thinking about it all non-stop. I relive the day of his birth in my day dreams over and over again. I imagine another pregnancy. I wonder what we'll do with his room when we eventually move. I look into foster care or adoption. I think all the time that it may be better just to never have living children. It all just spins around and around in my head.

But the thought of actually moving forward with planning a new pregnancy stops me cold. We're still actively preventing, and my husband the non-planner will never be the one to change that. I keep thinking that I'm 34, and I should try again, if that's what I/we want, and yet I feel utterly unable to move foward. How can I even think about what I want now when what I really want is gone so completely and inescapably?

Today I ordered a couple of books about pregnancy after stillbirth. That's the only step forward I can manage at the moment.

For those who are trying again, are pregnant again or have had another baby, how'd you get that far? What has helped you cope with the panic and fear of trying to get pregnant again?