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?

Death Barged In

Today I heard a poem that I just have to share with all of you. This was written by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno. I heard her read it on NPR during an interview. She recently published a book of poems about the murder of her daughter 6 years ago. Read more about her book here. I think I'll go out and buy it.

Death Barged In

In his Russian greatcoat
slamming open the door
with an unpardonable bang,
and he has been here ever since.
He changes everything,
rearranges the furniture,
his hand hovers
by the phone;
he will answer now, he says;
he will be the answer.
Tonight he sits down to dinner
at the head of the table
as we eat, mute;
later, he climbs into bed
between us.

Even as I sit here,
he stands behind me
clamping two
colossal hands on my shoulders
and bends down
and whispers to my neck,
From now on,
you write about me.

For me this poem spoke to me in the same way that An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination did. All I can think afterwards is yes.

What does a dead baby mama look like?

I go about my life... working, hanging out with friends, and generally doing what I feel has to be done. And it seems to be convincing. Everyone seems to think I'm fine. No one asks how I'm really doing any more and when I bring up Colden or sadness or pain, the subject gets changed pretty darn quick. The list of people who I've decided to remain silent around, at least about the main thoughts that course through my mind, grows steadily.

Do they really think I'm over it? Or, has it gotten that uncomfortable to talk with me? I don't feel like a huge downer. I can carry on conversations about every day subjects and laugh plenty these days. I work hard. I socialize. I'm not looking for someone to talk with all day about my dead baby or future hoped-for pregnancies filled with anxiety and fear, but I resent the total silence from most of my friends and family.

I sometimes think about it when I am out and about. I'm walking down the boardwalk at the Jersey shore dressed in work out clothes, and I'm passing many people who look very similar to me and some with obviously different lives. I wonder if they think about how I got there and what's going on with me. I certainly think about them and what their stories might be. Which person has lost someone they love? Which one is unemployed? Has a sick family member? Lost their baby? They don't really look like it either.