November 11

I have to pack, but I need to be here more right now. Today we are going to visit my new niece and I am both excited and terrified. What if not freaking out at the sight of her was only enabled by technology and I have to run from the room before I start screaming when I see her in person? I think if I could just go see her myself it would be easier, but my whole family is going to be there and it involves driving to another city and staying with my aunt and uncle and just being away from my cave for 3 days. Uggh, this should not be stressful, I should be nothing but thrilled at the prospect of seeing my first niece.

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A year ago, D.G. and I were packing for a few days away too. My mom came to watch D. and we spent 2 days at The Mall (It's the the biggest mall in the world and it's only 30 minutes away). We did nearly all our Christmas shopping, we ate whatever we wanted at odd hours, we rented movies and we slept in. Well he slept and I got up to pee frequently, but it was still good because we didn't have to worry about our 2 year old. It wasn't fancy but it was as close to a baby-moon as we were going to get.

When we came home, I found out that my friend L's son was stillborn. I was so shocked. I remember thinking "Full term babies don't die these days." How could that happen? (My cousin also delivered her son 11 weeks early that week and he didn't make it either so it was not a good week.) I was at 17 weeks and just wanted to wrap my arms around my belly and shield my baby from all this bad news. It was so sad for L, but something like that couldn't happen to us. Ha ha, the joke was on me because 5 and 1/2 months later, it did.

Anyways after all this rambling, today should have been L's son Kaelen's first birthday. If you have a spare moment, please stop by her blog and remember with her. (And yes it was me that gave her the gift.)

Trying to avoid it

So it's another 3rd, this time November 3rd which means it's been 7 months. And I'm trying not to think about it because Mother Nature (that nasty bitch) has made it so that I am about to ovulate and thinking about dead babies is not conducive to making more babies. (Funny how that works because if I didn't have a dead baby I wouldn't be worried about making babies right now.)

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At my last counseling session, my counselor suggested trying another form of therapy, EMDR. (there's lots of info here so I won't get into details.) I know I'm not getting better, I can see myself getting worse with every anniversary and bfn, but I have no idea how to make myself feel better. Just letting myself live with the grief and waiting for time to pass isn't working. I have no idea if this will work for me, but I guess it's worth meeting the therapist who uses it to see if she thinks it will help. Has anyone else had any exposure to EMDR?

Flowers

Just before of all the horrible and painful things that have happened this week something good did happen to me. Last Sunday, the 6 month anniversary, just as I was backing out of the garage to go to my support group meeting I looked out the rear view mirror and saw our doula standing in the drive way. She brought me flowers and lasagna and garlic bread. The food is in the freezer but will likely be supper on Tuesday. The flowers are still looking pretty good.


I have always loved gerbera daisies and now they are extra special because the birth flower for April is the daisy. In fact I have decided that I am going to get a tattoo for Reid and it's going to be a red gerbera daisy. And if I don't get knocked up in the next 2 cycles, it will be done on December 18th! I hate that I have to wait that long, but the artist is a mom with 3 kids and only works 2 days a week. I met her on Saturday and she was really understanding and never said anything like, "It was probably for the best" or "You can have another" or any of the other horrible baby loss cliches. All the artists in the shop are women so no one will be freaked out if I get all emotional and cry. I just have to decide where I want the tattoo and then count down the days. Now I have something to look forward to in December instead of just dreading Christmas. And despite the fact that I am well into my 30's, I really like the idea of freaking my parents out at Christmas with a tattoo.

(Right now I am debating between lower calf/ankle, inner arm or shoulder. Any advice would be welcome. I am a tattoo virgin so I am pretty much clueless.)

Six months and 3 days later

I got a call from the lovely Dr. K yesterday. The autopsy report is finally done, a mere 6 months and 3 days after Reid died. So there is still no definitive reason for Reid's death, but there are some things she wants to rule out so I have an appointment with her tomorrow. D.G. declared that unless there is some reason they can give us for Reid's death talking about the autopsy is just a waste of time. This led to a less than pleasant argument in front of D which ended with a 3 year old telling us in no uncertain terms to stop arguing. (that was another dose of mommy guilt). The outcome is that he is not coming to the appointment because I am tired of making him do things just to support me. Expect there to be a very emotional post sometime tomorrow after the appointment.

And in case you are wondering a wedding anniversary, an autopsy report and ovulation are not a good combination.

Another day we should be celebrating

Today is our ninth wedding anniversary. We got married on Thanksgiving weekend (the 2nd weekend in October for all my American readers) in my tiny, little home town. It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm and lots of beautiful fall leaves. We could not have ordered better weather which is good because it's not unheard of for it to snow Thanksgiving weekend in SK.


Those two people had a pretty good run for the first 8 and a half years of marriage. Not perfect, but still good enough that on their last anniversary her FB status said something about eight great years together. I wish I could go back to last year and warn those people that things were going to change and not way they had planned. I wish I could tell them they would be very different people by their 9th anniversary.

Enough already

Okay, that's enough, it's just not funny any more. It's been six months and I am ready for the giant cosmic joke that my life has become to be over. I proved I can take it. I can survive without my baby, but I don't want to have to. Time for it to be over, to go back to Saturday April 3rd at 1:20 am and change the way things happened from that point on. There will be a squirming 20 lb boy on my lap right now, not a computer. There will be cloth diapers drying on my clothes line, not collecting dust in a basket. There will be hundreds of pictures of him on my camera, not pictures of balloons with messages for dead babies. I will be tired from getting up at night to nurse him, not from staying up late mourning him. There will be pictures up of all the friends' babies born this summer and I will be looking forward to the arrival of my first niece or nephew (please let it be a niece since none of the rest of this can be changed). There will be no talk about another baby and the giant pile of baby crap will be slowly being given away or sold as he out grows it. There will be a bay sleeping in the crib, not a box of ashes. Just make it all be the way it is supposed to be because the way it is really sucks.

Going for a Walk

Today was the Walk to Remember here in Edmonton. It was a beautiful sunny day, the best you could possibly wish for in October in northern AB. I was so happy to see that they had invited Kate Inglis back to speak again. (I just found her amazing words from last year in the Stirrup Queens Creme de la Creme of 2009 list a few days ago.) I even worked up to the courage to walk up to her and say thank you for Glow In the Woods. Is it okay to be a DBM blogger groupie because if it is I will be her groupie. She was very kind and didn't freak out when I walked up to her and started crying before I could even get the words "Thank you" out of my mouth. Overall it was a good day and it felt good to be able to include D in an event for Reid.

Here are some pictures from today:

The note I wrote to Reid




The sidewalk of names




The name we were looking for

Our balloons on their way

Tomorrow, which starts in 87 minutes, will not be such a good day. Many times today I thought "6 months ago, I was ... so happy, so pregnant, so clueless, so not the way I am now."

Things you never want to tell your MIL

The next week and a bit is going to be jam-packed, with some good things and some not so great things. On Saturday we are going to the local Walk to Remember. It won't be an easy afternoon but I am still looking forward to it and it will be the first memorial event that I have felt was appropriate for D to come to with us. Then as soon as we get back, my MIL will be arriving (this is not so great, but I would never tell her). Just being around my MIL stresses me out for many reasons. I am not looking forward to this visit as she basically just announced she was coming (and no other weekends worked for her) without really asking if it was a good weekend for us. I don't think she has a clue that it is 6 months on Sunday. That brings me to Reid's 6 month anniversary on Sunday, which the Walk to Remember saves me from having to think of a way to commemorate. And to add to the fun, next Wednesday is D.G.'s and my 9th wedding anniversary (I literally just realized that tomorrow will be 14 years since we got together, holy crap). Neither one of us really feels like celebrating anything these days and there is a distinct lack of babysitters here. The only night that the MIL could watch D is on Reid's 6 month anniversary on Sunday and I am NOT celebrating my anniversary then. I told D.G. on the weekend that we should get U2 tickets for the concert here next June. I might feel up to going out in public again by then and since it's only 8 months away, we won't have a baby by then no matter what. ( Even if we get pregnant soon, I am not afraid of pre-term labour, just miscarriage, stillbirth and full term death, that seems reasonable right?)

Which brings me back to the blog title. There's one more thing happening in the next week. I should ovulate about a week from now. My MIL wanted to stay from Saturday until next Tuesday. The guest bedroom is directly below our bedroom and we have hardwood floors and a somewhat squeaky bed. Do you see my problem? What man wants to try to get his wife knocked up with his mom sleeping 10 feet away? Okay, don't answer that because there probably is someone that messed up out there. I told D.G. that he had 2 choices, DTD with his mom there or let me tell her she has to leave for her sister's sooner than planned if she wants another grandchild because I wasn't going to skip trying this month. To my surprise, he told her himself, but it doesn't change the fact the my MIL knows way too much about my sex life.

P.S. Thanks to the three five lovely ladies who gave me an award in the last few days. It means a lot to me that you are out there reading my blog. Now my problem is that I think nearly every blog I read has already been nominated because I am so slow moving these days. Please don't think badly of me, I was terrible with these kind of things before my brain got scrambled.

What's a DBM to do?

Welcome to the first official blog post written on my fancy-schmancy new laptop. Thanks to my mushy brain and inability to make decisions, it took me over a month to finally decide what I wanted and actually buy something. But now that I have, it's pretty fabulous (I bought a VAIO 15.5" with a Core i3 just in case any other DBM's are closet tech geeks). It is a vast improvement over the old laptop (now D.G.'s exclusive gaming machine). Now D.G. and I have another way to be in the same room and not actually speak for hours on end.

Reid's 5 month anniversary did not have big surprises. I survived the appointments with the counselor and lawyer with the socially acceptable amounts of crying (lots and none respectively). It was kind of weird having D.G. at the counselor's with me but at least now they have met and I know that D.G. will come back if I need him to. I now get to add panic attacks to my list of symptoms as this was how the therapist labeled my description of my reaction to coming home from vacation. We also got a phone call from my pregnancy gp, Dr. K. She wanted to let me know that while the autopsy still hasn't been finalized, (seriously 5 months?) she has managed to track down the name of the pathologist working on the report and is going to try to find out what's going on this coming week. She also told me that she thinks about us on the 3rd of every month and still feels sad (She's had other patients lose babies but never quite like us). I still think Dr.K is great and will be calling her office as soon as there are two lines on that stick.

Now that I can finally stop researching laptops, I need a new obsession. For the last week, I have been getting the urge to do something "crazy". Mostly I think it is just the normal female urge to change something on the outside to symbolize the changes on inside. Besides, I don't have the energy to do anything truly crazy these days and I have a 3 year old who has to come along on most of my adventures any ways. I don't want to cut my hair off (it takes way too damn long to grow out) and I don't want to color it because my natural color is so dark that it would take way too much effort/money to maintain. I already look like crap 90% of the time, I don't need to add roots on top of the pasty skin and huge dark circles. I am willing to consider a tattoo but D.G. did point out that I spent over a month researching a laptop that just sits in the house and I'll have for a few years tops, so it could take me years to chose a design and artist for something like a tattoo. Any ideas out there for what a indecisive DBM can do to be crazy without being too crazy? I don't want the husband to start looking up crisis hot-line numbers, I just need to "do" something.

Starts out okay but gets pretty dark by the end...

Thank you for all the complements on the shadow box. I am pretty proud of it and am glad you all like it too. (If you are moved to create your own versions, send me pictures)

Minor bit of blog housekeeping, I am tired of referring to my husband as DH. When we were younger, he was referred to as "Leash Boy" because due to a random act by a scheduling program, we had all our 1st year university classes together, so to some it appeared I was keeping him on a leash. However since that was a very long time ago (14 years, yikes) and he is now a grown man with a semi-important job, it's probably not fair to call him that. Our daughter calls him "Daddy Guy"so maybe for now I'll try D.G. (When I was home on mat. leave with her and he would come home from work, I would say "Who's that guy? It's Daddy!"and in her mind it became Daddy Guy)

Tomorrow is a big day. On top of it being Reid's 5 month anniversary, D.G. and I are going to the lawyer's office to get our wills in order (yes we are bad parents who didn't have a will for the 3 years our daughter has been alive). It should lead to some fun discussions on what happens if our whole family dies at the same time and what we want to happen if one of us becomes a vegetable. Then we need to pick up a "unbaby" baby gift for the friend I was cyber stalking while waiting for her baby to arrive (She has yet to contact us since except for the mass birth announcement email). I will meet my social obligation and send a gift but I am not forcing myself to go into a baby department or to sew baby things for anyone who hasn't been there for me. After that, the fun continues as D.G. is joining me for my second counseling session. He is apprehensive about it, at best, but is willing to go for my sake. Now I didn't book these things for Reid's anniversary on purpose, it just works better to schedule things for his Fridays off and the 3rd just happened to be a Friday this month so instead of waiting an extra 2 weeks, I decided to suck it up and get things over with. Besides we already "won" the dead baby lottery, whose to say we won't find a way to defy more statistics and have a reason to need our wills long before we should.

Time to run away again

And now it's time for the vacation I have been both looking forward to and dreading. Looking forward because it's a vacation, duh, and I will get to spend time with my most wonderful friend who remembers all Reid's anniversaries and her great kids. Dreading because when we planned this vacation, it was January and I was pregnant and I was sure I would have a 4 1/2 month old baby along with me. It never occurred to me that it could be any different.

P.S. Love to all the DBM's who will be marking anniversaries in the next week. I'll be thinking of you.

3 years and then 4 months

Today D turned 3. We had her first ever birthday party with friends and although it was smaller than we planned, it was just right and she had a blast. We worked our butts off getting ready and finishing one of her gifts, but working myself to exhaustion helped me to not think about who wasn't going to be at the party. (Or any other parties for that matter.)

Here is D with her most requested and now most beloved birthday gift, a "Squishy Whyatt". (from her current favourite show). Looking at this picture just makes think if she could love a toy that much and hug it so tight, how much love would she have for her little brother if he was here?


Today my wonderful, amazing, and most importantly, living and breathing daughter turned three. But as soon as she went to bed, I was consumed with the thoughts of my not living and not breathing son, who should have been 4 months old tomorrow. It should be Reid that Delia's is hugging so tightly at her birthday party. How shitty is is that I have to be thankful for the fact that Reid was not born on April 2nd so that at least his death didn't completely overshadow his sister's birthday for me?

3 months

In 2 hours it will have been exactly 3 months since Reid died. By some lovely twist of fate, it's also 13 weeks so the anniversary is falling on the same days of the week as the actual events. It made it very hard not to spend the whole evening thinking about what happened 3 months ago. (At 5:30 3 months ago, my water broke. At 8:00 3 months ago we were driving to the hospital. )

I talked to one of my university roommates today. I must admit that we have been out of touch for the last few years (we finished university 10 years ago). After Reid died she sent me an email and told me that she and her husband had been forced to end a pregnancy at 14 weeks last year. I knew that they had had trouble conceiving but I didn't know how bad things had gotten. She called me today and we had a really good chat. Even though our losses are very different we were very much on the same wavelength. It was good to talk to someone who I have known for a long time and who gets "it". Although I hate that being dead baby mamas is what has brought us back together, I think that we are not going to drift apart again. It's nice to think that maybe a friendship can be renewed in the middle of all this crap, unlike all the other ones that seem to have been erased.

Speaking of messed up friendships, the friend whose baby announcement on FB I posted about on Thursday morning, left a message for me Thursday evening while I was outside. So I guess she did call me after all. Now I have to work up the courage to call her back. (Talk about a weird feeling hearing that message after writing that post)

June 3rd

Reid should be 2 months old today. The worst thing I should have to deal with is whether or not to start his immunizations on the recommended schedule. Now everything is crappy and shitty and completely fucked up.

7 weeks...

I thought I was doing better. I didn't spend all day Friday dreading Friday evening/early Saturday morning like I had for the last 6 weeks. Then Friday evening came and I cried from 8:30 until I fell asleep and I spent most of today either crying or just avoiding the world by staying in bed. I am tired of the grief rollercoaster. Why can't I just be somewhat miserable all the time instead of semi-okay or completely miserable? It would be be much easier to handle and much less confusing for DH. When I am completely miserable, I just want someone to cry with me and he can't do that for me. (He is willing to rub my back or hug me while I cry, but I don't like him watching me cry, it just makes me more sad that he doesn't feel the same way I do.) If I could get off the rollercoaster and just stay somewhat miserable, maybe I could start to adjust to the altered reality of my life. It would be nice if something besides the fact that my baby is dead and gone would stay the same from one day to the next.

6 weeks and counting

So...today is 6 weeks weeks since Reid's birth/death/whatever you call it when your baby comes out and doesn't have a heart beat. I still want my baby back. I want the 6 week old little boy that should be here with us. There is no clearer way to express my feelings. There have been times in the last 6 weeks when I actually enjoyed myself but they are all tainted because as soon as I have time to think about it, I realize that all those time would have been better if Reid was with me. The best I can hope for is that in the future those realizations will come without an hour of crying my heart out.

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I had my 6 week check up on Thursday. My doctor, who I had never met before we arrived at the hospital in labour, was great. She came in early for my appointment and made sure that the nurses snuck me out the back way after my appointment so I didn't have to see the waiting room full of bellies. I ♥ Dr.K. She is one of the good things that have come out of this mess. Unfortunately, she still hasn't got the the full results from the autopsy so we don't know anymore about why he died. That didn't really surprise me although I had hoped to find out something. What did surprise me was that when I asked how long we should wait before ttc again she said to start whenever we are ready. I was really expecting her to say to wait 6 months and so all the "plans" in my head were based on that. So now that there is no medically mandated waiting period, how do I figure out when I am ready to risk it all again?

Still 1 month

DH didn't realize that I needed to recognize today but I did manage to explain things to him without tearing his head off. (there was a lot of crying though) He now knows that I need to know that he thinks about how long it's been since Reid died and it won't make me more sad if he brings it up. (Really what is he going to say that is going to make me more sad?)

I was trying to pretend I was a functioning human being by buying cards for all the moms and grandmas today. (I had to do it today because all our families are back in SK and the cards had to be mailed.) There were cards for every maternal type person (moms, grandmas, great-grandmothers, aunts, 2nd moms, stepmoms) from every child type (daughter, son, kid, grandchild etc, then I saw " Mother from Baby " and almost trashed the whole card display. Later, once DH came home and I could have a big cry, I started thinking about what my "Mother from Baby" card would say:

Dear Mommy, sorry for dying and messing Mother's Day and all the other holidays for you and Daddy. Love, Reid

1 Month

Reid would have been 1 month old today. I am miserable and alone. (well alone for now cause it's nap time) I told myself that it would be good to spend my first day without DH or my mom alone with D, but that's not true. I don't want to have to remind anyone what today is, I want them to be already thinking about it.

Thanks to my IRL friend and fellow DBM (dead baby mama), L for remembering Reid's "1 month anniversary". I thought that some other people might remember too, but so far there's been nothing and that really hurts. DH had to spend the whole day at a conference today so I can forgive him not thinking of it this morning, but I will lose it if he doesn't acknowledge the day when he gets home tonight. I know men in general aren't big on anniversary's and dates, but DH knows that I like to mark milestones even if they are crappy ones.

I spent most of the weekend reading every blog listed under Stillbirth here. I was desperately looking for someone whose babyloss story was like ours. After reading the history of every blog on there, I found just one that came close. I have spent every free minute since reading her entire blog history. She has turned her tragedy into something positive by co-founding Grieve Out Loud. I am going to "celebrate" Reid's 1 month birthday by writing our story and sending an email to her to thank her for her blog and for letting me know that I was not the only one. Maybe someday my story will help someone else.