I don't know

How does one event change your life so much that 7 months later you don't recognize your life or yourself? What is this place and where I am supposed to go from here? Where did all the people that I thought I could count on go? If it was just the crushing sadness (and it is still crushing) maybe I could deal with Reid's death, but it's not. It's that my brain has been scrambled and I don't know who I am any more. I don't know what I want anymore (other than another baby) or what I am supposed to do with my life. I hate all this "not knowing".

Drowning

Yesterday was the worst day I have had in months. I cried on and off all day despite the fact that I was home with D. It seems like the pregnancy announcements are pouring down all around me, while I got another BFN yesterday. I feel like I am drowning. My support group and the on-line baby loss community were my life lines, now they are the source of the flood waters.


"It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. "

That about sums up how I feel. What is the point of ttc if you don't hope that it will work? I can't pretend that I've got something else more important going on in my life than trying to have a baby. I can't pretend that I'm okay if it doesn't happen this time. How am I supposed to survive what promises to be a painfully awful holiday season without some little speck of hope that maybe I could have the only gift I want, a non-dead baby?



(The quote is from John Cleese in the movie Clockwise. I read it somewhere online in the last while but couldn't remember where.)

(When I had hope that I could be pregnant, I felt happy for all of you out there who were. Underneath all of my pain, it's still there. I just can't feel it right now.)

Stupid commercial

Has anyone seen that stupid Nissan commercial (It annoys me so much I can't link to it here, but just search "Nissan commercial baby" and the video will come up. Basically a woman gets a BFP and her hubby freaks out that he won't be able to keep his 2 door sports car. He then "stretches it out" into a 4 door sedan. I just want to yell at the TV every time it comes on. "Wait you bonehead, don't change your car until the kid is ready to come home from the hospital! Just because you got her pregnant doesn't mean you get a baby!"

Anyone else got a commercial that they hate now that they are a DBM? (I know I also can't stand the i.Phone baby commercials too.)

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.

Back at it

My parents were here visiting for the last 3 days so it's been hard to write anything (posts or comments). When other people are here, I try to hide the bad feelings and limit the bitter, sarcastic comments. I don't know why for sure, maybe it's because I don't want to upset them or because I just know that they won't understand but it just feels like I have to hold things back. Also, only 2 people who know me in real life know about this blog, my husband (who I have asked not to read it) and my DBM pal L, who more than understands and encouraged me to start blogging. I'd like to keep it that way as I think it would only make my parents worry. Anyways the parents have left now so I can go back to being Dead Baby Blog obsessed.

I have been cyber-stalking my friend who is now about a week over due with a baby boy. I keep checking her FB status and blog for news. I know it's is going to hurt so, so bad when the big announcement comes, but I do want to know that everything is ok. I keep wondering if I will get a phone call or not. I thought she was important enough to get a phone call when Reid died, but I have feeling that it will be like the last time a close (or used to be close) friend successfully had a living baby. It will be too "hard" for them to call me before they post it on FB. In my mind people who get to bring home their living breathing babies shouldn't get to make excuses like that, they have someone to cuddle when the "hard" part is over.

(Yikes, I better prepare DH for the freak out that is coming when this baby arrives judging by how upset I am already)

17 weeks and WTF?

So my maternity leave has officially run out. (this is how I know it's been 17 weeks, I had stopped counting the weeks since Reid died.) I know lots of DBM's have had to go back to work much sooner than this so I will understand if you think I am being a big whiny spoiled baby because I don't want to go back to work, but I need to vent.

I know that I am not ready to go back to work, but since I am not seeing a doctor regularly and am not heavily medicated, I am being "encouraged" to start seeing a counselor or psychiatrist by the insurance company that provides disability coverage to my employer. I had to do a phone interview today and it seems that if I can force myself to function for my daughter I should be able to do it for work too. (Yes, my job helping oil companies destroy the environment should be as important to me as my living child.) It is awful having your grief evaluated like it's a broken arm or herniated disk. And the twice a month support group meetings mean nothing to them. My employer has an Employee Assistance Program that we are supposed to access by internet. I am supposed to feel supported by a company that offers "e-Counselling" and has these statements on their website:

"The model of counselling is primarily cognitive-behavioural and short-term in focus, with clearly defined and achievable behaviour-change goals."

and

"Our unique, solution-focused approach focuses on enabling individuals, couples and families to develop the skills necessary to solve their life problems without creating a long-term dependent counselling relationship."

So my dead child is a life problem that I can develop skills to solve? And I wouldn't want to depend on a counselor for help over the long term because my dead child problem can be resolved with a short-term solution? WTF? Seriously?

If they can offer "e-Counselling" why can't I list all you ladies as my "e-Counsellors"? I certainly trust your advice more than anything that will come from these people.

I want MY life back. I want to be "normal". I want to be happy to run into people I haven't seen in months (Of course if I had my life back I probably would have seen these people months ago.) I want to be able to love babies again. I want to not have to literally flee the room when people show up with babies (to an event whose rules said REGISTERED CHILDREN ONLY - MAKE OTHER ARRANGEMENTS FOR YOUR OTHER CHILDREN) I want to not have to worry about having a break down in the kids section of the library and scaring small children.

My baby is dead but at least...

... I don't have a side butt. I was in Ikea this morning (I know it's a prime location for the crying baby hit squad) but I wanted to pick up a couple things. D and I were standing in line and the woman in front of us with her roughly 4 year old boy had the worst butt ever. I mean really bad. She was not fat, maybe you could call her curvy at most, but her hips went straight out to the side while the back of her butt was completely flat. I know it was horribly mean to think about this poor girl's butt like this because she could easily be thinking awful things about how I look. (I definitely don't like the way my body looks these days as all my extra baby weight makes me look like I am still pregnant) Heck she could be a dead baby mama too for all I know. However, it did distract me from all the pregnant people and baby strollers while we waited in line so I'll go with it. It's a sign of how crappy life as a dead baby mama is when you have to stare strangers' butts to keep it together in public. Maybe next time there could be a cute college boy in front of us.

What is the point of trying?

I was trying to be a normal mom for my daughter today. I was getting ready to take her to a birthday party. (I had checked ahead to make sure that there would be no babies less than 6 months old at the party). I thought "I'll just check my email before we leave" and not knowing that there was a bomb waiting in my inbox. Yet another person is about to have baby and of course they are all perky and confident that they can make plans to do things with their baby 2 weeks from now. I almost threw up. I still made it out the door and to the birthday party but as soon as we got home and I put D in bed, I had a huge melt down on the kitchen floor.

Nail polish

I have attached an irrational significance to some completely insignificant things since Reid died. The most visible one is the nail polish on my toes.

Going for a pedicure was one of the things I did the week before Reid died. One last chance to relax and pamper myself before I became a very busy mother of 2. Now I look at it as one of the last things I did when Reid was still alive. Even though my feet look horrible, I won't even consider taking the nail polish off my toes. (I have managed to trim my toenails so polish has disappeared that way). The purple is all but gone from toes 2 to 5 so all that's left is the polish on the big toes and that is half gone. It's like my own biological calender of how much time has passed since Reid died. Maybe by the time it's completely gone, I'll have started to figure out where I am supposed to go from here.

More self -torture

Why do I keep doing this to myself? I keep getting bored and looking at FB and I keep getting smacked upside the head with baby crap. "We're expecting boy#4", "I'm done work for the next 13 months", "Why won't this baby come out already?", "Look how cute my baby is". I don't need to check FB, it emails me if there's a message, why can't I stop? Better yet, why can't I be the one obnoxiously posting pictures of my almost 3 month old?

Need my fix

My internet fix that is. We are at my MIL's and the only computer is in the middle of the living room so not a good place for writing or reading dead baby blogs. (everyone except D is out running errands so I have about 10 minutes to get caught up). I think I am just as addicted to blogs and Glow In The Woods (which I think of as Dead Baby Facebook) as I ever was to Facebook. Of course now I can claim that these sites have theraputic value so I don't feel bad about this addiction at all. Can't wait to get home to my laptop.

Fridge Magnet

My mom has this magnet on her fridge. I used to think it was cute, now not so much. Bonkers is too cutesy for the way your baby dying messes up your life. Why isn't there a word that describes how I am sad and angry and bitter and confused and lonely and scared and numb and "blah" and a million other bad things all at the same time?

D and I survived the drive to my parents farm. (I hate Dora but she got us through 10 hours on the road with minimal complaining) I had pictured us spending lots of time outside, helping my mom in her garden and taking D for tractor rides with my dad. However it has been raining nearly non-stop for the last 3 weeks and shows no sign of letting up. And when it's not raining , huge swarms of mosquito's are circling the yard looking for anything warm blooded. So much for the idyllic week in the country. This has left me with far too much time to miss DH and obsess about everything. I haven't cried for the last few days and that seems wrong. Things happen that make me feel sad, but they don't make me cry right now. Does that mean I didn't love Reid enough or am I "too good" at dealing with his death or am I in denial/shock and in a couple weeks I'll be a basket case again? How crappy is your life when you have to wonder what's wrong with you when you don't spend the majority of your day being utterly miserable?

Running Away

I am fleeing the province for 2 weeks. D and I are heading out Monday morning and making the +800 km trip to my parents' farm. A whole day driving, alone with an almost 3 year old might make a normal person crazy, but since I may already be there, I am going to risk it. After 9 days, DH is flying to SK and then we will spend a few days with his family. Don't know what in the world we will do at his mom's place but it's only 2 or 3 days max. (DH parent's split up just after D was born so it makes for extra fun times when visiting the in-laws).

I can't wait to take D to the farm, but of course I keep thinking that I should be taking Reid for his first trip to the farm. This trip will also be my first chance to see my grandmother in almost a year and a half. Her first son (the baby before my mom) was stillborn more than 60 years ago, so I know she will have things to share with me that we have never talked about before. I haven't talked to her since Reid died since she is losing her hearing and I haven't felt like shouting my feelings into the phone while crying so I hope she isn't too upset at me either. ( is it weird that this image makes me giggle? more dead baby black humor I guess.)