Trying is highly over-rated

(This is a big long ramble, but I just need to get it out of my head so forgive me.)

So we are back. I saw the baby. (I held her, but only once) I tried to pretend I was normal, but could only hold it together for about 2 hours when everyone was around, so I would just hide out in the guest bedroom and read/cry for the rest of the evening. Except for the first night, when I locked myself in the guest bathroom with the lights off and the exhaust fan on to drown out the noise of everyone else talking right after supper was finished.

It was just all kinds of weird. Everyone would reply to me if I talked to them, but it felt like everyone was avoiding me. The only time I held the baby was when we first got there. After my parents held her, my dad gave her to me and I held her for about 2 minutes. My brother never asked me once if I wanted to hold her. I really felt like having a dead baby was some kind if communicable disease so they kept the baby away from me. We stayed with my aunt and uncle and my parents stayed at my brother's house. They all came to my aunt's house for supper every night we were there (D was the only one with an early bedtime) but we were never invited to my brother's house.

I guess I just have to accept that my brother having a child doesn't change the fact that he's an ass. I thought it might make him more understanding of what I have been through, but an ass who loves HIS baby is still an ass.

I barely talked to my mom during the whole ordeal and since I went to bed early the night before we left, I never even said goodbye to her. I figured she knew where I was, if she wanted to talk to me she could try, but she never did. I wonder how long I'll have to wait for the inevitable guilt-inducing phone call how about horribly I behaved during the trip.

Well at least D had a good time, apparently the dead baby taint has not been passed on to her.

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.)

It finally happened

I have been waiting for something like this to happen for months now; waiting for someone in our families to deny or at least fail to acknowledge Reid. It finally happened today. My MIL sent us an email with a submission she was planning to send in for a local history book being published about D.G.'s home town. (It's a pretty common thing for small towns in SK to publish history books, my home town did it about 25 years ago and it is WAY smaller than D.G.'s) The line about D.G. mentioned me, D and his job but not Reid. This lead to a less than pleasant exchange between D.G. and myself, a session of sobbing on the bathroom floor for me and then a long emotional discussion after D went to sleep.

The result is that D.G. says he's "OK" with mentioning Reid as long as I am the one to tell his mom. I really want Reid to be mentioned and besides it's a history book, there should be plenty of families with mentions of dead babies over the last 100 years. (If there isn't then, it's not like I have to be there to get weird looks for daring to break the taboo.) However, I don't believe that D.G. is really OK about it. I do believe that he could put it out of his mind and forget about it, but that's not the same. Which should take priority, my need to acknowledge Reid or D.G.'s need to avoid reminders? We are such different places when it comes to grief. (The long emotional discussion revealed just how far apart those places are.) I don't want to hurt him, but I hate the idea of ever pretending that Reid didn't exist.

Bad and Good

I had one really awful day while we were away. I spent an entire afternoon crying my heart out. It was like everything I had been holding in for the first 5 days of the trip just built up and poured out. And it wasn't that I had to deal with anything extra horrible during the trip, no one was pregnant and I didn't have to see any babies close to the age Reid would have been. One of the other couples we were with had a miscarriage a couple months ago and is dealing with secondary infertility. I talked about Reid when ever I wanted to and no one looked freaked out (if they were, they hid it well and that's just as good). The worst thing I had deal with was seeing D play with Baby S (who is almost walking and not technically a baby anymore but that's what everyone calls her). D would make faces and fuss over Baby S and every time my heart just broke because it should be Reid that she is playing with. D is so ready to be a big sister and now who knows if she will ever get to be a big sister to a living baby.

So back to my awful day, I ended up by myself on the beach (the cabin had it's own private beach). The wind was so strong that I probably would have had any beach to myself that day. At least once, I cursed the damn lake for being too shallow. It was not a fun time on the beach that day, but I did get something out of it. As DBM's frequently do, I wrote Reid's name in the sand.


Northern SK beaches do not have big stretches of damp sand for writing names, besides I had a plan. Last night I turned the picture into this:


I kept all the rocks that were used to write his name and brought them home to put in the shadow box. (See, I didn't just have bad ideas while sitting on that beach) I don't know where its permanent home is going to be yet, but it's the first picture related to Reid that I have framed and I want it to be where everyone can see it.

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.

Don't know what to think

So yesterday was a pretty good day. The birthday brownies that I baked turned out to be very tasty. It's what happened when we sang "Happy Birthday" that is confusing me. I stuck a candle in DH's brownies and D started to sing and I joined in and then in a blink of an eye, D was bawling. I was not shocked as she has cried at all of her birthdays when presented with a cupcake with candles. What shocked me was when she said, "I miss Baby Reid so much." I really don't know what to make of it. She has said this before but only if she saw that I was upset first. And there have been times were I suspected that she said it to try to get me to do something (It's awful that I have to suspect my almost 3 year old of using her dead brother to manipulate me, but even if she was, she has no way to know what it really means so I can't really get angry at her). And it's not like she needed to convince us to give her what she really wanted, there was a huge chocolate brownie sitting right in front of her. I even asked her again this morning why she cried and she repeated that she missed Reid. I don't know what I am supposed to do with this. I don't want D to be as confused and sad about Reid as I am. Yay, more mommy guilt coming up.

Stupid, stupid, stupid

I can't even stay away for a few hours. I went back on FB to check on friend who claimed to be having mid-life crisis (I am so glad I have at least 1 friend who doesn't have kids) just to see if I could guess what was going on and there it is, yet another baby announcement. And of course, it's another boy. And I am a total wreck again.

It's not just that I am angry and sad because Reid is gone. It' s that yet another person who was supposed to be my friend, (I even personally called her to tell her about Reid) didn't call me to tell me that her baby had arrived. (He has born over a week ago). The kid is out and safe, I don't think she has to worry about me jinxing her pregnancy anymore. This is just the kind of cheering up I needed to go with the rapid approach of the 3 month milestone on Saturday. (And my hair is all falling out as well, another gift that comes after having a baby whether they are alive or not)

Way too hard

On Saturday afternoon, I tried to be a normal person and went out to run errands without an almost 3 year old in tow, something that I should look forward to. I thought it would be no different than going out with D, but it was very different. Without D to distract me, the effort of pretending to be normal human being was overwhelming. 1 1/2 hours into my errands, I had to have a cry in the car before I went into the grocery store and 1/2 an hour after that I full out bawled as soon as I pulled back into the driveway at home. It's not like I saw anything that really upset me, it was just too hard to keep it together. I feel so awful for all the DBM's whose first child has died and have to go out in the world without the "shield" of a living child.

Fast-forward a couple hours and I was feeling good enough to go along with DH and D for ice cream (no downside to eating a huge ice cream cone to make me feel better, right?). And of course, there is a family with a little girl and a baby waiting for ice cream when we arrive. I have no idea if that baby was a boy or girl. I couldn't even get within 50 feet of them because the baby was sitting in the exact same car seat that is sitting in my basement. The same car seat that we should have brought Reid home in.

So much for a nice soothing ice ream cone.

Home not so sweet home

I am back home after 2 weeks on the road. I am so glad to not be traveling anymore but mostly I feel like crap. It's not like I could pretend that Reid never existed and therefore never died while we were away, but there were definitely fewer reminders right in front of my face. Fewer babies and bellies around. I didn't have to walk past the "baby room" and all his things sitting in there a hundred times a day. I didn't have to be surrounded by memories of all the things I did while I was pregnant and all the things I have done to try to survive since I wasn't.

Maybe part of it is that everywhere I look there are chores that need to be done, (DH is wonderful but he definitely let more than a few things slide while D and I were away) but that shouldn't be enough to make me want to cry non-stop. It's like the weight on my chest that had eased off during the trip has all been dropped right back into place.

I can still cry

Well Sadkitty was right, all it takes is one wrong thing and you are a basket case all over again. Last night I made a slightly bitter comment and got " be grateful for what you have" from my dad. I fled the room in tears and only stopped crying long enough to get D bathed and into bed. Then I spent the rest of evening crying myself to sleep. He tried to apologize, but he doesn't understand that D is the only reason that I haven't said to hell with the world and spent the last 10 weeks curled up in bed. Holy shit, it's been 10 weeks. Yeah, now I can say "This has been the worst 10 weeks of my life."

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?

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?