Baby, it's cold outside (and inside and all around me)

This is what I woke up to on Monday morning. I took the picture this morning because I was too lazy to make myself go out into the snow yesterday, so obviously the snow is still here. Now it's not really that shocking for it to snow here before Halloween, but that doesn't make it feel any warmer.

I am officially now at the point of grieving where even the people who are supposed to support me the most, my husband and my mom, don't understand why I am still this sad. Yay, another Dead Baby Mama milestone instead of a living baby milestone. Whoo-hoo.


Edit: I live in Alberta, Canada. But I was watching the news last night and they were talking about all the snow in Washington state so it isn't just western Canada getting early snow.

A trip I didn't plan for

...but before you get excited and/or envious, it's a guilt trip.

Hi to all the ICLWers. Welcome to my messed up corner of the internet.

When I got up this morning, I thought I would have a nice fluffy post today about how I finally got off my ass and did something "for myself" as many people have been telling (nagging) me to do. However any fluffy happy feelings have been crushed by a phone call from my mom so it will be a big, whiny, bitchy post today.

While I generally avoid most people's phone calls, I almost always answer the phone when my mom calls. D likes talking to her grandma and I can ask about what's going on with my parents' farm, a topic which does not involve pregnancy or babies (living or dead) at all. I pretty much avoid talking about what's going on emotionally but I still at least talk to her.

Today my mom decided she needed to dump all her worries about me out there and shift through them. First she accused my of not going to counseling which I go to twice a month. Secondly she accused me of pushing everyone away. I had to ask where the line up of people trying to help me was because I hadn't seen it yet. It's hard to push away people who won't come close enough to even ask how I am doing. Then she started talking about God which always means we are going on a guilt trip ( and she is really good at taking me a guilt trips). Lets see if I can remember all the things I am doing wrong on that front: I am not taking D to church/Sunday school, I am not making my husband go to church and believe what she thinks he should believe, I am not being forgiving enough of the "friend" who stopped communicating with me (not that she's contacted me in any way, I'm supposed to reach out to her), I am not thankful enough for the things that I do have and and yes the big one, I am not accepting that Reid's death was part of God's plan so that means that it must have happened for the best.

All of those things make me so mad. I could probably write for days on how they make me angry and how her way of thinking just doesn't work for me, especially the part about Reid's death being something that God decided should happen. I am fine with her believing what ever she wants to about God but she shouldn't be allowed to try to make me feel bad for not believing the same things. She would say she is trying to help, but I don't need anyone making feel any worse than I do already.

And now I am pretty sure that this means that she is not going to be understanding of my feelings at all if I have a hard time dealing with the birth of my brother's child next month. The same brother who has never even mentioned Reid to me, not even a generic "I'm sorry about what happened to you". If I point that out to my mom, I'll just get another lecture on being the bigger person and forgiving him. There won't be any acceptance of the fact that seeing other people having babies just reminds me of what I lost and that it causes me pain. I guess I better start packing for that guilt trip now.

(And will someone please remind of this rant 25 years from now so that I can avoid doing the same thing to my daughter.)

Things you never want to read in an autopsy report

The appointment wasn't horrible, well at least no more horrible than going to get an autopsy report should be. Dr. K again proved she knows how to take care of a DBM by having all the clinic staff prepared for me. I didn't have to even set foot in the waiting room with all the pregnant women. There was crying of course, but there were hugs too.

So the report itself doesn't have any answers about why Reid died. There are a couple indicators that might point to undiagnosed gestational diabetes which leads to higher risks of stillbirth, but all my blood work was normal. However, since there's nothing else to blame, we are going to keep a very close eye on my blood sugar from now on. I am going for the less than fun 2 hour glucose test at the end of the month. If I don't manage to get knocked up in the near future, we will repeat the test when I do and then we will do it again at the normal 26-28 week mark. And maybe a few more times too just to be sure.

Coming home with a copy of the report and not being able to stop myself from reading it was way worse than the appointment.

Fun and Guilt-Inducing Autopsy Details:

1. Reid had brown eyes. Not a surprise given that all three living members of the family have brown eyes, but I would have rather seen that for myself.

2. He was above the 97th percentile for height and weight and just below 90th of head size (no wonder I couldn't deliver naturally). Normally you find out these things when you take your baby for check ups and vaccinations, not in autposy reports.

3. He was dressed in a blue sleeper. On one hand I am grateful that one of the nurses put clothes on him. (I couldn't bring myself to pick him up the last time I saw him and he was all swaddled up in blankets so I didn't know what he was wearing.) On the other hand I am consumed with guilt for not having been the one to dress him. Every time I read about how someone spent hours with their baby, bathing and dressing them and taking pictures, it's like a knife in my heart because I DIDN'T. It just NEVER OCCURED TO ME that I would want to do those things and no one even suggested it beyond someone asking if we wanted pictures right after I got out of surgery (when I was just a little in shock). I can spread the guilt around a bit to D.G. and the hospital staff (they are more used to dealing with stillbirths when the baby dies before delivery and the parents are not in total shock), but that doesn't change the fact that I will never have the change to do those things for my son. AND I have no "nice" pictures of him.

4. There were signs of hypoxia so his oxygen supply was cut off before he died. Of course they can't tell when or how he lost his oxygen supply but he did. It makes me worry that he suffered before he died. That during labour he was literally trying say. "Get me out of here, I'm dying!" and no one could hear him. That if I had just told my doctor I wanted a c-section at 38 weeks, he never would have been through stress of labour. Maybe he would have died anyway because life is stressful, but we might have gotten a few minutes or hours or days with him before he died.

I'm sure that there are more things in there what would freak me out but I am trying not focus on the fact that I could know how much all my baby's internal organs weighed. Not really the kind of thing you can brag about at mom's group.

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.