Holding Oliver - 31 weeks

Last weekend I visited my best friend and her two week old son. I thought it would be difficult for me, to hold a tiny little baby, but it was natural. I wasn't thinking of my boys as I held Oliver - I was thinking about Oliver. He's cute and tiny and sweet. He smells of formula. He is not John and he is not Drew.
He is not what I am missing. He doesn't even represent what I am missing right now. That's how deep and soul-touching my grief is...my boys are an independent joy and an independent hurt, they are feelings untouched by things around me. It can't get better and it can't get worse, even when I'm holding a newborn baby boy. I believe I have found the middle ground in this grief of mine, though I am still affronted by people who like to tell me (unsolicited, of course) that "Third Time's A Charm" and "Well, this one is just meant to be, I guess."

Why do people think that of all the things to say to a BabyLoss Mama, saying that their dead children simply "weren't meant to be" is a good conversation starter? I can think of a million things to say - even simply, "How are you?" before launching into a speech about things being "better off" or "not my fate."

My dear mother-in-law, who is very sweet and well-meaning, has decided to throw me a baby shower. (Excuse me while I take a shaky breath here).

She would not be deterred. She insisted that I register for gifts and choose bedding and bibs. She has spent weeks planning and changing and planning the menu and the guest list. She has been so darn nice about everything. Emily is equally excited about the party.

I have a panic attack every time I think of going to this shower.

Where my mother in law sees a room full of people looking to celebrate me and the baby, I see a room full of pity head tilts, questions about whether "this one feels different," and comments about "the trouble."

Why must it be so hard to celebrate my rainbow baby? I think it's because Clark wasn't supposed to be my rainbow baby - Drew was. I live a life that isn't supposed to be - and celebrating anything that IS supposed to be feels like a fool's roulette.

The Thing About Dead Babies - Week 30

One thing I think the people around me don't realize is that I have four days of peak sorrow in my year - four days of remembering and crying and trying to reconcile my heart.
When you have a dead baby, you mourn the death date and the estimated due date. It isn't even something I do consciously. I'll notice that I have the blues, that my hormones are more hormonal and I want to sleep more and eat less. Then I realize - a due or death date is looming.
After a fairly emotional weekend of internal back-and-forth, I realized that Thursday is Drew's death date. There it is - on my the paper calendar and the ticking calendar of my heart - October 24 - the day I said goodbye to John's rainbow brother.
See, in our house, we "celebrate" the boys' birthdays with Emily. We go to the cemetery and release balloons or plant flowers or bring little toys to the headstone. My husband and I cry a little bit and we lay in the grass and look at the sky and just be sorrowful on a day that should have been happy.
But I'm sort of on my own with death days. I don't bring them up to Emily because we want her to celebrate her brothers. I don't mention it to my husband because this pain is the kind of pain I want to keep to myself. I don't want to have to explain it to someone because I really can't put it into words. It just hurts and that's all anyone needs to know. It's my hurt and I just want to hold it and let it be a real feeling for awhile.
So I know tonight and tomorrow and Thursday and the weekend and even the week after will be hard and I know that this will happen to me four times a year, every year, for the rest of my life.
That's what happens when you carry babies in your heart instead of your arms.

I'm going to throw up now - 29 weeks

I am certain of vomit as I type this now. I have failed my glucose tolerance test and am in the doctor's office, laptop on lap, for my three hour test.
I chugged the not-so-delicious orange flavored stuff and had my blood drawn, so now I wait - one eye one the clock - for 11:16 a.m. for the second blood draw of four. I feel like I am going to puke and that delicious burrito I had last night in preparation for fasting is suddenly not such a great idea.
Pregnancy is so much fun! (sarcasm).
I haven't written much lately because my days and weeks have been blissfully uneventful. All the way up until I failed this glucose test last week, I was just humming along, working, painting Clark's bedroom, ordering his custom bedding and curtains, trying to get the house organized...
All of it is impossible to do. We tore apart our bedroom because of a plaster issue and spent three weeks in flux with our furniture stuffed in every other room. Then we started on Clark's room and did the exact same thing plus carpet. That means the furniture can't go back in there until the carpet is installed.
I am amazed that this and a little blood sugar are the biggest problems I have in this pregnancy.
It is very difficult for me to get too excited about these faux disasters. I remember that with both John and Drew I told my husband I wanted to be the woman who fails the glucose test and whines and worries about it. I want to be the woman who has one strange bleed and considers that the disaster and near loss of her pregnancy.
Now I am that woman. It's kind of amazing.

Emily is another story.

My 7-year-old has meticulously planned for her brother's arrival and I was impressed with her level of trust that Clark is coming no matter what.
I was driving the other day and she asked me if Clark would look "just like other babies" and "if he would have anything wrong with him."

Even when we trust in our household, we trust with exceptions.

With Clark well into viability, with my cervix still "long and closed," with his room painted and waiting for carpet, with my baby shower invitations sent, there are still three people who are holding their breath and trying to trust and trying, trying, trying to believe in the average, uneventful pregnancy.

A Baby Loss Mama Doesn't Understand - Week 24

There is this one thing that has been on my mind more often than not lately. In my conversations with fellow Baby Loss Mamas, there is a common thread from the mamas of rainbow babies that I just can't quite grasp. Many of these mamas hold a tiny grudge against their rainbow - "I think to myself, if your sister were alive, you wouldn't be here" one mom said.
I don't want to feel this way about Clark. I don't feel this way about him. Not now and hopefully not ever. I told my husband that as devastated as I have been this last year with the loss of John and then Drew, carrying Clark has been a tormented joy. I worry, I watch every symptom, count every cramp, take every vitamin. I plan for happiness and prepare for another disaster. I lean terribly on the genetic science that soothes me, but I don't trust it at all.
But somehow that has everything to do with Clark and almost nothing to do with John and Drew. Of course I miss them. I still cry for them. I bought orange tulip bulbs to plant at their shared grave this weekend. They are front of mind, always.
But like I told my husband, as sad as I am, as much as I miss my boys, as much as they mean to me individually and together in the sense of motherhood and the sense of loss, I would not trade Clark for either one of them. I would not barter this child away to get back the most precious things I have lost.
I say this because Clark is as much my child as John or Drew. He is as much a part of me and of my husband as those lost little angels. I do not love him less. I do not love him more. This is a symptom, I suppose, of my insistence on grieving them as whole people with whole personalities and whole identities. I can honestly close my eyes and see what I think John would have looked like, or what Drew would have been like. But those somewhat assigned personalities and identities also extend to Clark.
For me, this isn't about "If your brother were alive, you wouldn't be here." It's about "Your brothers died and I am lucky to have you."
Perhaps this feeling will change when he gets here, when he is here and alive and I can think more about how his brothers never had these chances, the opportunity that comes with life.
But I never want to lose touch with the fact that this is a little person who is here not because his brothers died, but because we were brave enough and lucky enough to have him.

The Truth Hurts – 23 weeks

My husband and I have become a little bit obsessed with viability.

Now that we have hit the 23 week mark, my hubby, the king of charts and graphs and metrics, pulled out a viability calendar to scrutinize.

At 23 weeks, Clark has a 10 to 30 percent chance or survival if he were born today. The positive percentages go up exponentially with each week after this one. In a week or two he will have a 50/50 chance of survival.

The thought hit me and the words were out of my mouth before I could swallow them: “That gives him 10 to 30 percent more of a chance of survival at 23 weeks than his brothers had at full term.”

I’m right. The fact that this fact is true is an aching scar on my heart. I think I have only recently come around to the realization that my boys had no chance at life. Of course I knew this when we terminated, especially with Drew. But there is knowing something and then knowing something in your whole self. I had convinced myself that my boys had no chance and now I know that to be fact.

It makes me glad for Clark, that he has a chance, no matter how small, of survival. But it makes me want to cry and scream at the unfairness of it for John and Drew. How do you come to terms with your babies having never been given even the slimmest chance?

The Hard Leaps - 23 weeks

So here I am, 23 weeks!

I type that with a lot of enthusiasm, but not a lot of energy. There has been a lot going on and I am exhausted, mentally and physically.

Where to start?

I have had good scans since my last post – nothing about our situation has changed. I feel the baby kicking several times a day now, almost constantly throughout the course of the day, really. He seems strong. He responds to my husband’s touch and voice, which is a joy to see and feel.

I suppose that is the part of this pregnancy that is so markedly different for me than my angel pregnancies. John would actually squirm away from stimuli. Drew would ignore it. I know now that they were like this because they could not see or hear, both died before they could really feel sensations. I have the feeling John sensed vibrations – he moved when the dogs barked or if I yelled. We know now that the glycosylation meant they would have been born blind and deaf or been born with limited and steadily degenerative senses.

Clark, on the other hand, seeks out his father for activity. My husband puts his big paw on my belly and Clark squirms up to meet it and kick. It is my sign, more so than the genetic tests and ultrasounds, that this really is a different sort of pregnancy.

My daughter has taken on a mission or two of her own in the journey to big sisterhood.

Over the holiday weekend, we took her to the toy store and let her choose any toy she wanted. She chose a doll that wets itself.

“I have to practice,” she insisted. “I have to learn how to burp a baby and how to change diapers. I have to practice now.”

No arguments there. Every week, on our shopping trips, we buy something for the baby. I have worked it out that, mathematically, we should need about 100 packages of wipes in Clark’s first year. So we buy wipes now to prepare. Yesterday I bought a fuzzy little snowsuit for his December arrival. We have chosen binkies and bottles and lotions and toys and little but fun needs for the baby. This is good for my nesting and for Emily’s planning. It keeps us all in the right frame of mind – the place where we are preparing for a baby to come home, not preparing in case we have a live baby.

As for me, I am a lot bigger than I had anticipated I’d be at six months, which means I pretty much need to go clothes shopping again pretty soon. I’m exhausted a lot of the time and that makes me mad because the second trimester is supposed to be about feeling better and more energetic. All I want to do is sleep.

We had a real hold up with our nursery planning this month as a floor joist in the attic broke and sent a chunk of plaster crashing to the floor in our bedroom. All that blow-in insulation EVERYWHERE. So now me and Hubby are bunking in Clark’s room, so it feels a lot like we are camping in our own house. Not fun.

Emotionally, my thoughts are all over the place. On one hand, I miss my Drew and John so much. Taking Emily to Chuck E. Cheese over the weekend was hard for me – babies of all ages are always there. My mind never fails to jump from one lost son to the other – John would have been just big enough to sit on the rides. Drew would be just about as big as that little baby there.

I am constantly reminded that as blessed as I am to have this life and this possibility of Clark, this is not the life that I was meant to live. Something – two things – are missing and they will always be missing.  My arms will always ache for those lost boys. The emotional leaps from happy and blessed to genetically victimized are not big, but they are incredibly hard.

Did It Again - Week 19

So we skipped week 18. Life is busy and crazy with me working about one and a half jobs right now. Do I need to work so much? No. Do I want to work so much? No.

So why do I feel the need to work my pregnant self to death? Who knows. I just want to get financially ahead before this baby comes.

Baby, baby, baby. Thank goodness for this wiggly baby! I feel him every single day, multiple times each day. He gets especially wiggly for Mallo Cups right now. It's the most fantastic thing to be able to let go of my deep fear because I can FEEL him. Just about the time not-so-irrational "Dead Baby Girl" gets scared, Clark knees me in the bladder and it hurts and I am happy and soothed. Listen - Baby Loss Mamas know - we take comfort in the strange, small things.

Part of our busy life of crazy includes getting our house ready for Clark. We took all the furniture and junk out of the guest room last weekend. (We have been using this room for "storage" since John died. By "storage" I mean we were hoarders in one room).

We sorted the stuff and got rid of most of the furniture. Then my husband vacuumed and spot cleaned the carpet, vacuumed again and then used a borrowed Hoover carpet cleaner to deep clean it. OH. MY. GOD the stuff that came out of that carpet! So we stood in the doorway of the little bedroom and decided to go ahead and replace the carpet anyway because we hate the color, it was in the house when we bought it, and the stuff that came out of it was gross.

So now we will scrub down the walls and let them dry. Then we will paint and then have the new carpet installed and THEN we can put the baby furniture in there.

In the middle of all of this we painted and redecorated our daughter's room and transformed it into "The Big Sister Room."

The 7-year-old is very excited about Clark, but she has been an only child for a long, long time. The concern is that she won't feel special when he comes, that she will begin to resent him. So we are transforming her room (and her, to some degree) into "The Big Sister." So now her room is Tiffany blue instead of baby pink. Big Sister.

As for symptoms, my feet still hurt and I am MOST CERTAINLY in my maternity clothes (especially pants!) now. I need to buy bigger underwear and that's never fun. As I mentioned before, I feel the little one kicking and wiggling all the time now. Cravings are gone, but now I just eat everything all the time. I'm almost always hungry. I drink a lot of orange juice.

We go to the high risk OB on Friday for the "anatomy scan." This is the scan everyone gets - the "gender scan" for Live Baby Mamas who are too naive to know that doctors are looking for mostly disaster - and the gender to shut them up and/or keep them coming to the doctor for pre-natal care. I'm not worried about this scan because of all the good scans that have come before it.

So next week is the halfway point and we are ever-closer to viability. As Little Miss Emily always says "It takes a long time to grow a baby."