Change

Well... shit.  I started this blog 3 years ago and quickly lost interest.  Since then, everything has changed.  I started acupuncture school, I blew out my ACL and had surgery to repair it, I retired from roller derby, and the majority of the women I know got pregnant and had babies.

I also got pregnant, but my baby died.

My baby died.

Those words get a little easier to think and write as time goes on, but I cannot say them out loud without crying.  It sounds so wrong.  It looks so wrong written on the page.  It is a horrible thing that was supposed to happen to someone else; someone stronger, or someone who hadn't suffered as much as my husband and I already had.

But it happened to us.  Our baby girl, Nina-Louise Danger Van Ryn (yes, I wanted her middle name to be Danger... a reminder from her mom that she was born to be a badass, even when she didn't feel like one), was born and died on Dec 29, 2013.  There are many more details to this story, which I hope to eventually share here, but that simple fact is what has changed our lives forever.  She is gone, and we are here.  Without her.

I debated a lot about whether I should write publicly about losing my daughter.  The fact is that four weeks after losing Nina-Lou, miraculously, I'm still here.  Shattered, irreversibly changed, but here.  She died and I lived.  I don't know how or why I lived, but I did.  I remember telling people, towards the end of my pregnancy, "If I lose her at this point, I will be destroyed.  I will lose my mind.  I won't be able to go on living."  Oh, how I wish it were that easy, when something like this happens, to just dissolve.  I would like to curl up into a ball and shut my eyes until it's over.  But I wake up.  I shower.  I put food in my mouth and chew it up and swallow.  I don't find any meaning or purpose in these things, but I do them because I have to.  I hope that by writing here about my experience, maybe I'll find some purpose in this life; the life that I have to go on living without her.

Maybe I will create a tribute to my lovely little girl.  Maybe I will look back at this later and realize how far I've come.  Maybe I will provide solace to other bereaved parents.  Maybe, at the very least, I will pass the hours of the day a little quicker until it's time to crawl into bed with my husband, and fall into the sweet, mindless surrender of sleep.