waves

Last week, Thursday, I went a full day without crying.  I was amazed.  I felt sad that day, and I saw things of Facebook that were upsetting (this, by the way, happens every time I look at Facebook, but I still do it), and I felt worried about whether or not Turner and I would ever have a baby, and I missed Nina and felt her profound absence in our lives.  But the tears never came.  I went through my day to day activities and I didn't break down or need to hide my hideous, dark sadness.  It was just there with me, but it never pounced.  I carried it silently.

Then Friday came, and the fucking shit hit the fan.

It started with my acupuncture treatment in the morning.  I was going through my various symptoms with the intern at my school clinic, discussing my appetite, my body temperature, my bowel movements, etc.  And then I burst out with, "this is just the shittiest fucking experience of my life and I am so sad, " and as I said those words, tears poured out of my eyes, and I couldn't stop.  Her supervisor came in to check my pulse and go over the diagnosis.  This supervisor is a teacher at my school, an adorable, tiny, elderly chinese woman who taught me medical mandarin during the time when I was pregnant for the first time, before the miscarriages had started and before I knew how bleak life could be.  She was kind and asked me questions about how much blood I lost during delivery, and she told me to take care and that they would put together a good herbal prescription for me (a dank concoction that is burbling away on my stovetop as I type).  I really kind of wish she would have said something consoling, like, "I'm so sorry your baby died," but she didn't.  They left the room and I cried more.

I weighed myself on the scale out in the hallway and the number from last week stared back at me, stupidly the fucking SAME, and I cried more.  I sent Turner a text to vent, and then I followed that up with one that said It's bullshit.  I'm so frustrated.  I hate my stupid life.  Then the intern came back to treat me, and I put my phone on silent and threw it in my purse.  I laid face down on the table and sobbed tears and snot onto the floor through the face cradle, afraid to wipe my nose because of the needles in my wrist.  When she came in to check on me 15 minutes later, I had to ask her to stop the treatment early; I just couldn't lie there crying onto the floor anymore.  She thought my nose was just stuffed up, and she was concerned that I was getting a cold.  No, I told her, I'm just crying a lot today.  She was silent but I felt her concern.  She gently massaged my back after she removed the needles.  It felt good.  I breathed.

When I got out of the building and looked at my phone, I was confronted by a series of increasingly panicked texts from Turner, the last three of which read Will you please talk to me?  Where are you?  Do I need to come home?  Sweet T-bone.  I called him and caught him before he was about to hop on a bus.  He hadn't realized that I was getting a treatment.  Poor guy thought I was gonna off myself.  Or something.  I scared the shit out of him and I felt horrible.  We talked and he went back to work.  We texted back and forth while I sat in the car and rain beat down all around me.  I cried and felt sure that we would never have another baby, that Nina was my only shot at happiness and that I had ruined it.  I felt deeply sorry for myself.

I cried myself out, and then decided to stop by Trader Joe's for groceries.  That stupid mantra of dead baby which has come and gone since she died was going full force in my head.  Dead baby dead baby dead baby.  I wanted to be on my first shopping outing with the baby.  To be struggling with a shopping cart and a baby in the rain.  To be laughably unprepared and stressed out and trying to manage life as a mother of a newborn.  I'm not that at all.  She is just not here and it's so strange.  Life is surreal and familiar all at once.

Right after Nina-Louise died, I kept having this feeling that maybe it was all a nightmare.  I sincerely felt that it might be.  Faced with such an irreversible, horrifying reality, my mind went to crazy places.  I am a little ashamed of my childish desire to just shut my eyes and have it all be changed as I opened them.  But I hear that it's natural.  I wish so much that she had lived.  I wish it so hard.  Friday, in the rain, putting my groceries in my car in the Trader Joe's parking lot, that feeling came back to me strongly, and for a split second I entertained it; considered that there might be some way I could take a sleeping pill or meditate my way into my real life.  Wake up and find myself still pregnant, having been taught a profound lesson about gratitude and love.

It's not a nightmare.  It really happened.  I have to heal.  I have to keep living and moving forward.  It's the hardest thing I ever imagined.

Later that night, after a few more crying jags and half a bottle of wine, Turner and I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and I allowed myself to get lost in the fantasy of the film.  It felt good to get swept away.  And when my mind started to settle back into dead baby dead baby dead baby I thought about our next baby.  I thought about my darkest fear, the voice in my head that tells me that I'm cursed with a desire to have a child that runs deeper than any other, and the inability to do so.

And then, I did something a little crazy.  I decided that was a bunch of bullshit.

I decided that, no matter what, I am going to be a mom to a live baby.  I decided to believe in that reality beyond any other.  I will have a baby.  I will have a baby.  I keep telling myself this, and it actually comforts me.  It allows me to mourn Nina-Louise without getting that all mixed up with mourning the life I wanted for myself.  I had been laboring under the thought that, in order to heal from this, I needed to confront the fact that I may not ever be a mom.  Reconcile the mother I wanted to be with the mother I am.  But, honestly, I am not ready to do that.  Right now, I need to believe I am still going to be that mom I wanted to be.

Last night, one of my good friends gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.  We had been pregnant together, our due dates only a few weeks apart.  Nina came 2 and a half weeks early, tiny and dead, and her boy came a week late, 9 pounds of alive.  As her due date came and went, I started to realize that, along with my obvious jealousy of her excitement and joy at the inevitability of meeting her baby, I was terrified that her baby was going to die.  I was so scared that I was a bad luck charm, and that the horror of my life was going to rub off on her.  That her baby would die and she would always secretly blame me for it.  After we got word that he had come, alive and healthy, I breathed a huge sigh of relief and admitted to Turner this fear I had been secretly harboring.  As soon as I said it out loud, I realized that it was silly.  Life is neither fair nor unfair; it just is.  And although looking at the picture of her sweet baby makes my heart hurt because loving the two of them makes me feel my loss so acutely, it also gives me a strange feeling of hope.  Maybe next year that little guy can meet my little one.  Maybe I can get through another 10 months of pregnancy without losing my mind.  Maybe I can deliver a baby and hold him or her in the moments after birth, and be amazed that I did it.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I looked at the picture of my friend in the moments after her birth, her exhausted face and the tiny baby with his mouth full of boob, and I stared and I stared and I stared.  It filled me with the warm tingly feeling of love and desire that I get whenever I see new babies -- a sensation I've experienced my whole life, even before I had ever been pregnant or was sure I wanted to be a mother -- and it filled me with so much longing.  Longing that my birth could have gone differently.  It brought back memories of what it was like, giving birth to Nina-Louise.  I am so proud of myself for what I did: I endured the pain of childbirth, knowing that my daughter was dead.  It was so hard, and it pains me that I can't share my story in the same bragging, amazed-at-my-own-strength way that mothers of live babies get to.  I am amazed that I did it.  I am amazed at the pain of childbirth; that red hot wave that you have to ride until it crashes out on the other side, and then prepare yourself for the next.  I'm amazed at the way it felt as her body gushed out of me.  Right after I pushed her out, even though she was dead, I still expected to hear a chorus of congratulations, because I had done it, the seemingly impossible!  I had known that women who lose their babies at term still have to birth the baby, and that fact had always been a sobering, nightmarish idea, but I had faced the fear and the pain and the work, and yet the room was filled with a horrifying silence.  It was like, until then, no one else had been sure of the reality of Nina's death.  But there she was.  Dead, dead, dead.  Birth is so primal, and when I was pushing, I became an animal.  The push came from somewhere else.  I couldn't stop the force of it, it was so strong.  I was something else in those final moments, and I think I let go of the reality of what was happening for a few minutes.  I was so relieved to feel her come out, that I was actually a little surprised at the silence that followed.  But the truth is it was not a happy birth, not the kind of birth you brag about in passing.  I like to think that people, especially my closest loved ones, are strong enough to hear my story along with the happy ones.  And I know that it is valid and true, and deserves to be told.  But I'm not sure if it's right.  I am not sure that Nina's birth story belongs alongside the birth stories of live babies.  It might have to stay hidden away, and that saddens me.

However, I must admit, I am getting used to this life on the other side.  I am less and less shocked that my baby isn't here.  I am less and less surprised at the way my heart grips tightly in my chest when I see things that remind me of her.  I am actually, really, starting to move forward.  It sometimes makes me feel sincerely guilty, but it mostly makes me feel relief; getting a glimpse of how I might be able to get through this is hugely comforting.  It is so difficult.  It is such a roller coaster.  But the dips and turns are coming a little less frequently and sometimes I can even see them in the distance and steel myself before I get thrown.  My god, I miss that baby.  I miss her so much.  But, as my therapist reminded me last week, although I feel like Nina is a part of me, she is also her own person.  I am me, and she is she, and we have different paths to follow.

I finished Cheryl Strayed's Wild last night, and I related to so much of what she found throughout the course of her life, in reconciling the death of her mother and integrating that into who she was from then on.  It all comes back to life just HAPPENING.  It happens and we deal, and the suffering and the happiness and the work is all ours.  I also discovered that Cheryl Strayed has an advice column called Dear Sugar, and someone on a baby loss blog posted a link to a very poignant response she wrote to a woman who had lost her baby to stillbirth.  I copied and pasted a paragraph of it into the notes on my phone so that I could reference it when I need to.  It says

You will never stop loving your daughter.  You will never forget her.  You will always know her name.  But she will always be dead.  Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will.  Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words.  Nobody will protect you from your suffering.  You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away.  It's just there, and you have to survive it.  You have to endure it.  You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.  Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing -- the genuine healing, the actual real down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change -- is entirely and absolutely up to you.  

Below this, in the notes on my phone, is another one, that I wrote.  It' says You are going to have a baby.  You will be the mom you want to be.  Stay positive and believe in yourself!  I have looked at this note several times since I wrote it in there two days ago.  It brings me comfort to know that it's up to me.  I know that I am not through with mourning Nina, and that dark days will still come and I will still cry and I have a lot of work ahead of me.  I miss her.  I love her.  I can't ever entirely let her go.  But I am choosing to believe that I can still, despite her death, be the mother I want to be.

I am me, and she is she.

I am still so lost without her, without the possibility of her.  It hurts me so deeply to know with absolute certainty that any baby I have in the future will be a different baby; even another little girl with dark curls and beautiful lips will be someone else, with a different name and a different future.  I find both comfort and pain in that fact.  She's gone and we're here, and there is no answer to the question WHY.  It just is.  It just IS and there is no going backward.  The future is a vast unknown expanse and there is nothing left to do but live it.