Pregnancy After Loss

The Blame Game

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Recently, I have been extremely bothered by the seemingly-innocuous question, “how’s the baby?” So many people have said this to me recently in person, by phone, or by text. It always leaves me completely frozen.

How’s the baby? I HAVE NO IDEA. And trust me, I wish I did.

I want to scream at the question-asker, “I FUCKING WISH I KNEW.” It’s something I think about basically every waking moment of every day of every week of every month.

Depending on my mood, I usually say something with a similar meaning to, “I fucking wish I knew,” but in a slightly nicer tone. I’ll say something like, “I wish I knew! Lol”. That “lol” gets them every time. I want people to think, “She’s so breezy! So casual! Look at her, what a chill loss mom!” FALSE.

Sometimes I say, “your guess is as good as mine!” Sometimes I say, “how do you think?,” which always leaves them confused, because how would they know? But the thing is, they honestly do know just as much as I know.

In this weird in-between time where people know I’m pregnant and I’m definitely showing (if you know what my body usually looks like), but I’m not feeling consistent movement and I don’t have closely-spaced appointments, I really do not know how the baby is.

I was chatting about this with my therapist this week, and she said, “why can’t you say, ‘last time we saw him, he was good’?” Sometimes, I do say this. But that usually leads to follow-up questions about why I stated it that way, and what happened since that last time. Nothing bad happened! But also, nothing happened at all. I am just operating on a wing and a prayer. I haven’t had visual confirmation that my baby is alive in weeks.

In my mind, I compared this to another frequently-asked question I receive, “how are your parents?” Of course, I don’t have airtags on my parents and I don’t watch them on monitors at all times, I have no idea how my parents are doing at the exact moment when someone asks me about them. And yet, I answer that question all the time. I say they’re great and give some sort of recent update about them. It doesn’t send me into a panic, and I don’t say, “well, I haven’t had proof of life from my parents in 9 days, but last time I spoke to them, they were very much ok.”

So, why is it so different when someone asks about my baby? First of all, just like I mentioned about trauma informing anxiety around pre-e, trauma is also informing my thoughts here. Thankfully, I have never had someone ask me how my parents were, and then something horrific happened and I didn’t know about it. If that had happened to me, I might have a similar trauma response now when people ask about them. That’s exactly what happened with my last baby: things were very bad, and I had no idea.

But it’s more than that. People don’t expect children to be their parents’ keepers. People do not expect a human to know IMMEDIATELY, with some sort of psychic capability, when something happens to their parents. With pregnancy, people do. If it turns out that a mom had no clue their child was in danger, the blaming and shaming comes out with a vengeance.

When speaking with my therapist, I told her that for some reason, with this specific question, I find that I can’t “lie” and say the baby is good. When pressed, I said, “what if I say the baby is good, then the next day I find out he isn’t, and then not only did I lie, I will be blamed for not knowing something had happened?” We dug into that blame a little bit more, and as with everything else, there’s a touch of PTSD there.

Last year, I will never forget when I checked into triage at labor and delivery, and the nurse there called me a mom for the very first time. She said, “you’re doing great mom; you did exactly the right thing for your baby coming in and getting everything checked out.” At the time, I said, “don’t call me mom, it’s way too early.” In hindsight, that statement bothered me even more, but for a completely different reason. I know she meant it to bolster my confidence, and to make me feel like I did a great thing by coming in when I thought something was amiss, but the reality is, I didn’t know anything was wrong. I had no clue. I felt great and I was at home cooking dinner! The only reason I went to the hospital was because my doctor called my cell phone and told me to. That statement from the nurse actually made me feel terrible because, if great moms knew when something was wrong with their babies, then what did that make me?

Good moms are expected to always know what is going on with their kids, and this extends throughout their lives. I hear the guilt from moms who had reduced fetal movement and didn’t know, or moms who put their kids to bed and then they never woke up, and from parents of much older kids who maybe let them go out late at night, even when they had a “bad feeling.” The guilt never ends.

My therapist shared a personal story about someone she knew who was taking care of her 20-something-year old grandson, and he had a seizure and died, but she hadn’t known because he was in his room with the door closed. This poor woman was blamed for not checking on him sooner, and somehow not preventing this completely unpredictable event. He was a fully-grown adult who had the right to privacy and a closed door! It’s not just guilt, but also blame that never ends.

In pregnancy, it feels like, as Gen Z says, “you have one job.” The job is to keep your baby alive, but it’s also to know when they’re not alive, or not doing well. This is easier said than done.

As I’ve said many times on here, with Maliyah, I had no symptoms and no signs. But I also didn’t know what the symptoms or signs were that I was supposed to be looking out for. Parts of me blame myself for this, and wonder that if MAYBE I had known what to look for, I would have spotted something. I know this is probably not true, since I was in the hospital for days, and doctors were asking all the right questions and looking for all signs, and I had none.

But this time, I do know. The main difference between last pregnancy and this one is my knowledge. With that knowledge, comes more blame. I say to myself, “this time I will KNOW if something is wrong.” But what if, yet again, there are no external signs? What if I don’t know? I will never be entirely sure. What if I say things are good, and they aren’t? I wish I had an ultrasound machine at home, but I don’t.

I am symptom-spotting all day every day. I know that a headache is a tell-tale sign of high blood pressure and pre-eclampsia due to brain swelling. But headaches are also just a common occurrence in pregnancy. Also, I am prone to headaches outside of pregnancy! This does not help my anxiety. I also know that dizziness and light-headedness is a sign of low blood pressure. Since my blood pressure has recently been on the low side, I am now looking for this possibility as well.

Monday, I was at the gym, and I started to get a headache. I was panicking. My blood pressure had been fine in the morning, but what if it was spiking? How quickly could I get to the hospital? Should I go home and check my BP or just go directly there? I felt paralyzed, stared blankly at the wall, and I hadn’t done any exercises for 2 minutes when my friend asked me if I was ok. I remembered that I had not had a headache before class, and one thing that had changed is that I put my hair up. Sure enough, when I took my ponytail down and quickly braided my hair, my head felt a lot better.

Then, 3 minutes later, we went into a circuit of chest presses to high bridge pulls on the TRX. I got up from the bench, and felt light-headed. Panic set in again. Was my blood pressure actually too low? How do I make it go up? I’d never had this problem before, so I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I also go to the hospital for that? Again, I stood paralyzed by fear. Then I remembered that it is semi-common to get light-headed from standing up quickly, and it’s even more common in pregnancy, especially when feeling overheated. After standing there staring at the wall for a second, I felt completely normal again. At least, I felt normal physically. Mentally, I felt like a crazy person.

Meanwhile, the blame game was continuing in my head. What if I went to the hospital and they asked where I had been when it happened, and said I shouldn’t have been at the gym? I have followed all of my doctor’s advice, but surely this would somehow end up my fault. Don’t I care about my baby? I should know better! As a reminder, readers, I entered this thought spiral simply because my ponytail was too tight. The self-blame is never-ending.

In my rational mind, I know there’s no explanation for what happened with Maliyah. It is not my fault. Many doctors have told me this. But to me, it still feels like I somehow made some mistake. Maybe I didn’t make a mistake causing her demise, but I certainly feel like I made a mistake by not realizing it faster. Everyone is allowed one mistake of innocence. Two mistakes though? Not ok. I feel even more pressure now to do everything in my power to protect this baby because I already used up my naiveté, and I do not want to be blamed if something goes wrong again.

There’s no good way to answer the question, “how’s the baby.” This is part of why I avoid discussing my pregnancy in general. I have decided that for now, I will simply sidestep the question like a good politician and instead say, “physically I’m feeling good.” That is true, but a non-answer to the actual question. Another one of my favorites at the moment is: “no news is hopefully good news.” Also true. Note I didn’t say, “no news is good news,” because that may be a lie. Every one of these interactions is a stark reminder of how lovely it would be to be pregnant and naïve, and how nice it must feel to just answer simple questions with simple answers. But that’s not my story, and none of this is simple.

(Written at: 21 weeks 4 days)

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Pregnancy After Loss

The Danger Zone

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white caution cone on keyboard

Here’s a warning up-top: This may be my most boring blog to date. There are a lot of numbers and statistics. That said, it is also possibly my most important blog I’ve ever written. While I’ve never been fully transparent about what happened to me last year during my pregnancy, today seemed like the right time to share since May is Preeclampsia Awareness Month, and May 22 is World Preeclampsia Day.

You will read that my story was incredibly rare. That said, preeclampsia is still one of the leading causes of maternal death in the United States.

American women are more than three times as likely as Canadian women to die in the maternal period, and six times as likely to die as Scandinavians. In every other wealthy country, and many less affluent ones, maternal mortality rates have been falling; But in the U.S., maternal deaths increased from 2000 to 2014. The rate of preeclampsia in the U.S. has increased by 25% in the last two decades and is a leading cause of maternal and infant illness and death. Preeclampsia is responsible for over 70,000 maternal deaths and 500,000 fetal deaths worldwide. Up to 24% of pregnant women with HELLP syndrome and up to 34% of babies die from the condition.

There are a lot of statistics, and in my case, I came down on the wrong side of basically every one, with one important exception: I’m still alive and I could very easily not be.

This blog was a tricky one to write, because my idea of “the danger zone” is very different from other moms. Therefore, even though I know this is my personal blog where I am sharing my personal opinions, I want to start with the disclaimer that, as always, people may feel very differently than I do.

The danger zone in pregnancy is historically prior to 12 or thirteen weeks, or prior to the second trimester. Most people think of the weeks after that as the safe zone for one very specific reason: 80% of miscarriages occur before the 12th week of pregnancy. As someone who has been on the shit end of a statistic before (more on that later), when I see that 80% number, all I see is “1 out of 5 miscarriages happen after that time.” But most (non-traumatized) people don’t think that way. This is why most people announce their pregnancy after 12 weeks. The actual miscarriage danger zone is far more nuanced than that, of course. The rate does not DROP after 12 weeks, it slowly decreases over time, and once you have a confirmed strong heartbeat, a confirmed uterine pregnancy, and a confirmed growth rate, all of these numbers decrease. This can happen far before 12 weeks, even as early as 6 weeks. But in general, people feel “safe” after 12 weeks.

Now that I’m in the loss community, however, I know innumerable ways for babies to die at all different stages. For me, I think about genetic abnormalities such as trisomies, things you might be able to detect in a non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) blood draw at 9 weeks. I think about neural tube or abdominal wall holes or placental leaks, which may be detected by an alpha fetoprotein (AFP) blood test at 15-20 weeks. I think about anencephalies, which may be detected in a 12- or 20-week anatomy scan. And of course, I think about everything that could go wrong after, up until full-term stillbirth, SIDS, school shootings, you name it, I’ve thought about it.

Some of those dangers will literally never go away. There is no “safe zone.”

That said, I have learned from my experience, and from my peers in the loss space, that a person’s individual trauma tends to inform their anxiety and their own fears.

For example, I know a lot of women who experienced early miscarriages by discovering bleeding, so then in a next pregnancy, they fear going to the bathroom because they think they’ll find blood. For me, in this second pregnancy I am always elated to go to the bathroom, because of my whole organ-shifting snafu in my previous pregnancy.

For some women who found out their babies had no heartbeat from a scan in their first pregnancy, they are terrified of ultrasounds in a next pregnancy.

For me, my personal “danger zone” is 20 weeks and up, which is exactly what I am right now, to the day. The rate of miscarriage once you get to 20 weeks is less than .5%, but for me, I feel as if I’m entering the danger zone. The reason for that is, except in EXTREMELY rare cases, the risk of pre-eclampsia begins at 20 weeks.

I’ve never gone into the particulars of my story on my blog before, but the reason my pregnancy ended last year was due to an extremely severe form of pre-eclampsia (“pre-e”), known as HELLP Syndrome. HELLP is an acronym that stands for hemolysis (H) elevated liver enzymes (EL) and low platelets (LP). The severity of HELLP is divided into three classes, and I had the worst kind. Serious illness and death can occur in about 25% of HELLP cases, and most of those deaths occur in the top class, the one I had. That percentage is only the first of many in this post, so strap in.

As I mentioned before, I’ve gotten the shit end of the stick in a LOT of statistics. Let’s do some math, and start at the top. Among pregnant women, 5 to 8% develop pre-e but in the United States, it’s more like 3 to 4% of pregnancies. That means 96-97% of women in the US do not develop pre-e. Unfortunately, I was in the 3-4%.

Of the 3-4% of pre-e cases, 15% of those cases develop HELLP syndrome, 85% do not.  Therefore, I was 15% of the 3-4%. Also, of the 3-4%, 90% of pre-e cases occur after 34 weeks of gestation. Therefore, I was in the 10% of the 3-4%, and then 15% of that.

Let’s do the math another way: HELLP syndrome happens in about 1 to 2 of 1,000 pregnancies, or .1 to 0.2% of all pregnancies depending on the study. HELLP syndrome is typically a third-trimester condition, with most (68%-70%) cases occurring between 27 and 37 weeks of gestation.

For me, I was at 24 weeks when I started showing signs. I haven’t done the exact math, but basically, I was in the 30% of .5% of pregnancies. And the percentage is actually even smaller than that, if you consider the fact that my case was so severe.

Most doctors agree that test results are not alarming until they are “twice the upper limit of normal.” When I checked into the hospital, my liver enzymes were five times the upper limit. By the time they said it was “not safe for me to be pregnant anymore,” which was two days later, my enzymes were 11 times the upper limit. This all happened within 48 hours.

If you’re an optimist, and you’re a believer in “lightning doesn’t strike twice,” then you may be thinking that I am worried about nothing. The statistics are SO small, it couldn’t possibly happen to me again, right? WRONG. Here’s the problem: once you have it once, you’re far more likely to have it again.

More stats… here we go:

Research suggests that for women who had HELLP, the rate of recurrence ranges between 5-19% with higher rates if HELLP developed in the second trimester aka me. Now again, if I hadn’t already been 1 in 100,000,000 or something like that, I’d be calmed by that fact that at WORST, 81% of people do not get it again. But in my traumatized brain, all I see is, “1 in 5 chance this happens again.” When I mentioned in a previous blog about the bravery of pregnancy after loss, this is exactly the statistic I was thinking about.

If you’ve gotten through the numbers, thanks for sticking around. For most people this is boring, and completely irrelevant. For me, I do these calculations literally every day in my mind. I think of the risk factors I have, the gestational age of my baby, his chances of survival, how quickly things may escalate, and the time it will take me to get from my apartment to the hospital. I do math in my head all day every day. No wonder I have trouble thinking or caring about anything else. I’m in a constant loop of risk assessment calculations.

Many experts would say that there is a lot of hope, and that in most cases, even if I get HELLP again, it’s likely to happen later, and less severely. But again, when I see “most cases,” I think, “I’m not most.” I wasn’t “most” last time, and I probably won’t be “most” this time.

As I consider how scared I am, even at 20 weeks, my feelings of jealousy continue to creep in. Just last week, I saw 3 pregnancy announcements on my social media feeds. You’d think I’d be happy, because I have a little bean growing too! But instead, I have begun a terrible habit of zooming alllll the way into the ultrasound photos. I know exactly what I’m looking for, after all, I’ve had many of my own photos on my fridge, 6 with Maliyah, and 7 so far with baby 2.

I look for two very specific things in the social media posts on the scan photos: the gestational age in the ultrasound, and the date. Then I calculate how long they waited to post. The only reason I do this is jealousy. I wish I had the confidence to tell people at 13 weeks. I wish I saw my 12-week scan and thought, “I’m going to bring home a living baby and I’m going to tell everyone!” But I am 7 ultrasounds in, and I still don’t believe that.

If anything, as I enter “the danger zone” today, I think less and less that it will happen. All of a sudden, I am watching my own body like a hawk.

Yesterday, I walked 15,000 steps. I came home and I put up my feet to watch tv and I inspected my legs like a scientist. Were there signs of swelling?

If I feel a possible headache coming on (which I’m prone to outside of pregnancy), I wonder if my brain is swelling.

Every night when it’s almost midnight, I play the constant game of, “am I seeing spots, or do I just need to take out my contacts?”

I leaned down to pick up a pen from the floor today, felt a slight twinge in my side, and wondered if that would be considered “upper right quadrant pain.”

All those bolded words are signs of HELLP. They are signs I knew nothing about last year, and to be honest, I didn’t have any of those symptoms, anyway. But now I know, and now I am VIGILANT. I have never known my body more than I know it now.

You may think that makes me feel safer, and that I will now know when there are signs of things going south, but my previous pregnancy took that from me as well. Last year, when I checked into the hospital, even the specialists were floored by the incongruity of my lab work (BAD), and my physical symptoms (NONE). If the doctors couldn’t believe it, how am I supposed to trust my own body? The doubts and fears I have are creeping in with a vengeance, and I am only on day 1 in the danger zone.

Every morning when I wake up, and every night when I go to sleep, I remind myself of what I can control (taking my meds and trying my hardest to keep my stress down) and what I can’t (everything else). I have no words of wisdom. I have no sage advice. All I have is the fact that I will wake up again tomorrow, and try to get through that day, just like I got through this one. One day at a time, day after day. I have a feeling this herculean task will become more and more difficult as the weeks wear on, as we approach the date I carried Maliyah until, and then after, as well. The danger zone is forever, so I am arming myself for battle.

(Written at: 20 weeks 0 days)

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Grief and Pregnancy Loss

The One Where All of Her Friends Were Pregnant

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TW: Pregnancy Loss

I am 36 years old. That means that if my friends want to have kids it’s now or never. Unfortunately for me, that means a lot of my friends are having kids now. And I am… not.

It’s hard. I think the main theme of this blog post is going to be that it is just plain hard. It’s difficult to navigate friendships when you’re a loss mom and your friends are pregnant. It is difficult to keep friends when they’re pregnant, to communicate with them, to relate to them, to be happy for them, to be around them, and quite honestly, it’s hard to just see them. Let’s start there, with the bare minimum.

How do you keep a friend when literally seeing a picture of them makes you cry? I remember exactly where I was post-loss when I saw the first picture of my friend and her baby bump. It was bad. It set me off for about three full days. It was not a surprise that she was pregnant, I already knew. It was also not a surprise how far along she was, I knew her due date. But to see that physical proof of something she had that I didn’t have, it was brutal. (Side note: I do not fault her at all for posting a photo, in fact I have a whole blog coming about this.)

I saw her body, and my thoughts started to spiral: Was I ever that big? What did people think of me? Did they ever think I was pregnant? What do people say to her when she’s in public? Do people congratulate her? Give up their seat for her? Can her husband feel the kicks? Do they ask her what the sex of the baby is? Does she already have names in mind?

All of these were things that I never got to have, and they were right there in my face. The hardest part was that when that picture was taken, she was exactly the same amount of weeks I was when our daughter died, but every body is different, and my body never looked like that.

One option to deal with these friendships would have been to stop all communication with my pregnant friends, or as my therapist called it, avoidance LOL. I decided this was not what I wanted for a few reasons: 1. I had lost enough, and I didn’t want to lose my friends, too. And 2. My anxiety NEEDED to know that my friends were ok.

One of the worst parts of navigating these relationships was that my emotions were and are unpredictable. I really didn’t know that seeing a photo would be so triggering. But I knew that if a photo sent me down a rabbit hole, seeing a pregnant friend in person would be even worse. For that same friend in the photo, we were going to hang out a month later, but I ended up telling her a week later that I couldn’t. I just didn’t think it would be productive for either of us if I was crying the whole time. Another month later, I changed my mind again and decided that I wanted to see her, so long as she wanted to see me. My feelings and moods kept changing, and there was no way she could have known.

A month ago, I went to coffee with another friend who was 9 months pregnant. I was SO proud of myself for this, especially for giving her a hug when I left. I thought I might spontaneously break into sobs when her baby bump touched my flat(ter) stomach, but I held it together.

Even when we didn’t physically see each other, it was hard to cut off friends from communication when we were used to speaking constantly. As I mentioned in my blog about small talk, conversation felt extremely meaningless when I knew we were just dancing around and avoiding the big stuff. As the loss parent, it was my job, I supposed, to lead the conversation. Most good friends avoided speaking about their pregnancies to me at all. I knew they did this to protect my heart, but sometimes it felt like they were actually just hiding from me and excluding me. When I most recently heard from a friend that she, too, was pregnant, she told me she wouldn’t talk about it at all on the group chat. For some reason, that rubbed me the wrong way. I knew she was doing it so that the chat would be a safe space for me, but instead, it felt like my friends were afraid to talk about their lives in front of me anymore. I was too fragile for them to share with, and they had to walk on eggshells around me. It made me take a step back and think about what I actually would want, if asked, and I realized that I didn’t know! How could my friends possibly know if I didn’t know.

In my specific case, I had the added complication in my loss that I nearly died. When I think of pregnancy, I think of death. I know too much. I know allll of the things that can go wrong. For example, my anxiety and superstition would not let me publish this blog until all of my friends due in September delivered alive-babies, and all of my friends survived and went home from the hospital.

Recently, I texted another one of my pregnant friends who lives in the same neighborhood as me. I had texted her on her birthday a few months back and she hadn’t replied. I had seen her post a few times on social media, but she never mentioned a pregnancy. I started to get nervous. I texted and asked how she was, her due date, how everything was going. As I suspected, she hadn’t been texting me because she didn’t want to push her pregnancy on me. Once I texted, I opened our communication again, which I was happy for, but then she offered for us to go on a walk. This was one step too far. I couldn’t imagine chit-chatting and walking alongside a 9-month pregnant person. I typically avert my eyes when I see pregnant strangers on the sidewalk! She totally understood when I turned her down for a walk, but I imagine it was confusing for her that I was fine to ask about her due date, but not to see her. I couldn’t explain this discrepancy.

A few months ago, another one of my pregnant friends asked me if I wanted to know when she had the baby. I was adamant that I wanted, nay, NEEDED to know that she had the baby. I explained how I had extreme anxiety keeping me up at night, knowing that so many of my friends were about to go through this mortal and dangerous time in their lives. Of course, my therapist reminded me constantly that many babies (most babies, even) were born fine, and their moms are fine, but all I could remember was what happened with me. My friend told me she hadn’t even thought that I may be thinking about her own safety, but she was so glad she asked me if I wanted to know about the birth, because she was nervous to tell me.

During pregnancy, my friends were uneasy talking to me, but leading up to their due dates, they were even more hesitant. The crazy part was, I had experience with labor and delivery! I used to be someone that people went to for advice, but in this one area, I was cursed. People forgot that I had a kid and she just, unfortunately, died. My friends knew I was pregnant, and they knew I was not anymore, and a lot of them read this blog. But most of them forgot that I was VERY pregnant, that I understood what it was like to be pregnant, that I went through 31 hours of labor, and that I delivered a child. I’ve done it.

I was recently talking with a friend who had an induction date coming up and she was explaining to me a procedure she planned to have to induce labor. She explained it for a minute or two until I interrupted and said, “I know what that is, I had that.” I had it all. They did almost everything to get my baby out of me because she was literally killing me. I had a balloon. I had a membrane sweep. I had multiple (failed) epidurals. I had fentanyl in doses that I thought were reserved for shows like Ozark. I had an emergency operation post-delivery. And then, I was post-partum. I had all of the problems and physical limitations that come along with that. I was doing everything possible to prevent and minimize milk production, I had hormone changes, night sweats, a ban on sex and hot tubs, I just didn’t have a living child. I could relate to my pregnant and post-partum friends (minus the whole “taking care of a living baby” part), but it was uncomfortable to talk about because of the ending. I completely understood that they wouldn’t want to think about my experience because it was scary and horrible, but sometimes it felt like their avoidance invalidated my story.

On the flip side, I couldn’t really bring it up either because who wants to think about possible bad outcomes when they have hope and happiness? While I wanted to text my friends daily and remind them to check their blood pressure at home, I recognized that while I thought I was protecting and looking out for my friends, it could have been viewed as patronizing, not staying in my lane, and projecting my anxiety.

When I first talked with my therapist about my anxiety around my friends’ pregnancies, she asked if a small part of me wanted something to go wrong with their pregnancies so I wouldn’t have to go through this alone. But you know the saying, “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy?” Well, I certainly wouldn’t wish this on my close friends. Not even a tiny little bit. I spent many weeks agonizing over whether to send baby gifts in advance. Even though my friends didn’t send me their registries, I knew where to find them on Amazon or Babylist, I had had them myself! Every time I added things to my cart and went to check out, I imagined them having to return the gifts or send them back, or worse, look at them in their homes and cry. I remembered myself packing our baby stuff on a luggage cart 12 hours after returning from the hospital so my mom could take it all out of our apartment. I thought about my friends having to go through that, and I couldn’t do it. I decided I would wait until all babies were earth-side and I could feel some sense of calm and celebration for everyone. I’m not going to lie, buying items I had looked at for myself, and sending them to someone else, was not easy. At all. But I tried to channel my relief that they didn’t have to go through what I had, and I was able to feel some sense of joy. As a lot of memes say, “happy for you, sad for me.”

It’s hard not to compare. When my first friend mentioned she had a baby at 3 am, I remembered that I had, too. But she was in labor an entire day less than me. How was it fair that she had a living child AND 24 hours less of labor? I thought to myself, “AT LEAST let her go through a tough labor.” But then, a few weeks later, another friend of mine had her baby and her husband talked on Instagram about how strong she was for going through 24 hours of labor. Meanwhile, I went through 31 and no one was singing my praises on the internet. I can’t tell you what it’s like to labor hoping you’ll have your alive baby in your arms soon, but I can tell you what it’s like to labor knowing yours will be dead and I can almost 100% assure you it’s worse. But none of this is fair, and knowing that others went through 4 or 24 hours of labor doesn’t make it any better.

So, PHEW, now they all have living babies and everything is great, right? Wrong. Pregnancy, while temporary, leads to a permanent role change. The best-case scenario of having a pregnant friend, is that they eventually become a parent friend, and they have a living child for the entire rest of their lives. This brings a whole new set of problems I’ll reserve for another post.

A few weeks ago, I was on my way to a baby loss event with Baby Loss Library when I was scrolling through Instagram and saw my third friend who was due in September had her baby. Almost at the same time, she messaged me. She said since it was Sunday, she was planning to “have beer and watch football like a normal person.” I was on my way to an event full of moms with dead babies, and I realized the cold reality that I would quite literally never be a “normal person” again. Yes, I might have my own little family someday and I may also be watching football and drinking a beer, but I’d always have a dead baby. It was impossible in that moment not to compare. I was thankful to spend the day with women who understood, but the contrast of a “normal person” versus me, spending the day talking about dead babies, is my reality now and forever.

When I started writing this, I wanted to give tips. I wanted it to be a “how-to” of navigating friendships while dealing with loss. After free-writing, I realized I can’t give a how-to, because I literally don’t know how to! My main takeaways are for those who are pregnant: You should know that navigating this is hard. While us loss-parents know you are probably scared to bring up your pregnancy, and you are probably scared to even reach out period, please do. It’s a huge burden for the loss mom to constantly reach out. Loss moms are probably anxious, scared, scared to scare you, and lonely. We probably don’t want to bring our bad juju into your space. But we also probably love you and want the best for you. And while we may not be able to be “happy” for you every day because we’re jealous and angry and sad, we also don’t want to lose you. We’ve lost enough. So please, check in. Ask how to be present without showy. Be sensitive but not absent. Ask what we want to hear. What pictures of your babies we want to see. It may change day to day. And hopefully someday, we can all have earthside kids who play together.

My beautiful place setting at the baby loss event, with free books, a bracelet for pregnancy and infant loss awareness month, and of course the dates with the most important spaces in my heart.
The mandala I painted, they provided all of the supplies and instruction and frame.
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Grief and Pregnancy Loss

I Couldn’t Care Less. Really.

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People use the phrase “I couldn’t care less” pretty liberally. Once something horrible happens to you, though, you really do start to care less. About friends. Family. Work. Everything. And yes, I’m aware this is a symptom of depression, but those aren’t the things I will be talking about here. I’ve been publishing a lot of super depressing blogs, and everyone loves a light-hearted listicle, so here is a list of things about which, as Cody Rigsby from Peloton would say, are “not that serious.” Care less.

I could not care less about:

  • Hard clothes – Let’s be honest, clothes with zips, buttons, and no stretch were left in 2019 pre-Covid. But now for sure. Why would I wear something that isn’t comfortable? Like what is the point; who am I trying to impress? Zoom doesn’t show my boobs, why would I wear anything besides a sports bra? No one sees me from the waist down, so hard pants are a hard pass. Related:
  • Makeup – Makeup is problematic because it is far too close to your eyes. It is sometimes literally ON your eyes. When your eyes double as unpredictable waterfalls, it really makes no sense to put anything on them. What a waste of time and waste of sleeves when they are ruined as you wipe your eyes with them. Also, who am I trying to fool? Makeup is usually used to cover imperfections, but it isn’t covering anything in my case. You can read my face like a book and no amount of CC cream is going to cover it.
  • The size/shape of my body – Almost all women, nay, ALL women think about the size and shape of their bodies at some point in their lives. Some think about it at all points in their lives. I must admit, I did too. But I have also done some serious work the past 10 years trying to unlearn those thoughts and behaviors. And I’ll say something here: if there’s one thing that being on the verge of death teaches you, it’s that the container size of your body does not matter at all. Like not one single bit. If your organs work, you are Gucci, as the kids would say. I have a LOT to say about body size/body image/body changes in pregnancy, but for now I will just keep it at this – it doesn’t matter and I couldn’t care less.
  • Leaving the air conditioning on – Climate Warriors come at me. I used to care about this. I was so conditioned (pun intended) to turn off the AC when I left the house to save electricity. First of all, it saves money. Second of all, it saves the planet. But realistically, it’s only 3 months of the year that you need it. That’s not too much money. And I’d rather be comfortable. Not much nowadays brings me a modicum of comfort, and this is one of the things that does. There are so few things in this world that are predictable but one thing is for sure: I hate the heat and I am far more irritable when overheated. Summer is the worst season. I said what I said. If I can do something so minor like leaving the AC on when I go to the gym so it’s still cool when I come home, it’s worth it. I also used to turn the AC off in the room I wasn’t in. Nowadays, I move around a lot. Namely, I move from curled up in a ball crying on the couch, to curled up in a ball crying in my bed. I need options! All rooms must be cool and ready just in case.
  • Cancelling plans – Sorry not sorry. If I don’t feel like it, I’m not going. I’d rather be miserable at home than miserable out and wanting to go home.
  • Making the bed – In 2022 I had a goal to make my bed every day. Everyone loves to climb into a freshly made bed. But when you’re in and out of bed so often, it loses its luster. Let’s be honest, I’m climbing in there whether or not the sheets are pulled up. Also, how many times in one day can you make a bed? Waste of time.

There are many more things I don’t care about, but these are my top 6. Are there any things you all don’t care about? Life-altering trauma or not, I think these 6 should rank high on everyone’s list.

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