Grief and Pregnancy Loss, Pregnancy After Loss

My First Pregnancy Was a Dead Baby

8 Comments

Last week, I wrote about how difficult it is to be excited about my new pregnancy. That’s because it seems impossible to believe that things will end well.

Before this new pregnancy, I used to say, “100% of my babies are dead.” That was true. That was also why I was terrified to consider another pregnancy. Based on the only evidence I had, when I got pregnant, I almost died, and my baby died. That was the only example I had.

I am a very realistic and logical person. If X, then Y. If not Y, then not X. It’s basic algebra. The contrapositive. When I got pregnant, my baby died. Therefore, in order for my baby not to die, the only way to ensure that, was to not get pregnant.

I may catch some serious hate here, but I’m saying it anyway: losing your first pregnancy is worse than losing a later one after having a living child. I know, this is extremely controversial, but hear me out. When your first pregnancy is successful (as in, it results in a living child), you had one glorious naïve experience. You not only had the absolute freedom of joy in a pregnancy, but you had unadulterated excitement in a birth. Also, you have at least one example of how things can go right.

Once a dead kid comes out of you, you have lost naivety forever. Every single bit of the journey is tinged and you know every little thing that could go wrong. This is true for every stillbirth, no matter the birth order. But when it’s your first, it is impossible to consider something breathing leaving your body. You have no reason to believe things can go well, because they quite literally never have.

When Chris and I talked about possibly growing our family, it meant completely suspending my sense of reality. My reality was: get pregnant, nearly die, baby dies, birth a dead baby. Don’t get me wrong, I know for other people, pregnancy, labor and delivery don’t end that way. But for me, with my body, it does. And it did. I have the evidence. I’m sure you’ve all heard the saying misattributed to Albert Einstein, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.” To me, when I thought about considering another pregnancy after loss it was exactly that: insanity. Entering the space of considering a different outcome felt entirely unrealistic and plain stupid to me.

I remember when Maliyah died, people called me strong a lot. People don’t say that to me as often anymore. The irony is, the true strength is happening right now. The idea that I would consider entering this beast of pregnancy again, knowing what I know, with the evidence I have… THAT is strength. That is bravery. And that deserves recognition. I always think about other types of trauma, and how most people would never consider willingly and knowingly putting themselves in similar situations again, making themselves vulnerable to the exact same type of repeat trauma. If you were bitten by a shark, would you willingly and excitedly open-water swim ever again?? But for PAL (pregnancy after loss) moms, we do it time and time again.

Last week, I promised the story about my breakup with my therapist. Our conscious uncoupling was about this very issue. I could tell immediately from her reaction to my pregnancy announcement that we were operating on different emotional planes. Despite my months of prepping her for my storm of emotions that I knew would come with a next pregnancy, she didn’t seem to understand. Week after week, things came to a head because she was so extremely excited for me, and I was… confused and scared.

Eventually, after weeks of her excitement and my hesitancy, I received a test result that had me terrified. It was the exact same elevated liver enzyme that went haywire last time, which was the second indicator that my body was going to shut down from my pregnancy. Staring at the test result, seeing that exact same elevation AGAIN, was even more evidence to prove my theory that being pregnant would cause both my death and my baby’s death.

We got into a huge fight. Raised voices and all. She kept saying “what if everything is fine and you have a healthy baby?” For me, that was an absolute impossibility. The conversation was not productive, and I did not think we could ever be on the same page. She didn’t understand my fear, even when faced with scientific indisputable (later disputed due to lab error) evidence. I knew we needed to separate.

Later the next week, I repeated our conversation to my other therapist. We usually focused on EMDR, but I felt like I needed to disclose that I had parted ways with my other therapist. Also, I wanted her opinion on the conversation. I wasn’t necessarily seeking validation on my “side” of the fight, but I was looking to see if I was unfixable by therapy. I wasn’t sure if my “inability to be optimistic” (quote from ex-therapist) disqualified me from therapy. I figured I would check before throwing more money down the drain. (Thank you, American healthcare system.)

We spoke for a while about affirmations. Specifically, she talked about phrases people write on their mirrors and repeat to themselves every morning until they believe them. Sometimes they work. But sometimes, the phrases are so incredibly outlandish, that they are impossible to imprint in one’s thoughts. They are just too far-fetched to become reality. She used a simple example: the difference between saying, “my body is beautiful and I like myself,” versus, “I am as beautiful as Beyonce.” The first one is more likely to “take,” because it’s easier to believe, and closer to a person’s current truth.

For me, the idea that “everything is going to be completely fine and I’ll have a healthy, full-term baby” seems like an insane thought that is so far from my current truth. There are hundreds of hurdles to get over and past before we get to that point. I cannot possibly wrap my mind around it. My EMDR therapist said, “that makes sense. It’s hard to believe because it’s never happened before. So, what can you believe?”

Since then, that has been my motto. What can I believe to get me through each day? Can I believe that I’m doing my best? Can I believe that I’m taking my meds and monitoring my health, and going to all of my appointments, and that’s all I can do? Can I believe that it’s only 4 more days until I can get visual confirmation that my baby is still alive? And can I believe I will get through those days, one way or another? Can I wait 24 more hours to take my blood pressure again, and feel peace that it’s exactly the same as it was the day before? Then, can I maybe believe that it will also be the same the next day? I may not be able to fast-forward 5 months and believe that it will stay steady 180 more days, but I can maybe allow myself a couple days of peace at a time. For now, while it doesn’t seem like a lot, it will have to be enough.

I can no longer say 100% of my babies are dead, because I have an alive one right now. I think. And I’ll get confirmation of that again next week. And maybe… just maybe… my second pregnancy will not be a dead baby. I am not sure I can believe that yet, but hopefully, someday, I’ll have evidence. In my arms.

(Written at: 12 weeks, 0 days)

Continue Reading

Grief and Pregnancy Loss, Pregnancy After Loss

I’m So Excited! … I’m So SCARED

12 Comments

I have some news…

That’s always how these things start. They’re usually followed by uterus photos (if the “news” is delivered by text) or high-pitched squealing from the receiver (if the “news” is delivered in person).

It’s true, I am pregnant. Notice, I didn’t use an exclamation mark. That’s because I’m not exclaiming it, I’m not necessarily excited either. When Chris and I started sharing the news, we mostly said we were “cautiously optimistic,” because my main doctor said exactly that, she’s “optimistic.” But if we’re being completely honest, “cautious” is operating a hell of a lot stronger than “optimistic.”

When Chris and I decided we were going to attempt to have a living baby, I tried hard to prepare and pump myself up. I talked to all of my therapists about how I wanted to be excited. I wanted to be less nervous this time. I wanted to “cherish every moment.” I wanted to be grateful for every day I had with my new baby. I thought I could think these things into being. I thought I could just erase a year + of trauma. It’s not that easy. I haven’t gotten there yet. I’m trying, but I’m failing.

I was explaining recently to my one remaining therapist (other-therapist-breakup-story coming later) how I felt like such a failure not being able to get excited. I’m in this infertility/loss community now where I know many women would be so grateful and excited to be in the spot I am in, but all I can do is be scared. My remaining therapist said, “maybe being ‘excited’ is too much to ask of yourself.”

Right now, it’s true, excitement is too much to ask. My real feelings are: I’m scared, I’m anxious, I’m worried, and I’m nervous. If you didn’t catch the reference in the blog title, it’s from Jessie Spano’s popular caffeine-pill-induced breakdown on Saved by the Bell from November 3, 1990.

While I have consumed zero caffeine pills, I definitely feel the same. I can tell myself a million times that I’m excited, but right now, I’m really just scared. I am also happy. For now. Every time I say I’m happy, I get the nagging feeling like someone is tapping on the back of my brain, and saying, “but for how long?”

At one of my doctor’s appointments, Chris was out of town and couldn’t come. I knew myself, though, and I needed a chaperone, so I brought a friend. As I casually had a borderline panic attack in the waiting room and my Fitbit logged 33 “activity zone minutes,” my friend tried to distract me. When we went into the exam room, and everything looked great with the baby, I was crying, as usual. The doctors said, “it’s ok, everything looks great!” I couldn’t speak because of the tears and the snot and such. My friend said, “it’s just… she’s been here before.” She took the words right out of my mute mouth.

In recounting this story to my therapist (can you tell we talk a lot?), I said, “sure they say everything looks great… for now!! Meanwhile I was just thinking, ‘yea well everything looked fine last time… until it didn’t. So, when is sh*t going to hit the fan this time around?’”

She reminded me about dialectical thinking, which I struggle to use as a default, but I’m trying to train myself to think more consciously about it. I try to shift my thoughts from “yeah but…” to “yes and.” Instead of, “yea everything looks great now, BUT when won’t it?” I try to make a minor shift to “everything looks great now AND someday it might not. For now, though, it does look good.” The minor shift from “but” to “and” helps me think a little less negatively. Yes, things may go south. AND for now, they are looking good.

There have already been many comedies of errors. First, a 2.5 hour wait at the doctor that led to me almost missing a flight. Then, a pharmacy called to say they didn’t carry my meds and hung up on me. Then, there was a lab error on one of my blood tests which led me to believe I was heading into liver failure AGAIN. Then, the lab where they sent the replacement test lost the vial of my blood. Then, I had an ultrasound where they couldn’t see anything and I thought the baby was gone, but eventually with an internal ultrasound everything looked completely fine. It’s been a roller coaster and I’m barely in the second trimester.* After the initial lab error, I said to Chris, “I had tricked myself into thinking that I deserved a pregnancy that was smooth sailing, but I guess that was too much to ask.” He agreed, we were not likely to have an uneventful time.

When I broke my pregnancy news to a friend recently, she asked me when I was due and I wasn’t even sure. My doctor has never mentioned my due date to me, I had to look in my chart to find it. Thinking to the future to a full-term baby, that’s way too far away. “Full term” is not the goal. “As far as I can get,” is the goal. “Staying alive” is the goal. “A living baby” is the goal. I remember last pregnancy, I hoped I wouldn’t share a birthday week with my baby. This time around, I just hope our baby gets a birth day that isn’t the same week as a death day. To say my expectations are different with my second pregnancy is a gross understatement.

The best thing people have said to me when I share the news is just, “congratulations,” because then I can simply say, “thank you.” Some people have asked me how I am feeling, which is a very difficult question to answer. Physically, pretty good. But mentally? I’m a wreck. I’d need a novel (or a blog) to explain that, so I usually just say, “so far so good,” which is definitely a lie. According to the notes in my chart from my doctor, I have “significant anxiety.” I wonder why…

Despite my millions of doctor appointments and the ever-present sharps container on the table and ultrasound photos on the fridge, it’s still difficult to believe. Will I get what I want? Do I deserve it? Does anyone NOT deserve it? Who even am I to get what I want? These are all existential questions and I have no answers.  

I am taking things one day at a time. Sometimes I’m at the hospital three times in a week. But everything will be worth it if it is worth it. And I can’t tell the future, so I will just operate in the present. Feel free to extend your congratulations, but don’t ask me how I feel, because I honestly don’t know and it will probably be different tomorrow.

* Writer’s Note: I wrote this blog when I was heading into my 2nd trimester. Despite what I thought I would do, mentally I couldn’t bring myself to share about this new pregnancy until I made it through Maliyah’s first birthday. I’ve pre-written many, many blogs about this pregnancy as I felt the urge to get my thoughts on “paper,” and I will be sharing them in the coming weeks, even if the language and my thoughts no longer align with the timing completely. Therefore, at the end of each blog, I will share the gestational age of baby #2 when I wrote the post.

(Written at: 11 weeks, 6 days)

Continue Reading

Grief and Pregnancy Loss

Body Image and Pregnancy Loss

No Comments

TW: pregnancy loss and eating disorders and TMI if you’re not comfortable with female bodies

I have been debating for a few months whether or not I should write on the topic of body image and pregnancy, since I didn’t have a full-term pregnancy and my view is different from others. But a few weeks ago, I was on a support group with a fellow loss mom who lamented that her stomach was slowly getting smaller post-loss, whereas she watched other future moms as they continued to get bigger. I realized that while pregnancy and body image are intimately linked, so are pregnancy loss and body image. I can speak from both sides, the before, and the after.

I never understood people who said pregnant bodies were beautiful. I was never the type to look in awe at someone with a baby bump. Honestly, to me they looked uncomfortable. When I started to seriously think about getting pregnant, the thought of my body changing outside of my control was terrifying. For many years I struggled with disordered eating, but for about ten years, I’ve felt good in my own skin and I’ve been a staunch proponent of the body positivity/intuitive eating movement. I enjoy food and I don’t want to count calories. I also enjoy movement and I don’t want to count workouts. I like sweets, and I like lifting weights. I try to balance everything. Since I knew that being pregnant could cause me to change both my eating habits and my movement habits after I was finally in a good place with both, I was very scared.

After we told my parents I was pregnant, I remember talking to my dad on the phone and he asked me if I would take weekly “bump” pictures comparing the baby to a fruit or whatever weird thing the apps say your fetus is the size of (a peanut!). I remember exactly what corner of the sidewalk I was on when I started laughing hysterically. I said, “Daddy have you ever met me!?” I would never do that. The thought of taking maternity photos where I would be capturing my body in its largest and uncontrolled form seemed preposterous to me. Why would I ever want those pictures? I distinctly remember around 15 weeks when my blood pressure was on the cusp of normal and my doctor suggested she may want to induce me at 37-38 weeks “to be safe,” I was so excited because it meant I wouldn’t be so big and uncomfortable.

But let’s rewind. During pregnancy, everyone’s body reacts differently and there are a million things strangers will say about it. Pregnancy is one of the times society has decided that it’s ok to comment publicly about a woman’s shape to her face. Some people will decide you are having a boy or girl depending on if you’re “carrying high or low.” Some say you “pop earlier” if you eat certain foods, or do certain things, or who even knows. Everyone pretty much agrees that you don’t start to show until later if it is your first pregnancy. In my case, I am not a small person. I am 5’11” and I used to describe my body type on my OKCupid profile as “athletic.” Long legs, big city, remember?

More like, long legs, no big belly. Around 12 weeks, I started to get nervous. Why didn’t I have any bump yet? Not that I wanted to have a changing body, but shouldn’t I see something? I started to be a little more conscious of the foods I was eating. After years of “only eating when I was hungry” I started to think about whether or not I was hungry and why. People talk about pregnant women “eating for 2” or being ravenous during their second trimester. I never was. I was just eating the amount I normally ate. I started asking friends for protein shake recommendations so I could make sure I was consuming enough protein, but basically every protein powder said to ask your doctor before consuming it if you’re pregnant, so I nixed that plan.

For my 16-week anatomy scan, I went to a different ultrasound facility because most of them were closed. I happened to be 16 weeks during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Not ideal. My appointment was at 8:30 am. I hadn’t been that hungry, but I figured I should eat something, so I had half of a protein bar in the cab on the way there. Most of the scan went well, but the tech had some issues getting some of the pictures, because she said our baby was staying in the same position, and she needed her to move into a different position. She said sometimes this happens, and I might have to come back the next day. But then she asked me to stand up and walk around the office and she asked what I had eaten that morning. I told the truth (half a protein bar), and she started scolding me. She said, “your baby needs nutrients and you need to feed it what it needs. You need to think about your baby and not you.” I was taken aback. It wasn’t even 9 am two days after Christmas. I had basically rolled out of bed and hopped in a cab. I wanted to do what was best for my baby, but I didn’t want to gorge myself when I wasn’t hungry.

Two weeks later, I had a regular appointment with my OB, and I asked my doctor about it. I explained to her that I didn’t want to know what I weighed because I try not to focus on the number, but that I was yelled at by the ultrasound tech, and I wanted to make sure I was gaining “enough” weight to have a healthy baby. Of course, I ended up in tears. I cry every single time I see my OB now, but at the time, I think this was my first time crying in front of her. My doctor apologized profusely for the ultrasound tech and said she was out of line and really should not have said that to me and shouldn’t talk about what to eat. My doctor said I was gaining exactly what I should be for where I was in the pregnancy, and that I should continue to listen to my body about hunger cues. I noticed after that appointment that she added “history of disordered eating” to my chart.

At that same appointment, my doctor checked on our baby and mentioned that due to the placement of the placenta, I probably wouldn’t feel movement until much later in the pregnancy, but not to worry, everything looked perfect. It seemed hard to believe that I was 18 weeks pregnant but looked exactly the same. Throughout the winter I wore the same jeans without a problem. At 20 weeks, we had another anatomy scan, and again, everything looked great, but I still had no visible bump. At 23 weeks, I finally had a tiny visible bump. I noticed it in the mirror when I was just in underwear, but in clothes, it was hard to see. I was going to my friend’s wedding in Florida, so I bought a new dress that would fit well. For the day and night before, I wore my regular clothes, which still fit. I spent the day before the wedding at the pool with my best friend, and she commented about how she couldn’t believe how little I still was. My mom asked me if I bought a maternity swimsuit and I laughed. I just looked like I maybe ate unlimited breadsticks at the Olive Garden.

The next week, at a 24-week growth scan, everything was trending well, our girl looked good, and I still looked… barely pregnant. I was secretly thrilled. As long as our baby looked good, I was totally fine with a baby on the smaller side, easier birth, right? Less stretch marks! But it was still strange. Nobody who walked by me on the street would know I was pregnant, my own friends couldn’t really tell. I was still working out like usual, going to Orangetheory 4 days a week, doing most of the same exercises with the exception of some core work. I kept my ultrasound photos on the fridge as a reminder since there weren’t many external ones.

When I was checked into the hospital the next week, they had a mandatory protocol that they needed to have a fetal heartrate monitor strapped on to me 24 hours a day to monitor the baby. For me, they had trouble getting the monitor to stay in the right place because I barely had any bump. They Macgyvered all sorts of things to try and keep it in place. One nurse folded up a paper towel and put it under one side so the monitor was tilted down. Some nurses were better than others. Every 12 hours during a shift change, one nurse would show the next one what they had come up with to help it stay. But if I shifted even an inch, the monitor would slide or slip and the alarm would go off. I had to lay completely still for days. I had to alert a nurse every time I was going to go to the bathroom because I knew it would trip up the monitor. Reaching for my water cup would move it. The nurses kept apologizing and saying it was just because I wasn’t that far along, so it was difficult to keep in place. Of course, I knew I wasn’t that far along, but having that constant 24-hour reminder, while also being told I needed to deliver my baby within 24 hours was a complete mindf*ck. I hated my body, both the size of it, and the fact that it was failing me from the inside. The two were intimately intertwined.

Now, when I see people on the street with baby bumps, I immediately think, “if they had the baby RIGHT NOW, the baby would probably survive.” The exact bumps I didn’t want, and didn’t think were beautiful, are now the one thing I wish I had. Sure maybe they are 31, 32, 33 weeks, but that’s all I dreamed of, a few more weeks. I see that bump and I think, “survival.” I think, “If only I ever had that.” It’s wild to be so close to the loss that I can remember how I felt before about being that size, but I can also see how much my entire mindset has changed.

The one thing that definitely changed throughout my pregnancy was my boobs. My first indication that I was pregnant was that they were changing. As someone who grew up like Judy Blume, doing the “I must increase my bust” chants, they were finally increasing. I thought it would make me happy, but it made me uncomfortable. I remember one time saying to my friend on the treadmill next to me that my boobs were distracting me! I wasn’t used to even noticing my chest, and all of a sudden, they were right in my face. But then, as quickly as they were new and exciting, they were terrifying. Post pregnancy, I was told that my body would likely start producing milk because my body didn’t know my baby was dead, my body only knew that I had a baby. I was constantly terrified. My body had already completely disappointed me, and now there was this. I felt like everything that was contained inside my skin was broken. My doctor (and the internet) said that the only thing I could do to prevent this from happening was wear my TIGHTEST sports bra, 24 hours a day, and basically bind my chest. I scoured google for how long I would have to do this, but every website said something different. To be safe, I decided on a month. 30 days of wearing the tightest sports bra I owned. I feared warm water, too, another thing the internet warned about. I took cold showers and barely let any water get on the front of my body. I went to sleep praying I wouldn’t wake up with a wet shirt. Every night that first week my sheets were soaked, but it was “just” post-partum hormonal sweating. My body continued to mock me and my childless arms and womb.

And then, after that month of obsessive sports bra wearing, I finally took it off and my boobs looked… the same. Normal. Just like they had “before.”

Did I make it all up? Was I ever really pregnant? How could I wake up with no baby, to a dead silent house (pun intended), and yet I looked exactly the same. I felt like I had lived 100 lives. I felt like I didn’t even know the woman I was the year before, and yet I wore the exact same clothes. I fit into everything. My body failed me over and over and over again, and yet, the mirror said it was the same body. I was the same person.

I’ve always loved to work out, and one of the hardest parts of post-partum with no baby was the bar on exercise. During those first few weeks, I went on hours and hours and hours of walks just to get out of the house and fill the time. I don’t remember them, really, I would just move aimlessly. I couldn’t tell you what I thought about. I was just trying to fill time until I could sleep again. Not being allowed to lift weights, or run, or do anything active like I was used to made me feel even worse. How was it fair that I was not allowed to do the things I liked, and the things that brought me joy, but I also didn’t get a baby? When I finally was allowed to go to the gym again, I remember a friend of mine saying I looked thin. I said “thanks, I lost a baby worth of weight.” He already knew that, of course, but it seemed like the only thing to say. I wasn’t happy I was thin, I was devastated. For the first time in my life, I just wished I was bigger. For the people who didn’t know I had been pregnant, I probably just looked normal. Even for the people who did know, I looked normal. This was the strangest part.

Throughout my entire pregnancy I probably gained 4 pounds. By the day after the hospital, I had lost those 4 plus an extra 5. Some of that was probably from not being allowed to eat for 5 days. Some was from muscle deterioration. Some was from my baby being gone. Some was from blood loss and surgery. None of the lost weight was “good.” Even two weeks ago (7 months post-loss) I went to the doctor the day after going to multiple 10 course tasting menus in Peru, and she asked me if I had lost weight. I told her I didn’t know, because I don’t weigh myself, and she said I looked like I had. Never in my life had a doctor said that to me before, and for SURE never before had it been said with the unspoken words of “are you ok? You don’t look ok.”

Clearly, I’m not ok. I also don’t think I lost weight. But I certainly look sad. Sometimes I think the circles under my eyes and the hollows of my cheeks are simply physical manifestations of my brain. I look in the mirror and I don’t see “thin,” I see “sad.” I see the indents in my collar bones, and where I used to think “oh!” I now think “oh, right, dead baby.” I wish I saw my tired eyes I thought “new mom, no sleep.” But instead I see, “mom of a dead baby, nightmares.”

When I look at my body now, I see nothing but a container. I don’t think anything of it at all. The shape of my body is the least interesting thing about me. I realize now more than ever that the size doesn’t matter. It can look one way, and completely rebel against me. I was at Orangetheory feeling 100% fine, and 4 hours later I was in the hospital feeling 100% fine and they were saying I was going to die. I can look like a supermodel and my body can still try to kill me if it gets pregnant again. I don’t necessarily hate my body, I just am completely disassociated from it.

However, I have a new added fear that people might think I’m pregnant. Most girls always fear this, the “are they or aren’t they?” like Rihanna at the Superbowl. But now, there’s the added issue that if someone asks me, I know I will spontaneously burst into tears. I am especially nervous because I know it’s from a place of love, and people will act hopeful and excited for me. I’ve stopped wearing anything with an empire waist because I don’t want the speculation. There was a photo of me in a swimsuit from the summer that was at an unflattering angle and I immediately edited it. I don’t care how I look, but I don’t want to field any questions.

Back in my post about what not to say, I mention how you should not comment on a person’s body. You can see now, it’s because it’s layered. The fact that my child lived and died within my own body adds a huge layer of complication. It’s the only loss that is completely contained within another person. For men, they don’t have all of these additional complicated feelings, and that adds to the difference in grieving. While I look the same, everything about me has changed. It’s surreal.

I am not sure how this will manifest if I ever become pregnant again. Maybe I will be happy to have a big baby bump, or maybe I will be terrified of that as well, because it’ll be even one more thing I could possibly lose. Maybe I will be happy if strangers recognize me as being pregnant for the first time. Or maybe I will view it as superstitious and wear baggy shirts for fear of not wanting anyone to speak of it. I can’t predict how I will feel in the future, all I know is that it is complicated and while I wish more than anything that I had a baby, I am not looking forward to it.

Continue Reading

Grief and Pregnancy Loss

The One Where All of Her Friends Were Pregnant

2 Comments

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.
Continue Reading

Grief and Pregnancy Loss, Travel

Peru Part Dos

8 Comments

If you missed Part Uno, start there!

Our first day in Cusco, we had a bumpy start because our flight was nearly two hours delayed. Our scheduled tour was supposed to begin at the Cusco Cathedral, but we wanted to put our bags away, eat some food, and change shoes, so we met up with the tour at stop two. Cusco was the capital of the Incan Empire, so we started at the most important Incan temple, called Coricancha, that is right in the middle of town. We learned about the amazing ways Incas measured time, astronomy, and seasons. We also learned about their ingenious engineering using internal metal joints and trapezoidal shapes to resist seismic waves. Their engineering is why so many of their temples and fortresses are still standing despite the many earthquakes that have hit Peru since the time of the Incas. Unfortunately (or fortunately!) this was the first time we had rain on the trip. While inside Coricancha, we were able to stay under covering until the clouds cleared, and then at our next stop we were blessed with a fabulous rainbow and mostly great weather for the rest of the trip. I “wasted” 5 soles on a disposable poncho, but since that converts to about $1.25, I was ok with it.

Next on our tour we visited a few other Incan ruins, including Sacsayhuamán, an Incan citadel, and we had some time to explore on our own. It’s crazy that so many of these ruins are just massive things standing on semi-public grounds (with ticket entrance) and you can just walk around on them and touch them. We ended the day at a store that specializes in alpaca and baby alpaca scarves. We learned about the world’s most expensive and exclusive wool, made from vicuña, one of the two wild South American camelids, which live in the high altitude areas in the Andes.

Coricancha after the sun came out
Saksayhuaman
Saksayhuaman with sexy women!

We were told by our travel agency to avoid red meat and alcohol while we acclimated to the elevation, and since 11,500 feet in Cusco didn’t seem like enough for us, we booked a last-minute trip to the Palcoyo Mountains for the next day, which stand at a cool 16,076 feet. Most people who have been to Cusco may have heard of Vinicunca, which is a large rainbow mountain about 3.5 hours from Cusco. Many tourists go there, and it is 17,000 feet above sea level. Also, it is 3.5 hours from Cusco, and an hour and a half hike once you get there. For all of those reasons, we searched for alternatives. We were pleasantly surprised to find Palcoyo, which is an hour closer, 1,000 feet lower, only a 30-45 minute hike, AND it has THREE rainbow mountains instead of one. However, since it is less visited, there were no tours and we had to book a private driver and guide. Thankfully, it was only $50/ person for the entire 9-hour day (what!??). Our driver picked us up and along the way, our guide taught us facts about Peru and alpacas (they’re trimmed once annually after winter for fur, and the first shave is most valuable and softest), and the rainbow mountains (they used to be lake beds, and the colors come from sedimentary minerals).

When we got to Palcoyo, the views were breathtaking, literally and figuratively. It was certainly tough to climb stairs and mountains at that elevation, but with periodic breaks, it was doable. The scenery made it all worth it, and at the top, we took photos with alpacas after tipping the local man who brought them there specifically for photo opps. We saw a total of ten people the entire time. It was so nice and peaceful to have the mountains to ourselves. About 700-1000 additional feet up, there was a “stone forest,” and while the other girls opted out of the “encore hike,” I decided I wanted to do it. #YOLO, right? When else was I going to be there? Our private guide walked me up to the stone forest, which I appreciated because it had started sleeting and he kept me steady on the way back down. He also served as an expert photographer. It was stunning. Truly so special. I started to have the same spiraling thoughts I mentioned last week, about how lucky and unlucky I was to be there, witnessing these beautiful sights, but I tried to keep them at bay while I climbed down the slippery mountain back to my friends.

Along the way up the mountain, we had seen various piles of stones and our guide had explained that they were called apachetas, a combination of the words Apu, the name of the Mountain God, and Pachamama, the name of Mother Nature. People made these tiny rock towers as offerings to hope for good luck and blessings, either on their current journey, or in general. On our way back down the mountain, my friend and I decided to make our own and we scoured the mountain for different colored rocks of various sizes. Our guide helped us balance it and as soon as our apacheta was complete, it started sideways sleeting. Our guide said this meant our offering was received, although we couldn’t be sure if it was a good or a bad thing. After an exhausting day, we had dinner in Cusco, and then packed our bags again to get ready for our next day in the Sacred Valley and our journey to Machu Picchu.

Girlies!
Look at these.
Alpacas! Plus Peruvian man.
Kiss kiss!
Rainbow Mountains pre-sleet rolling in
Rainbow mountains and sleet
Stone Forest
Best photographer
Look at this view! Sleet and all.
Apachetas and Sleet

We started our day early, cramming our many bags into the van for the day. Our first stop of the day was a lookout point with a breathtaking view of the Sacred Valley. We stopped for a few minutes to take it in, and of course to take some photos, then we headed to Pisaq. We stopped at a silver factory that was more like a small storefront, where we learned all about silver, silver-making, and even got to see some of the local artists making jewelry. There were some aggressive sales tactics, and they worked. I bought a couple things and then we headed to more Incan ruins. While each one of the sites was impressive, I must admit they started to get a bit repetitive. We climbed many, many stairs, and we started to recognize certain architectural patterns, ways the Incas tracked the sun and the stars, and the ways they built their civilizations to face the best sunlight for their crops. In the afternoon, we went to Olantayytambo, another ruins site, with 254 more stairs to climb. We did it! This specific site was interesting because it was overlooked by a mountain with two faces in it – one profile that was natural, and another that was carved by the Incas. It was a fabulous view, and we were blessed with amazing weather.

In between ruins, we ate lunch at a restaurant called Tunupa in Urubamba. The food was buffet-style and it was fine, but the views were out of this world. The restaurant was situated on the Sacred River, and after we ate, we went to the river to put our hands in and gather all of the blessings the river would give us. There were alpacas and llamas on the grass, and there was even live traditional Peruvian music, played with multiple different kinds of flutes.

After many, many stairs, we were ready for a break in the form of a train ride. We were dropped off at the train station, where we were surprised by another dance party, as people in traditional clothes held signs and danced and sang and led us to our train car. The entertainment didn’t stop there. Not only did the train have some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve seen, as we traveled along the Sacred River, but there was also a show. Two of the workers put on a whole love story skit in the middle of the ride. I had no idea what we were in for, and I didn’t understand any of the words, but I got the gist of it. After we dropped our bags at our hotel where we would be only one night, we went out to find food. Not only did we find a restaurant called Machapo that served both guinea pig and alpaca burgers, but we also found the friendliest waiter in all of Peru. We are now Instagram friends. Hi Kevin! Miss you every day!

Sacred River, hoping I got some blessings
So. Many. Stairs.
Can you see the faces?
Train and dance!
Amazing train views, before we even got on!

The next morning we were up with the sun and ready to hike Machu Picchu. As I mentioned before, we did not do the 4-day Inca trail. Instead, we took a bus to the entrance. This is traveling in your mid-30s. I have no regrets. Of course, the day started for me with many braids. I did 2/3 of my friend’s hair, and I did mine in the bus. Again, this day we had a private guide, which was helpful because we could take as many breaks as we wanted, and we had a built-in photographer. Our guide liked photos a LOT more than we did, and he insisted on many, many, many photo breaks. You should see my camera roll. He wanted individual shots and group shots and selfies. I only included a select few below.

The views from Machu Picchu were truly gorgeous. We had picture-perfect weather, and despite it filling up by noon with people, it felt like we were there alone. There was a moment (after our 100 photoshoots) where we just sat down and took in the view. Again, I was hit by a wave of sadness. It’s really hard to be in such a perfect place and then reflect on my not-so-perfect life. The juxtaposition of the beauty and the hurt seems to highlight itself like a neon sign whenever I realize the vastness of everything. I see ancient ruins and I just think about how small my problems are, but then I realize how BIG they are to me and it just makes me sad. It’s hard to be present when my present is so hard. My thoughts constantly go to my friends with babies, and thinking about how I’m “lucky” to be where I am, but also wish I wasn’t. One of my therapists always encourages me to feel my feelings but also recognize that emotions are fleeting. I try to understand that I’m feeling this way and that it makes sense (because my baby died), but I should also allow myself to move through it and into a less heavy feeling.  We started to climb down the many stairs and back to the bus to town, where we had lunch and I started to feel lighter again.

We went back to our hotel, grabbed our bags, and then took a train back to Cusco, where we did some final souvenir shopping and then packed again for our flight back to Lima the next morning. Our final two days in Lima, we mostly ate a lot of food. We also went to see the catacombs under the San Francisco Cathedral (no photos allowed), but we mostly ate.

As I mentioned last week, Lima has established itself as one of the world’s greatest food towns. No city other than Copenhagen also has two restaurants on the current top 10 of the prestigious World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Lima has Central (#4) and Maido (#7), both of which were completely full when we tried to make reservations, since we only booked our trip three weeks in advance. We decided to try our luck and put ourselves on the wait list for Maido, and we got in! I am not exactly sure what we were thinking when we booked a 16-course tasting menu for 9 pm on a day where we had an early flight that morning, but we were excited to try everything. The food was absolutely fantastic. They call it the “Maido Experience” and it was a true experience. However, by midnight, we were falling asleep at the table with 3 courses left to go. I included some of the food photos here, but the pictures cannot do it justice. The cocktails were creative and the dishes were delicious. But don’t worry, by 1 pm the next day, we were ready to eat again and we had a reservation at another highly rated restaurant, Gaston y Astrid. The restaurant is centered around a beautiful courtyard with a huge tree in the middle. We chose to order a la carte this time, and again we had the most amazing food. We left with extremely full stomachs.

Glorious Machu Picchu
Part of our many photoshoots
More learning about Incas and the Sun Temple
Sitting, pondering, probably crying.
#GirlsTrip
The beginning of a lot of food

The first few days I was in Lima, I had decided I wanted to try paragliding. I hadn’t done anything crazy adventurous since I was in Australia when I had gone scuba diving, sky diving and ziplining in one week. I was ready to try another new thing. But the day I wanted to go, it was extremely cloudy and I was scared I wouldn’t have much visibility. I decided to postpone until we were back in Lima and hope for the best. Sure enough, on the day we landed back in Lima, it was cloudy but better than before, so I decided to go for it. As I waited for my turn to go into the sky on a tiny air boat/go-cart apparatus, I thought for sure that it was the end. My friend recorded a video of my “last words.” I found out that the woman I had booked with via whatsapp was the wife of the pilot, and so I figured she didn’t want us to go down, either. Nevertheless, they did give me a life vest to wear in case we crashed into the ocean. I didn’t tell my husband or my parents I was doing this, why worry them!? While I am not immune from fear, I definitely care a lot less about dying now. Since I wake up every day now and think “ugh this again,” it makes it easier to do riskier things.

After strapping in and putting on a helmet (would that actually help anything?), we took off into the sky. Part of the price of the experience included an HD video, and I must say, this video was hilarious. It captured every single human emotion there is. I started with happiness and elation and you could see me laughing and smiling huge. Then I switched to awe, you could see me taking photos and videos on my phone. Then I started to look at the ocean in its vastness, a place that usually gives me such peace, and I started to cry. You could see tears rolling down my cheeks as I realized all of the amazing things I can do now that our daughter isn’t with us. I always think about her when I’m at the beach, I don’t really know why. A lot of grieving people mention the ocean seems like a safe place because it is the only thing vast enough to hold such huge emotions. I often think about that. As I watched the waves roll in and the sun setting from my perch hundreds of feet above the water, I again realized how small I am in the grand scheme of things. We turned around toward the land zone, and I was hit with another emotion: fear. The pilot started dipping left and right, gliding in extreme angles to descend back to earth, and you can see me saying “oh my god, oh my god” in the video. Then we finally turned around toward landing, and you could see my relief. What an exhausting emotional ride. I knew as soon as I landed that the video would be a trip.

Overall, I feel the same way I did about paragliding as I did about the whole trip to Peru, I am glad I did it. I felt proud of myself for doing something outside of my comfort zone, and I was glad to make new memories. It was not easy, and it was not without its bumps, but it was an overall fun experience that I don’t regret. I had to navigate my own emotions as well as my friends, which I haven’t really done all year since I’ve been living in a bubble. I can’t say when I want to go on another trip, since I’m still mentally recovering, but it’s not out of the question. Where do you think I should go next?

Me in my life vest that was not going to save me from anything.
Go-go-gocart in the sky!
Byeeee
Selfie!
Flying high, probably crying
Watching the sunset probably crying or yelling oh my god
Continue Reading

Grief and Pregnancy Loss

Say Something. But Not the Wrong Thing.

8 Comments

After we lost our baby, we heard from a lot of friends and family. We received calls, texts, emails, flowers, Instagram DMs, you name it. Some things that were said were great, and some were… not so great. I’ve been waiting for a while to write this post so I could base this on my own experience of things I heard, instead of the usual list. I’m almost 6 months post loss, and I have heard it all. That said, I have to shoutout to my absolute favorite podcast ever, As Long As I’m Living. They did an episode called “I Can’t Imagine,” which goes over a more general list of do’s and don’ts, and in general, I agree with everything they said. There’s one place I differ but I’ll get to that later.

This post requires a very important preamble. I want to thank EVERYONE who reached out to me. I know it is far easier to say nothing than to say anything. If you read this and you identify yourself as someone who said the “wrong” thing, do not fret. Death and mourning and grief are complicated and we, as a culture, do not talk about it openly. It is uncomfortable and it is hard to know what to say. But you know what’s worse than putting your foot in your mouth? Not acknowledging the loss at all. It means so much to a grieving person to hear from friends and family. And sometimes when I heard from a friend on a particular day, absolutely nothing felt like the right thing to my ears, but a week, a month, or 6 months later, I do remember each person who texted to check in, commented on my Facebook post, or sent me a 5-pound bag of gummy bears.

I am not writing this post to chastise people who put themselves out there and tried to console me. I also know that unfortunately, I am not the only person you will meet in your lives who will go through a loss, whether it is a child, parent, sibling, or close friend. I am writing this as a first-hand account of what felt best to me, so you can take this advice and use it in the future. I want this to be a practical and useful tool.

I will be the first to admit that before this happened to me, I had NO idea what to say. I look back at the way I acted when I had friends lose parents and I cringe. I did not understand. I said the wrong things, or I said nothing at all. I forgot important dates. I didn’t acknowledge how hard Father’s Day must be for them. Etc. etc. etc. I hope that my own experience can deepen my empathy for others and help me react in kinder ways in the future to help my friends and family.

I am not an “expert.” But I can tell you what made me feel slightly better, and what made me feel slightly worse.

What not to say:

For starters, PLEASE do not call. If you are very close family, I understand calling, but anyone else, please text. In the early days, I was fielding so many calls from unknown numbers: doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, social workers, support groups, peer counselors etc. I felt that I needed to answer my phone no matter what, and I was often not in the mindset to be screening the calls. It put me in an extremely awkward position when I picked up and all I wanted to do was hang up. I once had a call from a distant family member who called from her work number. Her work, unfortunately, shared a word with the place where our daughter was being buried. I saw the caller ID and I picked up thinking it was a call about the details of burial. I was stuck on the phone for 5 minutes. Eventually, since I was mostly answering in one-word answers, she understood and ended the call, but it was excruciating.

Now on to the actual words you may say. Let’s start with the worst and most common mistake of all. DO NOT SAY “AT LEAST.” There is no “at least.” At least nothing. My child died. I almost died. I find that people start off strong with “I’m so sorry” or “This is horrible,” then they go on to the “at leasts.” As my favorite podcast hosts Judith and Alina say, don’t say anything that could end with “…so don’t be so sad.”

At least you didn’t die! … so don’t be so sad.

At least you can go on vacation now! … so don’t be so sad.

At least you have a partner who loves you! … so don’t be so sad.

At least you’re young! … so don’t be so sad.

At least you know you can get pregnant! … so don’t be so sad.

At least you have more time to save money! … so don’t be so sad.

At least you won’t be super pregnant in the summertime! … so don’t be so sad.

At least you never got so big or got stretch marks! … so don’t be so sad.

I could sit here and go down that list individually and tell you why NONE of those were “at leasts” in my mind, but as a general rule just don’t say it.

Don’t say, “you’re so strong.” This one is my personal pet-peeve. I absolutely despise this. DESPISE. If you take one thing away from this blog, please, please don’t say this. One griever to another can say this but a normal person to a griever cannot. I heard this so much, and I started to get so upset that I started saying in response, “what’s the alternative?” I was always met by crickets. This is my life now. My reality. I wake up every day and this is what I am faced with. Is that a choice? Am I strong for waking up? I guess that means the alternative would be… not waking up. It doesn’t seem like I am “strong” when you put it in that light. When someone says that I am strong, it feels as if being strong is a choice. You choose to go to the gym, you choose to lift weights, you want to be strong. Well, I didn’t choose this. In fact, I’d choose anything BUT this. Don’t say this.

Unless you are very close with me, don’t cry. If you are family or a best, best friend, it’s ok, we can grieve this loss together. It is a loss for both of us. If we are not that close, please don’t cry. It puts me in an awkward position where I become the consoler. Where I have to say, “it’s ok,” and it’s not ok. Also, it makes me feel like I should be crying. Don’t get me wrong, I cry a lot. But in a moment where I am not crying, where I am maybe relaying the news to the 300th person, it feels strange to have the other person cry without me.

Here’s another one reserved for only close family or friends. Do not say, “call me if you need me.” I won’t. Why would I? It’s strange to say, “I’m always a phone call away” if I have not called you in 10-14 years since I was charged per text message. There’s a big exception here if you have gone through a similar loss. I want to leave interpretation up to you on what “similar” means; if you had a great grandmother die at the ripe age of 92, that is not similar. But if you had a nearly 3rd trimester pregnancy loss? Even if we aren’t too close, I may very well take you up on the offer to chat.

I feel like this goes without saying, but I heard it a few times, so I will say it: do not comment on appearance or body shape. It is irrelevant and likely hurtful. I know people may mean well when they say I look thin, but all it reminds me of is how I should be bigger. I am aware I have been subsisting on gummy bears and naps, but there is no need to mention it. I have no baby bump, no “mommy pouch,” no external reminders about what happened. That is hard. And even if I did have those things, it would be hard, too! Would I rather look like I was pregnant and not have a baby? Or would I rather look like I wasn’t pregnant and not have a baby? Neither! I’d rather have a baby. Even saying, “you look great” carries huge emotional baggage. Should I look worse? What does a person who loses a daughter look like? Am I not sad enough? There’s no reason to talk about appearance.

Here are a couple quick things not to say, ripped from the headlines a.k.a. things people actually said to me. Do not ask what happened in a public forum. I will tell you if I want. I certainly will not tell you if you comment on a public Facebook post. If I wanted to talk about it there, I would have put it in the caption. Do not ask me if it was a difficult pregnancy. My baby is dead. That feels like the most difficult pregnancy around, no? If you are asking me if I barfed every day, I can tell you, I’d rather barf and have an alive-baby. Do not say congratulations. Read the caption, y’all. If I was announcing a living child, I would have said that. I had one person who commented this, realized her mistake later, and messaged me directly to apologize. Of course, I knew she had written it in error, but I still appreciated her private message when she realized her mistake. The other three people who wrote it probably still think I’m at home with a newborn.

This seems obvious, but for the sake of comprehensiveness, I’ll remind you that platitudes are annoying, pointless and hurtful. I’m not going to waste any time here explaining why you should never say “she’s in a better place” or “everything happens for a reason,” or “God needed another angel.” My eyes could not roll higher into my head. Do not say any of those things.

I’ll close with the only thing I disagreed with Judith and Alina on. They say not to say, “I can’t imagine” or “I can imagine.” Personally, I’m fine with “I can’t imagine,” because truly, you cannot. As bad as you think you imagine it is to be hopeful and excited one moment and then be devastated and almost dying the next, it’s worse. Saying “I can’t imagine what you’re going through” is a fine thing to say. I’d say, “yeah, I hope you never have to.” You cannot imagine, nor do I want you to!

So, if you aren’t supposed to say any of those things, what can you say? I’m so glad you asked. I have thoughts.

What to say:

If you text or email, don’t expect a reply. I saw all of the messages in those first few weeks and I “hearted” or replied when I could. Every text that came in would set me off crying again, and sometimes I just needed to hide my phone under a pillow until I could handle it. Include the words “no need to reply” in your text. It gives an easy out. And if I feel like replying, I will.

Another related piece: it’s never too late to reach out. A lot of people will text in the first few weeks, but a grieving person will be grieving literally forever. For as long as they live and their person isn’t living, they will be grieving. Don’t feel like you missed the window. It is never too late to check in and say, “I have been thinking about you.”

Do say, “I’m so sorry.” This is an easy one if you are uncomfortable with loss. It’s a full sentence. Do not follow it up with anything else. Just “I’m so sorry.” I will probably say, “thank you.” The end.

Another great easy one, “this is so terrible/horrible/painful.” Acknowledge how bad it is. It’s bad. There’s no way around it. Having someone recognize how bad it is helps. For me, hearing someone say this helped me take a step back and be like, “Yea you know what? This IS fucking horrific. I am totally justified in becoming one with the couch and going through a whole box of tissues in a day.”

Related… curse. Yep, I said it, use those expletives. Maybe this one is more me-specific, but the one Facebook comment that made me laugh out loud and then be like “YESSS!!” was when someone wrote “FUCK Emily I am so so so sorry.” I was like “THIS IS EXACTLY HOW I FEEL. FUCKKKK!!!”

Do mention the person’s name who died. I haven’t shared our daughter’s name yet on the blog, but I will eventually. I have a whole post coming about how and why we decided to name our daughter. For most people who lose someone, you will know their name. Use it! I remember the first time I heard my daughter’s name come out of a friend’s mouth, it made me cry happy tears. I was so thankful that she was acknowledged as existing. Sometimes it feels like this whole pregnancy and loss happened in my mind, so to hear her name, and know that she truly existed, it meant the world.

Finally, ask me if I want to talk about it. Most times, people tiptoe around the subject. They don’t know if I want to talk about it, or if I want a completely baby-loss-free coffee date. But trust me, if you’re awkward, I can sense it. The easiest thing to do is just ask. “Do you want to talk about it?” The answer may be different on one day than it is on another. My moods fluctuate and sometimes I want a “normal” happy hour, but sometimes all I can think about is my daughter and all I want to do is talk about her. If a grieving person does choose to talk about it, thank them for sharing. It takes extreme vulnerability to talk about loss (cough cough, like this blog), so to know a friend is listening and wants to hear more, and recognizes your bravery in talking about it, it’s meaningful.

I hope this post was helpful not just for talking to me, but for talking to anyone else in your life going through a loss. Three rules of thumb to take away:

  • Don’t call! Text 😊
  • Saying something is better than saying nothing
  • In conversations, let the griever lead, and listen
Continue Reading

Grief and Pregnancy Loss

Death by a Million Cuts

4 Comments

TW: Pregnancy Loss

People sometimes ask or ponder what it feels like to lose a baby. There are thousands of metaphors on the internet. Grief is like the ocean, some days have large waves and some have small. Grief is like a black hole that never fills, but you build around it. Grief is like a big black ball in a jug, where the ball doesn’t get smaller, but as you heal, the jar gets bigger. I could go on and on. But most of these descriptions and similes have to do with grief, not with actually losing a part of yourself. That’s what losing a baby is. My daughter’s entire existence was within my own body, and then she was gone. If I could describe what it’s like, it’s like dying yourself, but not in one fell swoop in a large dramatic event. It’s like death by a million tiny cuts.

Obviously, there is one huge gaping wound, and I mean that physically and metaphorically. But the tiny cuts almost hurt worse because they are completely unpredictable, and it seems like they are always right behind a dark corner. Nowhere is safe.

The first cut came the same day I got home from the hospital. I went on Instagram, which is a mine field even on a good day. I saw a post from a friend who I knew was pregnant and due the same month as I was. Her lizard died and she was devastated. Her lizard. She posted a photo of it in her hand. Meanwhile it made me think about how little my baby had been. Would she have fit in my hand in an 8×8 box in a similar staged photo? What if I posted that on Instagram? This girl still had a baby in her stomach, how dare she be upset about a reptile???

The next cuts came from a doctor’s visit. Twelve hours after leaving the hospital, I had to go into the doctor’s office to have blood drawn for labs and to calibrate my meds. I was really hoping for a video appointment so I wouldn’t have to sit in a waiting room full of pregnant people, but the only availability was in-person, another tiny cut.

I was sort of prepared for the waiting room, and I was so glad Chris was with me, but I was fully unprepared for the next part. I was originally supposed to have my 26-week appointment that day and take a glucose test. Even though all of my upcoming appointments had been deleted from the system (thanks to my sister for handling this for me), there must have been a miscommunication. The nurse asked me if I drank the glucose drink. I said no. She asked if I already did the blood sugar test. I said, “I’m not doing that test anymore.” I couldn’t bring myself to say why. The nurse then handed me a packet of papers and told me there was information in there about “how my baby is acting and measuring at 26 weeks.” I looked to Chris and I said, “what the f*ck is going on??” I thought it was some sort of cruel joke. I was waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out from behind the door and say I was being Punk’d. I was speechless. Chris said, “we’re not pregnant anymore” and I burst into tears. Of course, the nurse felt horrible and ran out of the room. When the nurse came back with tissues, she handed me an EDPS survey to measure post-partum depression. Another small cut – how could I be post-partum with no baby?? She proceeded to take my blood pressure and of course it was sky-high.

Then, I had to get more blood taken (a physical small cut), and the phlebotomist asked which arm I preferred. My arms were COVERED in bruises, so I said, “how about I show you my arms and you can decide which is better.” She told me she was pretty confident in her skills and had seen some bad bruising in her time, but when I freed my arms from my long sleeves, I believe her exact words were, “damn girl! Those are impressive!” I had green, yellow, blue and purple gnarly bruises spreading from my tops of my hands, to my wrists, all the way up my arms almost to my shoulders. Looking at them through the phlebotomist’s eyes took me immediately back 7 days to my initial few minutes in triage where 8 nurses and doctors were running around trying to get a needle in my arm as fast as possible, trading off to the next nurse after each one failed. Over the next few months, every time I had blood drawn at the doctor’s office, that same phlebotomist remembered me and my bruises.

10 days later, more metaphorical small cuts came at the doctor. I checked my chart online first, to make sure it wasn’t showing a 28-week appointment or anything like that. Instead, it was coded as “post-partum,” which, technically, was correct. I was hopeful there wouldn’t be any mishaps. Again, I waited in a room full of pregnant people and sat in the corner with sunglasses on, listening to a podcast, trying to breath normally. Again, Chris was with me to try and allay a panic attack. We were called into the room, and the nurse started asking all these questions about my delivery, how I was doing with the baby etc. This time I was able to say out loud “there’s no baby” and of course immediately started crying and losing control of my breathing. Again, she felt awful. And again, she proceeded to take my blood pressure and it was sky high. When the doctor came in, I asked her to PLEASE put in caps in my chart that there was no baby and I started crying again.

Two days later, another tiny cut came in the form of stomach problems. One of the main side effects of the medication I was on was stomach issues. Thankfully, I hadn’t had any. Until now. It felt cruel that just as my body was starting to normalize and stop bleeding, it would let me down again. I canceled all of my weekend plans because I felt terrible. And to be honest, I didn’t want to go anywhere anyway. There is nothing worse for your mental health than when your physical health is bad as well.

I was pretty sure my doctor had to be sick of hearing from me, but I messaged her again asking how to fix my stomach. She wrote me back the next day and good news (irony) was that since I wasn’t pregnant anymore or breastfeeding, I could basically take anything I wanted. While I was thankful and hopeful it would work, I remember chugging the medicine and crying, extremely angry that I was even allowed to take it. Another cut.

At least my body wasn’t bleeding anymore, right? Wrong. My body just continued to blackmail me. Two weeks later, I was bleeding again. And again, I messaged my doctor, “is this normal?” Good news: it was “within the range of normal.” Bad news, the doctor said “normal” was that my body could be messed up and out of whack for three months. EYE ROLL.

I took two weeks off work, but I was going stir crazy at home. I wasn’t allowed to work out, which was another tiny cut. I decided I should go back to work because being alone with my thoughts wasn’t helping. But the second week back to work, I opened a Zoom and boom, it was a woman holding her 3-month-old baby. I felt like I was stabbed. In my job, I help people find new jobs, so she was lamenting to me about all of the terrible things that had happened to her in the past year, and why she wanted to look for a new job. All the while, she was bouncing and holding her (very alive and healthy) baby on camera. I’m not sure if she could sense my silence or uncomfortability but she added “of course having this little guy was amazing and the best part of our year.” Then she made some baby noises at him. At that point I just blacked out. I have no idea what I said to her. I was just trying to survive and get through the call. Eventually it ended and I gave up on work for the rest of the day so I could cry.

I haven’t even mentioned the endless tiny cuts caused by social media. As a 35-now-36-year-old female, I know a LOT of people getting pregnant. It felt like a new person every single day. A bump pic. A pregnancy announcement. I only have four cousins, and one of them had a baby the exact same day we lost ours. So of course I saw photos from them and from other cousins. Also, from my aunt and uncle, proud grandparents 3 times over. Just when I thought the social media barrage was done, all of a sudden somehow my baby cousin was 1 month old, and I saw more pictures and a reminder that it had been exactly one month since we lost our daughter. I realized that for the rest of that child’s life, every single milestone would be a reminder of what we don’t get to have. I immediately muted my cousin’s social media.

One of the issues with losing a baby so far along in a pregnancy is that people know and word travels quickly. Soon, it’s not just the people you told, but the people they told. That also means that you don’t necessarily know who knows or when it will come up. Danger is around every corner and you’re left with two options: mention it first and create a very awkward situation, or don’t mention it and hope it doesn’t come up or hope that they don’t know. A million cuts waiting to happen.

Two months to the day after I left the hospital, I was in the elevator in my building with a friend of my neighbor and her 4-year-old daughter. The doors closed and she excitedly said, “you’re having a baby!” I was stunned and momentarily speechless. Then I finally said, “I’m not.” And she said “Oh!” Another awkward silence. Then I said, “I was, but now I’m not.” Thankfully, the doors then opened on my floor, and I walked out.

In a twisted sense of fate, I had told my neighbor we were expecting the week before I went into the hospital. Of course. The universe has a sense of humor sometimes. When I came home from the hospital, I didn’t tell her what happened. I didn’t have the words to tell anyone, but I had asked a few friends and family to spread the news on my behalf. Of course, they didn’t know to tell my neighbor. After my elevator run-in, I walked into my apartment and collapsed on the couch to cry. It was so unexpected and that made it even worse. I was mad at myself for letting my guard down and leaving the house. Nowhere was safe, not even the elevator to my home. Worse, I knew I’d eventually hear from my neighbor once her friend wrote her and probably yelled at her, “how could you not have told me! I felt so bad!” I just curled up into a ball and waited for her text, another small cut.

Sure enough, an hour later my neighbor wrote to me and was so sweet and empathetic. She really couldn’t have written a better message, but it still wrecked me. She said she was so sorry and that she had no idea we were mourning a horrible loss, meanwhile she was picturing us nesting and getting ready for a baby on the other side of our shared wall. I couldn’t stop thinking about that: what could/should have been happening versus what actually was. I started thinking about what was happening with my other friends who were due the same month as me. Instead, in our apartment, it was just Chris and me and a silent house filled only with blank spaces where baby things used to be and punctuated by sounds of my cries instead of a baby’s.

The little cuts never stop coming. It’s the lake house my family booked for a week that was driving distance to New York City, because we thought we’d be driving with our baby. It’s the trips we can now take because we have no reason not to. It’s the weekend mornings when I sleep ‘til 11 am, and wake to an empty and silent room. It’s my friends asking to go to happy hour, and me knowing I can drink as much as I want because I’m not breastfeeding. It’s every friend who has a baby who will now be older than any future baby of mine for the rest of their lives.

I wish that this was a one-and-done loss, but unfortunately it seems like the gift that keeps on giving. Just when I think one cut has started to scab over and heal, I hit something else sharp, and a wound opens again. I hope a time comes when the cuts are fewer, and I have more healed scars than open wounds, but that time is not now.

Continue Reading

Grief and Pregnancy Loss

Social Media and Grief

12 Comments

TW: Pregnancy Loss

I’m on social media hiatus. I know it’s hard to believe, but Little Miss 4 Instagrams, 3 Facebooks, and 2 TikToks has gone dark. I haven’t been on the apps in almost 2 weeks, and I have to tell you, I feel free and light.

I’ve taken a break one other time since my loss and it was around Mother’s Day. I left social media for 5 days and felt great about it, and then the moment I opened Instagram for the first time I was bombarded by yet another pregnancy announcement. I regretted it immediately. Of course, the ultrasound and bump photos are extraordinarily terrible, but it’s not just that, it’s everything.

I remember a few months ago, I mentioned to my therapist how tired I was. She asked me if I was sleeping well, and the honest answer was, I was sleeping great! More than ever (hello… no baby to wake me up!), and with amazing quality. She dug into my statement a little more, and asked if I was tired like sleepy tired, or something else. I had to think about it, but the reality was, I was just mentally exhausted. Something people don’t talk about enough is that grief is extremely exhausting. There was the anxiety piece – I was always worried that something I didn’t want to talk about would come up – and there was the fear that no one understood me, but there was also the main problem: it takes an exorbitant amount of energy to “act fine.”

When I explained to my therapist that I was mostly tired of pretending I was ok, she again pushed and asked why I was pretending. Part of it was that I felt no one wanted to be around the “sad girl” and I had already lost so much, I didn’t want to lose my friends, too. Another small part was that I was hoping I could almost will myself to be ok, in a “fake it ‘til you make it” mindset. But the main part was, I felt like I was the only sad person in the world. It seemed like everyone else was happy and thriving, and I was… not.

In May, Chris and I went to Jamaica. We took some photos, although nowhere near as many as usual. I could have posted the picture of my nails around my pina colada in the pool. But the truth of that photo was that I was crying behind my sunglasses because I saw a pregnant friend on Instagram, so I was staring blankly at my Kindle and I couldn’t process the words. I could have posted the view of the 5 pools at the resort, but the truth was that I was barely functioning, staring at the water thinking only that we wouldn’t have been at that resort or looking at those pools if I was 37 weeks pregnant like I was supposed to be. My main activity during vacation? I had telehealth therapy twice while we were there.  I thought about posting a selfie of us on the shuttle to the airport and captioning it “can’t wait to sleep in my bed,” but the truth was that an old friend texted me that morning while we were at breakfast to “check on me and the baby” and I cried when the TSA agent asked me to open my passport to the photo page. I couldn’t stop crying until an hour into the flight, and the reality was, I “couldn’t wait to cry in my own bed,” not sleep in it. I struggled posting anything happy on Instagram, because I knew how unrepresentative it was of the whole picture.

I realize that Instagram is a “highlight reel,” and people are showing only the best parts of their lives. The app literally has a feature on your profile for “highlights” and no one is ever talking about lowlights. There have been some ups and some downs in the past few months, but it feels fake to talk about the ups, when the downs are so far down. For example, I went to multiple Miami Heat Playoff Games, but when I see those photos, I remember debating whether I could put on mascara or if I would cry it off. I once was talking about social media with my sister-in-law, and she said, “of course everything on my Instagram is fake and highly curated.” But I never ran my social media like that. I tried to be as real as possible, showing highs and lows in my stories, complaining about the dentist, showing my gross sweaty self while waiting for the subway in the summer, not putting filters on my face, etc. I knew I was in the minority, and it became even more clear when I was seeking to find anything real or any sort of struggle as I was dealing with my own, and I couldn’t find it anywhere.

When I explained to my therapist how tired I was of acting fine, she encouraged me to “bring people into my grief.” She said that real friends would be there with me if I invited them in. She gave me some homework to try and make a genuine connection and open up with a friend. I tried, and you know what, that b*tch (my therapist) was right… to an extent. I hate when my therapist is right, but unfortunately it happens a lot.

Chris and I eventually decided to share about the loss of our daughter on social media, and I was ready for empty platitudes and stupid replies, but I found that was not the response. Most people said what they could, because what could you say? I have a blog coming soon on what to say and what not to say, but the reality is, nothing helps. A few people said “Congratulations,” so I recommend reading the caption before commenting, y’all. (“Congratulations” definitely doesn’t help.)

It was relatively cathartic to come out of hiding with my grief. I found that people were willing to share things with me one on one. Sometimes on the very same app where they were posting happy smiling kids and spouses, they opened up to me in my direct messages that those same smiling kids were sick and up all night. Or they had 2-month NICU stays. Or their happy family actually had a member who was struggling with deep depression. Or despite their 2 happy kids on the ‘gram, they had 2 pregnancy losses before them. I started to feel a bit less alone, but I still couldn’t get over an overwhelming feeling of fakeness.

I was working so hard to be authentic, to open up my whole self and show my hurt, my depression, my endless tears and panic attacks at doctors. And then I would go back to the main feed and I saw highs and highs and more highs. I heard all of the “right” words in private conversations, but no one was sharing the way I was. I found out that someone was hiding a pregnancy for months while at the same time, I was throwing my heart on the table. I wasn’t able to balance what I knew to be true through conversations, and what I saw in those happy smiley photos. I knew I needed a break.  Sharing things is a delicate balance, and some people are far more private than me. I wear my heart on my sleeve, and often expect the same in return. Unfortunately, social media doesn’t work that way. People share what they want, when they want, in the way they want.

I was recently journaling trying to figure out what I needed in friends, whether it is coworkers, super tight best friends, acquaintances or Facebook “friends.” I came to the realization that I need people I can relate to, people I have things in common with, and people I can feel like I’m in a relationship with 2-way sharing on similar levels. I am fine with surface-level pleasantries and highlight reel-type interactions from people if I do the same toward them. My real struggle is when there is an imbalance, and when I feel like I open myself up to a person and it isn’t reciprocated.

I realize this is a hilarious oxymoron, as I am currently pouring my heart out on a blog that is read by over 100 people, but often gets 0 comments. Writing on a blog feels different than social media because I am writing into blank space. I don’t need a reply, and I don’t need to see anyone else’s thoughts or “perfect” lives. There is an understanding that a person is reading this only if they want. Social media feels like a constant imbalance where I am pushed things I don’t want or need to see. I am sure that I will eventually be back on Instagram and Facebook, maybe even tomorrow if I’m driven to it, and I’m sure I will see things that upset me. My hope is that I’m able to find genuine connections, as well, to balance these surface-level ones. While some people are extreme introverts and are ok without deep connections on a regular basis, I know I am not that person. I crave closeness from others, and I have been working hard to find people who I can relate with, share with, and who I feel will share back. It’s a work in progress, but for me, I know I need that balance before I can dive back into social media.

Continue Reading

Grief and Pregnancy Loss

Memories (or lack thereof)

1 Comment

TW: Pregnancy Loss (some studies suggest trigger warnings aren’t helpful, but I personally find them helpful so I’ll be trying to remember to use them)

Next week I am starting EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). If you haven’t heard of it, EMDR is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress resulting from trauma. Some studies show that 84%-90% of single-trauma victims no longer have PTSD after only three 90-minute sessions. Those are pretty amazing numbers. And since I’ve already hit my out-of-pocket maximum on my insurance like 20 times over, I figured I’d try anything for free. In my mind, it’s a little like hypnosis and a bit too woowoo for me, but most articles say it’s very different than hypnosis and plus, the research shows it works.

But there’s a catch. EMDR depends on a patient’s memories. The way you reprocess is by evoking vivid visual images related to the memory, and then you think about your negative beliefs about yourself and the related body sensations and emotions, then start to reprogram those beliefs and sensations that are related to the memories. This obviously poses a problem if you have no memories.

In preparation for EMDR, I’ve been trying to remember everything that happened in the months leading up to my hospitalization and loss of our baby, but I have a lot of gaps. First of all, it’s hard for me to pinpoint anything happy. It’s as if my brain remembers how horrific the week in the hospital was, and it has deleted and reconfigured any happy emotions I had at all the entire pregnancy. I’ve been meaningfully trying to remember being happy and excited, but now it’s all tinged with fear and extreme depths of depression.

When we told my parents about the baby, we had created a whole fake story so that we could get their reaction on video. It’s really hard to watch that video now. My mom cried. There were so many happy tears. But I watched that video trying to remember how happy I was and now as I watch, it feels fake. Was I really that happy? It seems like I’m watching someone else have those emotions. On a deep level, did that girl know what would happen? They say hindsight is 20/20, well now it feels like hindsight is just SAD.

Since I haven’t actually started EMDR, I am not sure if we will focus on the whole pregnancy, or only on the hospitalization and loss trauma. But if we focus on the hospitalization, I’m in even worse trouble because I have even fewer memories.

A couple of weeks after I came home from the hospital, I started writing a never-to-be-published blog about my experience and I realized I couldn’t remember a lot. I went through all of my hospital records trying to remember. I had 118 unopened test results in the app. I had pages and pages of doctor notes. From the moment that my OB told me to come into the hospital, my fight-or-flight reaction was triggered. I won’t get into all of the science, but basically when there is trauma, your memories can be affected. Add that to the fact that I was on a magnesium infusion for a week, which causes confusion, and also add the fact that I wasn’t allowed to eat food, and I have major memory gaps. Not to mention the later epidurals and the Ativan. Between the psychological issues and medical interventions, my brain feels like Swiss cheese.

Last week, Chris and I were trying to go through the timeline of what happened at the hospital. There were certain things that I thought happened on Wednesday but he said they happened on Friday. Some of the conversations that happened throughout the first night when we had a revolving door of neonatologists, maternal fetal medicine specialists, residents, doctors, nurses, etc., I don’t remember at all. Even in that moment, I recognized that my memory wasn’t great and I had my sister taking notes on her phone to report to Chris, who was on a last-minute flight back to NYC.

Two weeks ago, I started going through my text messages and phone logs to try and reconstruct what happened. Most of the calls made from my phone in the hospital were made by my sister. I was in no shape to make phone calls, I was mostly sobbing the entire time out of fear and sadness and confusion. My sister called some coworkers to let them know I would be missing meetings and that I wouldn’t be at the strategic planning meeting the next week in Texas. She called Chris and my mom many times, but those calls were mostly made from her own phone.

Then in my call log I saw one call from my best friend that came in at 7:18 pm on my first full day at the hospital. I hadn’t slept the night before because doctors and specialists were in and out of the room every 5 minutes, so I was awake approximately 36 hours by that point. According to my call log, that call lasted 17 minutes and 59 seconds. I have 0 memory of it. None. Not a single memory. I don’t remember it happening. When I saw it, I didn’t even believe it. Even though it was in black and white right there in my palm, I still thought maybe it didn’t happen. I took a screen shot of my call log and I texted my friend. I said, “Can I ask you a really weird question – did I talk to you when I was in the hospital? I’m trying to like put my memories back together and I saw this in my call log and I have literally 0 recollection of this.” She wrote back immediately, “Yes we did talk!”

17 minutes and 59 seconds gone. And the worst part is that I saw that date and I realized it was the last full day that my daughter was alive. And I don’t remember it. Not only are the memories of my pregnancy now completely overshadowed and tinged with sadness, but my final few hours pregnant with our first child are missing from my brain. I’ve been working on giving myself more grace, but it feels unforgivable that I just don’t remember those last few days. What kind of mom forgets the last few hours of their kid’s life? These are thoughts for my therapist. I realize this isn’t necessarily my fault, and that a body’s trauma response is not rational. I realize that this wasn’t a choice. And if I’m completely and totally honest with myself, I’m not even sure I want to remember those days. They were terrible. Every single minute of those days was horrific and if I forgot 17 minutes and 59 seconds of one of them, that could be viewed as a blessing. Some days it seems that way, and some days it feels like a curse, adding insult to injury.

We have so few things to remember our girl by, and the fact that I don’t even have reliable memories feels extra cruel.

p.s. I originally thought I’d talk about physical mementos in this post, but that’s for another blog, if I get to it. I am also trying to give myself grace on these posts. I’m figuring out what I want to share, and what I want to keep for ourselves. There are so few things. And while I think our daughter deserves her own space in the world, I also selfishly want to keep her for ourselves. There isn’t much to go around.

p.p.s. Some of these blog posts won’t have tie-in-a-bow endings. My story isn’t tied in a bow. Not only is it ongoing, but it’s messy. If it feels like a post ends abruptly, it’s probably because I left my computer to crawl into a ball on the couch and cry. This is just real life now.

Continue Reading

Grief and Pregnancy Loss

Very Superstitious, Writing’s On the Wall

9 Comments

TW: Pregnancy Loss (some studies suggest trigger warnings aren’t helpful, but I personally find them helpful so I’ll be trying to remember to use them)

Last week, I opened a new Listerine. I put some in my mouth then tried to fit the bottle into my drawer in my bathroom. It wasn’t fitting. As I was gargling the super minty concoction, I started fiddling around with everything in the drawer to fit it in and that’s when I saw them: two pregnancy tests in the back of the drawer staring at me in the face. I nearly swallowed the Listerine. I almost took the tests out and put them directly in the trash but something stopped me dead in my tracks. I looked at the expiration dates: 12/23. Would throwing them out mean I for sure wouldn’t be pregnant again before the end of the year? Do I even want to be pregnant by the end of the year? Will throwing them out somehow tell the universe I don’t ever want to be pregnant again? Are my thoughts that powerful? I fit the Listerine snugly into the drawer and closed it without doing anything with the tests. As I write this, those tests are still in the back of that drawer. But closing that drawer hasn’t made me stop thinking about those tests. Every time I wash my hands, I know they’re in that drawer, waiting to be used, or waiting to not be used as time continues to march on and that expiration date comes and goes.

Meanwhile, I can’t stop thinking about superstitions and ultimately that’s what drew me back to the blog. Everyone has superstitions, or at least I used to think people did. I never considered myself a very superstitious person, but as I take stock of my life, I’m realizing maybe I have been. The stakes were so much lower before, so I never took my thoughts too seriously. Growing up, I remember jumping over cracks in the sidewalk to avoid “breaking my mother’s back.” But that was just a childhood game, right? Maybe. In college and in the years after, I had this orange and blue underwear set I had to wear when the Gators played a football game. I didn’t necessarily think that I CAUSED them to win if I wore them, but I figured, “it’s worked before, it can’t hurt!” Just last year, the Miami Heat lost in a playoff game to the Celtics on my birthday. I remember exactly what outfit I was wearing. Again, this year they faced off against the Celtics in the playoffs on my birthday and I made sure not to wear that same jersey. But I didn’t think it would necessarily be my FAULT if they lost, they were coming off 3 losses and I was convinced it was their fault if they lost again. They deserved it! But if I could do this one small thing to help them by wearing something else, why not? And guess what, they won.

According to Merriam-Webster, a superstition is a belief or practice resulting from fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation. I was recently talking about my superstitions with my husband, and he said he just called these things “quirks.” My therapist, on the other hand, called them “physical manifestations of my anxiety.” Maybe all of those things are right. I told my therapist that rationally, I understand I’m not causing anything to happen, but it’s nice to feel I have some sense of control in a world that is so completely out of my control. I think she was proud of me for this insight, but I don’t think she would be proud of me if I told her I for sure would not be throwing those pregnancy tests out any time soon (or ever) JUST IN CASE. Why anger the universe when I can just keep them safely tucked into the back of my bathroom drawer, collecting dust until they expire?

Those pregnancy tests require a bit of a back story. When I got pregnant, I was thrilled and surprised. Could it be this easy? My best friend was pregnant and we were going to have babies so close together! It was a dream. With the advent of social media and people being open about fertility struggles, I was well aware that conception was not as easy as the movies make it out to be. Having sex does not equal pregnancy. I knew too many people who struggled to get pregnant. But maybe I was a lucky one and it was easy for me! Three weeks after that thought, I was shoved back down to reality when my best friend lost her pregnancy. From that moment on, I became more realistic about the possible outcomes.

At that time, I called myself “realistic,” but what I realize now is it was extreme anxiety. I was convinced something would happen to my pregnancy, too. It’s one of the reasons I never wrote about it on my blog! At my first doctor’s appointment, I made my husband come with me and I remember looking at my Fitbit and seeing my heart rate was 120 bpm. Literally double my resting heart rate. And that anxiety never fully quieted. I made my husband come to every single appointment.

Most people announce their pregnancies around 12 weeks because they are “out of the miscarriage window.” I never felt comfortable announcing. I was sure something would happen. I remember we finally decided to tell my parents at Thanksgiving, and we wanted to give them something cute as part of the reveal. But my 12-week ultrasound wasn’t until 5 days before we were going to see them. I wanted to buy something unique from Etsy, but I was way too superstitious to buy anything in advance of that appointment. What if, by buying those things in advance, I would cause something to happen and then I’d have those items in my house with no baby to announce? I waited until the appointment went well, then I ordered something kitschy and dumb on Amazon Prime to arrive the day before we left. But even after we announced to my parents, my superstition was high. We took photos together, and my mom wanted to post them on Facebook. I told her absolutely not. What if something went wrong? We couldn’t tempt fate. We couldn’t taunt the universe. What if we had to UN-announce? I couldn’t bear to think about it.

I was with Chris’s entire family for Christmas on December 21 when my phone started blowing up. My mom had posted about us being pregnant on Facebook. By that point I was 16 weeks pregnant and we should have been in the clear! But I was angry at her and nervous. Now everyone knew and what if we weren’t in the clear. I walked outside to call her. It was a frigid 9 degrees in Atlanta, but I needed to step away from Chris’s family. My mom explained that she had forgotten that I told her not to post about it and was just excited. She said she hadn’t tagged me, so it would be ok. She offered to take the post down. But it already had so many likes, so many eyes on it, everyone had seen. And more importantly, the UNIVERSE KNEW. We were too excited. Unrightfully so. I told my mom it was too late. I couldn’t figure out how to explain why I was so nervous. Most people would have been so happy! I wouldn’t let myself get too excited. In my rational mind, of course I know the Facebook announcement didn’t cause any of the events to come, but in that moment my superstitions took over.

I had made contingency plans for myself. The weekend before I found out I was pregnant I had two friends over to watch the new Hocus Pocus. Being the basic b*tch I am, I am obsessed with everything pumpkin so I had gone all out. I bought 5 different kinds of alcoholic pumpkin cider, I had ten different kinds of pumpkin flavored sweets. A few days later when I found out I was pregnant, I posted all of the leftover pumpkin cider on Buy Nothing to give away. At the last minute, I decided to keep two cans of my favorite cider. I figured since it was a seasonal cider, if I lost my pregnancy I’d want some sort of consolation prize and by then the cider wouldn’t be in stores anymore because it would be winter. How hilarious that I thought 2 cans of my favorite cider would be enough to make me feel better if I lost my baby LOLOLOLOL.

For months and months of doctor appointments, those ciders stayed in my fridge. The outside of the door of the fridge started filling up with ultrasound photos. The entire door was plastered with our baby at 6 weeks. 8 weeks. 12 weeks. 16 weeks. 18 weeks. 20 weeks. 24 weeks. And still, inside that same fridge door, those ciders sat on the bottom shelf  “just in case.” Around 20 weeks, I started to convince myself I wouldn’t be drinking them until they were expired and I had a living baby in my arms. But despite the expiration date, I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out. What would that mean? Would I be tempting fate? What if I still needed them?

When I was in the hospital, I had so much support from family. My sister was with me the whole time and my mom drove in from Philly. All of Chris’s siblings flew up to NYC to be with me. It was the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for me. When I found out I’d maybe be discharged, Chris’s family mobilized and went back to our apartment to cook for us so we’d have fresh, home-cooked food. Not only did we not have groceries, but I hadn’t been allowed to eat in nearly a week. I remember the full-body sense of relief coming home. I remember sinking into the couch and being so thankful it wasn’t a hospital bed. And then I slightly remember seeing Chris’s little sister drinking one of my two contingency pumpkin ciders at the table. I had been on a lot of drugs for a very long time, so it didn’t totally register at the time. A few days later when I opened my fridge and saw only one cider there it hit me.

I told Chris about my secret superstitious ciders and he asked me if I was upset that one was gone. I wasn’t. Who was I kidding that a cider would make me feel better? Nothing could make me feel better! My whole world had fallen apart and the last thing I wanted to do was drink something alcoholic to remind myself of everything I didn’t have. Alcohol was a reminder of everything I had given up for six months just for it to be taken away.

Four and a half months later, that one single pumpkin cider is still in my fridge. What would happen if I drank it? What would happen if I threw it out? Would the world be mad at me? Would I never get pregnant again? What if I need to do IVF? Would it affect my egg count? Will we get denied for adoption? Surrogacy?

Do I actually think my drinking habits have anything to do with any of those things? No. I don’t. When I’m in my most rational state of mind, I realize nothing has anything to do with anything. The world is random. I was unlucky. Every doctor says what happened was “so rare and unlikely.” They say there is no explanation. There was no known cause. Did saving those two ciders have anything to do with it? Absolutely not. Will drinking that single cider that’s still in the fridge affect any future events? Also no.

Recently, I think my superstitions/anxiety relating to other people and pregnancy has become worse. Last weekend, Chris’s friend had a baby shower. There were many reasons I didn’t feel I could go, but one (maybe abnormal) reason was fear. I was nervous that my presence alone would somehow trigger the universe’s wrath and make something bad happen to his friend. Two weekends ago, my best friend, who is pregnant again, was in town and I had the exact same feeling. I wanted to go see her, but I had to call in advance to warn her. I said, “if you think that my presence will in any way jinx you, please tell me and I promise I won’t be offended and I won’t come.” None of that makes sense. I am aware in my rational thoughts that my mere existence in a certain space will not set bad events into motion. But just in case, I wanted her blessing before I visited.

My favorite podcast recently did an episode about “manifestation.” Manifestation is the opposite side of the superstition coin. This has become such a huge buzzword recently. People believe we can just will things into being. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that we cannot. It doesn’t matter how much you want something, sometimes the world is just unfair. Do people with food insecurity just not want food enough? I’m thinking no. Do people who are downsized and laid off from their companies just not want to be employed enough? No. Do people with fertility issues not want a baby enough? Definitely not.

After writing this whole post, I wish I could tell you I went directly to my fridge to throw out that cider but I didn’t. It’s still there. And guess what, it’s almost pumpkin season again but I probably won’t buy that cider again. It’s too loaded with sadness and guilt. And drinking it would feel like literally consuming and causing more of that sadness and guilt. I guess that’s superstition too.

I wish I could tell you that my superstitions will completely stop, but I know that isn’t true either. As I said to my therapist, whether or not they are healthy habits, having a miniscule sense of control over a world that is so out of my control can feel helpful. And if that means having expired pregnancy tests in the back of my bathroom drawer forever, then I’m ok with that.

Continue Reading