Baby passionfruit

Still here

2011-09-28T20:59:00.000-07:00

The spring was really hard. After mostly avoiding the emotional burden of jealousy and bitterness until then---a bit of grace I was really grateful for at the time---the ugly twins finally caught up with me. Some friends had babies, others became pregnant. It was a kick in the stomach every time. More like a knee in the gut. And it was double the burden for the way it then made me feel guilty for being bitter, the way it isolated me from people I genuinely care about, and how obvious it was to me that they pitied me on some level, or at least felt awkward around me in light of their good fortune, and how that made me hate them. There is simply no winning in these situations.

The summer got better. My beloved cat died, which was horrible. But the grief for Eva let up a little. Once we had time to recover from losing the cat, the first "baby" that we ever had, we were wrapped up in moving from one house to a temporary apartment and then another house that we've been renovating. We were a little band of travelers together, sharing a bedroom for a few weeks, and the closeness was soothing. As the deep grief and bitterness lifted, I began to have glimpses of how you come to accept something as awful as birthing and holding your dead daughter. You don't condone it, you don't want it, you'll never totally accept it, but you stop feeling like you can't really live the life you're in. You stop feeling that you're in the wrong life. You realize that this is the life you have and there are some good things about it. Things to embrace.

So that's where I've been spending more of my time. But I write now because we're coming up on the one year anniversary. One year ago today, I had a bad ultrasound that indicated that Eva was gravely anemic. That the bizarre Kell isoimmunization issue that we had discussed at every appointment might actually amount to something very serious and in need of immediate treatment in the form of a fetal transfusion. Over the next days, it just got worse. The treatment that would've worked if she had been just 3 weeks older before getting sick couldn't help. I keep thinking of that line from Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. I don't have it here with me. She's talking about the day she felt something was wrong with her pregnancy---the baby wasn't moving. In her case, this was at full term. She describes the vague concern followed by the nagging worry, the consultation with the midwife, the reassurance. "And then," she says...and I forget what the next word was. Catastrophe? Calamity? But she gave words to the moment between the old life and the new life, the pause before you plunge into an abyss.

I see that this is how the story turned out for us. What a horrible fucking thing. What a fucking travesty that my daughter died.

I don't know what happens next. We were too wrecked all year to decide what the next move was. We're starting to talk now. I'm old now...40. How unfair that we had the two miscarriages...lost all those years between when we first started trying at 35 and now. And yet we have Sam. How lucky is that? And how lucky are all the other good things? And yet Eva is still dead and trying to be grateful can sometimes get me ping-ponging between peace and self-pity and shame and anger.

Update

2011-02-26T13:07:00.000-08:00

Well, I left this blog on an ominous note and I feel inclined to note that I haven't fallen off the planet, at least.

What has happened since we lost Eva and today is mostly a lot of daily life. We didn't fall apart as much as circumstances might have allowed. In fact, in the early days, I was flooded with this very odd, very deep sense of gratitude for Sam in particular, but for all the other good things in my life. I feel that there's this trick that happens immediately after some losses. Maybe it's grace, maybe it's a neurological response, maybe it's both. But something cushions the blow in the beginning, if you're lucky. Even when you're on your knees sobbing and saying, "I can't do this," there is a moment soon afterward where you think, "We'll be okay." I think it's much harder after the initial crisis when you realize that the shitty thing is still there, only without everyone rallying around you. And the shitty thing shall remain evermore, get used to it.

I now understand what Joan Didion said about magical thinking. I've had so many moments, particularly when visiting the hospital where we were during the pregnancy, where I've had the half-conscious thought that maybe Eva didn't really die or that maybe this new doctor will be able to make things turn out differently. It's hard to even articulate because it's so nonsensical. It evaporates when brought up to the level of words.

Now the grief hits in occasional storms. Not waves, but storms. More storms lately because my due date is this week. When I'm in the storm, I absolutely can not see out of it. I feel desperate. Clawing, screaming, pounding desperate (I save it for when I'm in the car alone. Parked). In those moments, I feel that I am ruined, that Adam and I are ruined, that I must have another child right now because that is the only way I'll ever heal from this. Or, I'll feel that we can never take such a terrifying risk because surely that will destroy whatever good is left. And now we're even more ruined because I'll never stop longing for another child and never stop feeling jealous of every family with more than one and oh my God it is exhausting to be like this. God bless my parents who have gotten two such phone calls from me in recent months. Thank God they're still here to talk me down from the tree. I feel irrational rage toward Adam in these times and I'm glad I at least have the sense to shield him from it.

And when the storms pass, they're just gone. Most days I can feel quite happy. There is a shadow over things maybe. I can see it if I look for it. But most of the time it doesn't distract me.

If we want to have another child, if we want to take that risk, we have three options: use a sperm donor who is Kell negative, do IVF with PGD, or adopt. I suppose we could throw a non-Kell-sensitized surrogate into that mix, but it's not going to happen. I have no idea if we'll try any of them. Adam is so very wary (part of the reason for my rage during the storms). And when I'm not feeling desperate, I tend to agree with him. We got this one beautiful, perfect (within the range of human imperfection) child. We're lucky in many ways and happy on most days. Let's just be grateful for what we have and move on. Think of all the easy traveling we can do! A cozy family of three.

And yet...I think about my life ten, twenty years from now and will I be at peace with it then? Do I want Sam to live his life without a sibling? No answers yet.

And again

2010-10-25T20:37:00.000-07:00

We have had two years of such happiness. Overall, I mean. There was a cancer scare last spring---a benign tumor on a fallopian tube that looked a little scary in the ultrasounds. And stuff. Just regular life stuff that was challenging. But we have had so much happiness. We have Sam. And last spring we decided that yes, we both wanted to try again because of the love, and for Sam to have a sibling, and wanting to experience the baby thing one more time. Mostly because of the love. And so we started trying to get pregnant in May and got pregnant in May and despite my old age it all happened so easily for us. And then our doctor told us that looking over my charts and all the latest research, he didn't even think I needed to take Lovenox this pregnancy. No more shots, just a little baby aspirin to be safe. For the first time in four years, my IgM antibody levels were down to normal range. And so here was the easy pregnancy, for once. I think it did feel like a reward.

And now that baby is gone at 18.5 weeks. Her name was Eva. You think that once you've been through the forest, you know the most fearsome creatures that dwell there, but there can be other monsters you didn't even imagine. For us, that was the Kell antibodies that we'd never heard of, mostly likely created when I gave birth to Sam and our blood mixed in some quantity. Sam had inherited his dad's genes, which were different from mine. He had a little protein on his blood cells that was different from the little protein on mine. And when my body sensed his foreign blood, it went on alert, producing antibodies to his type. He was safe, as he was already delivered. But Eva had Adam's genes, too. And my body had been primed to seek out her blood type. Search and destroy.

There wasn't a thing wrong with her, except that she was trying to grow in the wrong body.

By 18 weeks, when they began to look for signs of a problem, she was already so sick. A sick, tiny baby, too small to save. It doesn't usually happen like this. Usually the baby doesn't get so sick so soon. Usually it happens later, if it happens at all. And then there are treatments—transfusions, namely—that work in the vast majority of cases. Ninety, ninety-five percent of these pregnancies end with a healthy baby at home. But at every turn of our story, the bad thing happened. What could've gone wrong went wrong.

I think this latest tragedy probably puts this blog into radioactive territory. After my second miscarriage, I went to a support group for the unfortunate minority grieving miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal loss. The stories I heard there were terrifying. Instead of comfort, I found new outcomes to fear. I drove home panicked.

Maybe that's how our story reads now, too. But I know we don't even have it that bad. It can always be so much worse. We have Sam. What more does the universe owe us? We get to be parents. Every day, he pulls us back into life.

And yet Eva is gone. My baby. I delivered her still, tiny body three weeks ago. We held her. Our daughter is dead. How do we live with that sentence?

Revisiting the diagnosis

2009-06-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, when I was living on the Left Coast and first got the news that I sort-of had antiphopholipid syndrome (I'll explain that in a sec), my reproductive endocrinologist told me that, while she didn't expect me to exhibit any symptoms of APS outside of my tendency to miscarry, I should have annual blood checks to make sure my antibody levels didn't go through the roof. Also, I should make make sure I wasn't developing any of the antibodies associated with lupus, which sometimes exists concurrently with APS (though the relationship isn't thought to be causal).

So that was two years ago, and last year I was busy having Sam (yay!) and didn't get checked. But I went back a few weeks ago to meet with a rheumatologist here in my East Coast city.

If there's one thing your doctor likes to tell you when you show up with an autoimmune disease, it's that "there's still so much that we don't know." Here's a summary of what I've learned so far:

1) To get a diagnosis of APS, you have to meet both clinical and laboratory criteria. Clinical criteria include venous or arterial thrombosis and/or pregnancy losses (specifically, one or more miscarriages after 10th week of gestation, three or more miscarriages before 10th week of gestation, or one or more premature births before 34th week of gestation due eclampsia). To meet lab criteria, you have to test positive for anticardiolipin or lupus anticoagulant antibodies on 2 occasions of some weeks apart (6 to 12 weeks, depending on which antibodies they're looking for).

2) My particular problem antibody is of the anticardiolipin sort -- specifically, IgM (Immunoglobulin M). IgM and IgG antibodies are measured in the following way: fewer than 12 units = normal; 12 to 20 units= borderline; 20 to 80 units=moderate; more than 80 units=severe. My understanding is that lupus anticoagulant antibodies are a binary thing: either you have them, or you don't.

3) APS (also called Hughes Syndrome) can be quite a serious disease in some people, but there's a current line of thinking that there may be a population of women whose only symptoms are pregnancy-related. That is, they don't appear to be in danger of pulmonary embolism or thrombosis outside of pregnancy.

I've now had my IgM antibodies measured four times. After the miscarriages, they came in at 21.2 and 21.6, measured 7 weeks apart. During my pregnancy with Sam, while I was taking Lovenox, they were at 16. At my most recent visit, they were 19. It looks like I have a "mild" case. I've "only" had 2 miscarriages. No clots.

So...my docs on the left coast felt that while I was a borderline case, they should still treat me as if I definitely had APS. And so I went on Lovenox as soon as I knew I was pregnant with Sam. And it worked.

But the rheumatolgist here, who doesn't specialize in APS or miscarriage, wasn't as convinced. "Your levels are so low," she said. "Who knows if those first two miscarriages were just a matter of bad luck? And it's not like there aren't risks to being on blood thinners. I'm not sure if I'd even want you to be on Lovenox if you get pregnant again."

But, of course, if I get pregnant again (something Adam and I are discussing only in vague terms, with no final answer), I'll get right back on my vitamin L. Maybe it was just a matter of luck that this pregnancy worked. Maybe my ovaries are shaped like little roulette wheels. But I'm pretty convinced the drugs saved Sam's life, and in the matter of reproductive endocrinologist v. rheumatologist, I'm going to listen to the people with the better track record of bringing healthy babies into the world.

And on

2009-03-17T20:54:00.000-07:00

Still feeling strange an vulnerable. Obsessing about Jade Goody and Natasha Richardson, being overprotective of Sam. At some point, I'll be able to remember that most people live for decades and I don't need to be on alert. But not now.

Pulling me back into the present, Sam seems to have learned his first word: Duck. Rather, "guck." It is incredible. "Guck, guck, guck," he was saying as I stood at the bathroom mirror. I looked down and saw that he was talking to the little rubber duck on the edge of the bathrub. "Guck-guck-guck-guck." "Yes!" I said. "Guck," he said.

Anniversary Waltz

2009-03-15T05:57:00.000-07:00

Adam left for a business trip this morning. It's a short one—he'll be back Tuesday. But in the days leading up to his departure, I've been feeling so anxious about it—enough that I was thinking about all those stories you hear when the wife says she has a bad feeling about a trip and then the husband stays home and the plane he was supposed to be on crashes.

But it wasn't just the flight. I was worried about being left solo to care for Sam, which didn't make sense because Adam travels at least once a month and I've found that I really enjoy the special one-on-one time.

And why were my thoughts turning to people dying, people who've died, and worst of all, children who died? Why was I perusing so many of those blogs this past week?

I was just downstairs mulling all of this grim business, wondering what was wrong with me, when I finally realized what it was. March 15. My due date for the first baby. Our first baby who would've been two today.

How quickly the conscious mind pretends to forget, and how the body always remembers.

We would've been thrown a second birthday party for you, little one. Everyone would've come and I would've made you a cake and we would've been so happy. I am so sad that you're not here. I'm so happy to have little Sam, but I'm so sad you're not here.

Catch and release

2009-03-12T17:57:00.000-07:00

Sam is going through a Mommy phase. He just needs a lot of contact. He has this little game that I call "hug and look around," where he stands up, facing me, squeezes me tight, then pivots around to take in the world around him, then squeezes again. I love it. Love, love it. And it is such a pleasure to be needed like that and to be able to reassure him.

Only...his phase corresponds to the busiest month of work I've had in...years. Certainly in his short life. The volume of work is insane. And I just feel so miserable about all the time I'm spending away from him. Every day, I want to quit.

How can we be almost 40 years beyond the second wave of feminism and have so little to show for it?

My employers aren't cruel or unreasonable. They let me work from home one day a week. They do what they can to spare me the late nights that everyone else is putting in. I have no complaints about them, really. It's just that the nature of the job is incompatible with motherhood.

Blah, blah, blah. It's just a tough situation right now. I miss my baby. My body feels torn in half when I'm gone so much. We went through a lot to have him and I'm tired of feeling like I'm missing everything.

Meanwhile, I finally got around to making an appointment with a rheumatologist. Back when I was diagnosed with antiphopholipid syndrome, my doctor suggested I go in for annual blood draws to assess my anticardiolipin antibody levels. I'm a little overdue.

As far as antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) goes, I'm lucky, if you can set aside the two dead babies, which, of course, you can't. My antibody levels were reasonably low, even at their highest, and they were even lower when they last checked early in my pregnancy with Sam. Barely made it into the "disease" range. It appears to be something that only acts up during pregnancy for me, and Lovenox was my magic bullet on that front.

So I think I'm pretty healthy now. But there's always some concern once you've wandered into the world of autoimmune disease. Sometimes APS is a precurser to Lupus. That's scary. But my doc said I didn't fit the profile, so other than a few weeks when I felt particularly achy after Sam was born, I haven't worried about it.

But it'll be good to get checked out and know whether things are trending in a good direction.

Eye meme

2009-02-23T06:55:00.000-08:00

Niobe suggested starting a meme where we post a photo of our eyes. Interesting timing, because I was just playing around with this site, which lets you calculate the odds of your children having any particular eye color, based on the color of the parents' and grandparents' irises. What I learned is that there's no way any child of mine will have my eyes, thanks to my brown-eyed in-laws.

I guess I'm just narcissistic enough to wish that I could look into Sam's eyes and see a reflection of my own. But his are settling into a gorgeous chestnut brown ringed with blue-grey. If I had any shot at getting him to sit still, I'd post a photo, but it isn't going to happen. Sam's eyes are his own, and I should be grateful for this ever-present reminder that he isn't meant to be a reflection of either of us.

p.s. If you look closely, you can see the post-preg skin tag just below my lower eyelashes. Have you gone about having them removed? Is it painful?

Crash

2009-02-13T12:17:00.000-08:00

I'm procrastinating on a project that's due today. Ugh, ugh. I should be hanging out with Sam, but I just didn't get this project done early in the week, so I lose my day with my baby, even though I'm home and can pop in to visit him while he plays with his babysitter.

Zev, our young kitty, was hit by a car on Monday. I got the call at work -- Adam sounding sick, waiting at the vet for more news. I raced over, steeling myself for the inevitable news, cursing our decision to let him go outside. "He might die from this," the vet said when I got there, "but I don't think he will." That was the first moment of hope. The xray showed blood in his lungs and a broken jaw and he was in shock and in pain. There was nothing we could do by waiting there, so I drove back to work, feeling the horrible sensation of not being in the place where I should be -- Sam with a babysitter, Zev in an exam room, and me dropping the balls I had been juggling so furiously since I went back to work.

Zev's breathing slowly improved as the day went on and they let us take our battered little kitty home with us, just for the night, so that we wouldn't have to transfer him to the hospital. Up every two hours to check on him, I listened to his breathing and tried to curl up on the bathroom floor, but he just turned away, doped up on painkillers and so far removed. "He's here, but he's not here," Adam said.

The next day, he went back to the vet for more IV therapy and antibiotics, and the vet said the next hurdle was getting him to eat. That took another 24 hours, but he did eat with the help of an appetite stimulant (I meant to ask if it was some sort of marijuana extract so that, when he was feeling better, we could joke about the munchies). And then Zev started hissing at the vet techs when they came around, and then he started wailing for more food, and that's when we all decided that our kitty was coming back to us.

And now he's curled up on the bed here next to me, and everything is right again, my family is in one piece, and I can breathe.

Working girl

2009-02-02T09:42:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling a lot of angst about working lately. Specifically about how much time I'm missing with Sam in order to work. I have such inappropriate timing, musing about my conflicted feelings when so many people are losing their jobs all around us. But the angst remains, not helped by a recent logistical nightmare of Sam's first ear infection paired with my nasty chest cold, followed by Sam's stomach virus which has since felled me and Adam. We're both here in bed, feeling too disgusting to comfort each other. Adam is about 10 hours ahead of me, which means I can expect a violent bout of diahrrea any moment now. Sam is all recovered and spending the day at the nanny share, where the other family is hosting.

In the middle of the night, while Sam was refusing to sleep and Adam was retching and I was starting to feel those first twinges of nausea, I thought, "Oh my God, wait...who takes care of the baby when the grownups are passed out around the toilet? What the fu--oh, I'll call Mom! Wait. I can't bring Mom into this cesspool. She'll get sick. Ok, we'll hire a babysi-- no one's going to work for us in this condition. Oh my God. No one can help us. We're all alone and we'll pass out from dehydration and Sam will fall out of his crib!"

I have missed a lot of work lately and it's stressful. We have this great little setup with our jobs, me working a 4-day week, Adam working mostly from home, the nanny share (more on that soon).

And even then, it's tough. As soon as someone gets sick, the whole thing falls apart. But it's not just that, of course. I feel like I'm finally relaxing into motherhood. Sam is so incredibly interesting now. [EDITED TO ADD: That makes it sounds like he was boring before. He wasn't. It's just that the back-and-forth of our play now is incredible). He's like that moment in spring when so many flowers and plants start bursting open that you can't even keep track. He can express his pleasure in my company, and his anxiety when I leave. I savor my time with him, instead of fearing it like I did in the early days. It's funny -- in some ways, having to go back to work at 13 weeks seemed inhumane, but I think it also helped stabilize me. Helped me make this transition more gradually. And, hot-house flower that I am, I do much better with gradual transitions.

But now, I feel like I want to give it up. There's a rightness to being physically near Sam all the time. Most of the time. Sometimes, I'll be laughing with my friends at work, and I'll think, "Oh, no, this is perfect. This is the balance I need. This makes me a better mother." Or I'll be working on a project and think, "I need to use my brain like this. I need my career." But then, I'll be nursing Sam and looking down at his little cheeks and eyes and I can't believe I'm so stupid as to go away from him for the major chunk of the waking hours.

You know, I should stop here before I go further to offer my personal feeling about the to-work-or-not-to-work mommy wars: We have no more business commenting on another woman's decision to keep a job or not than we do commenting on her field of interest, or college major, or favorite flavor of ice cream. There's no way to do that math for someone else.

Now back to my own personal calculus. I should also say that I muse here, setting aside the practical concerns. Like money. Actually, we have an affordable mortgage. We could get by if I quit. But it would put a lot of pressure on Adam. And what if he lost his work?

I see other downsides:

1) I like being an equal parent with Adam. I'm a little dominant because I have those Fridays at home, and I'm nursing and Sam is going through more of a Mommy phase. But I like that we're generally on even footing. When I was on maternity leave, it felt at times like I was the parent and Adam was flitting in and out, and that wasn't great for our relationship.
2) The work I do is very freelance-friendly, but that's when there's an actual demand. Which there isn't right now. A lot of recently laid-off people are trying to freelance at a time when there are fewer and fewer jobs. This is not a good time to try to transition to self-employment.
3) I have a tendency to lose myself too easily. If I wasn't forced to get out of the house every day and keep that non-mom part of myself alive, I might not do as well.
4) I despise the idea of being financially dependent on Adam. As it stands, he makes more money than me, but it matters to me that I'm contributing to the common fund, that I'm saving for my retirement, that I can earn my own money to treat myself now and then.
5) I really trust and love our nanny, Claire. She expresses an affection and concern for Sam that would be nearly impossible to fake. I like the way he lights up when he sees her, and in my optimistic moments I think that Sam is learning the wonderful lesson that he can get love and protection from many people in his life. I fear losing Claire if we slashed her hours. I also feel a responsibility for providing her with the employment we promised (she asked for a year's commitment).
6) I have a job that can be seriously fun. One of those, "You really get paid to XYZ?" jobs. It has its downsides, but I'd be an ungrateful bozo to not acknowledge that a lot of people would kill for this position and it's not one that's easily replaced. It might not be replaceable, in fact. It's not to be given up lightly. It's basically the dream job I set out to have.

But then I think about something my friend said last week. "The thing is, you have a new dream job. You have Sam. Dream jobs change."

I'm not ready to make a decision. But then, you can take your time, waiting for "the truth to emerge" or "the answer to be revealed" and suddenly your baby is a year old and you've made a call without really making it.

2009-01-18T09:34:00.001-08:00

Absence makes the heart

2009-01-18T09:28:00.000-08:00

Sam is showing new signs of stranger anxiety. It passes relatively quickly, but, for the first time, he's doing all the "I want Mama!" behaviors.

Is it screwy that I find this so gratifying, being needed so intensely? While simultaneously worrying that he'll be plagued by the separation anxiety that I'm told I had as a toddler...

Something fishy

2009-01-11T10:09:00.000-08:00

I mentioned a few posts ago that in November, I had a run-in with something that felt all too much like post-partum depression. The sudden onset made it seem like a physical event, one compounded by stress and the waning daylight. When the waves hit, I felt like I was looking through a window at a happy life---baby, good marriage, good job---and wholly disconnected from it all. The P&L sheet of my life seemed heavy on losses; any gains felt insubstantial. And then the guilt! of feeling so ungrateful, when I'd finally gotten what I wanted!

So we went on a vacation, and that helped a lot, and it eased my fear that I was on some kind of downward spiral. And then, when we got back, I stumbled across Moxie talking about fish oil as the miracle supplement for new moms---the theory being that your brain gets depleted as the fetus/baby basically sucks the fatty acids from your brain---and remembering an old bottle in the medicine cabinet, I popped a few.

Oh.my.god. They worked. They really worked! I just felt like...myself. More even and relaxed and sane. So I looked around at research exploring the relationship between EPA (fatty acids) and mood. Adam's uncle, a psychiatrist, told me that he recommends fish oil to all his patients, and takes 4000mg himself (I take 3600).

Why hadn't I heard this before? Could I have lessened the post-miscarriage crash if I had known about this then? All the therapy sessions, making meaning of the grief, fear, and pain -- it wasn't worthless. Spiritual growth and all that. But could I have skirted the worst of it?

Eh. No point dwelling. The point is that I've gone down another step on the Celexa without any problems. I hope the trend continues.

Erasure

2009-01-10T05:11:00.000-08:00

The holidays were good, but so busy. For some reason, we agreed to travel three times -- first to my parents' house, which is less than 2 hours away. Then down South to visit Adam's family -- a three-hour flight. Then home for two days, followed by another trip to my parents' to celebrate the New Year with my sister and her family. By the middle of the second trip, I was cranky. By the third, I was resentful -- of my family, even of Sam.

Sometimes, especially when I'm tired, it seems so much easier to meet the relentlessness of motherhood by just erasing myself. It's so much simpler and more efficient -- not juggling, just giving in. No real decisions to be made or priorities to be weighed, just a quick response to the most immediate in-my-face demands. Throw my job in the mix and it's easy to spend all my time merely reacting. And there is something oddly satisfying about being self-less. You don't realize what a burden it is to be a full human being until you get a break from it. But then the burnout sets in. Then I remember that martyrdom isn't much of a strategy. Damn.

Sam has picked up some really cool tricks lately. He can transfer Cheerios and Puffs to his toothless mouth. It's an inexact process, leaving him with three or four puffs stuck to his drooly chin before he gets one in the goal. But he is so proud of it, and I'm even cocky enough to think that we might be able to go out for Chinese and both eat food at the same time.

He also likes to clap, sort of. He slaps his hand down on my hand, making a nice thwack sound. Doesn't do it with his own two hands yet. I think the payoff isn't big enough, since baby hands don't make much noise. We're all about efficiency these days.

Piss poor

2008-12-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

I credit my final, complete recovery from the Great Post-Miscarriage Depression of '06 with the spring '07 arrival of a little kitten, who we named Zev. He was exactly what we needed: a clingy little 3-pound baby in need of lots of lap time and snuggles, who would knead my stomach and purr like a little engine, then curl up and fall asleep. Zev helped me to embrace hope again, turn the corner, and remember what it was like to feel happy.

Zev had a problem, though. Having spent his first three months on the street (my mother-in-law's street, to be exact, where some kindly neighbors fed the local strays), Zev did not take kindly to the litter box. And that's being generous. To get him to use it with any consistency meant changing the litter and scrubbing the box after every use, and with another cat in the house, that was impossible. If he couldn't pee outside (and, mindful of the vet's warnings about life expectancy, we weren't letting him out), Zev preferred to pee inside, specifically on our bed. I've washed our sheets and blankets more times than I've washed my underwear.

To remedy the problem, we tried getting him neutered, tried pheremone sprays, and tried positive reinforcent ("What a good kitty! good kitties get tweats when they use the witter box!"). We tried negative reinforcement (one brief and instantly-regretted attempt to get Zev to associate peeing on the bed with a quick trip to the shower. We both have scars from that bozo idea), and all kinds of special litter brands/types. We brought in a pricey cat psychologist whose advice, as far as I could understand, was that I'd have to quit my job and devote myself to providing a rich, stimulating environment for Zev, with a litterbox in every room in the house.

What we ended up doing is scooping all THREE boxes (one for each floor) every day, and putting the little Zev on Prozac, per one teary, desperate phone call to the vet (and yes, I have often savored the irony of our sweetly matching mommy-kitty SSRI ensembles). We also started letting him go outside during the day -- something we were loathe to do, as we live on a sort of busy street, but which we have come to accept as Zev's only true path to sanity. He's just happier being able to be outdoors. Keeping him inside makes him miserable, and he acts out by attacking our (IMMACULATELY behaved) older cat and, yes, peeing. So he goes out a few times during the day, and sleeps in bed with us at night, and we keep our fingers crossed and pray that he'll continue to show good sense when crossing the street.

And that has worked beautifully until this Great Blizzard of '08 rolled into town and Zev decided he doesn't like getting his paws wet. Or cold. Or something. Our Southern-born cat won't set foot outdoors, and last night, after one of Sam's usual 2am wakeups, I finally dozed off only to wake up sputtering as Zev dumped a couple of bladders-full of piss on my thigh.

Breathless

2008-12-11T05:36:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've been having so many moments where Sam's existence just takes my breath away. I'll be playing with him, or cuddling him, or watching him sleep, and the incredible blessing of it all just stops me in my tracks. This is my baby, I'll think. We had a baby. He's here.

I think that half the journey for me has been about my slow realization that this time, we got lucky. I think my heart and brain have been so slow to believe it. I had gotten so accustomed to being one of the unlucky ones--and hell! We didn't even have it that bad. Two miscarriages. How many women have been through so much more?

I guess I'm not quite sure how to digest this good fortune.

And now he's doing little things like wrapping his arms around my neck when I carry him, and squealing and bouncing up and down and waving his arms when I come home from work. My God, the gift of mothering this child! I think, "What did I do to deserve this?" but it's not about deserving. The blessings are as much out of my hands as the losses were.

If only I could do something to help all the incredible, brave, hurting, and yes, deserving women who've lost babies. If I were a more reliable carrier, I'd offer be a surrogate, but I'm still high risk, even with Lovenox. I'm too old to offer reliable eggs. Gah. I just wish there was something I could do.

Good boy

2008-12-06T14:33:00.000-08:00

Sam is a good baby. I find myself saying that all the time. "Oh, what a good baby you are," kiss, kiss, kiss. "Yes, he's a very good baby," I say to strangers when they ask.

But what does that mean? "Good" baby as opposed to what, rotten-to-the-core baby? I've only seen one depiction of a truly hateful infant, and that was fiction.

And yet there is this sense of a fundamental goodness in him. He's so content, generally, so quick to smile, so delighted by the Mexican tin hearts on the wall, or the skylight above our bed, or any random person talking to him. He's so quick with a giggle, and the noises, the noises! The delicious little squeaks and bleats and hiccups he makes in response to us.

But it's foolish to equate goodness with compliance. Hard to believe it, but he will defy me one of these days, and get angry and tantrum. I just hope I'll be as quick to defend and promote his fundamental nature. That's what unconditional love is all about, right?

______________________________________

For the records: He has been pushing himself up into a sort of Cobra pose for a couple of weeks now, but he has just started to try to also push his butt up off the floor in a sort of pre-crawling lift-off. Everyone reminds us that we'll be well and truly screwed once he starts moving around. Thanks, everyone. We haven't childproofed a single cabinet yet.

Bah lovebug

2008-12-02T17:45:00.000-08:00

Sam tried apples for the first time today. A big hit. But from the look on his face, he would have preferred the pizza I was eating. Good boy.

His vocabulary has two primary words: "bah-bah" and "muh-muh." From what I can tell, "bah-bah" has two meanings. The first is, "I'm the king of the world!" He says it when he's pleased with himself, like after taking a nice long swig off the boob. The second meaning is more observational. Something like, "It's all goooood," except, you know, thank God he doesn't say that because it's so dorky. But he'll kind of sigh and look around the room all mellow and say "Bah-bah-bah," and it's like everything's in it's place.

"Muh-muh," also sometimes "Ma-ma" or "Mmmmmmm," is a distress call. It means either, "I'm hungry," or "I'm tired," or "This sucks." A couple of times, I've half-thought he really was calling to me specifically, over Adam, when he used it, but I can't see how that would really be true.

Beyond the sea

2008-12-01T17:16:00.001-08:00

We took a big family trip this past week--a cruise out of Florida, down to Belize and up the Mexican coast. It was awful and wonderful in the way that all cruises are.

Awful: terrible food in huge quantities, too many bodies in one space, too much flash and forced cheer, the first world/second/third world mash-up, the Tanzanite and Gold By The Inch and Diamonds International orgy. Sam's gradually degraded sleep habits.

Wonderful: Sam surrounded by three doting grandparents, three aunts, an uncle, and two cousins. Waking up every morning and saying, "Hey! Where are we today?" No one having to cook or do the dishes, your whole world narrowed down to one boat, giving up control and learning to drift. Sunshine.

It cured me of the pressing anxiety/depression that had settled in over the past few weeks. Was it just stress? Time to buy a light box? I don't know yet. I had a phone appointment with my old therapist before we left. She said, "I'm not surprised you're feeling this way. I knew your perfectionism was going to kick you in the ass."

So I have some thinking to do. I'm confident that I had a hand in making myself miserable this past month. I live in fear of dropping the ball, and there's just no slack in the system. If work is intense, I can't let it eat into my time with Sam. If Sam isn't sleeping, I can't let it show at work. It's a terrific act to try to pull this off. A great way to keep the psychotherapy economy afloat. So what gives?

No answer yet, but I do know one thing: Sam's a pretty good traveler. He was great on the flights, cheerful on the boat. It wore on him eventually, being so far outside his routine, and the last couple of bedtimes had both of us in tears. But we're back now and he just went to sleep with barely a whimper.

Coming back

2008-11-19T19:07:00.000-08:00

I don't fully know why I stopped writing here. I think it's that my best coping mechanism throughout the pregnancy was to stay in the here-and-now and not think about whether or not there really would be a baby at the end of it. And chronicling everything on this blog felt like tempting fate. I just wanted to stay under the radar, let the time pass, and hope that I wouldn't attract any bad luck.

This worked surprisingly well. Not talking about my pregnancy with too many people, and not thinking too far ahead, kept me relaxed and happy in a way that I wouldn't have thought possible. But once I'd start getting ahead of myself ---like the time in late December when Adam's mom hounded us about decorating the baby's room, and, by the way, could she be in the room when I gave birth?---I'd shut down.

But really, most days, I'd joke that I wanted to bottle whatever hormonal blend I was brewing. Even better, once we got past the Down Syndrome scare, Sam aced all further tests and ultrasounds.

It was a beautiful pregnancy. I am so profoundly grateful to have been able to experience it.

And the birth---while somewhat dampened by the fancy teaching hospital's CYA approach to obstetrical care, which included unnecessary IV antibiotics for Sam and me for 48 hours ---was a good one.

So that's what we got. Healthy baby, healthy mother. Go figure.

What we didn't get, though, was the full storybook ending---a natural and easy slide into maternal bliss. Having Sam cured a lot of things, but not everything. I did not glide into motherhood. I stumbled. And then felt crushing guilt for not being simply happy after getting what I had begged for.

It has gotten so much better. Sam makes my heart explode with love at every turn. But I'm still stumbling on a regular basis. Sometimes I long for solitude, then take that as evidence that I'm too selfish to be a good mother. I worry about Sam when there's absolutely no need -- he's so happy, so robust -- then worry I'm teaching him to fear the world. I'm still taking Celexa, to my great shame, and had to bump up the dose earlier this month when I felt the first stirrings of could have turned into post-partum depression if I hadn't acted.

So I got what I want, and now what? Real life, I guess...

At last

2008-11-19T06:21:00.000-08:00

Sam, born May 2008

The Gift

2007-12-24T05:50:00.000-08:00

I was just lying in bed, hands on my belly, laughing as the baby did a series of flips inside me. I'm 21 weeks today and the reality of this is so much better than I had even imagined. It has been hard to find inspiration to write about it, as every post would read something like, "Still pregnant. Still incredibly grateful. Still happy."

Which is not to say that this pregnancy hasn't actually been filled with drama. At about 12 weeks, we had the standard triple screen for Down Syndrome which came back with an alarming result: a 1 in 9 chance that the baby would have the condition. To put that in context, plenty of women become panicked when their odds are 1 in 100. Once we got that information, we had a month's wait before the final amnio report assured us that the baby was genetically typical. Which he/she is (we've decided to be surprised about the sex).

That was a lot of time to think about what it would mean to raise a child with special needs. And for me, that was the only option—raising the child. After these losses, and especially after seeing that baby wiggling around in the ultrasound, and knowing how much I loved him/her already, I couldn't terminate. If it had been another trisomy, a fatal one, that would've been different. And if Down's had been accompanied by life-threatening heart defects that promised multiple surgeries and misery, that might've been different. But every blog, essay, and book I read assured me that raising a child with Down's (who is otherwise fairly healthy) has its own gifts.

Which is not to say that we weren't absolutely frightened. The thought of coping with societal prejudice; of fighting for school placements and resources; of having to go through the rest of the pregnancy feeling different or unlucky, unable to bond with the "normal" pregnant people with all their easy optimism; worrying about raising a child who would need some form of special care well into adulthood...the stress manifested in a rash of red welts on my face and in a reluctance to share our news with anyone outside a small circle of friends and family. It was...very hard.

But...it wasn't wasted effort, either. One thing became very clear to me through this: the whole purpose of having this child is to love it, just for being alive, and to to find daily meaning in providing that love and care. The point is not to see this child grow up to become some thing—an artist, a college graduate, a race car driver. It's to love the process, not the product.

Of course, I won't be able to remember this every day. I'll get caught up in the same bullshit that everyone does. I'll fret over report cards and standardized tests. But it's a gift to have this perspective at the outset, and to have even more reason to feel so grateful for this healthy baby kicking away. Sweet is the fruit of adversity.

New year, new beginning

2007-09-16T08:46:00.000-07:00

I didn't go to temple for Rosh Hashanah this year, which I regret. It is an intense time, and it would've been good to spend a day thinking about the past year, in all its misery and grace.

I'm pregnant again. We found out about a month ago. My cycles had been strange. I was beginning to think that I wasn't ovulating, and because charting was proving so stressful, I had skipped it altogether. But then I had some symptoms—the twingey sensations in my uterus, breast tenderness—so we tested.

The news came on a very good day. We had moved back home and were spending the weekend in a favorite coastal town. In the preceding weeks I had been feeling so relieved. Almost fully healed. Life felt rich and full again, I liked my new job, our friends were glad to see us. So I was on that high when we saw the faint second line.

Since then, I've been on a roller coaster. I started the Lovenox shots, which weren't nearly as bad as I had feared. I got some good hcg results, followed by last week's ultrasound which put me at about 7 weeks, with a good, strong heartbeat. That's a first for us. But being pregnant again is also kicking up some of the pain from last year. It feels like I'm far out on a limb, now responsible for this little life, while also managing my own emotions. It's so hard to not give into the fear and the what-ifs. Who am I to have a healthy pregnancy when I was such a mess just 9 months ago? How can this end in anything but heartbreak? Can I handle the uncertainty and the physical changes? How do I think about this little life? What do I owe it? For now, I'm tentative, trying to be welcoming and loving, but not able to really pull it off.

I'm trying to breathe through it, remember to talk to people when it seems overwhelming. The nausea and fatigue are slowing me down, which maybe isn't a bad thing. I'm trying to surrender to this.

Not pregnant

2007-06-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

Looks like I ovulated later than usual this month. It's hard to say exactly when, but it might well have been when Adam was out of town. Or maybe we just didn't get pregnant, for whatever reason.

I'm beginning to contemplate whether it would be smart for us to meet with an adoption agency when we move back home next month. Just to get some of the preliminary work underway. It might be that I'll get pregnant and it'll stick and all will be well. But I need to learn more about our options. Adoption takes time. And if we ever do manage to have a bio kid, we'd still want to adopt a second, if possible.

Meanwhile, we'll get back on the schedule that has worked for us in the past: sex every day in the 10-day fertile window (to allow for o-date variations).

On other news, I just flew home yesterday, after having completed all my job interviews. They went well. At least, I'm happy with how I did. If I don't get any job offers, I'll still know that I did my best. Meanwhile, I wonder what will happen if someone does make an offer. Can I handle a new job while also dealing with TTC and potential miscarriage? What if I do get pregnant? These jobs are all intense. Not pregnancy-friendly. They're also great opportunities. Career-defining opportunites. Do I let them pass me by on the off-chance that I end up with a baby that I want to be home with for a while? Could the stress of a new job hinder our attempts? I can't answer these questions until I know whether or not there's an offer at hand, but if that does happen, I'm going to have to decide quickly. Help.

"The world is a narrow bridge...

2007-06-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

...the important thing is to not be afraid."

-Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav

Wha?

2007-06-01T14:48:00.000-07:00

My chart is fucked up this month. I thought I was seeing an ovulation spike yesterday, but it dropped again today. Meanwhile, the thermometer is giving me a different temp every time I take it. Just two minutes apart, these temps tend to go up steadily, even though I haven't gotten out of bed or even moved.

Just in case I have ovulated, I've started taking low-dose baby aspirin for the rest of this cycle. But I'm so very much in denial about what I'll also have to do if I actually get pregnant.

Meditation

2007-05-31T10:55:00.000-07:00

I finished up my last day at work and am now officially an independent contractor. It's strange, having no office to go to, no place where I have to be. Unsettling. And there's a lot of contract work to do. At least I can do it sitting on my bed.

Adam and I took a long weekend in a resort town nearby. It was a charming place, as they always are, and unfancy. Mineral baths were cheap and clean, which really played to my egalitarian fantasies. Spas for everyone!

Lying in the bath, knowing I was near ovulation, I tuned in to something like sadness and unease. So I talked to those emotions the way my old therapist taught me: You give the feelings a persona (actually, you just let the image come to you. It's usually a younger version of yourself), and then talk to her in the voice of your most wise, compassionate self. It's a Sybilesque dialogue, a way to soothe the difficult emotions, and accept them as part of you, but not all of you.

I asked her (the image I got was of a younger me...early teens?) what was wrong. I got a deep sadness in my gut, and tears in my eyes. "I can't believe you're going to make me go through this again," she said, crying now. The miscarriages. I imagined gathering her up and telling her that I won't leave her alone this time. I pictured all the resources we had now, the ones we didn't have before. Being back home again. A safety net. I said I wouldn't abandon her like I did before, no matter how anxious or sad she gets. And I pictured all the different parts of me as a group that could surround her with love and safety. I resisted the part of me (it's always there) that saw the exercise as silly and indulgent.

It helped. But sometimes it's so hard to do this work while still living in the world. There's no space to stay tuned in like this. And yet I seem to need to do it. How?

To clarify

2007-05-26T16:46:00.000-07:00

After I wrote my last post, it occurred to me that what I had written is exactly the sort of thing that would have freaked me out right after my first miscarriage. So I should just say here that it's not inevitable for a woman feel up feeling as though she's dragging around a dead part of herself after a pregnancy loss. What happened to me happened in the context of my life, my family history, the other losses that were happening concurrently, the fact that we were living 3000 miles away from family, a frustrating job situation, and my own tendency toward anxiety when times get really tough.

I do think that the nature of grief is different for these sorts of losses. But people are bound to feel it to widely varying degrees.

The grief that we know

2007-05-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

Rosepetal has sustained more losses this year than anyone should ever have to. She wrote so eloquently today about her grief. How she can't eat, how she feels like a shell of her former self. It got me thinking about one of the subtle, profound experiences of miscarriage and infant loss. It's hard to talk about this without sounding a little extreme, a little melodramatic. But it's worth a try, because there's something here that I wish I had understood at the time.

The process of birth is one of separation (and actually, reunion). In utero, the baby is part of you, made from your very body, and yet it is not you. It's a complex reality. Two realities, really, existing simultaneously. The baby is of your body. In many ways, you and the baby are one. Women sometimes describe giving birth and saying, "You mean, there was another person inside me all that time?" Similarly, when the baby is born, s/he doesn't yet grasp that the mother is a separate person. As the baby grows, so does the awareness of an individual identity. It's a gradual thing. Both mother and baby slowly begin to conceive of the other as unique, separate.

So when that baby dies, doesn't part of you die, too? And not just in the poetic sense (as in, "It's so sad I could die"). The part of you that was one with the baby is dead. You aren't alive the way you were before. You're walking wounded, but worse. Dragging this dead part of you, like a paralyzed limb, everywhere you go.

I was trying to explain this to my sister-in-law, who was trying to dismiss the loss. "Something died inside me," I told her, instinctively putting my hand on my abdomen. "My baby died inside me." And suddenly she winced in sympathetic pain and never minimized our loss again.

That is why this grief is so different. It's emotional and physical. Our bodies grieve this loss, not just our minds/hearts. It's almost as if we live in a liminal state between life and death. We feel like shells of our former selves because, in a sense, we are.

When I was at my worst, that sense of being close to death, of some part of me being dead, terrified me. I feared that I was on the verge of becoming suicidal...that with just a little more stress, something would break and overtake me and make me do something horrible. But that didn't happen. Thankfully, with help, I began to see that it wasn't suicidality, but something else. No less awful, but different. The death I was feeling wasn't some future thing to fear. It had already happened.

For a while after that, I wasn't so haunted by death, but still felt untethered, disconnected from the world. I remember hiking up my favorite hill one day and lying down in the sun at the top. Before my miscarriages, I had always had the feeling there that I was grounded, with the comforting warmth of the earth under my back. But now I felt as if I could just float away. The earth could just shake me off. Adam and my family were the only things that gave me context and tethered me to my life. I held on tightly to them.

Then, with time and help (Adam, therapy, family, Celexa), I began to have glimmers of feeling alive again. Those moments kept me going. I had moments of feeling like I belonged in this world. There would still be dark days, but they would be followed by days in which I felt that I felt connected, even rooted. I began to feel like myself. And then, in time, I began to believe in the future.

I am awed to know that, even after such darkness, life can still come back. It feels like a miracle. In fact, I can only feel safe talking about those dark days now that I know that they can recede. I used to think that resilience meant never falling down. Being unhurt by injury. But maybe that's not it. Maybe it's more about coming through to the other side.

Time to get busy

2007-05-22T16:51:00.003-07:00

It's CD10 and we're entering the window of fertility. Oh please let this work.

Meanwhile, for your entertainment...

http://cutethingsfallingasleep.blogspot.com

Baby

2007-05-17T16:04:00.000-07:00

In the past two weeks, three friends have had babies and one has announced her pregnancy. Last night, it was our turn to bring dinner to one of these new families. To say we dragged our asses there is putting a really perky spin on it. On the way over, Adam suggested we sing "We are the losers!" to the tune of "We Are the Champions." I love him for that.

Thankfully, this visit was a blessing in disguise because these babies (twins) were conceived via donor eggs after 3 years of infertility (she is in her early 40s). These people know exactly what it's like to visit your friend's new baby when your own arms are empty. They made it easy for us. We arrived, put the food down, and Jenny said, "How 'bout you wash your hands and pick up a baby?" It was all very matter-of-fact, which broke the ice. And holding that little girl made me feel good, not sad. Like maybe it's possible for me, too. I looked down at her perfect face and thought, "Oh, I hope."

Not pregnant

2007-05-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

It's ok. I mean, it wasn't my favorite thing to figure this out on Mother's Day. But I can also recognize that it was a good thing to stick my toes in the waters of trying without having to manage the emotions of an immediate pregnancy. If I'm not pregnant five months from now, I won't be so sanguine. But for now, it's ok.

And I'm distracted by a couple of job prospects that have recently come up back in our hometown. What luck! What timing! Only thing is, I had planned to ease off the work a little bit. Do some consulting and independent projects. I thought that was the Big Lesson I was supposed to be learning after my miscarriages: Slow down a bit. Work more independently. Learn to go with the flow. Have a flexible schedule. Get pregnant, try to relax, tune in. But these opportunities have landed in my lap and if I'm offered either of the jobs, it'll be pretty impossible to turn them down. They don't come around often. Hardly ever. A very lucky dilemma. But how to manage a (pretty please) pregnancy and a new job? And then to be locked into full-time work after some sort of too-brief maternity leave? I've lost some of my drive. Work doesn't seem as important anymore.

In the past, I've found that it helps me to look for signs, indications that a particular direction is the right one. I've toyed with the notion that when you're on the "right" path, things tend to fall into place. When I look back over my life, certain people or opportunities have come along at key moments. They seemed to recommended themselves with their good timing. It was as if the universe was saying, "Here. Do this!" And it has always worked out.

I know that this is, in many ways, crap rationalization. But I yearn to feel that I'm on a path. That there's some meaning and order in life. So I ponder this good fortune on the job front: Does it mean that I'm supposed to take a job (if offered) and keep plugging along? Will it lead to great things? Or should I interpret this as a sign that the marketplace values my work; that I could do well as an independent contractor?

Well, first step is to not blow the interviews, I suppose...

Wondering

2007-05-09T18:34:00.000-07:00

Just got back from my trip, which was very good in almost every way except for my time with my family, which had me feeling oddly isolated. I think this is normal, though, when you go through a life-changing event and then return to your old haunts. I feel different now. And all of our old familial habits and ways of relating seemed hollow.

Don't I sound like Suzy College Freshman! Anyway, I think this will get better with time and proximity.

Meanwhile.

Possible pregnancy signs:

1) Sore breasts & nips
2) Crying at the drop of a hat (not in a depressed way, praise prozac, just a weepy way)
3) Toothbrush can make me gag
4) Occasional uterine twinges

Not-promising signs:
1) No implantation spotting (had that both times before)
2) No metallic taste in my mouth
3) Boobs don't seem that different from PMS symptoms
4) Didn't use the Pre-Seed this month, which has worked like magic in the past.

So...it'll be at least 5 days before I can test. Even that might be a little early.

Craving

2007-05-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

Last night, I had a sudden craving for Nutter Butters. This is noteworthy because a) I'm trying to wean myself off sweets and have mostly lost my taste for junk food (rest assured, I haven't lost my taste for bread, cheese, and homemade pie). And b) the last time I had such a specific craving, I was pregnant. In that case, the craving was for leafy greens and liverwurst. I guess I needed iron. The pee test one week later confirmed that I was indeed up the duff.

It's unlikely that I'm pregnant already. I'm only now feeling the twinges of ovulation and my temps are just starting to creep up after a week of ping-ponging. But the sex was well-timed. So...I'm taking low dose aspirin* and waiting.

I'm also noticing that I'm not really freaking out right now. Of course, as I type this, my lizard brain is saying "SHUT UP! They will hear you and then you will be so sorry because you'll freak out really bad and it'll serve you right." See how healthy I am? But I'm trying to hold onto this peace, even if it is brief. Right now I'm ok. Even if I freak out in the future, I will still have these moments of calm. I hope.

Tomorrow, I'm flying cross-country once more to see family and to prepare for our big move back home, which will happen some time this summer. We're tired of being so far from our nearest and dearest and we want more support from the people whose bad genes got us into this mess. So we'll pick up stakes sometime this summer. It won't be easy to say goodbye, but there's a rightness in this decision that makes me feel comforted.

*Edited because I had initially typed "aspiring". This is getting rich.

Back in?

2007-04-30T11:30:00.000-07:00

Today is CD 15. I generally ovulate around day 16, though my temperature was low this morning, so it may be a bit delayed.

In any case, we "tried" yesterday. I put it in quotes because it is too frightening to me to declare it. To simply state that I want a baby and then go about the business of making one. It feels like hubris, oddly. Like I'm inviting the universe to knock me down again.

If I get pregnant this cycle and the pregnancy sticks, I can have a baby before I turn 37*. It matters to me right now. So we tried. But emotionally, I'm keeping my head down, plugging my ears, and chanting "lalalalala" to silence the worries and superstitions. I don't have much faith in myself. I'm trying.

*Edited because I had initially typed "36". Hah. That's funny.

The secret

2007-04-25T10:13:00.000-07:00

My best childhood friend has lived a charmed life. She grew up in a generally happy family. They were well-off. She has always been healthy. She has taken risks and they've always worked out for the best. She met her husband at 31 and got accidentally pregnant right before their wedding. Because she's suspicious of Western medicine in general and prenatal care in particular, she saw only midwives throughout her pregnancy. Not even an ultrasound. She gave birth to her daughter at home, with no complications.

All of this has led her to adopt a particularly optimistic philosophy, one that reframes her good fortune as a reward for living the right way. She practices yoga, Ayurveda, tai chi, massage, vegetarianism, and can-do New Age spirituality. She believes that our body states are merely expressions our emotional/spiritual realities.

So you can imagine why I've been reluctant to call her in the months since my miscarriages. But she has been leaving messages and my silence was starting to look suspicious. So, as I was feeling strong and optimistic yesterday, I have her a call.

Two comments stood out:

1) Her response to the general news about the miscarriages and my antiphospholipid diagnosis: "Have you heard of The Secret?"

ahem.

My reply: Yes, but I found that philosophy particularly unhelpful since it blames people for their own suffering and serves only to comfort the fortunate.

2) Her response to my news that we'll be moving back to our home city over the summer: "Maybe your body just didn't want to give birth in a place where you don't feel at home. I bet that you're going to feel so grounded when you move back that it'll all work out."

My reply: "Hmmm...that's interesting."

But what I wanted to say was, "FUCK YOU!!!! Saying shit like that only comforts YOU and makes you think that you're in charge and that you "deserve" your happiness. And you know what?? You're not in charge! And I can't wait until something comes along to burst your goddamned smug little bubble."

sigh.

The thing is, she means well. Her heart is in the right place. She wants me to be happy, she wants me to get what I want, and she wants us all to feel safe in a benevolent world.

But she just doesn't get it. And I don't really wish that reality on her. Still, I get so very tired of having to excuse peoples' ignorance in light of their good intentions. I'm tired of the hush-hush attitude that makes miscarriage seem like such a rare aberration that people are clueless about how to comfort us.

So lately, when I'm talking to someone who seems compassionate or smart about things, I find myself more apt to tell them about what has happened to me. Not compulsively, not often. But when the conversation opens up in a particular way, I open up. I feel the need to record it: These things happen. To good people. Life can be random.

I'm just very anti-secret right now. Anti-Secret, too. People are suffering all the time, all around us. And we further isolate them by responding to their pain with fear and avoidance and platitudes. Albert Camus once described America as "this place where everything is done to prove that life isn't tragic." He's right. Life is pretty fucking tragic sometimes. Our only hope is to know that we're not alone.

At the gate

2007-04-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

My new cycle started this weekend. I think we're finally going to try again. I think I'm ready. At least, the thought of trying doesn't fill me with the panic that it did a couple of months ago. And taking care of the new cat has intensified my knowledge that I really, really, really want to have a child. I think I'd be a good mom. I really want to try.

The timing isn't ideal. Adam has to do a lot of traveling in the next couple of months. If we get pregnant this time around, I may well have to start the Lovenox injections while he's out of town. It's scary. I don't even know where to begin. My doctor said to call when I'm pregnant, but who's going to teach me how to do it?

On the other hand, I need to get moving. The pressures are partly biological: I got pregnant easily before, but what if my ovaries are winding down? They're also psychological: I don't want to face Mother's Day without at least having tried to get pregnant again. I'd like to try to have a baby before turning 37, if I can.

If my calculations are correct, I should ovulate around the 30th. Until then, we wait and see.

Gifts

2007-04-06T16:24:00.000-07:00

My trip to see the in-laws was just so, so good. I slept like someone who hadn't rested well in months. I sat in the sun and was quiet. I was proud of myself for facing my fear of flying, Adam and I had a couple of good meals, the weather was perfect, and we adopted a kitten! He just showed up on my mother-in-law's doorstep one morning and jumped in my lap.

"It's like God sent him to you!" said my sister-in-law, who's in recovery and believes that God is in charge of everything.

I'm doubtful. In fact, if I were one of the Seven Dwarfs, that would be my name. But this kitten does feel like a gift. And now that we're back home, the work of getting him settled in and integrated with our existing cat feels...satisfying. It gives me a place to put all my frustrated maternal instincts. It makes us feel like we can nurture life. It gives us something to focus on and laugh about.

Made it

2007-04-01T07:33:00.000-07:00

I'm writing from the other coast, where the weather is warm and the jasmine is blooming outside my window.

My flight here was long and turbulent (I mean overhead-bins-flying-open turbulent). But I was fine. I was not the crazy lady writhing in the aisles. Rather, I was the pleasant lady chatting with her neighbor and even dozing off for a brief nap. Yes, I took a Klonopin. But this trip has reminded me that I'm not broken, just a little traumatized. And it will get better.

Laugh when you can

2007-03-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

I know a woman who, after a really traumatic pregnancy loss, wound up at Chili's one night for dinner. Salt in the wound perhaps, but she was at the mall and there was nowhere else to eat.

So Chili's was doing a little table tent promotion for their signature ribs. It read, "I want my babyback, babyback, babyback..."

She took it home and keeps it on her desk. I love her for that.

Aaaand...crap

2007-03-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

So yeah, Adam's grandfather died Saturday. There is so much suffering on top of suffering right now, I just don't know what to do or how to think about it. We're muddling through, one foot in front of the other, but I can't face TTC this cycle in the midst of all this loss. And that feels awful.

Only fear?

2007-03-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

My great-aunt M. died yesterday. She was an amazing woman. Widowed in her late 40s, she moved to California and made a life for herself. She never had children, but she was so happy, so optimistic, so full of life. In recent years, she would sometimes go foggy and talk about an imaginary daughter who had died. My mother said she may have had a miscarriage, though she's not sure. M was the last one in that generation and while it's a blessing that she went peacefully, it's so very sad.

Adding to the strain, we had looked at this cycle as our target for trying again. Now in the face of it I'm so frightened that I can't think straight. It's hard to even write about it because I feel so ridiculous.

On days like this, the thoughts sound like this: Do you want a baby or not? Yes. Why this foot-dragging then? Because I'm broken. Oh, stop it. Buck up like other people have. Stop the self-indulgent whining. I can't do this. I'm too fucked up. Do you want a baby or not? Yes. Then why this foot-dragging...

I'm so, so tired of this. How on earth do people find the courage to try again? And forgive their weaknesses?

Rebecca Walker said an asshat thing*

2007-03-19T14:25:00.000-07:00

I hate to hate on feminist spokesmodels, but from Sunday's New York Times:

The most incendiary notion in “Baby Love” may be that, for Ms. Walker, being a stepparent or adoptive parent involves a lesser kind of love than the love for a biological child.

In an interview, Ms. Walker boiled the difference down to knowing for certain that she would die for her biological child, but feeling “not sure I would do that for my nonbiological child.”

“I mean, it’s an awful thing to say,” said Ms. Walker, who in a previous relationship helped rear a female partner’s biological son, now 14. “The good thing is he has a biological mom who would die for him.

First of all, screw you, lady! Second of all, who is that poor boy and can he read?

Fortunately, over in the Sunday Book Review, Alexandra Jacobs pans the book, calling it "solipsistic open diary," in which Walker "sorely tests the reader’s patience while settling into a pregnancy of privileged contemplation, achieved with relative ease under the ministrations of a homeopath."

Hah.

*I've softened the title of this post a bit (from "Rebecca Walker is an asshat"). I'm sure she is not, in fact, an across-the-board asshat, and I understand that comments can be taken out of context in newspaper stories.

And yes, I realize that she was "only speaking from her own experience," (That old chestnut! "I'm just speaking from my own experience, but old people smell bad. And gay men talk funny.").

But she's the one who framed the issue as a "biological mom" vs. "adoptive mom" thing. She could have said, "child of my happy marriage," vs. "child of the woman with whom I was in an ambivalent relationship" or "child of a family unit that preceded his birth" vs. "child I came to know later in his life as as a step-parent".

Nevertheless, it's wrong and petty of me to gloat over a bad book review. But I maintain that her comments belong firmly in the category of myopic remarks made in the self-satisfied glow of success, benefiting no one and only hurting the vulnerable.

Bugaboo

2007-03-19T10:44:00.000-07:00

I bought a big red suitcase on Saturday. An optimistic gesture, since one of the pesky residual symptoms of the big post-miscarriage depression is a fucking fear or fucking flying. I was never afraid to fly before. I loved flying. I loved travel. It was one of my great strengths, having such a sporting attitude about adventure.

Now the thought of flying puts my stomach in knots. It's not a fear of terrorists or of falling out of the sky, but of having a big fat panic attack in a sealed container 38,000 feet above the earth. There are drugs for this. I know these drugs work. But my brain likes to invent scenarios in which the drugs suddenly don't work and I'm trapped! I'm the crazy lady on the plane, convulsing in the aisles, disrupting everyone's plans, forcing an emergency landing, sending the FAA into fits.

This will not happen. My rational brain tells my dinosaur brain that while it may send out crazy imaginings that feel real, they are mere obsessive fantasies with no more substance than fog. I have a cross-country flight coming up in less than two weeks and I'm trying to hold on to that fact. And packing drugs.

Yesterday, on the way back from a little Sunday road trip, my parents and I stopped for dinner at a casual restaurant in a fancy town. A really rather cute couple came in pushing a little dumpling of a baby in a Bugaboo stroller that was the same shade of red as my new suitcase. My mom rubbed my arm sympathetically. I didn't fail to note the poignancy of this parallel...that, rather than being whole and happy with a baby and toting my new red stroller (though I would never, ever buy a Bugaboo, nojudgementandallthat), I am left with a phobia and a discount suitcase.

Due date

2007-03-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

Today is my due date. The first baby, who might have lived if I didn't have APS.

When we first lost her (and because I can't know for fact, I imagine that she was a girl), I comforted myself with the thought that she wasn't meant to live. "It's usually a genetic defect," intoned the midwife, the obstetrics resident, the nurse. Funny, then, to learn that only half of all miscarriages, maybe sixty percent, are caused by defects. Is it really more efficient to assume that it's just nature's spell-check at work until the miscarriages pile up? For whom?

This was the baby I saw on the ultrasound, the one whose due date inspired real plans. My parents are here now because last July they scheduled a trip to come meet their grandchild. They decided to visit anyway. I needed it.

This is the baby who would have been ruling my days all this time, the one conceived on Adam's birthday. Whose flickering heart reassured me, until I was told otherwise, that she was fine, everything was fine, I was a worrier. The one whose remains were tossed with the day's medical waste. I wanted it done, over, to put the setback behind me. I wish I could bury her. Why shouldn't she have a place in the world?

There is the comforting borrowed Buddhist notion of souls alighting and departing. Did she only need those nine weeks two days to achieve...completion? Was she meant for this brief stay?

And then there's the thought that she wasn't meant for anything. She could have lived, but I have a disease and she died. Or maybe I would have miscarried anyway. Maybe it was genetic.

Some say that she was an embryo, not a person. I don't even know if she was a she. A potential. Isn't this the assumed view? It feels like unearned credit to call her a baby. Maybe we just don't have the words for this in-between life.

There are things I didn't know at the time. I wish I had, but I didn't. She should have been growing inside me all this time. But she died. She has become more real to us in the months since we lost her than she was during the brief time we had her. I am her mother. She was from us.

That look

2007-03-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

Like most infertiles and hab-abs, I can spot a pregnant woman like a lion spots wildebeest (which is not to truly compare either of us with anything beastly. It's just that I'm that quick). Adam and I were walking behind a couple last night. Both young, slender, and fashionable. Nothing obvious from the back. But there was something about her walk, a slight rolling back on the heels, her stride just a bit wide. As we passed them I caught a sidelong glance. Sure enough. Pregnant.

That's ok, though. Life isn't a pie. Her pregnancy doesn't make me less pregnant. In fact, right now I'm riding high on the emotional peak that precedes each new cycle. Steeped in my happy hormone bath, I am all optimism, energy, and hope. Peace be with all of you. We are all one. Next week? We'll see...

When things fall apart

2007-03-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

I want to talk about the moment when you figure out that something in your life, something big, is broken.

Life can go very well for a very long time. You can start to believe that fortune smiles upon you, that you've earned your fine luck, that the road will rise to meet you. I had a long run.

The career came together, I met Adam, we bought our house and got married, we pulled off a big move, and we stepped up to the baby buffet at the fashionably late age of 35. Pregnancy happened quickly, and I felt proud to be so healthy, so fertile. "You come from good peasant stock," my mother said. I patted my hips, the wide pelvic bones that would make a cozy home.

And then, the little spot of blood. The "just to put your mind at ease" ultrasound, the slow heartbeat, the return untrasound one interminable week after the first, the snowy silence of the screen, the mute technician, the hour spent in the waiting room with all the round bellies, only to be sent to Labor and Fucking Delivery to be told 30 minutes later what we already knew to be true. Then the D&E, the ibuprofen, the little strawberry we picked and buried in the garden, the weeks of spotting, the determined belief that this would go down as a minor setback, a mere delay. "This won't break me," I told a friend.

Then the uncle's death two weeks later, the funeral, the sister's sudden divorce, the decision to try again after a month, the anxiety attack over dinner with friends, the sense of something slipping, the second pregnancy, the terror of a positive test, the next day's negative, the back pain, and, once more, the blood, only large clots this time. I had been making dinner, an ambitious menu for friends. I left the roast in the oven with the door cracked and we drove to the hospital.

We went back to Labor and Delivery. Once more, the nurses seemed caught off-guard. You're what? What to do? Where to put you? In the hallway, we heard a woman shout, "It's a girl!"

No need to intervene this time. I handed over a tiny tupperware cup with the tissue sample I'd retrieved.

We hosted the party anyway. What else is there to do? Life has to go on. Only, I find myself standing at the stove trying to remember what it is that separates me from the other lost causes. Something makes this life blessed, I know, but I can't find it. I hate myself for this. My body feels light, like it could float away. My legs ache. The little joys are so flimsy now. The sun sets and my despair rises. Nights become longer, and as December rolls around I'm frightened. When will this end? How can it, if a baby is the answer and I'm too sick to try? I call the doctor. The failure is complete. Mind and body undone.

Adam curls around me. "I need you," he says. I'm split open, grasping, exposed. I am not the woman he married. But he's there. It's something to hold on to, something to be grateful for. I confess my sins to friends. They tell me, these are not sins. I count down the days until the light comes back, until the drug kicks in. Each day, one more minute of light. When the bottom drops out, I don't fall as far. Soon (but not soon, it is never soon in this state), a pattern emerges. I can match the despair to each cycle. Is it the hormone crash, the absence, or the blood that reanimates the blackness? But it passes.

At some point between then and now, I let go of being happy. I'm rewarded with the first flickers of hope. The smooth path is gone (for now). I fold this chapter in to my story. My therapist tells me, "Love and gratitude are bigger than fear." Now I can't remember what it was to feel only blessed. To have all meaning depend on the absence of failure. But I know that I am loved. There is life beyond being fortune's favored child. I'm grateful.

The first

2007-03-11T20:57:00.000-07:00

It was warm today. I'm on the bed with the window open, looking out at the lights from the city. Cat is here. Adam is on his way home. I'm happy tonight.

I had my last miscarriage (5 weeks) in October. The one before that (9w2d weeks), in August. Despite my best good camper efforts, mild depression in November turned to crushing despair in December followed by antidepressants. Post-partum depression, without the baby. So much more streamlined. I wrestled with feelings of failure. Wrestled with God. Wrestled with my skinny jeans. Still no answers, but the light is getting longer.

My blood tests have revealed borderline antiphospholipid syndrome, a clotting disorder. We've sought out 3 doctors, received two opinions. 1) Assume it's a cause and treat it, or 2) assume my levels are too low and ignore it. I'm leaning toward #1, but that means daily belly shots of Lovenox and the odd fear of bleeding out. Or of Adam passing out.

I'm sitting on the bed looking out the window and waiting for a sign. Will it be soon?