Something fishy

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.

Meditation

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

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

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.

Back in?

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.

Made it

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.

Aaaand...crap

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?

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?

Bugaboo

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.

When things fall apart

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

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?