Our old life

I'm a reader, so when we got home from the hospital the first thing I needed to do was read about other people's experience with stillbirths.  I found message boards, blogs, books.  I read and read and read, but no matter what I still feel so alone sometimes.  The crazy thing is my best friend lost her newborn daughter on the same day.

Yes, my best friend's daughter died.  The same day.  On Christmas Eve.

Two completely different circumstances, but we both experienced the worst day of our lives on the same day.  And we both feel very alone.

The thing is I know the stats.  I look them up every day.  I know that about 30,000 babies are stillborn every year in the United States.  Stillbirths occurs ten times more than SIDS.  I know there are more of me out there.  I read the stories.  I still feel alone.

I read An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken.  My experience is almost identical to hers.  When she first found out what had happened, she had the feeling that everyone would be mad at her.  I lay in bed that night in the hospital, doped up on my first of many doses of xanax thinking, "Everyone is going to blame me for this.  Everyone is going to think this is my fault."  Obviously no one (that I know of) blamed me or thought that I did something wrong, but I had myself convinced that I must have done something.  I'd never heard of this happening outside of stories about my grandmother's stillborn babies in the thirties and forties and the old-fashioned books I'd read as a girl.  This did not happen in 2013.

Of course I know better now.  The pathology reports came back with nothing.  My whole pregnancy was uneventful.  I was completely prepared to bring Ramona home, but instead her carseat is hidden away at the in-laws and her nursery door is shut and I'm back at work early because I have no baby to take care of.  I have a baby I think about every minute of the day and a baby I cry over daily, but I don't have a baby in my arms. 

“For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We'd been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

 We've been to a support group, I know the stats, my best friend is walking this road with me, but I everywhere I go I see women with children and all I can think about is how their child didn't die.  That no matter how many people I meet and know, I still feel like a pariah, a freak, the woman no one wants near them while they're pregnant.  Even in this space I feel isolated and strange, my words going out digitally into the void.

Everything and nothing changed, everything and nothing is the same.