At least

Ramona would be five months old this Saturday, and apparently that's the time when people start saying weird shit.  I had my first 'at least' comment this weekend, followed up with 'everything happens for a reason.'  I've heard about them, but had yet to hear someone use that phrase.  I need to get a speech ready, because it seems people think it's a comfort.  It is not.  Definitely not.

I'm surprised that people think using phrases like 'at least' and 'everything happens for a reason' are helpful or comforting.  There is no 'at least' when it comes to your child dying, and whatever the reason is will never be good enough for us.  Our baby died and you mean to tell me you think there was a good reason for her death?  Fuck that.

What I find hardest is the people who say these things are always the nice ones.  They want to comfort us, they want to help us.  I can't help but be offended and hurt, but I know they mean well.  The Well Meaning.  Good band name, bad commiserators.  My husband tells me over and over again to ignore the worst of the comments, to understand that people care and sometimes can't express it well.  I understand this, I do.  I don't want to sit quietly as people question my motherhood or the validity of my child or whether or not it's better that she died before we got to know her anymore, though.  I will not do it. 

What I wanted to ask this woman, this sweet woman, was what 'at least' would she be willing to accept if one of her children died tomorrow?  What level of comfort would she receive from 'at least?'  What satisfactory reason could be given to explain away the death of her child?  Or if I was feeling particularly harsh and honest, ask her to think about her child and think about him dead.  That's what we have to live with for the rest of our lives.  A life, however long, lived without our child. 

There is no 'at least you didn't have to get to know her and then lose her.'  That's exactly why the grief is so consuming.  We hoped for, dreamed about, imagined a life with our baby girl.  Our whole life was stripped bare like a skinned rabbit in a matter of seconds.  'At least' doesn't cut it.  'At least' can kiss my ass. 

So for the general public, the well meaning, if you ask how we are and we answer with less enthusiasm than you expected, please refrain from reasoning with us.  It doesn't work, it doesn't help, and it doesn't make a difference.  There is no reason that will make us accept the death of our daughter.  None.

Today

Today someone asked me if I'd had my baby.  It was someone who might not have totally understood my full answer, so I didn't feel like it was worth elaborating on.

So I just said yes.

I had my baby. 

It's the first time I've said that without adding, "...but she died." 

It felt good.  It didn't stop the tears in the bathroom afterwards, and it didn't put a cork in the jealousy and anguish I feel daily, but it still felt good to only have to say 'yes.'

I had my baby.

Team Ramona & Savannah

My best friend Jessica and I are blogging about our daughters and our experience through baby loss over at Team Ramona & Savannah .

There are so many amazing people writing about their children and loss that I wondered if what we have to say and share is even relevant,  but I've noticed the further out people are with their grief, the less they focus entirely on it like they did in the early days.  If we can reach a handful of people who are new to this crazy world of baby loss,  we're doing a good thing.  The best thing about blogs for me has been watching the progression of grief and life in general.  It's good to know that eventually the pain will lessen.  We won't ever forget,  but we won't always hurt so much.

We also want to help family and friends learn how to support these moms and dads in the best way possible.  We know firsthand people don't know what to say or how to react to the death of a baby.  Hopefully we can help break the silence and make this experience less painful for everyone.  First instinct for many people is to avoid the subject for fear of 'reminding' the grieved of their loss, but I can promise you, we are never not thinking of our babies. We want to share resources that help not only mom's and dads, but the people close to them.

Kindness of strangers

Yesterday I had an encounter with someone who didn't know what happened to Ramona.  I explained, the woman was sad and shocked, but for some reason it set me off.  I ended up at a Coney Island crying my eyes out.

She wasn't rude, but she didn't ask what her name was and I was left just kind of standing there while she talked nervously.  She tried her best, but it was so hard to stand there and make small talk. 

All I've been thinking lately is WHY?  Why my daughter, why me, why my husband, why our family?  While I was pregnant I knew eight other pregnant women.  Two of us have lost our children, one gave birth to a healthy baby boy, and the other six are waiting.  I know they must be scared by what happened to my child and my friend's child, but I also get a feeling there is an air of certainty around them.  That since this happened to me, to Jessica, to Ramona and Savannah, that they should be in the clear.  And I hate them for it. 

These women are friends, one a best friend, and right now in this moment I hate them with every ounce of my being.  I don't WANT them to go through what we're going through, but WHY?  They will most likely bring their children home.  Two of those children will be girls.  I don't know if I will ever be able to look at them without hating them.  In an irrational way, I blame them.  I blame them for taking the place of my Ramona.  I know it's crazy.  I don't care. 

I ended up at the Coney Island after the gym and all this came pouring out of me.  When the waitress came to take my order instead of telling her I wanted two eggs over medium I started crying and choked out, "I'm having a really bad day, I'm sorry."  This woman I've never met before in my life grabbed me and hugged me.  She didn't know what I was going through, but she hugged me and showed me a smiley face on her receipt pad.  "You keep thinking about this right here," she said.

I'm trying.  I'm trying to move forward, I'm trying to push through the anger and the hate.  I'm trying to be a good person, but it is damn hard.  It is damn hard to live without your child when so many others don't have to.

Pre-

There's an unopened email in my inbox.  It's from my mother, sent Christmas Eve morning.  She didn't know we'd been in the hospital overnight.  I didn't have the heart to call her after we got the news.  I wanted our family to have one last night free of grief. 

I haven't had the guts to open or delete it.  Thanks to gmail I know what it says.  She just wanted to know if I was awake and to call her if I was.  As far as my mother knew we'd be over that afternoon, preparing our Christmas smorgasbord and celebrating together.  Or she'd be with me in the hospital, which is what we'd been expecting the night before.  Instead she would get a phone call that her first and only grandchild had died. 

It's my last, small connection to my old life.  I remember about a week earlier thinking how happy and lucky I was.  Pre-emptiness, pre-sorrow.  My life before feels like fiction, like a sitcom that occasionally touches on a serious subject in a humorous light.  I look at pictures of myself from when I was pregnant and I try conjure those feelings of joy and anticipation, because I know I'll never have them again.  That part of my life is over.

Baby Bee

I wasn't surprised at all to see this post recently.  The universe sends crazy things your way at crazy times.

My mom gave me the Betsy-Tacy books for Christmas one year, probably when I was seven or eight.  She loved those books and when she found the newer editions back in the eighties, she knew she had to give them to me.  I loved those books, too.  I still do.  I have all my original books, plus the new editions from a few years ago.  I identified as a Betsy, so did my mom, and the minute I found out I was having a little girl I knew she would be a Betsy.  She would have been a Betsy, but she turned out to be a Bee.  

As soon as I got up the courage I went into Ramona's room to get my copy of The Betsy-Tacy Treasury.  I had put it on her bookshelf along with her books, toys, piggy banks, and other carefully chosen gifts from family and friends.  It was my contribution, my gift to her, a hopeful love of reading.  I read her the first book while she was still alive, safe inside me.  I skipped the Bee part, though.  I read it to myself and I thought, what a terrible thing it must be to lose a child so small and young.  To lose all that potential.  How do live the rest of your life without that child?  Reading that part as a little girl wasn't nearly as shocking to me as it is to adults reading it for the first time.  I've read so many reviews of Betsy-Tacy that warn readers of the death of a baby.  I wasn't traumatized by that passage.  I just always felt sad for Tacy because her baby sister died.  I read that passage again days after Ramona's birth and instead of feeling sad for Tacy, I grieved for Mrs. Kelly.  I'd never given her feelings much thought before.  The story is told from a child's point of view, the one line you get about Mrs. Kelly is something along the lines of "Mama feels awful bad."    

Now I have my Bee.  And I feel awful bad.  Now I'm beginning to learn how to live without her.  The 'new normal,' baby loss mom's call it.  I don't like to look back, to think about what ifs, but I do my fair share of magical thinking. I imagine my life with her to the point where it almost feels real, like an alternate universe where she lived and she's two months old now.  I dress her in tiny clothes and marvel over her perfect lips that are an exact copy of Kyle's.  I smooth down her wavy brown hair and slide on the hairbows I made for her.  I finish knitting the blanket that I thought I had all the time in the world to complete after she was born.  My mother and I take her on a trip to Mankato, the real Deep Valley, to show her all the wonderful places from the books we've read together.

That isn't real, though.  The reality is empty arms, sleepless nights, and a room full of brightly colored dresses, toys, and blankets, hoping the birds will bring my baby girl a message:  I love you, I love you, I love you.

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.