The reason I won't answer my doorbell today

This happens regularly to women who lose a pregnancy under 20 weeks gestation in Canada, at least according to my support group. It doesn't happen to women in Massachusetts or California or any of the other pro-choice states that have managed to write a law determining what should happen to fetal remains, literally thus: all women undergoing a D&C or a natural miscarriage or whatever, sign documents stating what they would like the pathology department to do after they do their mandatory examination of the contents of the uterus: either dispose of the remains as hospital waste, bury the remains as part of a compassionate hospital program, or help the woman to make arrangements of her own with a funeral home.

Those states respect all choices, even ones they don't understand.

No one respected my choice.

No one has the right to traumatize a patient and violate their rights. Ever.

I think I'll just leave the house and not be home today.

Some of you may have noticed I've been distracted

Which is good---and bad.

I wish I was distracted by a surprise trip around the world, but that's not quite going to happen, so nevermind. Instead I got distracted by Mac's illness, which is practically cured! Mind-blowing how he can be bedridden one day and attempting to jump off the swingset a few days later. Resilient little guys, eh?

But I did kind of forget about what happened 3 years ago right around this time. I knew it was coming up, and got very very stressed about it, and then, everything shifted and I barely remembered my name.

But just so you all know...I know I still have more work to do to make sure that this never ever happens to another person, ever. I just have to figure out the legalities around it---not hard for my little obsessed brain, I hope. Apparently, Massachusetts and California have laws that prevent this from happening, and if they can do it, then Canada can right?

I saw a new shrink the other day, and we spoke briefly about this and some other experiences, and it occurred to me that for the last year or so, I'm starting to internalize that a lot of this crap has been done to me, and that it was not caused by me; two different things. Now I said starting, so don't get me wrong, I know that deep down I still blame myself for terrible things that have happened to me, and it's completely illogical to blame myself, blah blah blah, but that kind of CBT type of therapy never stuck to my brain. I needed to feel this deep down. I keep wondering if it was the EMDR therapy I did, or maybe the courses of propranolol? Or maybe just the passage of time.

Don't know....but tonight, I'm not feeling quite so crappy about it. And that has to be a good thing.

Couldn't write yesterday, maybe today?

I'm back home, swollen and bruised, but alive. We all survived our trip. I'm running around getting everyone back to school & work, dealing with electricians and repair people, and yes, going back & seeing my RE soon, next week in fact. Oh yeah, and there's a provincial election happening soon. Forgot about that.

All this activity...I'm great at keeping busy when I can't stand to be alone with my thoughts.

The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth, -

The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity. - Emily Dickinson

Yesterday was the anniversary of Matthew's death, 9 years ago he died the day he was born. If you've never read it, you can find the story under the label Pregnancy #2 on my sidebar. I've written a lot about him and all he meant to me.

Today is the anniversary of Georgia's death, 3 year's ago today, we discovered she had died in utero when we went to get our scan just prior to the amnio. I've really written very little about her. I had written a post before, then taken it down, and now, bits and pieces sit here on this blog & in my drafts, not really right somehow. I can't seem to get it out properly. I know I need to, but it's so much easier to just repress it all and pretend nothing happened? Right?

I know, wrong, I know.

I'll try to write something.

Maybe.

Maybe I'll just run screaming into the street instead.

Those of us who've been down in that hole

I'm wiped out, exhausted...had another night of insomnia. Everyone got out late this a.m.

This time it's stress. Funny thing about grief and the things we don't want to talk about. It comes out anyway. Maybe not as tears, or public renting of clothes, but it comes out. After 8 1/2 years of this you'd think I'd know it when it sneaks up on me. But I never do....

I've wasted time in therapy and in blogging not talking about the stuff that really hurts down deep. I'm so stuck, so unable to write, to say things out loud, to even make the damn video that I have shot footage for (yes, literally I had everything ready weeks ago, but I just can't do the final bit, *sigh*), that instead I have insomnia, I have fights with my husband, I'm afraid to go back to my own clinic and really try to have another baby.

Because to me, TTC=failure, and pregnancy=dead babies, not live ones. I had another huge session with my therapist last Monday and I discovered that I can only talk about my daughters and my infertility in a very professional public voice, devoid of true emotion, devoid of any real self-examination. This helps when I'm making speeches or talking to professionals about medical care for the bereaved. But it's really really unhelpful to me as a person trying to heal.

That brings me to my last bunch of blogposts. I have seen some wonderful kind things in the last 8 1/2 years since my son died, and some truly horrible ones. Some people who have healed well, and some who haven't, at all. Some parents, who in fact, have never ever been okay again. There seems to be a lot of confusion out here in blogland about the helpful and unhelpful ways to handle grief, but really there isn't any confusion among grief counsellors, among long time grieving mothers, among hospice and bereavement workers.

And that is not the same as telling someone how they "should" feel, or judging the quality of their grief, neither of which I would ever do, really....It's more like that West Wing quote I love so much, (indulge me here, I feel a need to type it out again)

"This guy’s walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and he shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on.
Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in a hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on.
Then a friend walks by, “Hey Joe it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.”
The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”– Leo to Josh on The West Wing about sharing his problems at AA.

In AA as in many support groups they tell you to you need to really self-examine your life and all the incidents that led up to the problems in your life. Well, grief is no different. Grief is about looking at the reality, not the imaginary fantasy, but the raw, unvarnished truth. We can't rewrite it "nicer" or "easier" at least not until we've seen the ugly parts first. And we can't deny it.

Oh, I know...that's telling someone how to grieve...except it's not...it's me saying that there and helpful and unhelpful ways of grieving. And I will be here for you, my friends, while you struggle with both kinds. But, make no mistake, I will be sad for you, I will try to suggest ways you can deal with you grief that might make you feel better. You don't have to listen to me, or read me, you can delete my comments, ignore my emails, IT'S OKAY. I'll still be here caring about you all....

The unhelpful stuff---the head of my support group, a bereaved mother herself, has some pretty horrific stories of what has happened to parents who don't face the reality of their loss. In her 20+ years she has seen divorces, suicides, debilitating depression, alcoholism, drugs, both legal and illegal, job losses, women literally walking down the halls of hospitals trying to find their babies---one was convinced the hospital had stolen her child, because she had never seen him after he was stillborn, and thank god the damn hospital had kept some pictures to show her, to prove he had died, otherwise, it would have even been worse. The women you hear about who have severe extreme PPD, they quite often have suffered previous losses, unacknowledged grief, that wells up years later after their new living child is born. They've found parents wandering through graveyards, unable to leave, parents who ended up in the psych ward of local hospitals.

Or the sadder less dramatic alternative, bereaved parents leading lives of silent depression. Never truly enjoying their living children or their marriages.

Facing reality can take many many forms, and we've talked about them here and on other blogs, like getting kind and decent treatment during a loss, from the medical system and friends and family, getting to see your child and hold them, getting pictures and mementoes, getting to say goodbye in some meaningful way. Saying a name out loud, having other people use your child's name. Finding out a reason why, a real reason. Being able to talk about it all with people you love, in a natural normal way.

Many people can't do this right away, but sooner or later they need to do some parts of it, somehow. The part I'm stuck on, isn't Matthew, and it isn't even the miscarriages of my daughters, so much as it is the nightmare of my daughter's remains being delivered to my home two years ago.

I saw her body, but it wasn't nice. It was awful, the worst possible way. I completely froze and lost it....I couldn't tell a soul. I told my support group, my husband, my therapist, and you my blogreaders. I've told policy people and others, pretending it was an unnamed client it happened to....but never under my own name. If I had delivered her in the hospital and seen here there, in one piece, all clean and wrapped up in a blanket, it would've been so different. It would've been healing.

Make no mistake....I know this has been an unhelpful way for me to grieve and deal with it. It's the recent cause of my headaches, my insomnia, and other issues over the last two years. I'm trying to undo the nightmare with some EMDR work, and some writing. I must succeed. I will not be okay until I deal with the trauma of this.

I will still be down in the hole.

Not feeling so miraculous today

Today is CD1.

Yep, you heard it right. I just had a seventeen day cycle. A new record, even for me. Didn't even get to fail a very expensive drug store pregnancy test.

Plus, this is a two year anniversary of sorts for me. In September of 2004, I had a very late miscarriage at 16 weeks. That pregnancy was, I believed, my last chance at a live baby. And when the ultrasound revealed that my daughter had died, no heartbeat, no movement, I lost it.

I knew I had to find out what happened, and get a diagnosis, so I had them send off a chromosome sample to the lab, and had my daughter's remains and the placenta sent to the US placental pathologist I had hired. She did her report, I read the email version and we discussed the results over the phone. The nightmare report where my perfectly formed fetus with perfect organs, had a massively clotted half-dead placenta on the mother's side of the chorionic plate. It was my fault, my genetic clotting defect that suffocated her.

The written report, and her remains arrived two years ago today in the mail. Yes, her body was sent to my house instead of back to the hospital or to the funeral home. (And yes, at 16 weeks there is most definitely a body...) No one would help us, no one would come pick the remains up, eventually my husband had to drive the remains of his own daughter to a funeral home, and then arrange for her burial and the funeral.

December 28 is officially the shittiest day on the calendar in our house.