airport thoughts and observations

I put Dh and his 5 huge bags on the airplane last night.  I always take a photo of us sitting together at the airport right before he leaves to go through security, one of those goofy self-photos.  It's a superstition thing for me, but I don't think he knows that.  He used to think I was really silly to do it, but he's starting to get into it.  He looks really good in the photo.  I can see my wrinkles. I had been kidding myself that they weren't very obvious.  Oh well.

On my flights to and from the meeting earlier this week I noticed a few things about human behavior:

1) men over 30 are either especially nice to women who are pregnant, or men over 30 are especially nice to women who are a little on the round side.

2) some people looked at my pregnant belly and then looked away a little ashamed, as if were embarrassed by the very open acknowledgment that I have had sex.  Little do they know how much sex was NOT involved with my getting pregnant.  In fact, it has been a really long time since I had sex...  we are very paranoid about miscarriages over here.

3) people that you kind of know professionally will generally not say anything about your bulging belly, but they will look at you sideways and maybe even giggle a little.

wave of light

7pm candles tonight in memory of the loss of my first pregnancy in Oct 2008 and for all of those other lost hopes and dreams 1 in 4 of us have faced. 

what I'm feeling today

trying not to freak out

baby books all say you feel movement between 16 and 20 weeks.

me?  at 19 weeks I got nothing. 

I am concerned about doing the fetal heart monitor too much, plus there is the concern that I might not find anything.  I also just realized that sometimes it's my own heartbeat I'm hearing...  oof.

and so I broke down and googled "miscarriage at 19 weeks" and there are lots of them out there.

And then I found this:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/04/050416100616.htm

Not that it helps much, but at least it is acknowledged.

I love the idea of a little garden of lost babies.  The Japanese definitely have the right idea there.

A bad anniversary

Over the summer of 2008 I decided that I needed to be more proactive on the getting pregnant thing.  We had stopped birth control in March, but "frequent" is not how I would describe schnoogy in my house.  I started OPKs...  so I know that I ovulated on September 20th.  (I still remember how Dh complained that timed sex was so "unnatural"... wow, have we come a long way since then.)

On October 1, 2008, I had a positive pregnancy test.  On Oct 21st I was having some spotting so I went to see my OB a few days early for my first ultrasound.  There was a heartbeat, so things seemed ok. 

That night, that Tuesday night I woke up with horrible, and I mean horrible cramping in my uterus.  I ran to the bathroom and passed a significant amount of blood and clumps of bloody stuff.  It was dark, and I was a little out of it because it was the middle of the night, so I went back to bed.  Dh asked if I was ok, and I said, "I have a really bad cramp and just lost a lot of blood; I don't think this bodes very well for the baby."  But I went back to sleep. 

On Friday afternoon I went back to the OB's office where, after an hour long wait in the waiting room followed by a 45 minute wait sitting half naked in the grungiest examination room in North America, it was definitely ascertained that I'd lost the pregnancy.  Things then happened very fast because it was late in the day.  I got the emergency Rh- shot (b/c I'm Rh-) and then had to rush over to a lab that was still open to get my blood drawn for an hCG test.  The nurse there cheerily asked if I thought I was pregnant, and I told him, "No, I just had a miscarriage."  He didn't say anything else.  Neither did I.  I walked out to the sidewalk, called Dh and told him that it was bad news and burst into incoherent tears.  He went home with me and we cried together on the couch for hours, and drank.

The cramping at night was 31 days after ovulation.  The diagnosis was 34 days after ovulation.   

If you count my egg retrieval as ovulation, as the nurse at my RE's office said to do, today is 31 days later.  Tonight is the anniversary of my miscarriage. 

The good news:

I'm not bleeding today.
I got my septate uterus fixed (which is a likely candidate for the cause of the miscarriage).
I can't do anything to change what will happen.

So I'm hanging in here.  I'm not freaking out.  There really is nothing I can do, and I'm about as at peace with that as I think a non-Buddhist can be.  Or at least as calm as someone with my temperament can be about this.

But I will definitely ask Dh to hold my hand on Monday when we go for our first ultrasound.  I have never been more sure of needing his reassurance.

feeling foolish

A couple of weeks ago I a read a post on a blog that I haven't been able to get out of my head. I can't remember who the author was because I was in one of those several-hour-long bouts of self-pity looking for oodles of comraderie on line, or for things that just made me feel worse. I read a lot of web sites that day.

But back to the point of my post today. That blogger wrote that she really really wishes that she could be pregnant even if just very briefly, so that she could experience the joy of seeing the positive pregnancy test, telling her husband and seeing the look on his face, and of knowing what it felt like to BE pregnant, even if just briefly and it ended in a miscarriage.

This made me sad, and I totally get her point and tend to agree. But it isn't quite that simple.

The month that I knew I pregnant was wonderful. I was so excited and got serious enjoyment out of reading every pregnancy book I could get my hands on to know what the fetus was doing that week. I loved every minute of it, and I jumped into the thing whole-heartedly. I was very, very in the moment and ready for this change of life.

And then I had the miscarriage.

Everything about a miscarriage is horrible, and the details of being in the supply room-turned examination room, having to wait half naked all by myself bleeding on the table for about an hour in that dingy room before getting the sonogram, all of that was nightmarish. I feel very sorry for me when I think back to that day.

But the lingering pain now is much more an emotion I've never heard anyone talk about.

And that's embarrassment.

I feel foolish for having been so excited about something that I ended up not being allowed to have. I am so embarrassed that I told my parents I was pregnant. I am embarrassed that I went and bought a new bra because my boobs had gotten so big so quickly that I was really uncomfortable in my regular ones. I actually told the store clerk that I was pregnant and wanted to get a bra that was a little on the big side so I could continue to grow into it. I bought pregnancy books and marked pages. I even took to touching my belly lovingly when no one was looking.

All of this makes me cringe as I confess to it.

Silly. I feel silly to have let myself jump into the experience just to have it completely pulled out from under my feet. It was an experience that I'm not allowed to have. Like god realized he'd made a mistake once he saw how happy and excited I was. He remembered that I don't really deserve to be that happy, so he took it away.

On a rational level I know this is absolutely absurd to feel this way. But I still do.

what I want to be like as a mom

My sister and I talk several times a week, but yesterday she called because she very specifically wanted to tell me that our mom loves me, and had said so the other night on the phone with her. This left me rather cold though, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I don't understand.

My mother is not warm and fuzzy. She was the type of mother that required you to be bleeding out your eyeballs before she'd believe you were sick. And she doesn't like weakness. My sister and I can never live up to her expectations. I can't even begin to imagine what they are because we are both pretty freaking well adjusted.

I envy people who want nothing more than their mothers when something goes wrong. My mom is the LAST person I would call.

I've made a few efforts over the years to try and change the relationship. I've been kind of like Bart Simpson in that Butterfingers commercial, you know the one where he keeps getting zapped when he reaches out for the candy bar but he just keeps doing it? incapable of learning.

I reach out to her but it always comes back to bite me in the butt, and I regret putting myself out there like that.

For example, I called home back in January of 2008 and asked for input into the question of whether or not to have kids. I thought it was a really nice conversation. And then when I called in October 2008 to tell them I was pregnant, I was really scared, but it went really well, basically.

But then I had the miscarriage and it all fell apart. My parents didn't handle it well at all, or rather, they just didn't handle it. No real reaction, no sympathy, no nothing really. In fact, a few weeks later when we were on the phone my mom did ask how I was healing and I told her that I was going to the doctor that day b/c I was bleeding again, and heavy, and it was rather early for it to be a period. I was worried. She told me, "well welcome to peri-menopause!"

This is not what you tell a woman who is trying to have a baby and just miscarried. Seriously the wrong thing to say.

I called her back later that day and told her that what she said was really mean. She was so shocked that I called her on it that she didn't say much of anything. But a week or so later she had turned it into one of those, "I'm sorry you were offended" things. I really hate that. It always ends up being about how I'm too sensitive.

My husband left town for several months right after the miscarriage. So that unfortunately left me all alone, and I was really, really not ok. I went into a pretty serious depression. The original plan had been that I'd spend christmas with my parents, but I just couldn't muster the emotional energy to deal with my mother. So I canceled about a month before (never bought my ticket actually). I never called home.

Now my dad is a psychiatrist, so you might have thought that my reclusive behavior would have been a sign. I had even called my sister and begged her to come out to see me. She did. She rocks. But she couldn't stay long b/c she's got a husband and kids and they needed her.

My parents never called to say they were worried about me. They never checked on me. In fact, much later my mom made some comment about how upset SHE had been but that she couldn't talk to any of her friends b/c I hadn't yet wanted to announce my pregnancy (it was only 7 weeks).

Did you catch that? SHE WAS UPSET AND HAD NO ONE TO TALK TO.

I feel a lot better now, and somehow worked my way out of the depression over the last year. I'm finally feeling pretty good and don't cry at the drop of the hat.

But I'm really angry that my mother can't just be a mom. I would have done ANYTHING to have her tell me that it really sucked but that it will be ok, and maybe even cry a little with me. Maybe even just a phone call every now and then to tell me she was thinking about me.

But no, she called me perimenopausal, and made a point to tell me about her friend who is so weak that she still talks about a miscarriage she had many years ago. Nice.

So this is one of the things I think a lot about when I think of having a baby.

I would do everything in my power to make my child know that I loved them no matter what. I would want them to know that no one has a perfect life, that family loves you through good and bad and doesn't think the less of you when things don't go perfectly. That's life. And love, true love is when you love someone even more because you can understand their problems, making it all the more rich when good things happen. I WILL COME RUNNING IF THEY EVER NEED ME. And I will work really hard to know when that might be, even if they can't say it. I really, really want to be one of those warm and fuzzy moms.