The aftermath - Part 1

So it's an unsurprisingly fucked up feeling in the pit of your stomach when a medium tells you that you are not going to have any biological children and then later emails you a homeopathic remedy for grief.  All of this, the day before you are supposed to take a relaxing beach vacation.  Ha Ha.

So what do you do?  You cry a little, you focus for a few minutes on some of the career advice you also received in the same session.  Your head is spinning, literally spinning.  You try to compartmentalize, pull yourself together and put on a happy face.  And then because you're trained as a lawyer, of course you sit, and ponder, and look for loopholes.

For example, there was that moment when she emphatically noted that miracles happen every day (you raised Niblet's miracle obsession).... but was clear to advise that you try to eliminate this thinking from Niblet, because it could be harmful.  Since it's harmful for Niblet, it's probably also harmful for you.  By definition, miracles aren't something you should focus on.  So no loophole here. Move along. 

But your brain is still ticking away.... Baby. Baby. Baby.  You are almost obsessed now, you are just craving a baby.  Maybe it's because we all want want we cannot have.  But you also know that when you return to your fertile office, like, everyone will be pregnant.  And it will just HURT.

So back to loopholes.... there's the whole issue of biological children and the closed door.... for the first time in the five years of going through this, you wonder, really deeply wonder - leaving aside the potential  financial ruin - would you consider a donor egg?  Do you need a follow-up conversation with this medium?  Is this a path that your soul would consider cheating?  Because maybe your husband could still have a biological child, couldn't he?  Maybe?  Maybe not?  Is he doomed too?  Are you doomed to lose all pregnancies, or just the ones with your biological imprint?

So you get off the phone, and the first thing you do while your daughter watches cartoons, is start perusing the online info available on egg banks.  You start looking at donor info out there for public view, comparing the costs of Fresh cycles vs FET.  You think long and hard about your father's younger cousin on the west coast, who has a large family with his beautiful - albeit older - wife.  Their four children all look like him and my great-aunt.  This isn't unprecedented in your family.

Are you crazy?  Should you just curl up into a ball and drink your grief remedy?

To be continued

So I am headed to the beach.

I have so much to write about my experience with a woman who I can only describe as a spirit guide. But I am frankly still processing all of it and need to unplug for a while.

Bear with me lovely readers, I will be back soon. Peace out.

"That door has closed"

This is fascinating.  I see very clearly that your soul, and [Viking] and [Niblet]'s souls - all three of you - had what I call a "contract" with another spirit to enter your family.  But somehow, that contract wasn't honored.  And now your souls have set forward for new goals for your family unit.  Everyone is ready to move on to being a family of three.

... He needs to understand what miscarriages do to you.  You have not adequately conveyed the depth of the losses.  The hormonal swings.....Your body cannot handle another loss or another aborted pregnancy of a very sick baby.  I am not saying that there is a door closed to adoption, or bringing in another member to your family that way, but biologically, that door has closed.

Do I look like a midwife to you?

Most days are fine. But some days.... yeah, some days, you really don't want to be the person to listen to your best friend vent about morning sickness (and you go an order them ginger candies you know are awesome on amazon.... but you secretly wish that someone else - like her husband - would have the foresight to do it instead).  And those other office break room conversations, like, with the other pregnant lady who is concerned about gestational diabetes where you try to talk her off the cliff, and the one who is now entering the third trimester and experiencing back pain - yeah, I wish someone would take those for the team too.

One of my readers noted that anyone who wants to get knocked up should work in my office.  It's true.  There are three pregnant women here (that I know of).

Thank god I am taking a vacation in a few weeks.  I think fourteen straight days of not being in this office and serving as the kindly resident expert on pregnancy will do something positive for my psyche.

closings and triggers

There's a diner near me that's closing. It's an old-school institution, it's shiny and silver and it's the kind of joint where you could order the best tuna melt in the world and chase it with a milkshake, and feel that in a world of bat-shit crazy, at least something in this world could be put together right.

Viking took me there the afternoon after we lost Celine.  My parents had swooped into town like the heroes they are, and took Niblet on an all-day shopping spree at the mall.

This diner is a near a Goodwill thrift store.  I went up to our attic and bagged and boxed up ALL of Niblet's old clothes.  There wasn't a ton of her baby stuff there anyways, because I tend to cycle all of her stuff out to two families with girls who live on a shoestring and could use her hand-me downs. But whatever was up there came down the stairs.  "I need it out of the house," I said to Viking.

So we loaded up his car.  There were about five trash bags worth of clothes and shoes.  There was also a random bag of maternity clothes.  We dropped the bags off at Goodwill, and then drove a half mile down the road to the diner.

I was crampy and dazed.  I ordered a cup of chicken noodle soup, which I happen to know they make, it doesn't come from a can.  It was so good that I ordered an extra quart to take home.  I recall being amazed that I even wanted to eat anything, because usually when I am in the midst of depression I starve beautifully.  I'm not much of a stress eater.  But that afternoon, after ridding my house of the vestiges of dreams, there was nothing I wanted more than to fill myself with something.  Soup was good enough.

This diner will always be a part of my psyche.  You may be surprised to read that I loved going back, even with the awful associations it conjured up for me, but it was no more triggering for me than the bed I sleep on every night, that I curled up in after every awful return from a hospital D&C.

It's not terribly surprising then, to discover just how triggered I am to learned that it will close and make way for a Starbucks. 

Unstick thyself

This week my acupuncturist, a woman I trust more than any doctor I have ever visited, suggested a new track for me.  A year ago I would have nodded my head politely at the words soul guidance and just said "thanks for the idea" and left it at that....

By way of preamble:  My last miscarriage was finalized (I hate the word "resolved") by a D&C in April of 2015.  I jumped on the horse of Not Trying, Not Protecting, in June of 2015.  NTNP is a funky place to live for me - because, well sure, we're not protecting.  But we're also, for all intents and purposes, continuing to TRY.  Let's just say that we never miss a fertile window in my cycle and leave it at that.

I am over one year into NTNP, and (of course) not getting pregnant, and lo and behold I am falling back into despondency.  I have shifted from a (natural) fear of pregnancy, to a WTF, am I now well and truly infertile? frame of mind.  I can't for the life of me figure out how to climb out of this hole.  I am 42, well past the age where someone should expect to get pregnant.  And yet, I was pregnant at 41.  And 40 and 39 and 38.   That's a lot of years to crave mothering another tiny person.

But I stare at the (many) pregnant bellies in my office (so many).  And I still find myself imagining myself as potentially being one of them, joining their ranks with my own swollen belly.  I have spent money and hours sitting with a therapist for over a year now trying to rid this image from my brain and I can't.  No matter how hard I try, no matter how many times I rationally tell myself that my fertility story has come to an end, it doesn't go away.  It's like there's this little ping deep inside my core, and it keeps fucking pinging baby baby baby.  You want a baby.  You know you want a baby. But hey now: You fool.  You are not one of them. They can have babies. Babies are not for you. 

And then you fall back into old patterns, that may or may not be destructive.  You're being johnny on the spot with your vitamins and supplements.  You're drinking wheatgrass shots again.  You shrug your shoulders when your acupuncturist says it wouldn't hurt to take royal jelly and surreptitiously hop on amazon to order some.  You're like some fertility crackhead, lurking back into the alley, not wanting anyone to spot you in your ridiculousness.

Admitting that you want this baby is awful because then you have to face the reality that NTNP is just an acronym for begging the universe for a miracle.  And you don't like to beg when there's people who have a whole lot more to beg for than you, and yo, just shut down your facebook and twitter because what you really need to do is crawl and hide under a rock.  Enough with your baby baby baby pangs.

So, when you realize you're stuck.... it's time to unstick yo-self.

On Monday, my acupuncturist recognized that this internal monologue is slowly destroying me.  And she suggested that I seek help.  Of the spiritual and metaphysical kind.  From a woman who may be able to tap deeper into why I have hit a wall.  And maybe provide guidance for me on how to tear it down and move forward.

I am not prepared to go into a ton of detail about the appointment I have just set up for myself, partly because I have no idea what to expect.  All I can say is that two ballet classes a week, zumba, massages, therapy, acupuncture, hugging the fuck out of Niblet and my Viking, and counting my numerous blessings have not made a dent in my own personal existential crisis.

I'm open to anything.

Some Men are from Mars...

I toyed with the glib title for this subject heading, which is fare more intense than the heading implies.

Coming out of a useful therapy session yesterday, I tried to talk to the viking about, well, everything. 

He was getting visibly frustrated, which in him displays as shutting down. Seriously, all of the emotion dissolves from his face, like some weird automaton, and he starts to physically check out.  And then walks out of the room.

Me being me, I started in on him, trying to demand of him that he accept why I need to talk about our dead babies, and frame them as babies, something he has been reluctant to do for all of these years.

And then he said this:

If I were to do what you do, if I were to remember their due dates and think about them and grieve them as our unborn *children* I would go insane.  Literally insane.  Like, I might not make it out the other side.

And that's when I finally understood. Something clicked.

We are very different, the viking and I.  Yes, he supports me, he understands quite clearly that what I have experienced is hell on earth, he knows that when I use the letters P-T-S-D I'm not fucking around.  I can cry on his shoulder and I can depend on him to pick up my slack when I am M.I.A. from life because I need a ballet class, or a zumba class, or a massage, or acupuncture or therapy (Jesus, I sound like a basket case).

But we are hard-wired quite differently.  I willingly go to very (very) dark places, and then fight like hell to pull myself out, looking at the fight as a challenge to conquer.  It helps that I am genetically blessed with little predisposition to addiction - I have little desire to pick up an old college smoking habit and I'd rather take a dance class than reach for a glass of wine when I'm down. And then another.  The viking, well, eh, he has not been so genetically blessed.  He is a careful study in control in many things.

I have my therapist, I have my readers, I have a few close friends whose shoulders I can cry on when this shit feels like weight pressing down on my chest.  But in the act itself of grieving, in my own feeble attempts to honor my lost babies as babies, I do not have my husband.  I have his support in a million other ways, but I will not have him by my side in mourning.  I understand why.