A Year Already?!?

I contemplated posting baby updates to this blog. Most of the miscarriage blogs that I found during my days of loss had morphed into mommy blogs by the time I found them. I should have found this encouraging. Yes, these women have been where I am and emerged with tales of no-sleep and poop. Instead I felt rejected yet again. Everyone gets a baby but me, even the ladies who are supposed to be sharing in my experience.

So no baby updates on the Peabody Project. In fact, no baby updates anywhere for the last year aside from a hastily scribbled screed about the first six months of life with Purvis.

If you have stumbled upon this blog after experiencing pregnancy loss, I urge you to return to the beginning of the story, the early entries and move ahead chronologically. Also, I am sorry, very sorry for your loss.

As for me, I still do think about miscarriage mainly when I hear of friends’ losses or when I post a baby-related Facebook update. I hope that my updates don’t cause anybody the icky conflicted murk of emotion that used to befall me when I saw my friends’ baby updates. I have never felt so alienated from my friends, family, and culture at large as after my first miscarriage. I existed in a shadow world of things that aren’t supposed to happen, a world where support groups are the only place of normalcy. I was the cautionary tale, the whispered story.

Friends who shared my experience told me that after Purvis was born I wouldn’t be able to imagine life without her, that in a strange way I’d be grateful that she was the one who came into my life because only Purvis can be Purvis and as great as Primo and Dewey may have been, she is the only child I can imagine. At the time, I didn’t want to hear it. How dare they speak of my lost ones like that, but now I feel the truth of that. I can’t imagine another smile, another laugh, another bugged out I’m-taking-a-crap face.

Yesterday we celebrated Purvis’ first birthday (which she celebrated by pooping in the bathtub. My girl likes to party ALL the time.). We reminisced about when I took what felt like the biggest crap in the world a year ago. (Please see the previous entry for more on that.) We are lucky. Purvis is the shine in my eye. But I still remember Primo and Dewey. I mourn for the lives they missed. I remember the story our post-miscarriage therapist told us about the souls of miscarried babies being protected by the Buddhist bodhisattva, Jizo. Jizo watches and protects their souls until they can be born into another body. One day, when we get our garden in order (which means actually clearing away 2 years worth of dead leaves and planting a garden), I plan to install a Jizo statue in honor of Primo and Dewey. I will tell Purvis about the ones who came before her even though they never really existed beyond the form of our hope and love.

Thanks to friends and family who have supported me, my family, my blog, and now my life with Purvis. May everyone find peace in and beyond Miscarriage World. May we find a way to talk about miscarriage that is sensitive, dark, funny, and true.

Peace out.

Getting Schooled

1-15-10

Is being busy being pregnant a worthy excuse? Not really, but I shall play the pregnant card as my reason for not updating the PPC2 lo these many weeks. Not that I haven’t been thinking about it or taking ever opportunity to flog myself for being so lax.

The typical scenario goes like this: I pull up ye olde Finder (yep, I’m a Mac user but not an insufferable one convinced of superior computing powers) to open a document. Peabody Project.doc looks me in the eye. Shit, how long has it been now? I really need to write something. But first I have to (insert lame unimportant work shit) and then update m my Facebook status and read that one thing about the thing on that one website. Another scenario involves me waking up in the middle of the night. I lie awake writing a blog entry and vowing to put it to paper the next morning. And I don’t.

An incomplete list of topics that have bubbled to the service in the past month and a half:

• Circumcision decision: For cultural (Mr. Crud is a member of the tribe) and health reasons, we have decided to circumcise the theoretically male Purvis. (Nope, we still haven’t opened the envelope to the frustration of our parents—and occasionally Mr. Crud—and the surprise of all who learn of the envelope system.) But what form the procedure takes has been a point of contention and negotiation. Mr. Crud would like a more traditional bris to be held 8 days after Purvis’ birth in our home. I have other, non-traditional ideas. We’ve talked to our doctor, who herself had to make this decision as she is a gentile married to a Jew. We talked to each other. While tears have been shed and uncomfortable silences endured, I think we’re coming to a mutually agreeable decision. Then again, Purvis may just be a girl in which case this was a great exercise in parenting, right?
• Dreaming of Purvis: In my dreams she is always an adorable little girl who can already talk and start telling me about all the things I did wrong while I was pregnant. Methinks this is not premonition speaking but rather my unconscious mind. I still haven’t dreamed that I gave birth to a cat or small animal. “Maybe we should say that we’re hoping for a dog,” I say to Mr. Crud. “Two birds with one stone.” “I was hoping for a slender cat,” he says. Our new line is that we are having a baby because we wanted a dog but weren’t sure if we were up to the responsibility of taking care of one. I plan to use this with the nurses as a humor litmus test.
• The early bird gets their crib on time, and then there’s us: During the winter break, Mr. Crud and I get serious about baby shit. We look at cribs, we work the Baby Bargains book so hard the pages curl. We learn the harsh truth that ordering a crib 5 weeks before your due date causes raised eyebrows in the baby boutique community. “They take 8-10 weeks to come in,” the clerk says. We agonize. We return to Babies R Us in hopes of finding something good enough that is also in stock. Every BRU crib seems to appear on Baby Bargains’ This-Crib-Will-Kill-Your-Baby list. We get depressed. Friends reassure us that we won’t need the crib for the first months of Purvis’ life anyway since we plan to sleep with him/her in a bassinet in our room. We feel a little better. We order the crib. Mr. Crud still harbors hope that things may come in early. “You never know,” he says. “Yeah, but Purvis could come early too,” I say.

The thought that Purvis could arrive before the 40-week mark didn’t really hit me until last weekend when Mr. Crud and I attend “Childbirth A – Z,” the hospital’s cram session for everything birth. As we go around the room, introducing ourselves we are relieved to find that we are not alone. Due dates in late January account for half of the crowd.

“I thought we were far behind,” Mr. Crud says. “We’re February 1.”

We commiserate about the holidays messing with our childbirth preparation. The teacher claps her hands together. “Some of you could be giving birth anytime now.”

Oh boy. Oh shit. I spend the rest of the weekend scrutinizing every Braxton Hicks. Could this be the one?

Mr. Crud and I are the only couple who do not know the sex of their baby. I wonder if this crowd would appreciate Mr. Crud’s sociology humor: “We don’t know the sex yet, but we’re going to gender it male.” Dr. Awesome laughed at least. We are also the only couple who have already hired and met with a doula. About a quarter of the 10 couples don’t even know what a doula is.

“I guess we’re the hippies of the group,” he says.

I am surprised and pleased to note that the other couples seem to be about our age. (Unless I am delusional about what 37-year-olds look like.) I had assumed we would be the oldy oldersons of the childbirth classes although I’ve yet to be the memaw of any of the mommy groups of which I’ve been a part. I guess all those articles about motherhood coming later to a large portion of the population aren’t whistling Dixie. The other couples also seem to be of a similar social milieu: educated and middle class, and mostly white except for the sore thumbs of the group, a Pakistani engineer couple, Hamim and Azana. I can’t calculate how many minutes Hamim and Azana add to our childbirth class with their constant and frequently repetitive questions, but I’d wager to guess at least 45.

The first question comes early. “Are you going to talk about epidurals?” Azana asks.

“Yes, and when do you know you need one?” Hamim adds.

Our fearless, willowy childbirth class teacher Aurelia nods. “Those come tomorrow in the interventions part of the class.”

This doesn’t stop Hamim and Azana from interjecting more questions about epidurals and whatever other tangential topic crosses their minds throughout the day. Yes friends, I have found my bete noirs.

Aurelia suggests that we test our powers to breathe through discomfort by holding a bag of ice.

“Ice? Where do we get this ice?” Hamim asks.

“You know, ice. From your freezer or a convenience store.”

Okay, I’m being unfair to Hamim. He did, in fact, ask where one could procure ice, but this may be a communication-language issue instead of the engineer couples’ typical MO: they obviously have not cracked the binding on a single pregnancy and birth book before this class. For us and the other couples, a lot of what we are talking about feels like review. I’ve read about the stages of birth, the white hot hell of transition, the ring of fire, and other such fun contortions that my body will find itself going through sometime in the next month. I know about positions to alleviate pain and strategies for coping. (“Yoga breathing! Yoga breathing!!” Mr. Crud will holler in my ear.) Aurelia adds a few tools to our box, but mostly the day feels like reinforcement of the reading I’ve done at home.

The other couples are patient during the first day. We smile when Hamim cracks a joke. We don’t roll our eyes when Azana steers the teacher off-course once again with a question about epidurals. The second day, the muttering and hard glances at our spouses set in.

“So what if the husband wants epidural and the wife does not?” Azana asks. “A friend of mine said that her husband wanted her to get one even though she didn’t. Can husband tell the doctor to give her one?”

The women in the room go wide-eyed. Aurelia takes a deep breath for diplomacy. “We won’t give Mom an epidural if she doesn’t want one. Her partner can ask for one but we’d at least want a nod from Mom.”

“But what if she is crazy with pain and can’t make a decision?” Hamim asks.

“It is still her decision.”

This leads Aurelia into a discussion of how in birth we won’t be magically transformed into different people. “If you don’t like baths now, you probably won’t like a bath when you’re in labor.”

Thus, I’m fairly certain that I won’t be going the epidural route.

“You hate taking aspirin when you have a headache,” Mr. Crud says. “I don’t think you’ll be going for heavy pain medication.”

Agreed. For both of my D & Cs I opted for super strength ibuprofen and anti-anxiety meds rather than deal with anesthesia. My motto tends to be that I can take pain as long as I know that nothing is really wrong with me. The more I learn about epidurals, the more I feel confident that I won’t be calling for the anesthesiologist. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Sure, I’m being a little macho about things, but mainly I am freaked out by a needle being stuck in my back and the possibility of a 2-week epidural headache. I’m not going to say never, but I’m hoping my doula and years of yoga will serve as my meds. I also plan to curse a lot.

After a break, Mr. Crud and I return to the conference room where our class is being held. I notice the name on the office door next to the conference room: Jill, the counselor who talked to us after we lost Primo. I feel slightly odd to be back in the office where both of my D & C’s were performed. It’s no Center for Sadness & Disappointment, but my memories of the Women’s Health Center are tangled. When we walk down the hall I crane my neck to look in every examination room. The site of Dewey’s extraction could be any of them.

“It’s kind of weird being back here,” I say to Mr. Crud.

“Yeah, I didn’t want to mention it,” he says.

Over the last month I’ve had a few moments of sadness over Primo and Dewey. I know that they were embryos, balls of genetic material, but I still mourn them and in a way, feel sorry for them that they didn’t get to grow into Peabody. My miscarriage books say that the birth of a child may bring up these issues. I don’t dread the return of thoughts of Primo and Dewey. I wonder what form these thoughts and emotions will take, the shape of my ghosts. The miscarriage days feel so far gone. It’s hard to believe that it was only a year ago when we were in the late mourning period for Dewey. I still worry for Purvis. I can’t 100% shake the stabs of fear that come when I haven’t felt her squirm or kick at my hip for a long stretch. And I still conjure horror scenarios, but they are a much smaller piece of my baby thoughts than I ever imagined possible. These days I’m thinking about nursery room colors (purple), which outfit Purvis will wear home from the hospital, whether it can even be true that I’m fitting into a 38DD bra (I still keep looking at the tags in disbelief), how long it will take for Purvis to breastfeed away my ample hip-ass-leg region, and when-when-when will we meet this mystery baby. The question of most immediate importance however is about tomorrow’s Breastfeeding Basics workshop: will Hamim, Azana, and their litany of questions be in the house?

RANDOM: Mr. Crud amused himself during the many Hamim Q & A moments by making a track list for Chloasma’s first album, The Bloody Show. Favorite: amniohook.

CULTURAL SENSITIVITY NOTE: Both Mr. Crud and I felt weird about our Hamim-Azana annoyance. Was this cultural? Oh hell yes. At one point, after Aurelia stressed for the hundredth time that doctors would not perform any procedure without the patient’s consent, the epidural discussion degenerated into a disagreement on the American medical system.

“Some things should be imperative then there’s a second level where the patient makes the choice.” Hamim said.

“That’s not how it works.” One of the frustrated fathers-to-be in the room said. “You always have to consent.”

“What if you make the wrong decision?”

“Then you make the wrong decision. That’s life,” Mr. Crud said.

“We could spend all day debating the American medical system, but let’s get back to epidurals,” Aurelia said.

On the drive home we agreed that cultural differences can be annoying. Also that engineers need social skills training. I wondered what Hamim and Azana made of the rest of us in the class. Did they find us incurious? Arrogant? I got the impression that they were so in their own world that they didn’t much think of us at all.

Maybe just maybe I am using Hamim and Azana to avoid having to delve too deeply into the reality of my coming experience. Annoyance is a great distraction from facing a total life transformation.

April Fools and Anniversaries

4-2-09

How does one mark the one-year anniversary of their initiation into Miscarriage World? I got my period, which seems pretty bloody appropriate (pun very intended and also protesting its use in the previous sentence). I thanked G-d that I wasn’t in the same place I was a year ago—devastated and terrified that I would die during my D & C. While smoking my first cigarette since my positive pregnancy test, I felt gripped by a fear that I was going to die--not just feel like I was dying--the next day. I made the decision that I wanted all my journals burned and told Mr. Crud as much.

“You’re not going to die,” he said.

“But if I do.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

From a year distance—and through the eyes of a D & C veteran—my hysterics seem melodramatic. I don’t view myself harshly. My whole world-view had been upended in the course of a single, sunny afternoon.

Last night after dinner Mr. Crud’s face fell into a frown.

“You thinking about--?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

It had been hard not to think about it since leaving for our annual spring break trip to Florida. The night we arrived I lay in my niece Emma’s bed tossing and turning as images from our previous trip zipped about my brain: Me going through maternity and baby clothes while Mr. Crud packed up the Pack ‘n Play and breast pump accessories. The terrible cold that kept me in bed for most of our visit since I couldn’t take any cold medicine. Even though I could have since my reason for abstaining was actually already deceased. Infuriating. For lack of anything more solid than Mother Nature to direct my anger, I get mad at my poor, dead collection of genetic material, Primo. Why the fuck couldn’t you have just rode the red menstrual tide instead of sticking around and stinking up my uterus with your baby-to-be-that-never-was death? I could have taken cold medicine. I could have tasted the delicious scallop dinner that I couldn’t eat because, lacking the ability to smell and taste due to my horrible cold, the texture was disgusting.

Because I wasn’t pregnant this time around, I popped a Xanax and eventually drifted off to sleep with visions of playing witches with my niece dancing in my head. She did not disappoint. Nor did her little bro, nephew Jonah. The chief recruiters did their job of kicking me back into the baby-making mode. Emma with her Lemony Snicket and Stephin Merritt obsessions (for real now, how cool is that for a 6-year-old?), and Jonah with his Caesar-style conquering of potty training--He came, he saw, he crapped, AND wiped—reminded me that the struggle is worth it. Well, unless it isn’t and the events of the past year repeat themselves and we end up sad, bleeding, and hating the g-ds. But what can you do? Hello, fertility calculators. Good-bye, cigarettes.

Due

The due date for Primo was October 19, 2008. I remember finding it out via the Fertility Friend.com due date calculator. My first thought: that baby better not be born on my birthday! Then, oh sweet, our kiddo will be an October baby. One of a fine breed if you ask me. I wrote “Due Date!!!!” on my desk calendar and etched the number in my mind. October 19. Of course, after the first ultrasound of doom, the date took on a confused character. I scribbled out my exclamation points in my desk calendar, but wiping it from the brain proves more difficult. I had plans to do something special in honor of Primo on the 19th.

“Like go out for dinner?” Mr. Crud said, knowing that I am wont to mark any special date, positive or negative, with a dirty martini (so convenient how you can use drinking for celebrations or as an emotional crutch) and a plate of fried calamari and Piri Piri sauce at Lauro.

“Maybe. Or light a candle or something.” I said.

Mr. Crud and I intend to mark the loss of both our babies-to-be-that-never-were in some way, but haven’t stumbled on something that feels organic, that feels like us. Mr. Crud’s cousin remembered her first pregnancy loss by saying a prayer then releasing an apple into the river, waving good-bye as it floated away. I loved that image. We considered making a paper boat, the S.S. Primo, and sending it off into the Columbia during a visit to Astoria a month after MC #1, but it was too soon and we wanted a weekend away from thinking about the miscarriage after being immersed in it for so long.

On lazy Saturday mornings, the issue of how to remember Primo, and now Dewey, floats to the surface during our drowsy chats. We remain unable to commit. Probably on some level, reluctant to say good-bye, to invite that overwhelming sadness back in even as it runs strong through our veins.

Friday night I met up with my yoga buddy, Mirjana, to celebrate her upcoming trip to India to study yoga with the grandson of the guru of our style of yoga. Over glasses of rose, I lost track of Primo’s upcoming due date. My tongue loosened after a half of a bottle, I attempted to explain the difficulty of Miscarriage World, how—as an awesome reader and friend of crud pointed out—language is inadequate to talk about miscarriage. Is there a word for the shitty swamp that envelopes me whenever I read a Facebook status update about a friend’s excitement over her pregnancy? I love my friends. I am glad to the depths of my heart and soul that most have not been privy to the sadness of infertility or pregnancy loss. Still, I feel left out, wistful. When I found out about my second pregnancy I was so excited to be able to share my symptoms, joy, fear with my pregnant friends. Now I feel torn. Ripped, in fact, between wanting to be there with them and share in their experiences and wanting to pretend it isn’t happening, that I am not THAT friend, the unlucky one with the clingy uterus and failed eggs.

Of course I am far from alone. I list the names of the other women who have been through this, who are going through this in their own Miscarriage World sublets. I whisper their names when I see that another old friend is pregnant. A new form of affirmation to replace the twice failed “My baby is healthy and safe” that I once repeated daily after my yoga practice.

As we stumbled into the cool fall night, Mirjana told me that she was here for me, that she didn’t know what to say, but that she was here to listen and witness.

“That is totally enough,” I said.

On the up side, nobody has told me that this loss was “meant to be.” In part this is due to the fact that I haven’t shared the news with any of the past meant-to-be-ers. Meant-to-be speak is now an automatic disqualification. “It was G-d’s way” will also get you thrown out of the exclusive club of Crud pregnancy updates. Poor you.

All weekend I felt the loss bubbling beneath the surface. During my massage, tears sprung to my eyes. And then the dam broke.

Saturday night Mr. Crud and I went to a play courtesy of a coolio actor coworker who just happens to be part of the hot theatre company in town. Through a perfect storm of bad timing moments, I ended up in the bathroom when the doors closed and the performance began. Oblivious to this fact, I walked back to the door where I had entered the theatre, which also happened to be the door close to the stage. I pulled on the handle. A blonde woman flew from behind the folding table that served as the box office. She pushed the door shut, hissing, “What are you doing?”

I felt like I had been punched. “I thought the play started at 8:00,” I said.

“No! 7:30.”

“Oh my G-d, I’m so sorry,” I said and skulked away, tears of shame burning my eyeballs. Guess I’ll be spending my night sobbing in the bathroom, I thought. At least until intermission.

The coolio actor coworker came up behind you. “It’s okay. She thought you were sneaking in. It’s fine. I’ll just let you in here.” He marched me up to the back entrance, opened the door, and I slipped down the aisle, taking my seat a minute into the play (or so I was assured by Mr. Crud, “You didn’t miss anything.”).

Around me people laughed at the brilliant dark comedy happening two rows in front of my hunched form. Try as I might to dam the tide, the tears flowed freely. I did my best to keep my gusher to myself. I waited for the big laughs to sniffle. I licked the snot that got away off the top of my lip. I dabbed my tears with my shawl. All in all, Mr. Crud rated my performance at pretending not to be totally weeping during a play to be top shelf. “I barely noticed,” he said.

The more I thought about the fact that I was crying my eyes out during a comedy, that the actors on stage might be able to see my tear-stained face, or catch a snippet of my sniffles made the tears fall even harder. I am an inappropriate weeper. It’s a blessing and a curse depending on the moment. A blessing because in theory I am letting the emotional rivers flow, letting go in a physical way. After a jag, I feel tired but clean. A curse because it can be damn embarrassing. Crying in front of a class full of people has happened at pretty much every age in my educational career. Not to mention the inevitable moment when I get all bubbly-eyed in front of my boss, which has happened with every boss I’ve ever had. Some roll with it better than others. Most are willing to trade my competence for a few uncomfortable moments. It doesn’t happen every time something doesn’t go my way but when I’m experiencing undercurrents of emotional craziness the tears are close to the surface. Pinch me and I bleed.

After intermission I stemmed the teary tide. Then came the late thirties female lead yelled, “I want a baby!” and a few more dribbled out.

Mr. Crud and I blasted out of the theater as soon as the play ended. Had I seen the hisser or my coolio coworker, I would have burst into tears afresh. We escaped without any further damage to my makeup job.

“The way I see it, you weren’t going to get out of there without crying,” Mr. Crud said.

“Good point.”

“I don’t think you were crying because that lady yelled at you,” he said.

We shared a laugh over the play, which though advertised as a comedy was most definitely not a comedy. More accurately it was a relationship drama about people who used comedy to keep from being sucked under by the tragedy.

“I felt very meta. I tried laughing to cover my crying while the characters were masking their own misery by laughing but then everyone ended up miserable.”

Sunday brought more reasons to be sad. A couple of weeks ago one of Mr. Crud’s colleagues committed suicide. She was a beautiful, smart, neato woman of our age. A wife, a mother to a five-year-old and someone I’d casually met at his office functions and the grocery store where we shared a laugh about how she, a feminist academic, was buying her daughter doll toys. Mr. Crud had interviewed her and her husband as part of his thesis research. It seemed totally inconceivable that she was dead and that she had made the decision to die.

Mr. Crud and I attended the memorial service at a retreat center in the Gorge. I was sniffing back tears as soon as I took a seat. Who am I crying for, I wondered. Is this for the tragedy that I saw in all the faces around me or for my own sadness? For Primo who was supposed to be born today? Am I piggybacking on someone else’s funeral? Several times during the shared remembrances, the reading of poems and music I had to restrain myself from breaking into hysterical sobs. Too much, too much, I kept thinking.

After the remembrances we moved outside. The air had turned chilly with a layer of fog resting on the evergreens across the gorge. The husband read a poem and then took a photo of Mr. Crud’s colleague and burned it over a bowl. He looked into her paper eyes and wept. I could only watch him for a second before turning away. Too much, too much. Was the burning cathartic? I had already thrown away the pee stick from Primo but still had an ultrasound photo and pee stick leftover from Dewey. Maybe burning is the way to go. A release.

I can imagine myself years from now pulling open a box filled with the paperwork from my D and C, the ultrasound photo, and other random effluvia of these two doomed pregnancies and crying more tears for my babies-to-be-that-never-were. My ghost children. Every morning I say a prayer for them, I wish them peace and imagine that my father and grandmother are watching over them. I think of the pregnancy loss counselor’s image of the babies-to-be-that-never-were being absorbed into the ocean of the universal consciousness. Maybe it is better to burn and let go than to keep objects to fondle in moments of future sadness.

I’m still figuring it out. And glad that due date #1 has come and gone. I have until April 17 to come up with my miscarried baby mourning system.