Read a memoir today...

I was supposed to be grading papers during my planning period at school today.  Instead I read a book.  An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken.  I read it, cover to cover, in about three hours.

Wow.

I read a memoir about stillbirth called Life Touches Life and I absolutely hated it.  It was one of the books I was given by LLOST at the hospital. It was all about the author's withdrawal from the world, her decision to not try to have more children, and then, at the end, a very Buddhist metaphor about buckets of water and sunlight that just made me want to scream.  I am not exaggerating when I say I hated it.

This book was different.

The author wrote the book immediately after the birth of her second child, her first living child.  It's about the absurdity of stillbirth, the complete darkness and irrationality speckled with the small spots of brightness.  So many of its pages echoed thoughts that I've had and that I continue to have.

One section in particular cut straight to the root of the root for me.  She was comparing herself to the crazed woman in a gothic novel wearing a bloodied nightgown and rocking her dead baby to sleep while singing lullabies, something out of an Edgar Allan Poe short story.  Here is my favorite piece:

     I remember one lunch with people who loved us in London early on, two of the most excruciating hours of my life.  Nothing but that endless juggling: Other people's jobs and boyfriends.  What kind of wine to order.  This was two weeks after Pudding died.  I might have been something like that gothic character one step short of total ruin: I wanted to rock and sing lullabies and hold out my torn, bloody nightgown and run my hands through my wild hair, and yet I knew you weren't supposed to do such things in polite society.  My hair was uncombed, and my face was puffy from lack of sleep and crying and too much wine, and my clothes were what I'd salvaged from the middle of my pregnancy, because of course even through people might pretend nothing was out f the ordinary I had the body of a woman two weeks postpartum, soft and wide around the middle, and if I'd been one step worse off I might have lifted my shirt up to display my still livid stretch marks.
    But I didn't.  I could feel how uncomfortable my mere presence made people feel, and I couldn't bear it.  So I sat in this Indian restaurant and listened.  Sometimes a piece of palaver came loose and shot straight toward me, and somehow I caught it and tossed it back.
     All the while, all I could think was: Dead baby dead baby dead baby.
     And I know everyone around that table was thinking the same thing, every single person.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Mike and I finally have the green light to try again.  Some people won't understand why we feel compelled to try again as soon as possible, but it makes sense based on the belief system I adopted.  So off we go.

I've already fallen down the rabbit hole.  If one were to go back and read any of the posts I wrote before we conceived Mia, back when we thought we'd never be able to have a baby and when we were still a little lost in the grief of our miscarriage, you'd see how much of a nut I became about the whole process.  I'm already seeing pieces of that now.  I really expected to get through at LEAST the first month before I became a crazy nut...

Today I took three, yes three, HPTs.  As though my levels will increase in an hour.  Not only that, but one of them was a REAL test...the kind that costs $5, not $.75.  I even did the photograph inversion thing.  Never heard of it?  It's when you take a picture of a HPT and invert the colors to negative because it makes second lines a little easier to see when they are shadows of shadows of shadows.  I'm in deep.

I'm a little concerned about the appropriateness of what I clearly recognize as a coping mechanism.  I'm pouring a significant amount of my excess emotion into this process, because I'm telling myself that this is what is supposed to happen.  I'm finding signs everywhere.  When you look for signs, you'd be surprised at how many you find.  I'm painting lines with my imagination.  Just like with signs, when you look for extra lines on HPTs, you'd be surprised what your eyes try to convince you are there.

I'm a little afraid that, when my period comes back, and reality crashes in on my illogical optimism, I'm going to crash.  This is a really stupid coping mechanism...

3 months

Tonight makes 3 months since Charlotte's birth.  Wow.  I am woefully behind on the photo journey project, but I just don't have it in me to find them and think on it tonight.  Maybe tomorrow.  For tonight, I'm just tired.

Getting through my birthday yesterday was a little tough.  I had such a different image of what I would be feeling yesterday when I was thinking about it over the summer, and somehow those feelings stuck.  That really surprises me, to be honest, because it was just a passing fancy of what it would be like to celebrate my birthday with a big belly, almost 8 months pregnant, enjoying the final weeks of Mia being an only child. 

It's strange the way things stick with you...even the silly, seemingly insignificant things.

Regardless, today is what today is.  It would have been my grandmother's 101st birthday today, if she were still alive.  She died when I was 17.  I felt kind of close to her today.  Maybe she's celebrating her birthday with Charlotte somewhere...

A Baby Story...

I was thinking about the TLC TV show A Baby Story today.  I was thinking, in all of the episodes they've filmed, there must have been at least a couple of babies that were stillborn, or born prematurely and in the NICU, or a baby who died of SIDS...something.  All you see on that show is 1) backstory 2) labor and delivery 3)happy family with new baby two months later.

What's that about.  I just looked it up, and there have been over 600 episodes of A Baby Story.  The stillbirth rate is somewhere between 1 in 160 and 1 in 170.  This means that, at the very least, there should have been (statistically) three stillbirths that were followed through this process.

I know that this show is about beautiful family stories and happiness and sunshine and bunny rabbits...but what about a real story for the rest of us?  For some of us there are no bunny rabbits.  Why doesn't that experience warrant equal (or, in my opinion, more) airtime and consideration on the network? 

Now, granted, it would require the family to consent to have their story followed through the darkest hours of their family's history...but I have to think at least one of the statistical three would want to do that.  I would have.  A part of me wanted to privately curl up around my pain and muffle it from the world...but another part feels compelled to put my story out there...to let people know that things like this happen to normal people like me.  People who have had healthy babies, and people who don't do drugs or smoke or drink or eat food with nitrates.  People for whom doing everything right isn't right enough...

In over 600 births...shouldn't there have been one story kind of like mine?

I do like stuff, though...

Since  Charlotte died, there has been a marked increase in the amount of stuff a few members of my family have bought me.  They sucked (and continue to suck) at providing actual support.  They think it's just not them, and they aren't willing to try.  Instead, they're buying me stuff.

Now, as today isn't too bad of a day, I don't feel too much resentment towards them for not being there for me.  On the bad days, everyone gets lost in the black fog of anger...but today isn't a day like that.  Today is a day when I shrug my shoulders and accept that it is what it is and they are what they are. 

That being said, they've missed the point.  It seems like they're trying to buy, literally buy, my happiness back.  As though that new sweater or scarf or book or pair of shoes or door (yes, a bedroom door...I'm not kidding) is going to make me stop hurting and grieving for Charlotte.  Intellectually, I can see as they're just trying to make me happy in any way that they can, but it's so totally and completely not the point.

I needed someone to talk to.  I needed someone who loved me to sit down and share my daughter with me.  I needed someone who would listen to me cry and know that it's what I needed to do.  I needed someone to just be there.  They weren't.  Some people were (hint: if you know me in real life and I gave you the link to this blog, I count you among those people).  They weren't.

Still, I have to acknowledge that they're trying, right?  Maybe they're trying in ways that don't make sense to me.  Maybe they're trying in ways that are contradictory with what I asked them, straightforwardly, to do.  Maybe it feels like they're cheapening my grief and my daughter's memory by trying to fix it through retail therapy.  But they're trying. 

I'm a little torn.  On the one hand I want to tell them that they're being silly.  I don't need stuff.  I don't need them to spend money on me.  I needed an ear, a shoulder, and a heart (to be cliche for a moment).  I don't need a sweater.  On the other hand....I do like stuff. 

Is it wrong to just let them?  I know inside that I harbor some resentment that they wouldn't be what I asked and needed them to be.  I know inside that there are some wounds from this that will always mar our relationships.  It'll eventually fade to a rough scar, but it will always be there.  How much of a horrible, selfish, greedy person does it make me if I just let them do this? 

It makes them feel better, I think.  I can justify it.  And I do like stuff....

Am I seriously sympathizing with this character?

I'm currently teaching The Crucible for the "I've lost count because I've done it too much"th time.  I can recite entire sections of the darn thing.

So, as we're working our way through Act I, in walks Ann Putnam.  If you're not on as intimate terms with this play as I am, allow me to explain.  Ann Putnam is a manipulative, hateful woman who gets other women killed in the name of witchcraft.  Not the kind of woman you'd want to be friends with, lest she send you to the gallows...literally.

Suddenly I find myself sympathizing with this woman.  The motive behind all of her hate is the death of seven of her eight children.  They all died on the day they were born.  I actually almost cried when discussing it with my class today.  The women buried seven babies and was looking for a reason...so she turned to witchery.

Seriously?  I'm mentally defending this woman?  I don't want to feel sympathy for the crazy Puritan woman who sent her only living daughter off to a seance to communicate with her dead siblings!

My experience isn't limited to this instance...I find myself increasingly sympathizing with women like this in fiction.  It's bizarre.  We aren't meant to sympathize with Ann Putnam...we're meant to recognize that she was motivated by a legitimate reason, then condemn her for being so destructive.  But, yeah, no, I kind of see her point.

Not going to lie...witchcraft makes more sense sometimes than, "it just happens". 

Capture your grief--Days 14-15

I considered giving the 15th it's own post, but I don't think that's necessary...here is my continued photo journey.  If you missed it, here are the days, yet again:

If you've not seen this before, my photo journey started here and continued here and then here.

Day 14: Community
I wondered for a while what to put here.  I just today shared publicly the fact that I had a daughter and that she's gone.  To this point, there has been very little community around me.  That's partially my fault, as I feared sharing Charlotte for fear of having her memories hurt, or tarnished, or...I don't even know.  You always see those photos circulating on facebook that have been shared thousands of times...which seem like no-brainers for support...but that have the most hurtful and insensitive comments from all the stupid people who just don't care.  I couldn't handle that, so I kept her close to me and hidden for a long time...except for my message board.  I finally realized that the community I turned to in my darkest hours was that of women who understood, who'd been there, who I'll never meet.

  

Day 15: The Wave of Light

I wondered for a while which candle to use for this purpose.  It seemed like a candle lit for remembrance on my daughter couldn't just be a half-burned out Yankee candle I pulled off a shelf.  Then I remembered my wedding.  At our wedding, we lit a candle as part of our ceremony, trying to symbolize the presence of those who couldn't be with us...namely all of our grandparents.  I realized that this candle might just be special enough for my baby Charlotte.  It hadn't been lit since our wedding in 2007.  On taking the picture, I got a really strange glare off of the box which holds Charlotte's remains.  It's strange, because I had turned off all of the lights except for this candle, and the light from the candle couldn't possibly reflect off of the side of the box in that way.  I wonder now if it's a little sign that Charlotte knows I'm thinking about her today.  It's a purple light...I always think of Charlotte when I see purple.

My photo journey CONCLUDES HERE