Tag Archives: pregnancy

Greetings from the South

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It’s amazing to me how each minute without Everlee has continued to drag on and feel like an eternity, but the days and months have flown by. Today, she would have been two months old. Instead of snuggling her late at night, I’m sitting on a sunny balcony in Florida relaxing after a morning of shopping (postpartum shopping is depressing). I’ve had a great week. Not happy, but peaceful. Rejuvenating. I’ve been able to relax and not worry about judging eyes, but there is never a second she’s not on my mind. We went to the Kennedy Space Centre yesterday and I just wish Darcy was able to share his excitement for the place with her. Everything I see and do I just wish more and more that she was here with me so that I could show her the world and experience things through her eyes.

I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to see families with their little girls here. But I wasn’t thinking about that when we booked this trip. It’s bearable, but it’s just one more reminder.

We went down to the hot tub last night and met a number of different people and I was asked for the first time if we had kids. I was instantly sick to my stomach. I knew I’d get the question eventually. I was preparing myself for it. But the instant knot in my stomach. I don’t think I could ever describe it. I simply answered (choked) that we had one daughter, but she passed away. The woman said she was sorry for our loss and that was that. But it hung in the air over my head for a long time afterwards. This will be my answer to that question for a long time to come. I wonder if it will ever get any easier?

We leave on our cruise tomorrow morning, so I will be in radio silence for the next week. I’m hoping that the new experience will bring some happiness and some genuine smiles, big at the very least I hope I will continue to relax and maybe get a little more sleep if I’m lucky.

In the meantime, happy two month birthday to my beautiful baby girl. I live very moment for you now. Mommy loves you, Everlee.

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The Loss of Potential

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I so desperately want to write something tonight. I’ve been sitting here looking at a blank screen for what seems like hours listening to the wind howling outside and I can hear the faint sounds of the TV from the basement where Darcy is. But the screen has remained empty for the majority of that time. Much like me. Another stage of mourning I suppose, but I feel just so used up. So empty and worthless. Not in a pity-party kind of way, but in a deeply tired in my soul way. Like a used tin can; contents emptied, can tossed aside. Of no use anymore.

These past few days have been particularly hard for no real evident reason, aside from the obvious. I’ve found myself wanting more and more to crawl into bed and cry for hours on end. My nights are still plagued with sleeplessness. I haven’t gotten more than two hours sleep in a row since Everlee died. I rarely sleep more than 3 hours a night. It’s really doing a number on my body, and it gives my mind no time to relax. It’s hard, on top of everything else that is already so incredibly hard. 

Today we started looking at headstones. I kept a brave face (I’m getting much better at swallowing my tears) but it was honestly one of the hardest things I’ve done in this whole process that has become my life. This will most likely be the last thing I ever buy for Everlee. The last thing I can really do for her. It will be her marker in the world. It’s how people will know she was here and that she was loved. How do I pick something like that? How do I commemorate the death of the dreams – first steps, words, days of school, riding a bike, learning how to swim and fish? How do I not only adequately mark the loss of our daughter, but a grandchild, a niece (by blood and love), a childhood friend for my friend’s children? How do I mark the loss of all of her potential and not just 34 weeks?

I thought Darcy and I would pick out a headstone today, I really wanted to get it done before we escaped for awhile,  but when we got there I was just flooded with all of that reality. This isn’t unfinished business to be dealt with. It’s a memorial to everything she was and could have been. I can’t rush that.  Her headstone will be simple, but I want it to be perfect, just like her. It’s worth that time. 

And for the first time I feel angry and jealous. I should be picking out dresses and hair bows. Instead I’m picking out headstones. 

Lost

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”

I’m not lost, for I know where I am. But however, where I am may be lost.

―  Winnie the Pooh 

The one thing that they never tell you that happens in all of those “What to expect” books, the blogs I read, the magazines I browsed has happened to me, as it happens to an incomprehensible number of families every year. My baby died before she was even born.  Everything I dreamed, everything I had hoped for shattered like a pane of glass in hurricane winds. There are no instructions to be found to guide me and my family through this unrelenting grief. There are no contour maps anywhere to be found to tell me the heights of the mountains I have yet to climb, or how low the valleys are that I will have to traverse. There is no timeline to let me know if in six months, eight months, two years… can I expect the pain to have diminished? Even a little?

Despite what anyone says about the stages of grief, sorrow is not linear; it ebbs and flows each day, sometimes each hour, for as long as it needs. There are no road signs, no maps to warn me of slippery slopes, or dangerous curves. I have no idea how many miles I’ll have to travel before I reach my destination: the day when I can smile or laugh again. When the pain no longer cripples me in all of my waking moments.

It’s a sad and secretive club I’ve joined. It’s vastly different from the one I envisioned months ago when that little digital screen popped up with it’s positive symbol and three joyous letters, y-e-s. I was unaware of the sorrow and the grief that lay ahead of me. In that happy, easy time in my life that I now refer to as Before, I never imagined how deeply anguish could penetrate my life.

People surreptitiously glance my way from time to time. They try to gauge how I’m managing in life After and judging my pain by appearance alone. Never daring to ask. Some of them choose to tell me ridiculous things like they lost their pet a few months ago and know exactly how I feel. Or commenting on how I look since I lost “all of that weight”… that weight was my daughter. Others whisper behind my back and hope I won’t notice. I long for them to speak to me and ask me how I am, and say Everlee’s name – she had a name, and a face and she was beautiful and so amazingly perfect. And she was so close to coming home. She isn’t just a faint memory. She is a person.

Even worse, the well meaning people, woefully misinformed people.  They tell me it’s for the best, that I have an angel now, that this was Gods plan and comfort me by telling me that I can always have another. Another child will never replace the one I lost. Everlee is my first born.  Sometimes I wonder how people can be so stupid. And I’m quickly reminded that they aren’t being malicious, they’re just not a member of this horrible nightmarish club. I realize how little I knew Before. No book, no article, no well-intentioned word of warning told me that my baby could die days before her due date, after the crib was assembled and the hospital bags were packed. Nothing could have prepared me for this – so why do I expect anyone else to be any different?

The sound of silence.

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Tonight was hard.  I’m more-than-ever acutely aware of how difficult I am to be around. And it hurts. Before Rhonda was always the centre of attention. After Rhonda stands on the periphery of a room and doesn’t get invited into the mix, let alone to the centre. 

I wish there was a guidebook for friends and family for how to deal with someone in  grief over the loss of a child. I make almost everyone uncomfortable, and awkward. More often than not, I evoke a deer-in-headlights reaction from people.  There are so few people I feel comfortable with anymore, and I know there are even fewer people comfortable around me. No one knows what to say, or do. They’re so afraid of hurting me they say nothing, unaware that it hurts me even worse than anything they can possibly say wrong. I’ve already lost my baby, anything you say won’t hurt worse than that. I just wish that there was a prescient for this – for all of our sakes. 

Afterthought: (Incidentally, I have discovered that someone HAS thought of this – this website has some suggestions.. http://www.glowinthewoods.com/how-to-help-a-friend/)

There’s an elephant in the room. But I’ve come to realize that the elephant is me. 

Everyone has gone back to their lives. I’m still here, frozen in time. It amazes me how I have not only become a stranger to myself, but to others too. Family and friends that I always considered so close to me have become strangers, they avoid me at all costs, physically and emotionally. Even when I’m in the same room. I’m not sure if they just don’t have the ability to interact with me without the fear of hurting me, or if  they fear I’m contagious – not unlike a leper. Whatever their reason I tend to feel more like the leper. I know their intentions aren’t malicious, but not having them here to support me hurts more than anything they could possibly say. Sometimes all I want is for someone to look me in the eye and ask me, genuinely, how I’m feeling (and not believe me when I answer with my usual, mournful “okay”). 

Then there’s those that I would never expect to even speak to me, or be understanding at all – relative strangers to the Before Rhonda –  that have come out of the woodwork to be some of my greatest supporters.

I guess watching people in grief does odd things to people. 

Darcy and I leave for a vacation in a little over a week. Miranda (my psychologist) says I grimace when I say the word “vacation”. She’s not wrong. I hate thinking of a vacation. I feel horribly guilty with the imagery of vacationing. This isn’t a vacation to me. I hate the thought of anyone, including myself, thinking of me care free on a beach sipping pina-colodas. This isn’t about sunning myself and getting my picture taken with Mickey Mouse. This is about anonymity, not having to constantly struggle to keep up with the social graces of being “that girl who lost her baby”. This is about taking some time to learn who I am now, away from the pressures of what “normal” has become, where I don’t have to look at that closed bedroom door all of the time. This isn’t about forgetting, because I’m not going to forget. I don’t WANT to forget. It’s about making happier memories and teaching myself that smiling isn’t a betrayal to Everlee’s memory, but it’s honouring her with my own living. It’s about learning how to smile again without having to concentrate on the mechanics of making it happen. 

It’s easy for me to type that. I just need to learn to live it now. This isn’t a vacation. It’s the beginning of a prescription for healing. I hope. 

And I hope being away from people I know will teach me how to be around them again, and maybe help me become easier to be around. And maybe I’ll get invited back into the mix, or maybe I’ll just find a new centre. 

 

Due date

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It just clicked over to midnight. Since July 15th I have been anticipating this day. 

For 8 months it was with joy and love and hope and a happiness I had never experienced before in my life.

For the five and a half weeks it has been with dread and bitterness and a hatred I never thought I was even capable of experiencing. 

March 24th is/was my due date. Now, it’s just another sour reminder that she isn’t here. She won’t be coming home. It’s another day that I’ll know there’s an empty crib behind that closed door in our house and that there’s a room full of things bought for, and given to her with love, things that she’ll never see or use. Outfits that I excitedly bought in Niagara Falls in October. A stroller that I have pushed miles around the basement and practiced opening and closing when no one was looking. Boxes of diapers I bought on sale so I wouldn’t have to worry about running to the store in those hectic first few months. And empty picture frames for those milestones she’ll never conquer. Constant reminders of my sweet Everlee and the future she’ll never have. I feel my entire being brimming with adoration and longing and wonder. Then my whole body aches by my broken heart. But I miss you, Everlee, with every breath I take.

Darcy and I decided we’d try to celebrate this day. Odd? Perhaps. We just both had been looking forward to it for a lifetime – her lifetime. We didn’t want to let it pass. Not without some recognition. Everlee deserves that. We deserve that. We’re going to go out to dinner. We’re going to talk about her. We’re going to remember her and celebrate all of that joy she brought to us for as long as we had her, and we’re going to be thankful for everything she gave us in her much much much too short life. 

And I’ll grieve. Like I have every day since she left us. And I’ll cry. Like I have every day since she left us. And my heart will ache for my lost baby. That painful sour lump in my throat will get bigger.  And I’ll survive the day. 

I’ve felt like the loneliest most broken woman on earth. Life is in a holding pattern. I try to remind myself of all the things I have to be thankful for. My husband, my best friend. My family. My friends. My good health.  The generosity of those who have donated to Ronald McDonald House in her name. My writing.  And yet, even among these many things that I list, there is a huge, empty, void. She is gone. She is still gone. This void is here in me. Every moment. Every day. I miss her. I miss my baby girl. 

In my dreams

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“I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Losing a child puts you in a place where the irrational can be completely and plausibly rational. It puts you in a place where you’re surrounded by all these crazy thoughts, and you know they’re crazy, but you can’t help listening to them and wondering if maybe they have a point, if maybe they are right after all. It puts you in a place where confusion is a normal, day-to-day thing. And then sometimes you come out of this crazy place and think, what just happened to me? Did I really think those things, feel those things? Was that me? How could I even think that?

And then you bury those thoughts and try to ignore them and go about your business, but they keep coming back to you at odd hours, and they hound you until you feel you really might be going crazy. And you’re not sure who you can talk to about it because what will they think? And then you just sit down one day and write about it and stop caring what people think, because it’s part of you and part of this life – this new normal you have to come to accept.

And it makes you feel so alone. Surrounded by people buy so horribly, awfully, utterly alone. My personality has always been to help other people and I feel like I’ve been spending so much time navigating other people through how to talk to me, and trying to make them feel comfortable around me that I so seldom spend time trying to navigate this dark and lonely place for myself. Perhaps that’s why I’m awake at night, because its really this only time I have to myself.

Or maybe it’s the dreams. I only have one. Reliving that night. The worst night in my life. And if my body knows when it sleeps that’s where it’s going, then why on earth would it ever let me sleep again? And worst of all, I usually wake up thinking I’m hearing her crying for me. As if she was here. But she never is. And I never get to hold her again in my dreams. Her cries always wake me up. If only I could sleep long enough that I’d get to hold her again.

Once you cross that threshold of grief, it changes you forever. You can’t have any of it back. You can’t unlearn the harsh lessons of grief. You struggle to find a “bright side.” It’s not like losing your first love or not getting that job you always dreamed of. You can’t just tell yourself, “If I try hard enough, I can do it. I can get what I want. I can succeed.” That doesn’t work after losing a baby. Because it wasn’t a matter of trying hard enough or believing in yourself. It was never in your power. You can’t control life and death. You can’t even try. She’s never ever ever ever ever coming home.

It’s still so incredibly hard for me to believe that she’s gone, but everyday I have the physical reminders on my own body that she was here. And no matter how brief and limited her life was, what’s unmistakable is the profound effect she has had on me. Everlee has changed everything I ever was and everything I will be. Now I just need to get to know myself and who I’m going to be all over again. Without Everlee.

When you lose a baby, you lose everything. You lose all the hopes and dreams you held over those ten months, you lose confidence, hope, courage, strength. Your sense of control. It’s all gone. All you have left to you is grief. It’s the only thing that’s real; everything else is just an illusion.

I Had a Baby.

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One day at a time. one foot in front of the other. I wake up every morning and go through the motions of life while everything stands still. Every morning I gaze in the bathroom mirror and try to remember what I looked like pregnant. I hated how my body looked pregnant at the time, and now I’m so acutely aware of how beautiful it was and how beautiful I was when she was with me. I was huge, but I had a happiness and a smile that transcended my circumference. Now I stand and see a saggy tummy, full of bright purple stretch marks that only serve as a painful reminder of what I had and lost, in so many ways.

It’s very easy for the world to forget that I’ve had a baby when I don’t have a baby. It’s easy for others not to acknowledge what my body has been through. I’ve been focusing a lot of the emotional side of this struggle, which is undoubtedly the part of this that consumes me the most. But there is a part of this that a lot of people forget about, that’s easy to forget about when you don’t have a baby in your arms. The physical side; the pain, the recovery, the engorgement.

These are things I might feel differently about if my arms weren’t empty. I’d like to imagine that when you do come home with a baby you’re so consumed with this new precious little life that taking care of your own physical needs becomes secondary and not nearly as consuming as it has been for me. Unfortunately, I can’t speak from experience, I can only speculate. I didn’t bring a baby home. People are afraid to ask, but for those who were curious, I didn’t have a c-section. I’m undergoing the same recovery process that any mother who delivered a baby goes through. And I’m not spared from the postpartum hormones either, I’m a tangled mess of hormones and grief. My body and my mind conspire against me.

Grief is such an odd “thing”. If am not sure if it’s an emotion or feeling or state of mind or stage or what so I am just gonna call it a thing. Its a thing that has consumed my mind and my body. I don’t know when or if I’ll get either, or both, back. It makes you sad and keeps you sad. It can take away the ability to see the happy in situations. It can smother you like a blanket and take your breath away. It makes you a stranger to yourself. It will allow you to go through the motions of life, but in a way, stop you from actually living.

Broken

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I am so incredibly thankful for amazing friends. Friends that care enough about me to force me out of the house when all I want to do for the rest of my life is to curl into a ball in bed and cry. Twice yesterday I had extraordinary friends force me out of the house and push me out of my comfort zone to try and got me to be social. I know I need that, but I think sometimes I’m expecting too much of myself too soon. 

I’m hesitant to say that I had a good time last night. I did. But at the same time it was mentally exhausting. I felt like the majority of the time I was there I was hiding behind a mask. Acting every part to try and make myself seem normal, seem like I’m not completely broken. I tried to smile, and laugh and joke (and I did) but on the inside I was screaming at myself. 

It’s too soon to be out.

It’s too soon to act like everything is ok.

They know you’re acting, Rhonda.

Don’t you dare cry. 

How can you genuinely laugh like that when your baby is dead?

I stayed for a little over an hour and the guilt got to be too much. I came home. And I sat awake in bed until 6am. Agonizing over every minute, every smile, every laugh. How could I do that to her?

And it’s crazy, because I know most of the time I’m being irrational. I’m in a constant fight in my own head. But it always wins over, and I feel like I’m betraying my little girl. If she was alive right now I wouldn’t have been out last night. I would have been at home, snuggling her and thinking I was the luckiest person on earth. Instead I was standing in the middle of a kitchen surrounded by the people I love most thinking what a horrible person I was for being there. I should have been at home mourning her. The way I wanted to be, curled into a ball in my bed crying. 

I wouldn’t trade my friends for anything in the world, I love and adore them and everyday I am thankful that they care about me so much.I’m so happy that friends I haven’t been with in 3 years have come together to support me. I’m so happy we stood together and took a picture for the first time in 3 years last night.  

I think this time I just pushed myself too far too soon. If this is what being strong is, I don’t like it. It’s hard. So very utterly hard. I’m tired and I want a break. I’m afraid that soon the mask will crack and everyone will see how broken I really am. 

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(April, Amanda, Me and Dwan.) 

Where is God?

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I’ve had this entry written for a few days. I haven’t done that with any other blog. Usually I post them immediately because I want them to be the raw and emotional account of this period in my life that they have been thus far. This is different. I considered not posting this, because I know it will upset some people. But this blog is about honesty emotion and hurt. This is how I am feeling at this juncture in my life. Many people have praised me for writing this blog, citing that it may help those who have gone through this who can’t find their voice. If that’s true, then I can only deduce that others have these same questioning, angry feelings about God that I do right now. So I’m posting this. If you want to debate the existence or love of God I ask that you first search deep inside yourself and ask if you were in my shoes would you really react any differently? 

This entry may upset some people. I’m prepared to deal with that. I am not, however, prepared to debate it.

I feel like I have been standing on the precipice of writing this entry for awhile now. Maybe it’s all of the fanfare surrounding the appointing of a new pope, or maybe it’s just my complete exasperation with people continually telling me that this hell I’ve been subjected to is part of Gods plan, but I really feel like it’s time I got this out.

I have always had a relationship with God. I was born and raised a catholic and the church has played various roles – sometime a supporting role, and sometimes a starring one – in my life. In my teen years, my search for God led me to many wonderful people who have helped shape who I have become. My faith has always played a part in who I am and has guided me in making many of life’s major decisions. I have never been showy about my spirituality, so this may come as a surprise to some. And although I have not been an active member of a church for many years, I have lived by the mantra that hands that  help are better than hands that pray. Not that I stopped praying, I just decided to devote myself to God in service in a more literal sense through volunteerism, than the figurative sense being spent in church for an hour each week.

But through all of this, I can’t help but wonder, when people tell me this was all a part of God’s plan,  what kind of monstrous, spiteful, vengeful God could ever rob my baby of a life she deserved? She will never wake me up to be fed at 3am. She will never squish buttercream icing between her chubby fingers on her first birthday. Her eyes will never light up at the sight of presents under the tree on christmas morning. She’ll never walk into a school for her first day of kindergarten. She will never have her nightmares kissed away by her mommy who loves her more than anything or anyone. If that was God’s plan – if he PLANNED this – I want no part in him. I want no part in a God conspired to take my baby away from me; a baby that I prayed and hoped and wished for every moment of my adult life. My Everlee.

There are a lot of things that are really hard for me to swallow when people say them, one is when people suggest “You could always adopt”. I think adoption is a wonderful, beautiful thing. But at this moment, it’s not a consideration for us. That is a last effort for us. And to me (again, what people say and what I hear are two very different things right now) I hear them telling me to give up and that I have no hope of ever having a biological child. The second  is that “God has a reason for this” or this is “Part of God’s plan”. I don’t often side with my husband when it comes to matters of the church, but in this case I agree with him – either I need another God, or God needs another plan.

I don’t foresee that I will search for God, or for a divine answer in all of this. As with all of my questions in this utter tragedy,  I don’t think that there are any answers. If there is a God out there, something I am doubting for the first time in my life, he’s going to have to prove himself to me.

What I do believe in, what I have more faith in now than ever before is the goodness of people. People have reached out from everywhere to support us. There have been people who have been there my entire life who have gotten closer, people who had left my life who have come back and shown me that love is never lost, and people who were always on the periphery in my life, who have stepped up when I have needed support the most. My faith is now, at least for the time being, in love, and in humanity.

Still Born

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I hate when people call me brave. That’s probably a silly thing to say. I don’t take offense to it, I just don’t get it. Being brave would seem like a choice to me. I didn’t choose this path, so I didn’t choose to be brave. It’s funny how things sound coming out of others mouths and how they bounce around in your head to become something completely different. My ears hear “You’re so brave”. My mind hears “Congratulations on making it another day without throwing yourself off of a cliff”, as if I had some other viable alternative through surviving another day without her. I wake up and breathe in and out and move forward without her because I -have- to, not because it’s a brave choice I’ve made. 

I’ve come to the realization in the last few days that I am now part of a scary statistic. From what I have read, still birth affects 1 in every 200 pregnancies in North America (incidences are higher in third world countries). That’s a lot. More than I ever thought. I remember being warned about miscarriage early on, that losing the baby was a possibility before that seemingly magic twelve week mark but after that it never seemed to enter into the realm of possibility.  As the pregnancy progressed there were conversations about preeclampsia, downs syndrome, common birth defects… why did nobody ever warn me of the risks of still birth?  Nobody ever talks about the sad side of pregnancy. I remember saying a thousand times to people when they asked if we knew if we were having a boy or a girl: “I don’t care, as long as he or she is healthy”. Why did it never occur to me to say “I don’t care, as long as he or she is alive”? 

Before (capital B), I dreamed that each month I would take a picture of my baby with this stuffed Winnie the Pooh that Mom and Dad (Nanny and Poppy) had bought for their first grandchild when they went away on vacation last October. The one that I clutched to my chest at her funeral. It’s just big enough that if I propped my precious baby up along side of it every month and posted the pictures to facebook everyone would be able to see just how much our little baby had grown. This is one of the many “never” thoughts I have in the run of each and every single day. This will never be her one month birthday. Not to anyone but me,  at least. 

I haven’t exactly decided if it was morbid, though it very well may be, that when the clock struck midnight last night I silently muttered to myself “Happy one month birthday, Everlee”, The same way I used to talk to her when she was still alive, still in my stomach. I decided to post it to facebook anyway. To me, even though she was stillborn, Everlee was still born. February 13th will always be her BIRTHday to me, it will never symbolize the day she died, even if we had to say goodbye before we ever really got to say hello.

She would have been a month old today, I should be propping her up against that soft and squishy Winnie the Pooh for her pictures. 

It’s hard to believe, after all that has happened, that I was so scared of the labour process throughout my entire pregnancy. I was petrified of the pain and what it would do to my body. I was scared my body would never be the same. Who knew that it would be the easiest and least painful thing I would go through that day? Who could have realized it wasn’t labour that would change me forever? Certainly not me. Certainly not the people who loved Everlee the most. My baby was born healthy and beautiful, like I had always hoped. My baby just wasn’t born alive. There’s no bravery in that.