37 weeks in, 37 weeks out

Happiness writes white, so they say, and these have been mostly happy times, but of course there is no uncomplicated happiness anymore.

Now Stellan has been on the outside for as long as he was on the inside and I am confident in caring for him and I love him more than I thought possible. He brings me so much joy in his laughter and playfulness, his sweetness and calm nature. The more I get to know him now the more I wonder at what Saersha would have been like. On the outside I knew her only when she was unconscious but somehow I felt like I got a sense of her strength and tenacity. She was tough to come back after 20 mins of resuscitation and she held on for hours more than I thought she would after we took her off of life support. It may be a projection but I think that is a reflection on her character. Of course I will never know and that hurts every day. As I watch Stellan grow and get to know him more Saersha is always like a shadow behind as I imagine her version of these traits and milestones.

Some days still are a struggle to keep going, to engage with the world and get out of the house. Some times my heart is just not in it, but I keep trying for Stellan's sake. If he were not here I don't think I could be either. Those 37 weeks of carrying him while still so fresh in grief was some of the toughest work I have done but I could not be more glad to have done it. 

Eraser

Do you ever feel like people around you are intentionally trying to negate your baby? Maybe they are failing to mention them in a list of your children or acting in other ways to pretend that your baby never existed intentionally, perhaps to try and force you to get over it?
The month after Saersha died a family member set about unraveling the hats she had knitted for her, directly in front of me. It was so painful and especially considering this person's personality and profession I think that she was trying to erase Saersha.

What is a mother?

As Bereaved Mother's Day passed last weekend and Mother's Day itself approaches this week I have been thinking about how I feel about the title of Mother for myself.

Was I a mother last year? Is this my first year of mothering or my second?

Most of the discourse I have read on this has been mothers asserting that they want to be thought of as such even if they have no living children. I totally respect and support this for them but last year when my close friends or other loss mamas assured me I was still a mother it didn't feel right. It was actually jarring and upsetting for me. Maybe because it painfully reminded me of my losses at a time where I felt very vulnerable. I felt like I wasn't a mother if I had no one to nurture; I wasn't doing the job as I understood it to be defined. It's like calling a widow a wife, an incomplete description. I had that empty arms ache and I wanted motherhood to be something that felt better than excruciating grief. I felt like there needed to be another category that is not lesser or excluded but specific to someone whose only child died before they got a chance to live.

Now I am definitely a mother by any definition but I still feel like I am something else too. I don't know what that is but now I can say that being the mother of a dead baby is a lot harder than being the mother of a live one. Saersha doesn't need me like Stellan does but I hope that I can honour her in my life some how.

Missing

I am missing you Saersha and I wish you were here. You would be 18 months old today.
I still wince when I see girly things, the knife twisting.
I wish I could see you again, or even feel like it is possible. I wish I could know you.
Your brother is not you and you can't be replaced.

Not enough

Sometimes it seems like my grief is not enough to some, my sadness not sufficiently passionate, my pain not shared and so they may forget that it is there or think I am unfeeling. 

I am not outwardly raging at the injustice, I am not weeping. I don't want people to see my hurt.

Almost a year and a half after her death my feelings for Saersha are a vulnerability that I try to protect from the world.

I steel myself, I talk about her but I don't let them see. It's only a few instances where I was held and cried and those were with my very closest people at the beginning.

In part this is because time as passed and I have healed a bit. Stellan has helped me a great deal. The thing is, though this is one of the most painful experiences of my life, this is not the first time I have gone through extreme trauma. My life was defined by it from 2 months old; I was neglected and abused. From that I have managed to become a functioning adult because I learned to draw from my inner strength rather than support from others, in fact I have always had to protect myself from others rather than trust that they could help me.

That said, I am tough but I'm not a rock.

At the same time now that Stellan is here, I want to connect with other moms and make little friends for him. Just as in pregnancy I am faced with the dilemma about what to share and when and how I will feel about what I say or don't say.

Also people have asked me about the early days with Stellan. Was I a crying mess? Was I overwhelmed? Did I think I couldn't handle it? Definitely there were moments of intensity and frustration and still are. There are also moments of guilt over my love for him. But compared to everything else, this is a dream. (Thankfully I have so far managed to avoid PPD and Stellan is pretty chill. I've been lucky in these things at least!)

That seems to offend sometimes too, people are looking for someone to relate to and even if I don't tell them about how/why I am so different, they are discomfited by my less stressed responses.

I guess all of these things come to a common point: don't judge me, and I will try to take my own advice.

Dreams

I know there is some part of my brain that doesn't understand that Saersha is dead. My waking mind is fully and logically aware of the facts but some part of my primitive dream mind seems ignorant (willfully in denial?).
When she first died I dreamed of her all the time. Dreams of nursing her back to fully developed life after she had shrunk back down to an embryo. Dreams of her being with us and healthy.
Since Stellan was born I have been dreaming of two live babies, not one. Twins who were not born together. In my dreams they are the same age. Once when my husband brought Stellan in to nurse in the middle of the night and still half in a dream I asked him repeatedly "where's the other baby?". I was thinking she must need to be fed also.
Lately my dreams are more of searching for her. Those awful dreams where you are searching though rooms and tunnels and hallways and never finding what you seek. Where is the other baby?

8 Weeks

I started typing this one handed and I am thankful that my other arm is occupied with holding my beloved boy. 8 weeks have gone by very quickly and I sometimes catch myself thinking of him as a fragile newborn even though he is now 8 weeks old and a solid 14+ lbs! He is a very sweet soul although he has been fussier than usual over the last few days. I think he is having a growth spurt now. I feel beyond fortunate and grateful that he is here. Sometimes I can't believe that after over 3 years of trying and miscarriage and losing Saersha, we get to keep this one!

When he was first born Stellan didn't look much like Saersha at all, but as we counted down the difference in gestation between them he filled out and the resemblance was there. In that time from 37-41 weeks I most acutely felt the experiences we had missed with Saersha. All through our initial bonding time when he would look at me or even move I would feel his aliveness and in the wonder of that miss Saersha more. Now he has grown past her and she will always be his baby big sister. I still wonder what she would have been like at this age. Would she have smiled earlier? Would she have nursed as well?

Christmas was pretty challenging this year, but of course much easier than the horror of last year. We were very busy visiting people so they could meet the baby and I don't feel like I took enough time to find a place for Saersha in our plans, minimal though they were. My mother in law really wanted to be with us for Stellan's first Christmas so they came over for the day, but it felt really forced. Like we are supposed to try and have this particular kind of happy Christmas when really no one was into it. The positive outcome from that though is that it's clear we won't be doing that again!

During these Christmas rounds I was talking with another mom about how I sometimes panic and check to make sure he is breathing when he's sleeping. She told me that she did this too and that's it's very common, somewhat downplaying it. I wanted to tell her that this is different. It's not the same as other parents. I know what it feels like to hold my dead child, to feel them not breathing. To me it is a very real and vivid experience, not an abstract fear. I wonder how hard it will be to try and relate to other parents when I can't help but see my parenting through the lens of grief.

I've been thinking about how I want to use this blog and I don't necessarily want to use it to record how things go with Stellan, but to reflect on the grieving process and the challenges of raising one baby while you are really missing another. I'm not sure how much I'll post but it is good to have a space for that.

November 14

I almost couldn't walk in the door of the hospital. I was overcome with anxiety and fear and grief. I was not prepared, could not be prepared for this. Face red with tears we sat at the admissions desk and filled out benign paperwork and answered  simple questions but I could barely think. I just kept running through various scenarios. Would the baby be born alive, would he cry, would he need to go to the NICU, would I actually get to hold him? Was it too early to take him out at 37W5D?

We had a very friendly nurse in the pre-op area and things got underway with talk of anesthetic options, the IV, my OB arriving, being introduced to all of the nurses and Drs... everyone aware of what had happened to us last year and insisting that this would be ok but I couldn't believe them. Even with the very apparent differences between an emergency and a scheduled c-section, I felt like I was in the same place at the same time of year to have the same thing happen. My poor husband had to sit on the same little couch outside of the OR in the same silly yellow scrubs waiting to be able to come in, those same moments when Saersha's heart stopped.

In such an intense situation as this I go inside myself, clench deeply to feel something solid in all of this that is beyond my control. My OB tried for some chit chat with me and one of the anesthesiologists and she held my hand while we waited for the spinal to kick in. Finally my husband was allowed to come in and then my OB told me when the surgery was already underway. Things happened fast and she told me she saw a head with brown hair, then moments later this tiny animal sound emerged and I cried. It was so beautiful to hear him. I almost couldn't believe it could have turned out like this. He was examined and had all 10 apgars and my husband held him and brought him to sit by me as they stitched me back together.

We went to the recovery room and the nurses helped me latch the baby on and he nursed for a long time. It was all that I could have hoped for.

We decided to name him Stellan, which is a Swedish name and means calm. I hoped that he would bring some calm to our lives which have been so dark and tumultuous over the last 3 years of loss and heartbreak. 

I thought the having Stellan might be healing and in some sense it has been. We finally have the life that we have been hoping for over so many years. That feeling of being locked out of something that comes so naturally to so many other people has lessened. I have moments where I am totally overcome with love for this little creature.

None of this makes the loss of Saersha any easier though. There is still a hole in my heart that is exactly her shape. Now my heart has grown with my love for Stellan, but the hole is still there. We have even more of a sense of what we missed with Saersha and I so wish that both of our children could be here with us now.

He's here!

I don't have it in me to make a proper post but for those few of you reading this: he's here,  he's healthy, he's as sweet as can be! He was 7lbs 9 oz and hearing his cry at birth was the most amazing thing! I am so overjoyed I can barely handle it. Thankfully he didn't need any interventions or NICU time and now we're home and getting settled in together. 
Thank you all for thinking of us.

Random thoughts on getting through a subsequent pregnancy

With 6 days left in this pregnancy, and inspired by the blogs that I read of fellow baby loss mamas, I have been thinking about some of the ways I have gotten through this pregnancy so far. When I say "gotten through" of course that doesn't mean that it has been easy. I have been at a high anxiety level pretty much the whole time, but these are some things or thoughts that have helped.

1. First of course is this baby himself and all the love and joy that I have in him. This can be a double edged sword as the more you love the more you fear that it will be taken away, but in the first trimester I did a lot of visualizations about sending love and positive energy to this baby and telling him how I would nurture and accept him if he would only just make it out alive! I will admit that this took more the form of pleading rather than anything more confident or hopeful. This was my mantra: Be My Baby 
In the second trimester I was able to hear his heart beat with my doppler and later in the pregnancy the baby has given me his own assurances with his thankfully regular movement and healthy development.

2. Denial. This may seem to contradict what I just wrote, but there were times when I just needed to forget about this pregnancy.

3. Going back to work. I was really nervous about this but I am very fortunate to work in a very supportive office and while I mostly just dove back in I knew I could take some time when I needed it. There were some days that it was tough to be there and there were some insensitive people and experiences I could have lived without but I think if I hadn't gone back I would have gotten lost in my anxiety and grief.

4. Projects. I am really terrible at it because I have zero attention to detail but I took up sewing. I had been given a sewing machine about 15 years ago and I never really learned how to use it. Before going back to work I took a beginning sewing class through the school board and I learned how to make a basic pair of pants, so then I made 3 over the course of the pregnancy. It was good to have something else to focus on in the evenings that had nothing to do with loss or with pregnancy or work. 

5. Reading. This too can be helpful in many ways but can also bring up more worries as the more you know, the more you know about what can go wrong. My top books on loss have been:Finding Hope When A Child Dies  An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination  When a Baby Dies
But maybe even more of a lifesaver has been losing myself in silly fiction. I usually would save myself for more literary options but over this pregnancy I read a fair amount of fun crap. I easily read twice as many novels as I normally would over this time period.

6. Realizing that I can go forward without real hope. Most of my strategies have not centred on hope but on determination and survival. I am not sure how to make the distinction between hope (believing that events will turn out for the best) and what I feel (being willing to give it a shot because there is no other option) but I feel there is one. I did not get pregnant because I thought it would work out, I did it because there was no other way I continue to live after Saersha died. I now feel like it's ok to doubt that it will work out and not feel confident and hopeful as long as you can still find ways to get through.


So, those are my thoughts on this for now. I think this is something I will keep chewing on and maybe I will need to come up with even more strategies to get through the next 6 days.