by Band Back Together | Sep 15, 2010 | Depression, Loneliness, Major Depressive Disorder |
I really don’t know where to begin, so I’ll start with a question.
When does it stop being a funk and become depression?
This year has been a doozy. My personal maelstrom hasn’t been nearly as bad as so many of you here, but it’s rocked my little world to the core. Up until recently my view on life has been pretty optimistic, but I can feel bitterness and cynicism in everything I say and do now. My job has put me through the ringer, but I don’t see any other options at the moment. I’ve been losing the struggle to be positive when it comes to body image. I feel like shit. I’ve had no energy or motivation. I’ve had no desire to be social and whereas I’ve always been fairly outgoing, I find a new and disturbing anxiety at the thought of approaching anyone new. And, to top it all off, the loss of my grandfather last month knocked whatever little wind I had left in my sails fluttering to the depths of the cold, dark sea.
I keep telling myself that I can’t be depressed. That I’m just being a baby. I’m too strong and too independent for that. That things will get better on their own… Yet, here I sit, the beginnings of tears burning the backs of my eyes and that now familiar lump rising in my throat. I don’t think it’s going to go away. I’m terrified it won’t. I feel helpless and powerless and I haven’t the slightest idea where to start, what to do.
I’m lost.
by Band Back Together | Sep 15, 2010 | Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Livng Through A Miscarriage, Loss, Miscarriage |
This post is not intended to knock people who have said some of these comments. I myself have mistakenly said these to someone before I had gone through a miscarriage. I have been told each of these statements at some point during my losses and although it can be difficult to know what the right thing to say is and most people genuinely mean well, here is why I find these statements so hurtful:
You can always have another! -or- You can always try again.
Although it is true that many couples struggle with infertility, the end goal of getting pregnant is not the positive pregnancy test but the baby. Merely being able to get pregnant is not a comfort for most women who experience a miscarriage.
Many women can go on to try again after a miscarriage, and indeed many find comfort in that idea after time. However, for someone grieving a loss, one baby does not replace another. Each loss needs to be dealt with individually and the woman needs to think about trying again on her own time when she is ready.
Be grateful for the children you have!
Even if a woman has living children, they do not replace the baby she lost. Grieving does not mean you are ungrateful!
I know what you are going through.
If you have not lost a baby, please do not say this to a mother grieving a miscarriage. Just as with anything else in life, unless you’ve experienced it yourself, you simply do not know how it feels. However, if you have had a miscarriage, it can be reassuring to a woman grieving a miscarriage to hear your story.
It was not a real baby – it was just a fetus.
This comment is hurtful on so many levels! It was a baby to the mom – you feel the connection and the physical effects and your body changing from VERY early on.
At least you didn’t know your baby!
All women know their babies growing inside of them. You mean before it was a real baby and I got attached? Nope, this does not make any difference. It still hurts like mad. Some of us love our babies from the minute we found out we were pregnant.
There must have been something wrong. -or- It’s probably for the best.
Never speculate that a miscarriage was for the best. Miscarriages happen for many reasons, and you do not know what may or may not have caused this particular loss. The best for whom? Me? The now-dead baby? You? The greater good of the nation? This does not make the person feel better.
It won’t happen again
Everyone hopes that everything will be fine in the next pregnancy, but sometimes it isn’t. Women who have recurrent miscarriages often remember being reassured by others that everything would be fine next time, and sometimes this makes for an even harder time coping with the second loss.
After so many miscarriages you should be getting used to it.
I have had 10 miscarriages and each one was equally painful – no matter how far along I made it to. Each one was a baby and each one was important and wanted!
Be brave, don’t cry. -or- Get on with your life, this isn’t the end of the world!
It is healthy and important to grieve.
Remember, when a woman is going through a miscarriage, she is mourning over
- the death of her child and the fact that she will not get to hold her child or meet her baby face to face
- the knowledge that she will not get to watch her child grow up, see her child’s personality develop or see her child achieve his/her dreams
- a sense of failure. I haven’t met a woman yet who has miscarried and hasn’t wondered if it was somehow her fault. She failed, her body failed, she’s being punished for a past mistake, she shouldn’t have eaten this or drank that – all of these thoughts can easily play through the grieving mommy’s mind.
6 SIMPLE WORDS TO SAY:
I AM SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS
by Band Back Together | Sep 11, 2010 | Baby Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, How To Help A Friend With Infertility, Infertility, Livng Through A Miscarriage, Loss, Miscarriage |
The first miscarriage was the one that destroyed me.
I lost four more babies; suffered a failed adoption; and barely saw my first born before she was yanked from between my legs – limp and drenched in a dark, life-sucking coat of meconium – then rushed to specialists trained to cheat death.
But that first loss, when my body cramped and convulsed and spit out a baby we so desperately wanted, is what shattered my heart. It robbed me of hope and started a years-long spiral into grief, despair and, ultimately, nothingness.
Exhausted by the anguish and terrified of feeling it again, I turned off as one loss became two. I numbed myself as two bled into three, and the doctors called me infertile. I became a shell and didn’t feel the fourth miscarriage or remember the fifth. I disassociated from my body when the doctors told me they intubated our first born and knocked her out after she had an eight-minute seizure. That person, sitting speechless and alone in the hospital room after they rushed our baby to a first-rate NICU at a different hospital in another city? That wasn’t me.
But it was.
I was 30 and married just a few months when I first got pregnant. I didn’t know much about babies, didn’t have friends who had them – or lost them. And I certainly never heard the statistic that as many as 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage.
We pored over baby name books at the bookstore and delighted my parents with the news. We heard the baby’s heartbeat and marked the due date on the calendar.
Then we saw blood. Just a spot. “It’s common in early pregnancy,” the nurse told us over the phone. “Try not to worry.” So, we didn’t. We believed her. We didn’t know enough not to. Idiots.
Then I bled more and they asked us, ever so calmly, to come in to the office. “Let’s just take a look.”
I sat in the passenger’s seat while Kent drove down the interstate and I tried not to think this was anything more than typical bleeding. Truthfully, though, I feared otherwise. Kent excitedly pulled an ultrasound photo from his suit pocket as we readied for the doctor; he couldn’t wait to compare the growth from the last appointment to now.
Ten years later, I can still see the inside of the car and the exit from the highway as it was that day that changed everything. I see the inside of the doctor’s office and Kent fiddling with the black and white photo.
“Put it away,” I snapped nervously. Sure he was jinxing the luck we needed.
And then, quick and impersonal as a business transaction at the bank, the doctor inserted the ultrasound wand, marked the top and bottom of the little bean with an X and explained that he didn’t see a heartbeat.
“Put your clothes back on and when I come back in we’ll talk,” he said.
We left the office in silence, a short, poorly-written book about miscarriage in our hands and an appointment for a D&C on the books. The tears started in the car and rushed with scary abandon once I crumbled on to the couch at home. I hid my face and howled into a pillow. Angry, terrified, lost.
Kent made phone calls to my family, talked to my boss. He tried to explain what we didn’t understand. How it happened. Why? When.
I agonized over the “when,” made myself sick flipping through the calendar as I tried to imagine what I did the day our baby died. Because, of course, I killed the baby. We went camping a few weekends before: did scrambling over rocks and hiking to exhaustion kill the baby? I spent too many hours at the newsroom: did I drown the baby with the stress of deadlines, interviews, and vapid politicians?
The baby fell out of me in horrifying pools of blood and fluid and mangled clots the night before the doctors planned a sterile procedure on a cold operating table. I was alone in the house, doubled over with cramps when the first gush sent me running to the toilet. Over the course of the night, Kent phoned the doctor several times to ask about the shocking volume of blood spilled in the tub, the toilet, the bed, on the floor.
We left the doctor’s office the next morning in silence. We stopped for bagels – because I was famished after losing so much blood – and ate without a word: chewed food, swallowed milk, stared past each other. Like robots, if robots could eat.
Kent went to work while I called in sick the next few days, stayed home and wept with little reprieve. I listened to angry, pulsing music at deafening volume to drown the mournful wails of my heart. And I wrote a letter to the baby I held in my belly but never felt in my arms.
“Today we were supposed to see you once again, all flickers and squirms and holy, miraculous life,” I wrote. “Instead, we shall say goodbye. We came to church to do it. We had hoped the baptismal waters would rush one Sunday morning in June as the priest held you aloft and the congregation craned to see your pink body and dark hair. God would welcome you then, we thought. We didn’t know He’d want to take you now…
“Now, we entrust you to Him. Though we wanted so desperately to hold you and touch you. Love you. Watch you. Clothe and bathe and feed you. Nibble your feet and tickle your ears. We couldn’t. But we did love you. And we will miss you. You can be sure.”
I signed the letter, then Kent did too and we traveled to church to leave a pink tulip at the base of the baptismal font, a symbolic gesture to signal the start of our healing.
Ten years later, I pulled the letter from the envelope and found a leaf from a Japanese maple and a helicopter seed tucked in with it. Signs of life lost, just like our baby.
I changed, but I am not healed.
by Band Back Together | Sep 6, 2010 | Anger, Anxiety, Child Loss, Coping With Losing A Child, Faith, Family, Fear, Grief, Guilt, Help For Grief And Grieving, Hope, How To Cope With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Loss, Marriage and Partnership, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Romantic Relationships, Shame, Stress, Trauma |
As women, we have to learn to listen to our gut. {Even when it’s telling us something we don’t want to hear.} And in March 2010 my gut was telling me one thing – loud & clear – “You must turn this ship around or it’s going to sink!”
I know, right? Clearly, something I didn’t want to hear.
You see, my son was nearly killed in an accident in July 2009 and eight months later, the bones were healing, but I was still broken. And, something had to give. I was bending and bowing under the heavy load I was carrying & I had to make a choice. The first choice that would turn my life, this ship, around was telling my husband the truth. I had to tell him of the awful thoughts that would fill my soul and haunt my nights.
I had to tell the man I love how often I had pictured him dead or dying, with our beautiful, innocent, children at his side. I had to tell him of the times I lied and told him I was sleeping downstairs, when really? I was sitting in one of the kids rooms crying. Picturing them dead. There is no marriage course that prepares you for that conversation. No book that tells you what to say when you’re wife is losing her mind.
I am blessed. And he reinforced what my heart knew and my mind couldn’t comprehend when he hugged me and held me and told me that I needed to call a doctor. {I knew in my gut that this was what I needed, but it was nice to hear him say it.}
You see, I was dying a slow death at the hand of post traumatic stress disorder. At the time I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that anxiety and fear were ruling my life. I was not living with intent.
Post Traumatic Stress had taken over & changed the woman I had once loved. It had stolen my husband’s wife & my children’s mother. I am a firm believer that life shouldn’t be the same after trauma, I expect that. I accept that. But, I also knew that I was not living and I didn’t want to settle for anything less. When you believe in your heart that one of your children is dying, is going to die, may die…there are no books or blogs or words or friendships that are inspiring enough to settle your soul.
And, even after I tucked my boy away in a bed, EIGHT long months later…safely upstairs, without a wheelchair, after a long day of school and baseball practice, I couldn’t shake my spirit of those haunting thoughts. Those reoccurring nightmares, I had when I was awake.
Nighttime would creep up on me like a thief and steal any sanity I had managed to build up in my reserves for the day. It was always worse at night.
The blackness would slip under the door frame and suddenly I would grow weak under the urge to hold my children tightly and scream into the thick air. The thoughts that filled my head were not that of a “sane” woman. I no longer recognized the woman that replaced me when night fell. The fear of losing my loved ones began to grow…and grow…and grow…
I didn’t tell the therapist everything right away. But after a week of visits, I let it all go. I told him that I pictured my baby dying of SIDS every time I closed my eyes. I would sit in her room in the dark on the floor and use my phone to light up her face so I could watch her breathe. I would rock in her room through the night and cry. And torture myself with the thought of finding her lifeless in the morning. A thought that wouldn’t let me close my eyes.
The blanket the boy brought home from the hospital would trigger phantom day-dreams that would leave me shuttering. I could hear him screaming in the night, in pain, even after the pain was gone. I would lay awake at night and watch my husbands’ chest rise and fall with each breath. I would picture how badly my heart would/will hurt when he dies, I would think of losing my parents…losing my aunts. Death consumed my thoughts.
I couldn’t drive in my car without sobbing uncontrollably. Every slammed brake or rushed traffic light would leave me in a puddle of doubt and fear. I was convinced someone was going to hit me, hit us, kill my family…
And, I knew this wasn’t right.
There were times when my mind would convince my heart that I was better off dead, rather than face the sadness the future holds. I would pray to please let me die before my children, my husband…and at times, I would even think “before my parents.” I would remember the agonizing pain of the unknown – as my son was air-cared to the local Children’s Hospital – and I would pray that the demon of memory be taken away from me.
But, as I told my therapist of my thoughts & fears…as I spoke of the anxiety that chased me in the night…the fear seemed to find a place where it could lay dormant. And I was fine with that. For now.
It’s been just over one year since the accident. And I still know that the dormant monster is waiting. Lurking…
And, there are times when I have talk myself off the ledge. Times when I feel the anxiety creeping back in. I accept the fact that life will never be the same. I accept the fact that it’s not suppose to. And, I know that with that change comes baggage, that at times will be too much to carry. But I also know I can face this demon head on, with the help of my family & friends…and even my blogging community.
I am working hard to turn this ship around. To make up for the ground that has been lost. To find my way back to the shore of safety and maybe, just maybe, even learn how to live on the sandy, white beaches of satisfaction.
Someday.
