by Band Back Together | Sep 15, 2010 | A Letter To My Younger Self, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Livng Through A Miscarriage, Loss, Miscarriage, Pregnancy |
Hindsight is 20/20 – that is what they say right? Do you ever wish you could go back in time – back to the future style – and share some words of wisdom to yourself? At times I find myself wishing I had that super power – or technology caught up because I could have some interesting/heartbreaking conversations with myself:
A Letter My Younger Self About: Miscarriage:
Dear Devan,
I think that you should sit down because what I have to tell you is not going to be easy to hear. It will seem near impossible but I am so sorry to tell you it is true. In 5 short years, you will experience one of the hardest journeys you will have been on in your 28 years of life and experience: 10 heartbreaking & painful miscarriages. Yes, 10.
You will bounce from worrying about ever getting pregnant because of your previous surgeries for ovarian cysts to worrying about never carrying a pregnancy to term. However, after your first 3 miscarriages you will become obsessed with basal body temping and you will be diagnosed with a short luteal phase and progesterone deficiency. Although this is part of the answer after you have your healthy boy and start trying to conceive again, you will be punched in the heart with 2 more miscarriages.
You will be strong and try to pretend this is not affecting you as much as it really is. You will not share your feelings with anyone, not your husband, your family, or friends. You will battle through it and you will be blessed with your second full-term child – a beautiful girl.
I wish I could tell you this was the end of your heartache. You will, in fact, endure 4 more and then you will become pregnant again and you will pass your 8th week and think you will be welcoming your third child in a handful of months. A phone call that literally brings you to your knees will have you broken in ways you could not imagine. Your amazing husband will be there to catch you. He will guide you through the surgery and he will be your rock. Triton will be with you forever and you will think about him a lot. After some new medical plans and medication you will welcome your third healthy child and she will bring you back from some of that darkness and sadness.
I wish I could tell you that all this wouldn’t happen. I wish I could stop it from happening. The reality is this experience, this wordless journey will define so much of who you are – not negatively. Good things will come from it – you will see just how strong your marriage is and just how incredible your husband is to help hold you up when you thought you were sinking. Your children will bring so much joy to your life because you know how much you fought and ached for them.
You will realize how strong you are and that this – motherhood – was without a doubt what you were put on this earth to do.
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 13, 2010 | A Letter I Can't Send, Grandparent Loss, Grief, Guilt, Help For Grief And Grieving, Hospice, Loss, Stroke |
Dear Grampa,
I don’t know if I will ever be able to live down the guilt that I feel for abandoning you in the end. I should have gone. I should have called. I should have written.
When the stroke hit, I felt like my own life was falling down around my feet. I was barely hanging on to my own sanity so I said a few prayers and cried a few tears as you lay in that hospital bed over a thousand miles away. I took the rest of the day off of work to feel sorry for myself and to soothe my sense of loss but I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
Time went on and you went home. Gramma did her best to take care of you with some help from Dad and your other kids and my cousins. I cried when I talked to Mom about the difficulties you were facing. You had to learn how to let other people do things for you instead of being independent like you always had been. I felt better with the sense of urgency gone so I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
It was a Sunday when Mom called. You were in the hospital again and it wasn’t looking good. Your kidneys were failing. They were going to let you die. I cried and I cursed Mom for waiting to tell me as you’d been hospitalized days before. I went to work the next day, numb and angry but still I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
You slipped away on a Thursday, two weeks before my birthday. I got the voicemail from Mom just before I went into a meeting at work. It was all I could to keep the tears from my face as my boss yammered about something or another. I sobbed all the way home, grief and guilt overlapping in my tears. I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
I don’t know if I kept myself from your funeral because of the expense (which is what I told everyone), out of selfishness (I’ve never been good at dealing with death) or to punish myself. By staying away, my guilt is complete. I didn’t go. I didn’t call. I didn’t write.
My Grampa, I have eulogized you in my heart: You were a mean, ornery old bastard that said what you shouldn’t and stepped on plenty of toes, but we never doubted that you loved us. You taught me my first swear words and gave me my first gun. You were the hardest working and most independent man I’ve ever known and I will miss you for the rest of my life.
I’ve never believed in communication with the dead, so my pleas for forgiveness must fall on deaf ears or be lost in the air. Still, I wish I could tell you that I am sorry that I didn’t go and didn’t call and didn’t write.
I will love you always,
Stephie
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.
