When Babies Attack

There is an interesting bunch of comments over at Niobe's regarding whether it is proper for a woman to bring live offspring to a walk of remembrance in honor of lost babies. The range of opinions is large, but can be very generally characterized as follows:

1) Babies? Oh, you mean those diaper-covered daggers with grenade handles. Remembrance marches should be adult-only events to protect the newly bereaved and anyone else who doesn't have a living child.

2) Babies do sort of suck. But ones born to parents who had a previous loss get grandfathered into my good graces. So ... bring your kid to the walk, if you really want to.

3) Babies represent hope. And kids who lost a sibling -- what are they, chopped liver? Let everyone whom the loss impacts walk together.

I am in the minority on this issue -- firmly ensconced in Group 3. I loooove babies. Babies were a much better soother for me than liquor or drugs or religion in my darkest days of loss. They were the best thing for me.

I should back up and say that in the first few weeks after my loss, seeing a baby was tantamount to a punch in the throat. I understand why some people recoil from kids in the wake of loss. I remember that stage well. But the lucky event that propelled me out of that place was the birth of my niece Scamp.

At first I couldn't believe how annoying, rude, and insulting the timing of that birth was. Scamp entered the world only six days after I said goodbye to my own daughter. I seethed at the unfairness of having to bind my stupid breasts to stop my milk while SIL geared up for a happy life at home with baby. I ground my teeth down to nubs listening to SIL complain about how hard it was to get up to feed the baby after a C section. I'd just gone through surgery and I was tired, too. But the reason I couldn't sleep was because of panic attacks due to complications from the loss. I yearned to tell SIL to suck it.

So when torrential rains flooded the roads between Oakland and Sonoma, I rejoiced at not having to go to the hospital to visit SIL and Scamp. Then once they went home, I perhaps exaggerated a wee bit about the whole family being deathly ill. "So sorry, we can't visit yet. Wouldn't want to give the new baby a cold, right?"

SIL, for her part, was lovely. She'd had a previous loss herself and understood. "Whenever you come is fine," she told me right after my termin.ation. "I realize it's hard. I won't be offended if you stay away for awhile."

All my instincts were screaming "Stay away forever!" But after about three weeks DH and I realized that like it or not, we had to go to Sonoma and see the baby. SIL and her family are the only relatives we have in the whole Pacific time zone. Staying away was weird.

Nobody asked if I wanted to hold the baby when we came. I couldn't decide if that was really kind or really mean. Finally, in an internal act of defiance, I thought, "Fuck it. Let's REALLY get this thing over with." I picked up Scamp and took a good look at her.

It was not what I expected. I didn't have the urge to drop her or start screaming at the loss of my own baby. In her nonchalant, unconscious way, she was utterly fascinating. Scamp settled into my arm and pursed her lips. They were the cutest little lips.

All I could think was, "Oh my God, she is adorable." And ... that was it. Nothing else. No spite or envy or bitterness. I was aware she wasn't my baby, but suddenly that didn't mean I had to dislike her out of loyalty to my own. In fact, I liked Scamp already. She and I were gong to get along -- I could tell it already. I patted her back gently and wished Scamp all the love and happiness on earth. Miraculously, I truly meant it.

It was the first moment since my loss where I didn't feel stunted and ruined by rage. It was also my very first moment of peace since I'd learned my baby might be sick. And all of those gifts came from a must-be-avoided-at-all costs baby. Go figure.

So that was when I decided that babies were no longer to be avoided. To this day I have a special bond with Scamp. She gave me so much, even though she is utterly unaware of all of it.

Hand Me Down

It took about 12 days for me to begin to eat and walk around like a normal person again, but thankfully I'm there now. Maybe the some-random-stomach-virus theory is going pan out after all! But even though I feel functional now (despite having caught Big A's chest cold last week), I still have some sporadic abdominal and pelvic pain. So, I'm going ahead with pursuing the might-be-endometriosis theory with my gynecologist. Endo frightens me because of the cyclical nature of it -- the idea that I might regularly be in as much pain as I was two weeks ago makes me shake and cross myself. On the other hand, if I have another attack that starts just as period begins, at least the mystery will be solved, and we could finally make a real stab at treatment.

I have been feeling on edge and punk in the past month, but given the mystery illness, that wasn't terribly surprising. But it occurred to me that most of the anxiety focused around Little A. Since we are also sorting out her health issues at this time, I figured maybe that was also normal. Still, I didn't understand the intensity of my freakouts. Little A has been doing well on her new meds and there really isn't much reason to be anything other than optimistic about what lies in store for her. So why was my heart hurting so much whenever my little girl toddled by?

While folding laundry the other day I finally figured it out: This black mood had started the day I took the bin of 2T and 24-month clothes out of the garage and incorporated them into Little A's general wardrobe. It's those clothes. The ones Big A wore three years ago when I was pregnant with my angel baby.

I have a hand-me-down hangover.

Who knew that such strong anxiety and grief could imprint on little dresses and pants? There is one particular outfit that looks adorable on Little A (much as it did on her big sister) but every time she flits by wearing it, I'm hit with the knowledge that this was the play dress Big A wore on Christmas 2005, which was just two days after my pregnancy termination. It was all I could do to keep from hurling myself out the picture window that day, and most of the events of that time are thankfully lost to the fog of despair and vicoden. But oh, that dress -- that I remember all too well.

It pisses me off! Not only because Little A looks so adorable in it, but because now that I'm a SAHM, my budget doesn't allow for me going out and buying an equal-but-different dress for Little A. So I'm in a conundrum: do I suck it up and deal with the sadness over seeing the clothes again, or do I donate the old clothes, and hope that people give Little A outfits for Christmas?

Strange and arbitrary. That's what grief is three years after a loss.

Out

Are you "out?" To everyone or a select few? And which -- or how much of your -- story do you tell?

This is the question Tash recently asked at Glow in the Woods regarding what portion of the story of our baby loss we share with the real world. For anyone who ended a pregnancy early for medical reasons, this is one of the core, lingering conundrums. You think about it hard from day one. Actually, given the nature of medical termination, you usually think about it before day one. The lead up to a second-trimester termination generally includes at least one or two days of prep, plus many tortuous phone calls with doctors and hospital or clinic staff to set up appointments. And the question gets into your head early on and clings: What in God's name can I tell people about all of this later?

Two and a half years since my termination, I still grapple with the concept of "out." I personally count four tiers of knowing my story in the real world:

Tier One: The most trusted. These people know everything about my baby's diagnosis, what went into my decision to terminate, as well as all the crazy woe that came later on. Plus, they know the horrible strain all of this put on my heart, body, psyche, and marriage.

Tier Two: The mostly trusted. These people know about the termination and probably also heard that my uterus ruptured later, but don't necessarily realize the connection between those events, or that I can't have kids anymore. Not every detail and no major emotional baggage has been shared, but I trusted these individuals enough to tell them the basic framework of the whole complicated story.

Tier Three: The suspect. Either I don't know these people well enough to gauge their philosophical stance on abortion, or I know for certain they are antichoice. I may not be close to these folks, but they are still entrenched enough in my life to require some explanation as to why I suddenly wasn't wearing maternity clothing anymore, or why my subsequent baby came so early. For them, I created an artfully edited version of the story that isn't false, but allows people to incorrectly assume that my loss was a stillbirth or miscarriage.

Tier Four: The blissfully ignorant. These are mostly people I've met since Little A's birth who have no idea of my pregnancy woes. It's not a secret, but it just hasn't come up, and I haven't volunteered it.

...........................................................................

In the early days after my loss, Tier 3 was the group that caused me the most tension and sadness. No matter how you lose a baby, you feel flayed and exquisitely sensitive to how others perceive what happened in the aftermath. People routinely say things that they think will help but inadvertently hurt. This problem magnifies significantly if you terminate. Because in addition to the kind-hearted blunderers, there are also the shunners and the snubbers. These are the people who feel that the manner of your loss negates all rights to condolences. In fact, some people feel that a termination requires insults and condemnation. Which is bad enough on any ordinary day, but downright impossible to contemplate in the wake of your shaky new grief.

So, everyone who terminates has a Tier 3. What varies is how many people get put there, and for how long.

Now, my Tier 3 is likely very tiny compared to many other women. That's because here in the Bay Area the vast majority of people are prochoice. There isn't much risk in being open with my story. The most push back I get is on this blog. And when the occasional anonymous wing nut stops by to comment, I hold the power to delete, which really takes a lot of sting out the random trolls. So my situation is much easier than someone in Topeka or in Oklahoma City. There a woman may very likely have a friend or relative call her a baby killer to her face after a medical termination. And there just isn't any magic button in real life that can erase that.

Yet even in my "safer" locale, the specter of snubbers and shunners falls over me every time I consider telling my story. I have to really think about what the long-term implications of talking with some one could be before I open my mouth. It's always a gamble, the revelation.

And as much as I try to keep it at the personal level when I talk about my baby and my decision, inevitably it's also more than that. It's where the personal, political, and religious intersect. For always, whether I like it or not.

By trade, editors deal with the micro details of a work. I have come to realize that I'm not naturally a big-picture person in regular life either. I try to employ my little-picture methodology to monolithic issues (raising kids well, saving for retirement, etc.). I want the reassurance of knowing the exact order of operations that go into whatever goal I'm facing down beforehand. But that's cramming a square peg into a round hole. The big picture is a vision that requires faith, hope, and improvisation at the start. For someone like me who absolutely sucks at improv -- that's a huge hill to climb, just to get started on something.

I've thought a lot about big-picture events and quests with a capital Q since reading the book, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I'm probably I'm the last middle-aged American woman to read it, but for the benefit of the three other people hiding under a rock, it is a memoir that chronicles a year of traveling and spiritual exploration after the author's soul-sapping divorce.

I'm shocked at how much I liked the book. I was cautious going in, because I heard the author was on Oprah promoting the story, and that Julia Roberts will star in a movie version. The book's press gave off the faint stench of The Secret, which really is just Social Darwinism respun in less harshly Victorian language (If your life is awesome, it's because YOU are positively special and earned every last orgasm and gold ingot! And if your life sucks, it's because You are negative and dragged those problems right to yourself like a magnet. Got that?)

But by just a few pages in, it was obvious that Gilbert wrote a memoir, not a smug how-to book. She isn't holier than thou or rigidly dogmatic. She's funny, open minded, and as enthusiastic about food in Italy as she is about meditation in India. Reading about her path from lost to found really did inspire me.

And here I am, recently awake to the fact that I am relatively at peace with my dead-baby-and-pregnancy-calamities saga. It took two and a half years, so it's not like it was an overnight change. Yet it feels so markedly different. It's like I've been staring for eons at the random dots in one of those Magic Eye books, and suddenly the big-picture just popped out at me.

For anyone newer to their grief, I would hasten to add that "at peace" doesn't mean I want to turn away from my loss, or distance myself from others out there for whom this is not as settled. I've been struggling to figure out a metaphor that explains the difference between how I felt before and how I feel now. The only one that sort of fits is that of the leg amputee.

We've all heard the death of a child being referred to as similar to amputation, right? It's permanent and impacts every step. The underlying truth is that you would always prefer to have your old leg back, where that an option. And in the beginning, even as you make progress at adapting to being one-legged, the lost leg is always keenly on your mind.

Being at peace is not getting your old leg back. Instead, it's akin to receiving a high-tech prosthetic. After being in a wheel chair and then on crutches, it feels pretty magnificent to bound around as a biped. So you don't think about the fact that all things being equal, you'd still like that real leg back, please. You just enjoy the breeze in your hair, and maybe look to the road ahead.

For me, anyway, that's what peace feels like. For others who have got here (in any matter, grief-related or not) what does it feel like for you?

EDD

"Waiting is Painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering." -- Paulo Coelho


This week is the two-year anniversary of my estimated due date for my angel baby. In a different world, I would be ordering a birthday cake and planning for my second daughter's official entry into the terrible twos.

The most interesting thing to me about the anniversary this year is that I forgot it. It was only when I logged into an online support group discussion board I'm a member of and saw my name listed under the "Special Days to Remember" thread that the significance of the date hit me.

Maybe part of the reason I forgot is that my healthier pregnancies ended no where near their due dates. Big A was supposed to make her debut a week before Halloween but stubbornly refused to come out until after Election Day. And Little A arrived in a whole different calendar year than her EDD. For me, due dates have not held true.

And of course, there are no real memories to associate with this. Unlike my angel day, which is burned into memory, the EDD was a guess of an assumption that never came to pass. It is ephermeal as a spiderweb made out of clouds and cricket songs. It casts no shadow. It floats away.

In years past I would have felt guilty for not holding on to my phantom baby bundle tightly on this day. So much of new grief involves fighting the disappearance of your child. We wait for these key anniversaries not only to get past the pain they bring, but to experience the jolt. Sometimes the white-hot memory is less disconcerting than the feeling of the fire going out.

But once you cross the line between forgetting and forgot, it's different. I have no guilt. It's ok. I'm glad to be set free in certain ways. To no longer be waiting, and to finally let the baby be lost.

6 X 6

The lovely ladies over at Glow in the Woods have posted 6 X 6, a self-serve meme for deadbaby-related questions and topics. I thought I'd opt in:

1) In a word, how would you characterize yourself before your loss, and then after?
Before: Lucky. After: Cracked.

2) How do you feel around pregnant women?

It's been over two years since my loss. I feel pretty ok around pregnant ladies most of the time now. Having living children undeniably helps me on that front because they are the band aids that cover my old wounds when I go out in public. Socially speaking, they buffer me from a lot of questions and interactions that previously hurt. For instance, nobody asks a lady who is nearing age forty who has two small kids if she plans to have more children. People assume the baby making went ok for you, and that you are now done by design rather than because of medical mishaps. And most of the time, these assumptions are exactly what I prefer. It's very relaxing, to pass as "normal" and not wear my gored heart on my sleeve. That feeling of naked emotional exposure that comes with early grief was terribly disconcerting for me. I'm glad it's mostly gone.

Occasionally a naive, lucky pregnant lady yammers on a little too long about hating stretch marks or about how their 27-page birth plan is going to ensure a drug-free birth, and at those times I still feel exasperated at the inequities of the universe. But the anger I used to feel for the actual women has gone away. I think it's because I know it could all turn on a dime for them. It did for me.

3) How do you answer the 'how many children' question?

I only tell about the kids who were born alive in 95 percent of the situations where that question gets asked. That's no disrespect to others who count differently. It's just how I happen to do it.

4) How did you explain what happened to your lost baby to your living children?

Big A had just turned two when we found out her in-utero sibling had Trisomy 18. Big A was young enough to not understand the reason for Mommy's growing belly, and we hadn't told her she was going to be a big sister before I terminated the pregnancy. We continued avoiding all dead baby discussions with her in the immediate aftermath.

Some might say this was good for Big A because of X reasons, while others might counter that it was bad for her for Y reasons. But why I chose that path had nothing to do with Big A, pathetic as that may sound. I just wasn't up for explaining how babies were made in the same conversation where I explained death to a 25 month old girl. Big A's age allowed me to punt, and so I did.

That said, I've always viewed Big A not knowing about her lost sister as a temporary situation. Some day both Big A and Little A will know about their other sister. I think I'll tell them about her existence first, and then when the girls are older and more sophisticated, I can explain about the termination part.

5) What would another pregnancy mean to you, and how would you get through it—or are you done with babymaking?

Little A is my "happy ending" -- a pregnancy after the loss that resulted in a live baby. Unfortunately her pregnancy was a complicated nightmare that ended with my uterus being so damaged from the rupture that I can't ever carry another child. I'm lucky to be alive now, and Little A is even luckier on that front.

If I'd known in advance how dangerous another pregnancy would be, I never would have attempted it. My parenting of Big A suffered greatly when I was so ill during pregnancy, and the idea that I also nearly orphaned the girl just because I had the urge to have more kids seems utterly ridiculous.

Yet I got away with it -- somehow, I got my Little A even though it all went so wrong. That contradiction is the duct tape that holds my life together today, actually. Because I don't feel like the world owed me this child. I don't think she is any sort of cosmic payback for what came before. But she's here, she's awesome, and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of being her mommy for as many days as I am lucky enough to have her. I own my relationship to the world in a different way because of her existence.

6) Imagine being able to step back in time and whisper into the ear of your past self the day after your baby died. What would you say?

I would tell myself, "Today is Christmas Eve. By this day next year, there will be a healthy baby in the bassinet by your bed. This era of waiting and wondering and worrying about these particular issues will be over. You will hang a lantern in your window to remember your dead, and hang two stockings on the mantle to celebrate the living."

But I do not think I would have believed myself. I probably would have thought I was one big, fat, equivocating jerk!

Back to the Sea

Two years ago tomorrow DH drove us wordlessly in the winter morning gloom, rain ricocheting off the car with an unrelenting ping, ping, ping. We parked on a street adjacent to the surgery center and waited until the last possible moment to go in. Sad as the world is round at not being able to fix our broken baby, we came down from our house on the hill to the hospital, came down from the lofty aspirations of parents to be, came down to an unthinkable, brutal place where all the outcomes were the same, and we could only say when or how. We came to the hospital in deep despair, but also in hope. We would curtail our baby's suffering by doing what we did that day. And we would reach out and grab hard at a shard of the dream that we might be able to go on, to try again, to have a healthy child someday. When it was time we got out of the car and trudged into the surgery center. The rain fell and fell, pooling in the streets where it drained down the storm sewers back to the sea.

Many women who end pregnancies when they discover something is profoundly wrong carry a picture of a healed, whole version of their children in their minds. They think of themselves as having delivered their babies from affliction, and see them as perfected now. This strikes me as lovely. But for better or worse, I have never been able to separate out the Trisomy 18 from the rest of my child. It was in every single cell, indivisible from the rest of the baby. It's just who she was. Yet while the trisomy changed so many things, the one thing it never muddied was my love for the baby. I loved her the same before we knew there was a problem as I did when I got the amnio results. I loved her the same when I scheduled the termination, and after. I loved her no differently than I loved my living children when they swam in my belly. At first this was a source of pain, the sameness of the love. But over the years the knowledge of it changed into a source of solace. I can live with what happened because I feel my motives in what I chose were good ones. And maybe that's the most grace and healing one can hope for in the end, when it comes to the death of a child.

Love you, baby girl. Miss you, too. Always.

Possibly Bad News

Going through old email today looking for an address for a holiday card, I happened across a reply someone sent me to a message titled "possibly bad news." And I realized by the date stamp that two years ago today, I received my crappy NT scan and maternal serum screening combined results. Two years ago today, I was sitting at this same desk working (with my gestating baby's last ultrasound pic up as my computer wallpaper, no less) when the perinatologist called to say my baby had a one in five shot at having either T18 or T13.

Hanging up the phone that day, I had absolutely no idea how badly everything would go after that. I had not yet done any research on trisomies 18 and 13, hadn't had to make any difficult choices yet. I didn't know that if it turned out to be a worst-case scenario diagnosis, that it didn't guarantee me an ok ride the rest of the way after that either, that there would be horrible and serious complications in the termination itself that would permanently alter the course of future pregnancies. Finally, it would have been completely outlandish, the idea that just a year later my uterus would give out and rupture. If that had been my fortune, I'd have squinted at the soothsayer and laughed. Who has so many worst-case scenarios happen in a row like that? How many times does probability just have to let you know you are its bitch?

And then just as suddenly, I was no longer probability's bitch. Little A was ok despite her early birth and the uterine rupture. Aside from being unable to have more kids, I'm ok too.

But I realized upon seeing that "Possibly Bad News" email that I still have absolutely no idea where to file that year of hell that started with the crappy NT results in 2005 and ended with a crash C section for Little A in 2006. I don't understand why everything went so wrong. Perhaps even more strange, I can't really grasp how it finally went right, either. Is God benevolent? Or is God a mean girl/queen bee, whipping me around at whim.

I'm grateful, but utterly confused. No answer I can fashion does the questions formed in 2005-2006 justice.

So I cried at seeing the old email, but it wasn't very cathartic, just a few strangled sobs. I feel like I've got rock salt and dirty snow slushing around in my chest and now I have to run off and pick up the girls from preschool/daycare. Hopefully I won't look like too much of a basket case when I do it.

Bargainer's Remorse

Maybe I was due. I've been surfing a tsunami of a birth high ever since Little A came into the world ten months ago. There were some turbulent, sad eddies here and there, but for the most part I have just felt so happy and thrilled to be alive and have a healthy baby. Life came at me in super-saturated colors. Fresh! Shiny! Smelled like skittles! At least until September, when the wave finally broke.

And what are the things that are making me glum? I am sheepish to admit them, they are so pedestrian. My kids have both been sick for most of the last four weeks. Nothing life threatening, but when the baby wheezes you end up going to the doctor a whole lot -- 3 times last week just for Little A, whom, it turns out, doesn't really sleep much when she's jacked up on albuterol. Then I caught the cold from the girls and also got my eyes contaminated with the germs (oh so gross to contemplate how that occurred) and came down with a raging case of viral conjunctivitis. Imagine picking up your child from preschool carrying a baby that has green stalactites hanging from her nose while you look like a hell demon yourself, what with those crimson, weepy peepers. Oh, won't you play date us, fellow preschool mommies? Care for a home-baked treat? Well no, I guess not.

Living in the house of plague has put a kink in my regular work schedule, which has already been dented because a relationship with a longtime babysitter has become a vexing, disappointing thing that I need to get out of. The problem is that I am far too behind on everything to properly research a replacement yet. So I'm stressed about work. I am upset about the babysitter. And I miss my DH. He's been on deadline for a new playable level on a video game ,which means that I've not seen him very much for the past few weeks.

The thing that bothers me nearly as much as the things that are bothering me is that I had promised myself I wouldn't get so caught up in this circle of stress and frustration over daily life again. If only I could get through such a difficult pregnancy with Little A alive and healthy, I just knew it would all be different.

What does it mean, to go back on a promise like that? I have major bargainer's remorse these days. It's so strange to discover that life suddenly feels ... normal. Recognizeable. And that despite my wishes and vows, my bar for stressing has readjusted from where it was last year to something a trifle closer to that of the "regular" human population.

I honestly don't know if this is a failing on my part, or a sign that I'm healing.

Maybe both?

The "A" Word

There is a Daily Kos diary on the "politics of miscarriage" that several of my favorite blogs are referenced in and/or linking to. It's always great to see pregnancy loss and infertility discussed in the general media and on sites like Daily Kos, which draw a huge number of readers from all sorts of areas and backgrounds. But while I agree with the gist of the piece -- people should know women are blameless for their miscarriages -- this particular diary didn't sit so well with me beyond that. One sentence in particular hit me like a slap:

In the medical community, I'm what is known as a "habitual aborter." Now, I am very pro-choice, so I'm not as horrifically offended by that term that many would be, yet I resent that it suggests I chose this.

Ah. So the author is merely resentful of being grouped with people like me, who have actually made the choice she professes to support but doesn't want to be personally associated with. And that's with her being "very" prochoice! How charitable of her.

Still, the writer referenced termination for medical reasons in a sympathetic way, and I agreed with her points she made about people unfairly assuming that everything in pregnancy is controllable when it isn't. I thought maybe she had just used a poor turn of phrase that struck me wrong. But then I got to the end:

In the event that Roe is overturned (something I think is more and more likely every day), every single miscarriage will become a matter of inquiry by the state, and the belief that miscarriage can be caused and can be blamed on someone will not only be more prevalent, but may result in criminal penalties for grieving women. For fear of legal reprisal, the movement and activity of pregnant women will become more and more curtailed, and there goes women's rights.

I understand her fears. A great fight is brewing in America over a woman's right to choose. But should our main goal be to protect our God-given right to have miscarriages that are not mistaken for abortions? How about protecting something we actually have some say in? Or am I just not getting the point?!

It's been a hell of a week. I think I need a really big drink now.

Sad News

Deep in the night the cry of a swallow
Under the stars she flew
Keen as a wail was her call to follow
Over the world to you.

Love in my heart is a cry forever
Lost as the swallow's flight.
Seeking for you and never, never
Stilled by the stars at night.

-- Sara Teasdale

Grieving for Meg and her lost baby girl.

Awkward in the Neighborhood

I was volunteering recently in the local park, pulling ivy from long-neglected paths, when I ran into a woman from one street down. My neighbor gazed at Little A, who was waving her arms and bah-bah-bah-ing in the stroller while Big A spun circles around us.

"She's almost eight months old," I said, even though the woman had not asked the question I was answering. I tried to look her in the eye, but she stared at her feet and then left a few minutes later.

I don't need to be told how old her children are. Her daughter is just a few months older than Big A. Her son is just a few months older than my baby with trisomy 18 would have been, if the baby had been born on time. This neighbor and I were pregnant at the same time in 2005. We'd casually exchanged pregnancy info that fall at a block party, both of us innocent and hopeful about what lay in store for us at that moment in time.

The next time I met her was Halloween, 2006. She stood at my door, costumed baby and older daughter happily clamoring for candy. I was home alone, too ill to go out trick or treating with DH and Big A. Little A's pregnancy was kicking my ass. It was the beginning of the third trimester and I was round as a pumpkin -- exhausted, haggard, obviously pregnant.

I had not seen this neighbor in awhile. Yet I assumed she'd heard about my dead baby. It was ten months since the loss and I was no longer guarded when I ran into people on the street. Nobody offered condolences or stared at me anymore.

"Where is your little one?" The neighbor asked lightly.

I froze. God, she didn't know about the dead baby. The only words that sprang to mind were completely inappropriate to say in front of her kids. Like, can't you COUNT? If I'm very pregnant this Oct. AND was pregnant last Oct., how could that be, unless I'd lost the first baby? Are you an IDIOT?

"Oh ... Big A is out with her father trick or treating," I finally stammered.

"Yes, we just saw them. But where is the BABY?" she asked again, clearly not catching my drift.

What the fuck? Do I just look fat? Or does she think this is some kind of a costume -- tired suburban pregnant lady is now a character you dress up as?! Exasperated, I pointed at my belly. "I'm not due until January," I said firmly.

It was too dark to see if she blushed, but she finally got it. She thanked me quickly for the candy and hurried away. I leaned against the door, bowl of M&Ms propped up on my belly, feeling a whole new level of bad that night. In fact, I think that I switched off the porch light and stopped giving out candy after that.

I wonder if she'll ever actually be able to look me in the eye again?

Done, Part 2

This weekend SIL brought the nieces down to our house for a sleepover. Despite the fact everyone is mega tired today, it's always fun to gather the girls together. Between the two of us, SIL and I birthed four kids in three years. And that is just the successful pregnancies, as SIL miscarried once and I ended one pregnancy for medical reasons in those same years. Needless to say, SIL and I have been in the same phase of life: gestating, lactating, and trying to juggle a little bit of work with a whole lot of nose and butt wiping for the under-three set. So we usually can understand what the other one is feeling.

I told SIL how strange and sad it is for me to be done with having children. She sympathized, but when I asked her if she thought she would like another baby too, she looked horrified. Adding a second kid had really kicked her ass, she said. She hadn't expected how difficult the juggling would be, and since her first kid was easy going, she'd been shocked to learn how different the baby stage can be when you have a more demanding baby. All in all, it was a bumpy family adjustment after the second birth.

The good news is that now that niece #2 is 18 months old, life is much better for SIL. She likes that the girls are older and a smidge less dependent on a moment-to-moment basis. And she loves that she is now back to work three full days a week, in a job she enjoys, with the kids in preschool/daycare part time.

"If I had another I think I would lose myself," she said. "So I'm definitely done."

All of this made a lot of sense to me, and also jolted me out of my "no more babies" funk a little bit. It is good to be reminded of the positive things that come with being done. It's good to see SIL clearing out her old spit-up-upon clothes and trading up for modern styles that -- GASP -- sometimes might actually not be wash and wear!

Of course, I'm a long way off from being able to wear nonsensible clothing. Little A spits up if she's even in the same room as a dry-clean-only tag. But, someday I'll get there. And it'll be nice.

Done

While I harbor definite neatnik tendencies, having two children requires a laser-focused diligence to keep the clothing, toys, and paraphernalia down to manageable levels. The baby stage is especially difficult to remain uncluttered in, because the little buggers outgrow things so rapidly that every corner of the house tends to store something recently indispensable but now obsolete. This wouldn't be a big deal if baby items were small and cute, or if I lived in a mcmansion the size of Walmart. But the gear tends to be over sized and designed by the same people responsible for casino carpets. And we are keeping it real here in Oakland, living in a tiny two-bedroom 1950s-era house that doesn't have space for extra crap.

In the past few months I have been reasonably good about dragging unused items down to the basement and garage, but quite bad about getting them completely out of the house. At first I chalked it up to lack of time -- going to Goodwill with a carload of boxes is a pain when you've got two kids to cart along. But the other day a friend said she was trying to conceive again, and I know that in her first pregnancy most of her maternity clothes were borrowed from a sister who took back her things when she recently got pregnant again herself. So here is an obvious situation where my friend could use some free maternity clothes, and hey, I've got boxes of them in the basement. While I'm at it, I should also give her the infant stuff Little A has outgrown so far. Yet in the basement everything remains. I just haven't been able to utter the words, "come pick them up" yet.

So, I guess the clutter in the basement is about lack of time, but not in the way I originally thought. I'm just not ready to let go of pregnancy and babydom. Not yet. I only just started down this path in life three and a half years ago, and now I'm done. How did that happen?

With Big A, when I finished a big stage all the related physical items that went with the era got carefully packed away. Sure, I might have felt a little misty at how fast she grew while I did it, but there wasn't anything truly sad about putting stuff away. I knew pregnancy and infant care were cycles I'd loop through again in the future. That bouncy seat was still needed someday. So were those stretchy pants. Saving everything was an affirmation of the dream of a bigger family. Saving things was fun.

But now every time a onesie is outgrown or the baby loses interest in a toy, it just reminds me that there is absolutely no need to keep those things. There will be no more babies for us, ever. Saving things under these circumstances is stupid, and yet that's what I've been doing.

Probably we would have stopped at two kids even if pursuing the second one hadn't turned into such hell. We are out of bedrooms in the house and out of money for raising more. But the fact that my uterus ruptured in Little A's pregnancy just makes accepting this more difficult. Because there isn't a choice anymore. We were told by several doctors and too many nurses to count that my rupturing at home was an amazing case of bad luck/good luck: Terrible for it to actually occur, but freakishly fortunate that Little A wasn't brain damaged from lack of oxygen, and that I didn't bleed to death. In light of that, it's just too dangerous to ever try again. In fact, DH got a vasectomy recently. Because we knew that if we accidentally got pregnant, we would want to try to keep the baby. All rational reasons regarding safety and fairness to "The As" (who deserve to keep a mom) would go out the window in a real pregnancy situation. So best to avoid all chance of it ever happening, we decided.

Oh, the heart is a greedy, irrational thing. It always wants more.

Crosses on a Hill

In a town not far from where I live there are about three thousand crosses on a hill, a memorial to the soldiers lost and a protest against the Iraq War. While I pass the area fairly often, I am usually driving on an adjacent freeway, so the most I get is a quick peek before it disappears in a blur behind me.

But this weekend DH and I were out enjoying the glorious spring weather at a nearby park. We exited the freeway, Big A making silly jokes and DH and I laughing at them, and Little A joining in the conversation from time to time with husky little coos that were so gorgeous that my toes curled up in my sandals at hearing them. It was a sweet little counterpoint for all the other boring or annoying times a family inevitably experiences in the car together.

We must have taken a wrong turn at the freeway exit, because suddenly we were directly beside all the crosses on the hill. It was startling, to see so many gleaming white sticks planted in the earth. I squinted, thought of the dead soldiers for a moment, and looked away.

"What are those?" Big A asked from the back seat.

"Crosses," I said.

"What for?"

"For the people who died in the war," DH said.

I cringed at DH's choice of the word "dead." I held my breath and waited to hear Big A's next question -- "What's dead?" But, for once she seemed satisfied with knowing just what the crosses were, and after a few more random questions, she was on to the next subject.

While I put it off for one more day, I know the time is fast approaching when I will have to have the death conversation with Big A. She's only three and a half years old but notices so much these days. Not just physical things, like spots on a bug, or the colors of the different roses in the garden. She also figured out by herself that a high-pitched cry means that Little A is hungry, whereas a low keening cry means the baby desires company. Sometimes when I am reading the paper or making coffee I will look up and find her staring at me, soaking in ... something. A thing I can't see in myself, but she sees.

Yes, the death conversation is coming. And even though I know that at some point she has to learn that we are mortal, that this is a fundamental thing that must shape her sense of meaning in her life, I will still mourn her learning of it. How I wish there would be no more crosses on that hill -- or any hill, for that matter. What a difference that would make.

Backstory 1: The Beginning of the Bad

When DH and I decided to try to start a family, we both worried. I grew up hearing about my mother's multiple miscarriages and her heartbreaking stillbirth, so unlike many who naively jump into trying to conceive who figure that they'll be hatching a cute little baby bump in no time, I didn't think the sperm and egg would automatically get together post-haste.

So, when got knocked up the very first month we tried, I was happily shocked, but still nervous that my mother's infertility history was something she'd passed along. The first trimester every time I went to the bathroom, I was sure that I'd find blood in my underwear. But despite a terrible morning sickness that lasted for 20 weeks and then terrible leg swelling that lasted the rest of the pregnancy, things kept chugging along. Ten days past her due date Big A made her entrance into the world. While it wasn't a "textbook" perfect delivery, I had pushed her out by myself, and she was ok in the end, so despite the liberal oozing of both Big A's and my bodily fluids, I was pretty enthusiastic about the birthing process. I remember telling a delivery nurse "Oh, that was ... FUN!" after it was all over and she was cleaning me up. Labor had hurt like hell, but it was also so amazing and interesting that the only word I could come up with to describe it was "fun." While poor DH was fairly shell shocked and told me that he would understand if I never wanted to go through that again, I was certain that I wanted to have another baby at some point, even just hours after grunting through the marathon of contractions.


When we decided to try to get pregnant a second time, the whole issue of whether sperm and egg could get together wasn't something we dwelled on. In fact, DH and I were pretty blase about everything to do with the second pregnancy: we told people we were expecting before I was showing, and made lots of plans for the impending birth well before I was out of the first trimester.


I only had one nagging, quiet worry in the next pregnancy. There was no morning sickness. How could that be, I sometimes wondered. How could I be so sick for so long with Big A, but not have any illness to speak of the second time around? But it was easy to laugh off the worry, or ignore it. At least until my nuchal translucency and maternal serum screening test came back positive for Trisomy 18. We got the results when I was past the window for a CVS test, so we had to wait until I was further into the second trimester to get an amniocentesis to confirm or deny the findings of the screening test.


People throw around words like agony and torture cavalierly. But the agony DH and I felt during the three weeks between screening positive for T18 and confirming that diagnosis via amnio were agonizing and tortuous is an old school, biblical sort of way. The first time I read about Trisomy 18 online I nearly vomited and had to lie down for awhile. The phrase not compatible with life seared my brain. The description of the defects associated with the disorder were overwhelmingly serious and numerous. I had never felt so bleak.


Our friends and family did not grasp the depths of DH's and my desperation at first. They meant well. Really. But, they didn't understand that advising us to "just not think about it" until we had the amnio results was impossible. They thought sharing stories of neighbors and cousins and coworkers who'd gone through similar worrisome scenarios that had turned out just fine would give us hope, rather than alienate us. Every pregnancy has a scare, they'd say. Everyone made it really clear that they would be there to cheer for us when we got good news.


Nobody, not even my OB, brought up what the options would be for the pregnancy if it didn't turn out to be good news. No one at all felt we needed to talk about that right now.


In the center of that cloud of positivity and good intentions DH and I sat alone, frightened, bewildered. We had to figure out what to do next. We had to consider all the options, not just the good ones. Because whenever I had the courage to sit quietly with my thoughts about our situation, my instincts blew through me like an icy draft. I was fairly certain my baby was not ok.

Three days before Christmas the genetic counselor called us with the amnio results. She was jittery and stammered when announcing the news. I told her I wasn't surprised.

Everyone else was extremely shocked and horrified at the idea that the baby had a terminal disease. Nobody really knew what to say. Me, I had precooked Christmas dinner and wrapped all the gifts for Big A early, knowing that in all likelihood, her parents were not going to be up for last-minute shopping or party planning once they found out their baby was going to die.