6 Months and Counting: An Update.

I can't even believe that it has been six months since The Worst Day. Well, technically, today was the middle of the three worst days. I was in the middle of my long induction, hopped up on morphine, and my thoughts and emotions were scattered.

I thought I was okay yesterday, which was six months since the day we first heard the terrible news. I was at work doing my thing when it just hit me. Thankfully, my boss is very supportive and didn't question it when I asked if I could have the next day off. She sent me home right then, in fact. I am so grateful.

Six months.

My depression has ebbed, though the past two weeks have been hard. I supervise summer camps as a part of my job, and this particular camp was full of little girls. A friend and a coworker had babies on the same day. Six months happened yesterday.

I have been sleeping most nights, which is a true blessing. The four months of not sleeping is what really sent me spiraling, I believe. Being back to work has lifted my mood and reminded me that there is still life outside the walls of my home. That I am good at things, and useful, and that someday I will have joy again.

I held a newborn baby yesterday for the first time since I held Haven. It was so hard, and my heart was heavy all evening afterward, but I think it was a good thing. He was just a beautiful little guy, sleeping so deeply as Danny and I passed him back and forth. His mom had a placental abruption and had to have an emergency induction. Though the situation was so different than what we experienced, I could tell that it had shaken them, made them think of us, made them so grateful for a good outcome when it could have been so different.

On that note, I am weaning from my antidepressants and hope to start trying again this month or next. I am so grateful now that I did not get pregnant when we were trying a few months ago. I was not anywhere near ready, and I was half out of my mind with grief and mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion. Now I feel like I can start this again with a fresh head, with a new strength.

And I am strong. It has taken me all of this time to realize that people were right when they said that I was strong as I put one foot in front of the other in the days after Haven was born. I was strong when we buried her. When I sunk to the bottom of the pit. When I crawled back out. When I faced the world again. When I learned how to smile again.

Joy comes from weird places, I find. Instagram, for instance. I didn't know what it was for months, until my boss explained (I might be the oldest 29-year-old ever). And now I am hooked. It actually brings me a lot of joy to take pictures and publish them. Cooking has been another joy. I love cooking, but when I was depressed I just couldn't. Crafts bring me joy. I have been making tutus and painting picture frames with friends, and it is lovely. Exercising. Well, I am working on that one, ha ha! I have also started another blog. Where this one has been a depository for my pain, the new blog will be a place where I track my redemption, my new beginning. I will post the link when it is ready to share, if you are interested in following. I will continue to need this space to put the pain, but I am now in a place where I need to sort out other feelings too.

Let's be clear: I have not arrived. I am not "all better." I never will be. I still cried on my way home yesterday thinking about my daughter's tiny body resting in my arms. No, I am not okay yet. But I will be. This is not where my story ends. It's just where it begins.

Headstones

The ground is thawing and we are starting to think about buying a headstone for our little one. I'm checking out the websites for local spots that do this sort of thing. I didn't know such places existed before. What a crap way to learn, huh?

Sometimes this all seems so surreal, like something that happened to someone else. I look at pictures of us from before The Worst Day, and I don't recognize myself. Who are those naive, happy people? They have no idea their lives are about to fall apart. That all of their plans for the future are about to be derailed.

Black, brown, or gray?

"Beloved daughter of..."

"Safe in Heaven"

An etched bird, perhaps?

Or some flowers?

Just one date.



How did life bring me here? When will I wake up from this horrible dream?

Pierced

Today marks one month since I brought Haven into the world. As she slid out into the nurse's waiting arms at exactly 7:30am, the room was filled with my anguished sobs. It was the most heartbreaking and beautiful moment of my life. One of the nurses said, "she is so perfect, Brandi." I was out of my mind with grief, and my husband was holding me and crying with me. It should have been her little squawking cries filling the room. She should have been hurried onto my chest for skin on skin time. I should have been trying to nurse her. Instead, she was out, and forever parted from my body, the only home she ever knew.

So many moments from that weekend are etched into my mind forever.

Today, I had a single lobe piercing done in Haven's honour. When it heals, I am going to get an amethyst stud for it; Haven's birthstone.

I like the idea of having a visible reminder of her with me at all times. Most people will never see my beautiful stretch marks! It's something pretty for my pretty girl.

Oh, Haven. Mama misses you so much, sweetheart. I'll never, EVER forget you.

Bitterness

Sometimes the bitterness creeps in and wraps its clammy fingers around my thoughts. You see, my husband and I have never had an easy time of anything. It's like we somehow found each other, the perfect mates, and then everything else went to shit in our lives. From the financial issues that have plagued us, to death and sickness and turmoil and pain in our families, to car accidents and therapy and multiple cars dying in freak ways, to being abused in the workplace and losing jobs, to owning houses that fall apart, to endless days of stress and anxiety... it's been one thing after another for 7 years.

And then we are blessed with the ultimate surprise. Without even trying, we suddenly had a beautiful baby girl on the way. I finally let down my guard and began to believe life really could be beautiful. But she is yanked away from me after a perfect, healthy pregnancy. No warning, and our baby is stolen from us. It is like a sick joke. And then that wasn't enough to throw at us, so just three weeks after The Worst Day, my husband's mother and step-father were in a terrible accident (thankfully, they will recover), husband comes down with a case of gout, then gets in a minor car accident, all in 36 hours.

We just feel bitter sometimes.

And so my mind wanders, as it does when you are home alone for hours and days on end...

Why did my baby have to die? She wasn't sick, so why her? Why us? After everything else? Those living newborns whose photos crop up in the minefield of my facebook newsfeed, why not them? (Not that I would ever wish this on any of those precious babies). But WHY? Did I do something wrong in my life that I deserve this? But she didn't do anything wrong...she'll never have the chance to do anything wrong. Did she die to fill some kind of dead baby quota and she was just the unlucky lotto winner? Is the universe trying to teach me something in the most perverse way possible? Why my spunky little girl and not the baby of a drug addict who didn't even try to take care of her baby?

Those cat-poster facebook memes tell us that everything happens for a reason...I don't think I believe that. I believe we can take the painful things handed to us and decide to turn them into good things in our lives, but I don't think that those good results are the reason we suffered. Sometimes, there are just no answers. No answers to the burning question "why?!" The answer is that there are no answers. For Haven, it was probably a cord accident, based on our recollection of events that week. Pressure on her cord. An awkward position, restricted blood flow, and death. All with no obvious sign until we put together the pieces in the following weeks.

A friend nearly lost her son just three weeks before we lost Haven, and she told me about the signs and the "bad feeling" that lead her to go to the hospital, where an emergency C-section saved her son's life. That's a part of what eats at me and why I feel so damned culpable. Because if there was a sign, we missed it. The only thing that might have been a sign were accelerated movements the night before, but they happened during her usual busy time, so I didn't think it was odd. She had been increasingly active for about two weeks, so this wasn't a red flag. We laughed, thought it was cute. Thought, "she is getting so strong, she must be almost ready to come!" Now I just have a sick feeling in my stomach when I think about that last night, because the last time I for sure remember her moving, she was probably dying. She was dying, and we were laughing.

Anyway. I know none of this will bring her back, and it's torture to think this way. I know it's a part of grieving when this kind of thing happens and that someday I will no longer unjustly blame myself, but punishing myself makes me feel a little satisfaction because there is no one else to punish. No one to blame. Accidents happen, and terrible things happen to good people. The end.

I just wish it all could have been different.

The Worst Day

"I'm sorry, I don't know what to say...there is no...we cannot detect a heartbeat." The doctor looked at me with sad eyes, then at the monitor, then at his feet. 

They wheeled me down to another floor for a second ultrasound. It didn't show anything different. She was still. No whooshing, galloping baby heartbeat came from the machine. My husband began to weep, and grief ripped its way from some dark corner in the center of me and out my mouth, filling the room with a ragged animal wail. It went on and on and I couldn't control it. A part of me had already known. I had known as I waited to be buzzed in at the door to the maternity ward. I knew when the fetal heart monitor was silent, when my belly felt oddly squishy as the nurse felt around for my baby's position. I knew before the first ultrasound and before the second. But I'd hoped....I'd hoped. The bottom fell out of the world. All joy was sucked out of my life in that instant. Colours grayed, music lost its sweetness, and food lost its taste. She was gone, my beautiful baby girl was gone, and so was the person I used to be.

It was just over two weeks ago. It was Valentine's Day and my last day of work before maternity leave. A day of celebration. I finished up some projects for my work replacement, then went for lunch at one of my favourite restaurants with my closest coworkers. I opened a gift: tiny, hot pink ballet shoes, a plush, hooded baby towel, a practical onesie. I oohed and awed. We ate and joked about the baby, talked about what I was looking forward to the most. "Everything," I said, with a shy, crooked smile. I poked at my belly a few times during my meal. Shook it gently from side to side. "You're awfully quiet in there today!" I was glowing. Powerful. Triumphant.

I was also a little uneasy. Was she sleeping longer than usual? Wait...had I for sure felt her move that morning? Or had I only felt Braxton Hick's contractions pushing things around? I went back to work and called my husband. "Don't be worried, but I haven't felt the baby move much today - I think we should go to the hospital, just in case."

Every memory of that day makes me feel physically sick. I hate the me I was on that day. I wish I could shake her and scream at her, "it's too late! She's already gone! You lost her in the night while you were sleeping and you don't even know it yet! How could you not know?" I also envy that me. She was so brilliantly, beautifully, perfectly happy. She was so hopeful. So confident. So alive.

We had been calling our baby "Shrimpy" since the week we found out we were pregnant; my pregnancy book had said that she looked like "an oddly shaped prawn." But her true name we had picked out long before and had kept it secret from all but family. Haven Melody... "safe place" and "music, song." When we found out at 19 weeks that we were indeed having a girl, we were overjoyed. Haven was real, and she was ours. We had imagined our future daughter for years, and now a surprise but welcome pregnancy would give us a chance to start the family we so wanted. We were going to have our longed-for, dreamed-about baby girl. We had joked about so many scenarios over the years, tried to imagine what she would be like. This little person growing inside me already had a personality and a history that she didn't even know about yet.

The third trimester came and we drank the Kool-Aid. Stillbirth was something that happened to other people. Something that didn't happen very often. We had no idea that babies are born still every day and no one ever talks about it. Not your family doctor, not your obstetrician, not your pregnancy book. It's the dirty little secret that is hidden from pregnant women to protect them from worrying. We had no idea that, as first-time parents, we were at a higher risk of it happening to us, even though I had a normal, healthy, "picture perfect" pregnancy (my OB's words). That 50% of the time, parents get no answers, even after an autopsy. That research is scarce, and "stillbirth" is an umbrella term that can mean one of so many scenarios. That it can happen very suddenly, with no warning, and you can go from the heights of happiness to the depths of grief on the turn of a dime. Death can rob you in your sleep.

She's gone. My baby. My hope, my future, my joy.

We are among the "babylost." Parents with empty arms and a hollow ache. Adrift. But she is still in our hearts...our love for her is Haven's Melody.