You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2007.
Last night I was falling asleep around 10, exhausted, when the date struck me. It had been a month since the miscarriage, and today I was having my follow up appointment. As a result, I couldn’t fall asleep until 3.
I spent several hours researching international adoption, which was somewhat informative if not particularly encouraging. It did, however, clarify that from start to finish, it would take longer than having the additional 2 miscarriages I need to get hardcore testing or an infertility diagnosis. Some require 3-5 years of marriage or relationship, which is also going to take a bit of time. Husband and I have been together for 2 1/2 years at this point.
I’m starting to get to a point where I’m looking at my next pregnancy as my next miscarriage in waiting some of the time. I don’t know if it’s assuming the worst and hoping for the best.
The meeting today helped me reach something more of a peace. Finding out that after the first period it’s about our choice and not medical dictates, which gives me more power back, something I feel like I lost in early September. If Husband does start a new job and we decide to wait for a bit of time, at least it will be our choice, which is a LOT better than the alternative.
My new psychotherapist is theorizing that I’m so baby crazy because I desperately want a bond with someone that makes up for the crappy mother/daughter relationship I have with my own mom. While on one hand it’s easy to shrug it off as blame the rents nonsense, there is something to it.
My mom and I have nothing in common except we’re related. She stays at home and crochets. Period. She does not vote, watch the news, read anything beyond the kind of romance novel with a half naked man and woman on the front. She does not follow gossip. She doesn’t like to travel. She doesn’t go farther than maybe a half hour at most for shopping. She’s not into fashion, makeup, or hair. She wears thick white socks with black loafers. She does not have a college education. When we talk, there are very few topics of conversation.
She loves me, she really does. And I love her. But we just have nothing in common. If we weren’t related, we wouldn’t be friends, and that’s the worst part to admit.
When I examine my relationship with Husband, I see that in some ways I use him and his family to get the things I’ve missed. I see his parents almost every week for dinner on Sundays. I’ve adopted his ethnic culture because I have no ties to my own, whereas he’s first generation American and the ties to India are strong. I felt safe marrying him because there have been maybe 2 divorces in his family, ever.
I don’t have a dad, so I don’t have a different parental relationship to make up for what I’m missing with my mom. My grandmother was the one I was close to, and she died 17 years ago when I was 12. Which means she’s been gone longer than I knew her.
I am missing something.
But while it’s a conveinent reason, or a conveinent excuse, I don’t think it’s the root reason. It may, however, be a contributing factor the urgency I feel.
However, we can’t ignore that I’m the kind of person who likes a plan, and having that plan fucked up messes with my universe in a very real, very scary way. And losing the baby most certainly threw my schedule out the window.
I feel like my body betrayed me, and that I can’t trust it to do it’s job. And considering that you can’t get away from your body, it’s hard to have an adversarial relationship with it.
Beyond all of that, it’s TIME. I did the college thing. I did the grad school thing. I lived on my own. I travelled. I got married. It’s what comes NEXT.
And…have you SEEN the little hats in the baby section of Target? Have you held a newborn? Have you been smiled at by a baby? How can I NOT want one, even if it means sore nipples, dirty diapers, and colic?
I finally made an appointment with a grief counselor. Part of me feels like this is yet another failing-my inability to deal with Hope’s loss, just as it was failure to have been unable to stay pregnant. But the more intellectual side knows I’ve struggled with depression since I was young, and that this is a major enough event that it’s only right that I need some help to get through it.
I just wish it weren’t so damn early in the morning.
I haven’t been sleeping well-I don’t remember the last time I went to bed before 3 am or, more accurately, to sleep before 3/4 in the morning. Which is the start of a vicious cycle wherein I need to sleep until noon so as not to be exhausted, but then am not tired at midnight.
Today I had to get up and begin functioning at 7:10 on about 3 1/2 hours of sleep. If I can survive the day (maybe with a one/two hour nap), hopefully I’ll collapse into bed at a decent hour tonight and begin to reset my internal clock.
I don’t think it’s just the wacky sleep schedule that’s driving this, though. I think I’d prefer to sleep away most of the day when things seem at their most real, when I have to interact with the greatest number of people. It’s much easier to be awake at 3 am when most people are asleep, the world is dark, and you can pretend that nothing exists outside the walls of your apartment.
By a pregnant woman I don’t even know…
I called my best friend today to ask if she wanted to come over and hang out. She’ d love to, but she has a baby shower to go to first.
A baby shower.
Fuck.
I read a book proposing that most miscarriages are the result of an autoimmune disorder. I’ve become obsessed with getting tested for them, but there’s not way in hell my doctor will recommend it.
One miscarriage is just “normal” I’m told.
How can it be normal? Why isn’t there more research and science about this? Why didn’t Hope’s remains get tested thoroughly? Why aren’t I getting a battery of tests?
I was cramping like hell from the time of implantation onwards, and it only got worse. The severely retarded fetal growth should also be a big red flag. But instead I’m convinced I’m going to have endure this AGAIN for anyone to take me seriously. Which will mean two dead children when there should have been none.
I’m so angry.
Yesterday was my husband’s birthday. Today was his party. Our friends know what happenned with Hope, so I got a lot of “how are you” to which I perkily said “fine.”
I’m not fine, but I didn’t feel like it was the appropriate place to say that.
I’m just trying to keep living in spite of myself.
Last night we had sex for the first time in over a month (I wasn’t allowed to have sex or orgasm during the threatened miscarriage stage and then wasn’t allowed to have sex during the bleeding post D&C stage). The weird part was remembering that we have to use condoms.
I was struck by how much I hate them. I know a lot of women say that they can’t tell the difference, but I definitely can, and I hate it.
Which of course makes me rather sad, realizing we’ll have to use the stupid things for at least another 8 weeks. sigh.
It’s only been a week since the D&C. It feels like a year ago. Sort of how once I found out I was pregnant, I only sort of vaguely remembered the days when I used to eat junk food (of course, today I’ve totally returned to my craptastic food preferences-something I have to give up again soon as part of my “making the body ready for a baby” vow”).
The only real reminder is the constant drizzle of blood.
The flip side is that I’m looking around asking myself how the fuck we got to October already. Where the hell did all the Halloween costumes come from?
Even though it’s not like I would’ve had a baby this Halloween, the infant Halloween costumes made me stop yesterday in Target, and stroke them wistfully, realizing I won’t (likely) have a baby to dress up next Halloween either, as it’s unlikely we’ll start trying before February, and I’m not some kind of evil wench who wants her baby early just so she can dress up a 3 day old in a costume.
I can handle the pregnant women showing up everywhere I look (mostly). I can handle the baby food aisle at my grocery store. I can even handle all the fucking storylines on tv with miscarriage or pregnancy (Jamie in Bionic woman lost her baby in the first episode, Betty’s love interest’s girlfriend on Ugly Betty is pregnant and no one knows who the father is, blah blah blah). In some small way I can warn myself that I’m about to enter the world (either in reality or through the tv) and I could run into pregnancy/babies there, and steel myself for it.
What I can’t seem to handle are the moments of realization. Realizing I might as well get my new winter coat tailored since I won’t be second trimestering my way through the snow. Realizing that there will be no Halloween costumes for my baby next year. Realizing that I haven’t even stopped bleeding and thusly can’t have sex even with a condom so I can’t begin the countdown until I COULD start trying again. A million small realizations that fly into my brain with no warning.
How do you protect against that?
Yesterday was the first 24 hour period that didn’t bring multiple fits of crying. I did tear up when talking with a friend, but I didn’t cry.
I suppose it’s a step, as was sending out the invitations to a small birthday party for my husband in 10 days.
I remember from my grandmother’s death that life HAS to move on, that we gain nothing from sitting in tears and despair for weeks on end. That doesn’t stop part of me from wanting to feel guilty-that I’m not grieving enough.
On the flip side, I take no pleasure in the fact that it took me five hours to eat breakfast and shower. I’m still moving slowly, as if through molasses. There’s a part of me that is growing impatient with that. I’ve always been the doer, and while my apartment is starting to resemble an apartment again, rather than chaos, I dislike the general malaise that I’ve fallen into.
Last year I called September my “lost month” to my friends. I was suffering from physical deterioration due to a herniated disc in my low back, and on September 8th was hospitalized for a week. I left the hospital using a walker, and on so many medications that I easily spent up to 17+ hours a day asleep from their combined side effects. Due to insurance bull shit, I couldn’t recieve the surgery at the hospital I was taken to by the ambulance, and had to wait until mid October for the surgery. I don’t remember much of anything beyond falling asleep to Gilmore Girls on the small tv in our guest bedroom, where I took up residence upon realizing that our bed was too hard, and that my sleep schedule was just too erratic, and forcing down a handful of cheerios so I could take my meds and drift back to sleep. I listened to books on tape because I couldn’t force my mind to focus enough to actually read and process the words at the same time. It was, in short, a pretty crappy month.
This year September was a lost month, too. I spent all of it in fear of losing my baby, in pain from the cramping, paralyzed by worry that doing anything would cause me to lose the baby. In the end, doing nothing helped me not one bit. I played endless games of pyramids on yahoo games, had the television on to HBO and then ignored the insipid teen movies that played out over and over again. I interviewed for jobs, trying really hard for the half hour or so that I was there, and immediately stopped caring if I got the job or not the second I walked out the door. Ironically, when I finally was offered a job a few days ago, I ended up turning it down.
I don’t want this October to be another lost month.
I suppose the first step will be leaving my house, but in order to do that, I need to be in a state where I can leave the house before rush hour would just trap me on the highway. Sitting in traffic would be too apt a metaphor for my life right now, and I’d rather avoid living out that particular experience.
