It's a Pity Party, and I'm Invited.

How much did I lose on my journey to start a family? Is that even something quantifiable? Sometimes, when I think about it all, I get so overwhelmed, so I'm going to spill some of it here to let it loose and begin to work on letting it go. Because self-pity is not my style, truly. It just doesn't suit me, nor does it honor my son.

What I lost...
-My first pregnancy ended in a completely unexpected early loss (I had no idea you could have a miscarriage without any symptoms of bleeding, cramping, etc…)
-Months of my life out of grieving and trying to recover from the blow of my miscarriage.
-Months of my life trying to conceive again (wherein I felt a profound sense of loss every single time my period showed when I just wanted a positive pregnancy test).
-The happiness of just being *pregnant* because I was terrified of bleeding and miscarrying again.
-The joy of having an ultrasound because at the first one and every single one thereafter I was terrified there would be no heartbeat.
-The joy of a “normal” pregnancy, because with twins I was high risk and had to worry times two, even though I was already worried more than your average pregnant mom before ever hearing the words, “There’s two in there!”
-The excitement of finding out their genders, because I was convinced something would be very wrong with one or both of them or that they would see my cervix shortening prematurely which would indicate I could very well lose them both.
-Feeling “normal” and “functional” at work because I couldn’t move around like I needed to or focus on any task in front of me.
-Not being judged by others, as suddenly people were criticizing me (sometimes openly, sometimes behind my back) for being so cautious and being a “worry wort” (clearly not understanding the psychology of pregnancy after a loss!), “oversensitive”, “living in the past”, and/or “a pregnant diva”, all because I wanted what was best for my babies and was willing to sacrifice whatever might make them safer and healthier. (Apparently I was expected to climb two flights of stairs up to fifteen times a day while in the third trimester with twins without going into a panic about preterm labor.)
-The joy of a “normal’ pregnancy and feeling like being pregnant with twins was very literally a subculture in and of itself that none of my friends (other than other twin moms online) understood.
-The ability to talk lightly about my due date with people who would ask, because “Well my due date is 12/31/10…But twins come early, so it could really be any day now” (followed by looks of shock and horror that I would say something so NEGATIVE when I was just stating what I had been told hundreds of times by various medical sources…Again, with the twin thing being its own subculture that many people do NOT understand…)
-The ability to freely purchase all the baby things I wanted / needed, because I would somehow “jinx” things the way I must have jinxed them before when I bought a few things and ended up miscarrying.
-The ability to work until my water broke, as I had fully intended when we planned to have a baby.
-The freedom to not do seven weeks of bedrest wherein I turned into a complete and total hermit and felt completely disconnected from my friends who mostly did not visit nor make a point to support me during one of the most trying times of my life. (Bedresters are their own subculture as well…)I had the joy of hearing "Oh just ENJOY this time! It's like a vacation! You just wait until those two little babies are here...You will be sorry you didn't just relax and enjoy all the peace and quiet of not working and having bedrest!!!"
-The freedom to drive places, eat out at restaurants, go shopping, get a breath of fresh air while taking a brisk walk, amongst many other things so that I could do bedrest in hopes of ensuring the health of my children.
-The luxury of asking my husband to go out and get me peach frozen yogurt and rub my back, because he was too freaking busy taking over the care of the entire household, chores, and meals, while I was on full bedrest.
-Feeling closer to my husband through the pregnancy instead of feeling like I was a burden because of my lack of mobility.
-My privacy, as I pretty much lived on the couch in our family room for a month and a half.

I lost all of that and then some. I did it all and then some, to bring my twins into the world whole and healthy, and then one died anyway.

Meanwhile, surrounding me were women who were very careless with their pregnancies, women who even blatantly ignored doctors’ orders and seemed to flaunt it in front of me, who all (thankfully) delivered live, healthy, breathing babies despite their complete ignorance and carelessness.
Ten months post-loss, I get to read an article about a woman who ran a marathon without any regard to how dangerous it could be if she tripped and fell on her stomach while pregnant. She and the baby were (thankfully) just fine. She even got fame for it.
I also get to read articles about women who seek no prenatal care at all and birth living, breathing, healthy babies only to kill them out of complete negligence or intentional murder.

What do I get? I get eight months of “I’m so proud of you!”s followed by a lifetime of “I’m so sorry!”s and people pitying me, hoping that babyloss isn’t “catching”, trying to avoid eye contact as they pass me, and secretly judging me STILL. Judging me for how I acted during my pregnancy, judging me for how I handled everything, judging me for going back to work “SO quickly!!!”, judging me for leaving my daughter with loving family members while I go back to work, judging me for wanting to acknowledge that I am a twin mother, judging me for recognizing that I will always have a son, judging me for connecting with other babylossmamas, and secretly blaming me for the death of my son. Because healthy women under thirty years old who do bedrest and follow all the doctor’s orders just don’t end up with dead babies. So clearly, OBVIOUSLY, I must have done something wrong. They tell themselves this, because it helps them sleep better at night; it protects their Faith, and it eases their fears that a horrible tragedy like mine could happen to them.

For the record, I am not bitter about my bedrest. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I believed in it, and I was happy to do it, but I won't deny that it was very trying.
What I do resent is thinking that all of that would equal a happy outcome, because I really did, and this loss just completely blindsided me.

ALL of this, when you look at the entire picture, was / is incredibly traumatizing to me, and I don’t think I fully understand the psychological or emotional impacts of it all on my heart, my mind, my identity, my life. I don’t even feel I have recovered from the miscarriage, let alone all that followed, and the feeling like I could NEVER do enough for my babies…and then one died anyway. I am just trying to process all of this and what it means in terms of who I am and how the pregnancy, not just the outcome, but how all I endured during the pregnancy in and of itself has profoundly changed me. I sometimes think those are the things I struggle with in terms of PTSD even moreso than the loss, just the everyday mental torment of never feeling I was ever doing enough for my twins. All the books I read that said how much sleep I should get, how much water I should drink, how many calories I should consume, only for me to vomit daily and feel I was failing my babies daily, even though they grew right on track and were healthy at every single checkup.

I tried so hard to do everything right. It consumed almost all my thoughts and was my identity for the eight and a half months I carried them.

Bringing them home safe meant more to me than anything in this world. It was my greatest challenge, and my greatest blessing, even with how difficult it was on me mentally, physically, and emotionally.
How can I not feel I failed?
How can I not feel everyone is disappointed in me?
How do I ever reconcile that in my mind and in my heart?

I would sacrifice everything all over again if it meant he could be here with me.
I would lay on a freaking couch every second of every day for an entire year, for an entire decade, if it meant Elias could come back to me.
I would give up my job, my social life, my favorite restaurants, every holiday there ever was, every shopping trip, walk in the park, and family outing.
I would endure just about anything.
I would give my own life.

But I can’t.

Instead, I have to live without him.
Live without him, and live with knowing (in the logical part of my mind) that I did everything I could and then some, while others are careless and for whatever reason get rewarded for their carelessness.

The loss of my son.
The loss of the unique parenting experience that is raising twins.
The loss of my daughter’s same aged brother.
The loss of my faith in prayer, in a God that intervenes, and in a God that is looking out for me and my family.
The loss of my understanding of the world.
The loss of believing there is any sense of logic, reason, or order to this world.
The loss of my world as I knew it.

What else must I lose?
Friends who don’t want to be reminded that horrible things sometimes happen to good people?
People being proud of me, because how can you be proud of a woman who couldn’t keep her baby alive?
My marriage?
My self esteem?
My self worth?
My identity?
My morality?

Who knows where the loss will end, if ever, for me.
It’s a pity party, and I’m invited.
I’ve gone from being a member in the subculture of being pregnant with twins and feeling misunderstood, to the subculture of being a bedrester and feeling judged, to the subculture of being a babylossmama and feeling ostracized by society. I’ll never, ever, ever be “normal”.

And during my next pregnancy, whenever that may be, I will still be cheated.

Cheated out of the joy of a blissful, ignorant, naïve pregnancy that most women get to experience.
Cheated out of thinking a positive pregnancy test means I will have a live, breathing, healthy baby at the end.
Cheated out of thinking that a full anatomy scan that shows everything is fine means I will have a live, breathing, healthy baby at the end.
Cheated out of thinking that once we are “viable” we will have a live, breathing, healthy baby at the end.
Cheated out of thinking that once we are past the danger zone for prematurity we will have a live, breathing, healthy baby at the end.
Cheated out of thinking that once we are at term we will have a live, breathing, healthy baby at the end.
Cheated out of thinking that multiple ultrasounds and non-stress tests and biophysical profiles that all turn out with normal results equal a live, breathing, healthy baby at the end.
Cheated out of the excitement that ensues when a “blissful, ignorant, naïve” woman’s water breaks.
Cheated out of the excitement of packing a hospital bag with cute fuzzy socks and granola bars and coming home outfits and assuming that all will be peachy keen.
Cheated out of assuming that babies don’t die and that God is on my side so nothing will happen to me or my child.
Cheated out of hanging around the hospital chomping on ice chips and asking for my sister to get my chapstick and a tabloid for me to flip through to pass the time.
Cheated out of having my husband hold one of my legs while my mother holds the other and I deliver a live, breathing, healthy baby at the end.
Cheated out of even thinking that a planned c-section will ensure a live, breathing, healthy baby at the end.

Cheated, robbed, and ripped off.
From the joy of pregnancy, birth, a hosptial stay, and the “afterglow”.
There will always be one missing.
Two missing, to be exact.

And I don't know if my mind and heart will heal from being battered so.

And yet, the baby to come, the baby we are yet to conceive, the baby we aren’t even thinking about trying to conceive yet…Would not even have the potential to come into our lives had Elias lived.
So will I love that child that much more because of it?
Will I learn to resent that child because of it?

I think I will just miss my son, no matter what, and I will love my future child(ren), no matter what.
But what I’m hoping is that all this loss is over with, someday, somehow.

What I hope for is the ability to overcome these feelings of loss, to some degree.
To learn to enjoy pregnancy by embracing my utter lack of control over the outcome, which I was never able to do last time, or the last two times, to be exact.
To recognize that the end result is that I have a family, and even if my road to that end result is a rocky and terrifying one, I am lucky to have a family at all in a world where some women only experience infertility, loss, and no living children.
To recognize that I have delivered a living child, and I mother a living child, and her name is Evelyn, and she is the most beautiful baby girl I have ever seen, and no one can take that mothering away from me. Not today, not ever, no matter what.
To recognize that even though Elias died, our hearts in that hospital were so full of love for him…That the pain of his loss sprung from how much love we had, and still have, and nobody can take that love away.
To recognize that I am still a mother to twins, and I still have a son, and no one can take that away from me, and it’s part of who I am, forever.
To recognize that Elias is always with me. Always. He may just be my spirit guide, a butterfly flying free, a star in the sky leading me to live better.
To recognize that there were joyful moments with our daughter in that hospital, and during my c-section, when the doctors held her up for me to see, I knew I would live.

Easter Sunday with my daughter, without my son.

What can I say about Easter? It was my daughter’s first Easter, my daughter who is my only living child. I had been shopping for weeks in preparation for this holiday, buying cards, baskets, toys, trinkets, etc. Different colored grass for the baskets and plastic eggs of every color. A few days before the holiday, I did my own little photo shoot with my baby, dressing her up like a bunny, then a flower, then a butterfly.

On Easter Sunday, I dressed her up for church from head to toe. Everything was perfect from her purple headband to her white patent leather shoes. People in the pews were turning around during the sermon and admiring my little girl. “She’s just absolutely stunning” I heard someone say in the pew behind us. The woman in front of us poked her husband’s arm and urged him to turn around and look at how beautiful our daughter’s dress was. She had two dresses, one from each grandma, and did a “costume change” midday.

Our adored little baby girl, Evelyn. So loved, so wanted, so cherished.

It was all bittersweet. Would it always be this way now for the rest of our lives? Through almost every step, I kept thinking, Elias should be here, too. He should be getting baskets. He should have had a photo shoot. He should be wearing a little Easter suit, dressed perfectly from head to toe. People should be gawking over our gorgeous little man and what a perfect pair our twins are.

Instead, I stood in church on Easter Sunday with my daughter in my arms and my son in my heart.

Our precious little baby boy, Elias. So loved, so wanted, so cherished.

Easter Sunday was the first time I had attended church in a very long time – maybe a year, even - and I wasn’t sure how I would feel about being there. I kept thinking about the enormity of all that had happened in that church. That church was where I had attended several funerals for beloved family members. That church was where my parents were married over thirty-five years ago. That church was where my husband and I were married almost four years ago, where we took vows to stay together, for better or worse.

We had no idea what that truly meant or the challenges that lay ahead for us. I had no inkling, no hunch, no foresight of the sheer agony that awaited us - the anguish that was to come from my simple humble wish to build a family of my own. If I could go back in time to my wedding day, and tell our former selves what was to come, would we both still say “I do”? The chain of events to follow those two words would be heartbreaking. Would we have willingly put ourselves in a position to have our hearts shattered so thoroughly and abruptly? Would we have called off the wedding, assuming it was a sign that we shouldn’t be together?

I didn’t attend church during my pregnancy. I was incredibly sick and threw up almost daily through week twenty-one. That in and of itself was mental torture, as I scoured the pregnancy books that spoke on multiple pregnancies, and each one recommended eating an inhuman amount of food intake that I couldn’t pull off to begin with, and add to that the vomiting, and I was way under what was recommended. Yes, even with the anti-nausea medication. So every day I felt horrible that I couldn’t eat enough for my babies, even though my OB assured me they were getting all the nourishment they needed, and that I should stop berating myself for vomiting due to the increased hcg levels of a twin pregnancy. She told me I was doing a great job; still, I felt like a failure.

As soon as the vomiting subsided, I was back to work full-time, as summer had ended, and I was too exhausted to do anything on weekends but rest up on the couch and scour the baby name blogs, pregnancy sites, and moms of multiples forums. Then it was soon bedrest for me after my preterm labor, and I was forbidden to go anywhere but to my once a week OB visit.

So, in a nutshell, no church visits.

I missed church. I missed it very much. I ached for it. I thanked the Lord from my house, because I was unable to attend church, and I prayed every single night, without fail, for the safe arrival of my precious twins. I felt this intense connection, and as I mentioned before, I had never felt closer to God than I did during my pregnancy, even though I physically did not attend church services during my pregnancy.

Yesterday, Easter Sunday, we went to our pew, and stood next to the rest of our family. I felt like a fraud, standing there in the house of the Lord, when I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore. A few moments later, a woman sat in front of us with an infant carrier in her arms. She set it down. The baby was all in yellow, so we couldn’t tell the gender. From the conversation of the parents, I knew it was a boy, just four weeks old. Brand new. A precious little boy, a bundle of joy, a gift from God. I immediately imagined the woman having just given birth and all the joy she must have been surrounded with, all the balloons and congratulations that I never saw nor heard after my c-section. The couple in front of us opened their hymnbooks and sang their praises to the Lord, while I stood there, trying to hide my tears from my parents, thinking about my boy Elias. How I ached to hold him in my arms. How I ached to raise my voice and sing amongst the other believers without feeling like a total fake. How my heart was just broken, feeling so utterly abandoned and betrayed by the Lord.

I sang maybe two lines from the first song, but the tears came, and I couldn’t bring myself to sit there and mark the pages of the hymnbook in preparation for singing, like I used to. It became clear to me that I was far too angry and broken to sing this Easter. I stared at the stained glass images of Jesus and asked in my mind, “WHY?! Why didn’t you provide us with a miracle that would have saved our son?! He was perfectly healthy and ready to be born, how could you do this to us?!”

Then I asked myself why I was bothering to even ask Him these questions? He didn’t answer my prayers before, so why did I think he would answer these questions? How stupid was I to think that praying could actually help? Hadn’t I prayed that I would have no bleeding during my pregnancy, as bleeding would be terrifying and remind me of my miscarriage? Yet I still bled. For two terrifying weeks. Two terrifying weeks, where I had to endure not only the ensuing panic but judgment from others who said I was simply “not moving on from the past”, and “don’t worry, your babies will be fine”. I had to deal with an ER doctor that told me I wasn’t miscarrying this time – that if I was miscarrying, there would be cramps first, then blood, and the fact that I had no cramps meant that it would be okay – followed by a different doctor who came in and handed me a packet of discharge papers that read “threatened miscarriage”. I said, “I was just told this isn’t a miscarriage”, and he replied, “Oh you could lose these babies any day, and there’s nothing you can do, you aren’t out of the woods because you aren’t twelve weeks along yet.”

I thought this torment would be the worst of what I would have to go through, and I thanked the Lord for keeping my babies healthy through the two weeks of bleeding. Their heartbeats were strong, and they were there to stay. Even through the weeks of threatened labor, bedrest, home uterine monitoring, daily phone calls to the nurse to document my contractions (per OB's request). Instead of questioning why God had put me through all of that, I thanked Him for seeing me through and keeping my babies alive. I thought, when I bring two babies home from the hospital, I will forget ALL of this and just be grateful that they are here. I will let go of all my questioning of "Did I do enough for them?" and finally let the guilt subside over whether I ate all the right foods, rested enough, prayed enough.

I continued to pray.
Pray that that would be my last ER visit, which it wasn’t.
Pray that my cervix wouldn’t shorten prematurely, which it did.
Pray that I wouldn’t go into preterm labor, which I did.
Pray that nothing horrible would happen to my babies, but it did.

One died, and it had nothing to do with any of the things I had been worried about.

So the questions remain, the guilt is stuck, the mental torment is unending. Did this happen simply because I did not pray for it to NOT happen?! I never prayed, “Please Lord, don’t let one of my babies suddenly be dead at a routine thirty seven week ultrasound.” I have to say no, it wouldn't have mattered, since none of my previous prayers had been granted. Still, I never even entertained the idea that I might lose one – not this way. Earlier I had worried about vanishing twin syndrome, but this? The stillbirth of one? Does that even happen?!?! How could this happen?! After all we had ALL been through, all the hospital visits, OB visits, ultrasounds, research, planning, caution, bedrest, monitoring, HOW?!

Was it wrong for me to attend church service on Easter Sunday after all this? I don’t know. I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore. I don’t know what’s up or what’s down. The world suddenly lacks any semblance of order, of cause and effect, of rationality or logic. The world is a place where cautious, well-educated, financially stable, loving people lose babies for no good reason, while careless people who are indifferent to having children and are ignorant about prenatal care seem to be blessed with healthy babies in abundance.

You don’t believe me? Just watch the show “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant”. You will wonder how someone like me doesn’t jump off of a bridge or end up in the loony bin. I wonder how someone like me doesn’t jump off of a bridge or end up in the loony bin.

Why, after all this, do I feel like I still enjoyed my daughter’s first Easter?
Even without my son here?
Even without my faith intact?
Am I feigning this joy, putting on this show for her sake?

It’s horrible that I don’t even KNOW if I ever experience true happiness, even when I FEEL like I AM. All the things I mentioned earlier that I did with my daughter – the shopping, the preparing for the holiday, the photos, putting her baskets together for her first Easter – was it all a sham? Was it all just a huge distraction from my grief, a way for me to “pretend” happiness?

I guess I must still believe in God. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be so angry at Him. I don't know how, or why, but I must. Therefore, I must be an Idiot.