Thanksgiving and Isolation

This Thanksgiving was incredibly difficult for me. I lit a remembrance candle for my son, and it had burned down all the way by the time we started dinner. This really upset me, but we were hosting and had to rush to get everything on the table while the food was still warm.
I regret not taking the time to light another candle so that Elias could be remembered and represented during our family dinner. I feel like a horrible mother for that. I know that sounds really stupid, but it's how I feel.  The prayer stated before dinner commenced did not mention anything about loved ones passed on, so between that and the candle thing, I was left with none of the things that last year helped me to feel my son was being honored on Thanksgiving.  I had no comfort - just the stress of errands, food preparation, and being social when I wanted to cry more than anything else.

Today the grief has resurfaced full force, and the tears are flowing freely.  I am feeling much like Brooke in her recent post about not being ready for the anniversary of her baby's death.  So much of her post resonated with me.  Of course, our losses were only days apart from one another, so it's no surprise I find myself in a similar spot at times.

I thought I was just tired today because I was back at work from being on Thanksgiving break, but now I realize the exhaustion is from grief bottled up inside.  I have been so detached lately from my grief.  Not processing, not working through things, not thinking things, just staying distracted. 
And let me officially go on record stating that it has bitten me in the ass.

The excitement over fall festivities, Halloween, and Thanksgiving had me distracted.  Now that the next "holiday" is Elias's remembrance day, my heart just feels so heavy.  The hubs and I have decided to do things much like we did last year in that we honor Elias on the day before the twins' birthday, as we want to honor his life (not the day we found out he had died), and we also want our daughter to have her own happy birthday (although obviously there will be tears shed in private as thinking about our son will be inevitable). 

It's all so complicated, and I don't know that it will ever be less so, as it's impossible to completely compartmentalize your feelings one way or another.  Inevitably we will have joyful moments on our son's special day just as we will have sorrowful moments on our daughter's special day, the feelings will bleed into one another, influence one another, and create a messy work of art that is life after loss.  The perfectionist in me wants things to work out less messy, but I know things will never be perfect ever again.  And really, they never were. 

So today I tried to blame my bad mood on so many other things.  Being back at work.  Being tired.  Having a headache.  The list goes on.  But really, I just miss my son.  So very terribly.  And what's worse is feeling like I'm not ALLOWED to miss him.  Like I'm doing my daughter some injustice by being sad at times, or like I'm not being a good friend or wife because I just want to be alone and cry every now and then.  As much support as I get from some people, at the end of the day there are times where I just really feel alone in all of this. 

The pressure I feel to just chin up and focus on the positive is too much sometimes, and I wish I could run off to a little island and just grieve for the little boy who should be sitting side by side with his sister coloring in books, playing with building blocks, and tormenting our cats. 
No one to act irritated or impatient with me and my grief, no one to change the subject when I do acknowledge my son, and no one to make me feel like an inept parent to my surviving child while I grieve the child I lost. 

Is there irony in that feeling alone in this only makes me want to isolate myself more by running off to a secluded island?

A little island without judgment, with endless Kleenex, and with plenty of FroYo.

Rekindled

I have spent way too much time throwing my own inner pity party over the people in my life who have utterly betrayed me.  People who acted like they were being compassionate only to gossip about my grief behind my back, ignore me for months on end, and then make up lies about it all to my face and pretend to be a decent person.

It has made me much more cautious.  There are very few people in my life who have pissed me off to the point where I will always remember it.  I don't hold a grudge typically.  Why waste the energy?  I will always, however, remember one person in college whom I trusted.  We both connected over very deeply personal issues, like food and body image issues, and then she stabbed me in the back and made all our friends choose "sides".  I was devastated.  Yet that pales in comparison with someone feigning compassion, love, and interest after the death of my son only to secretly judge me, never jump to my defense around others, and then ultimately tell me the friendship isn't working.  Would have been nice to know that before pouring my grief soaked heart out, am I right?  Would have been nice if she'd given me some cues as to how uncomfortable I was making her (apparently) rather than play along like a good decent person offering a shoulder to cry on.

I've come to learn that some things are just inexcusable and unforgiveable.  And yet, it doesn't have to hold a power over you.  You don't have to be held hostage to the negativity.  You can walk away.  No strings, anymore, ever.

I've come to learn that some people will literally stop talking to you once you've lost a child.  I can't analyze it.  I've tried.  And it makes no sense.  Never, ever, ever would I do that to anyone.  I've never stopped talking to a friend who has lost a parent to cancer, so I can't relate to just cutting someone out of your life simply because tragedy struck them.  There's no rhyme or reason other than to realize that true colors come out of people eventually, and now that I'm 30, I realize more than ever who matters in my life.  I'm absolutely done trying to phone and keep in touch with people who could ignore me for an entire year without so much as a flinch.  You know what those people are?  Baggage.  Negative emotional baggage.

I'm feeling a lot lighter these days without carrying that extra weight around.  Without wondering when so and so might call, or thinking maybe I should call to try and keep the friendship alive.

I have found some incredible people.  And before you assume they are loss people, that's not what I'm talking about.  Of course the loss mamas (and papas) I've met on my grief journey are some of the most incredible people I've ever encountered, and they continue to inspire me and fill my cup with love and appreciation for community.  But I'm talking about in real life friends that I've made, and only one of them is a loss mama.

The four friends I've made over these past almost two years since our loss have given me this amazing epiphany.  They've helped me to realize that I was doing it all wrong before, that my "friends" weren't really friends before, that it doesn't have to be that way.  That there are people who will actually call you to spend time together and nurture the friendship on a fairly regular basis.  People who work full time, have kids (well, half of them do), have a marriage, have a home, and still make the time in their lives for geniune social interaction.  People you don't have to go a year not hearing from but still call them your "friend".  Mutual respect with both parties wanting something similar out of the friendship, both parties feeling enriched by the friendship, both parties being able to be open and real about the crap cards life deals you at times, both parties being able to let loose and just have a good time.

I am ever so grateful for my four most recent friendships.  They are an investment, and not one I feel I will be blogging about later regretfully.  You see, I have clarity now that I didn't before, and I won't allow myself to be easily snowed or let my guard down so readily.  I realize that some people took advantage of my vulnerable state.  They knew I would spill my heart because my grief was raw and overflowing and needed an outlet.

No more.

The grief is there.  The pain is there.  I will carry it like a rock in my pocket forever, if you like a random movie reference thrown in.  But my friends in real life?  They don't get to see it, not unless that trust is solid, the friendship is balanced, healthy, and not one-sided. 

I am so grateful for new friendships.

My one friend recently met me for coffee and asked me how I've been doing.  Do you know how rare it is to hear that?  This friend doesn't even have children of her own much less understand my scope of loss, and yet she has been one of the most compassionate people I've encountered.  She asks me how I'm doing, and she really listens to my response.  She tells me the death of my son is not something I will ever "get over", not something she would ever expect me to get over.  Her eyes look down at her coffee as she processes her thoughts, and then she looks at me and says, "And in a way, you probably wouldn't want to get over it even if you could, you know?"  Yes.  Yes, I know.  And yet that is so profound of a statement.  Bold on her part, yet so perfectly true.  How does she know?  How does she know that conflicted feeling?  That the love and pain coexist, that the pain in itself is a connection to your child so you could never entirely wish it away, that "getting over it" couldn't happen when your love is and always will be so incredibly profound? 
Because she's a geniune human being, someone capable of real empathy, of putting herself in my terribly uncomfortable shoes in order to try and imagine some flicker of what it might feel like to have lived this unfathomable loss.  She goes on to tell me about her concern for me, that she recognizes that the loss of a child is something that changes a marriage forever, that she has such complete faith in me and my husband that if anyone can get through it, it's us.  She doesn't say it in a way that glosses over my struggles, our struggles.  Most of the time she is quiet, and nods, and seems deep in thought.  At times she acknowledges, "I just can't even imagine how must difficult this all must be."  Otherwise, mostly quiet, never jumping to quickly fill the silence with noise as so many others do in conversations they'd rather run screaming from.  Just sitting, listening, thinking, and abiding.  It amazed me, it humbled me, and it taught me a lesson about the false assumptions I've been making about the capabilities of others and about friendships in my life post-loss.

Compassion.  Empathy.  Openness.  Connection.  Honesty.  Encouragement without being fake, without judgment, without expecting anything in return.

Now that I've found people like this, I realize what a waste of time it was for me to try and hold on to people who were walking away from me all along.  I realize what a gift real friendship is.  I don't feel pigeonholed into this one identity, I don't feel that loss defines me, that the only people I could possibly relate to are other loss moms.  Knowing that I don't have to segregate from the land of non-loss women in order to be loved and respected is a huge epiphany for me, because for a while I was really starting to wonder if I could ever "fit in" with people who haven't "been there".

You have to make the decision that you are worth more than investing in people who don't invest back in you.  You have to be open to letting a little light in.  You have to be willing to accept that some people just won't like you, for no good reason, and that's okay.  They don't deserve to live in your head rent free.  And letting go of those people makes room in your life and in your heart for people who genuinely do.

I dedicate this post to my real friends, near and far, babylost and nonbabylost.  My cup runneth over, so much that there's no room in it for anger or bitterness toward those who have walked away or remained silent in my time of need.  Things are as they are, and I have learned so much about how ugly this world can be, but I've also seen so much beauty thanks to each and every one of you.

The Concept of "Time"

Today is one month since my childhood friend lost her beautiful baby girl unexpectedly to stillbirth.  We've reconnected a bit since her loss, and I asked her today if time seems to be flying by or standing still.  It got me thinking about the early days of my own loss.  How one month out was like nothing at all when it came to some semblance of discovering a "new normal".  How one month out, I didn't realize it at the time, but I was still very much in shock.  How I thought I had been through the anger phase.  I was sad, wasn't I?  So the anger phase must be over with!  I had screamed, wailed, thrown things, sure.  But it wasn't until three months out, for me, that the real anger hit.  The anger so fierce and so all-encompassing that it scared me.  I scared myself.  I wasn't really sure what I was even capable of doing in response to the anger.  But it wasn't directed at anyone in particular, which made it better, which made it worse, because I knew that going after someone wouldn't fix anything, so I wasn't really about to go do something stupid, but I also knew that throwing my rage in one particular direction wouldn't help me feel better, so I was just stuck.  And it became clear that those grief stages truly don't go in order or end up being "finished" one stage at a time in a neat succinct fashion.
Do any of you remember what one month out felt like?
Do you remember how time seemed like such a mysterious and inconceivable conceopt?
Was time flying by, or standing still?  For me, it did both, and I remember that being such an odd sensation – marking the days, then weeks, then months as they passed.  It felt like time was flying by – like it was just yesterday that I held my son, while at the same time it felt like everything was slow motion, and I wanted time to zip by because, as they say, “time heals” (ha!).  I wanted time to speed up so that I could get to that place that other loss moms told me about, that place where your baby isn’t the first thing you think about when you wake up.  That place where you can go until dinner time, and then stand at the stove making macaroni and cheese and suddenly think to yourself, "Oh yeah…My baby died" and feel the sad hit you like a ton of bricks all over again.  Which is true progress after going months and months with that ton of bricks hitting you on your first breath upon awakening to your living nightmare.  (I remember a post about this at Glow but can’t remember who wrote it or what it was titled, sadly.)  At the same time, I wanted time to slow down, because the further away I got from the date of my loss, the further I felt from my son. 
But then I knew. 
I knew that holding him, he had already gone away. 
I knew that was his shell. 
That time was just a concept, that it wasn't something that could truly separate me from my precious son.  That the love would stay forever.  That he would always be with me.  That he transcended time and space and was infinite, on his own journey.  That I could remember him through symbolism that spoke to me.  Through butterflies, sparrows in flight, the moon, and the stars.  My forever baby.  My son.

Superficiality = Trigger!

Anyone else feel their grief, particularly the ANGER stage, triggered by the superficiality of others?  This continues to be a problem for me.  Bit by bit I am trying to cut people out of my life who say stupid sh*t, but it's just everywhere, is it not?

Over the past year, I've heard several women complain (or post on their FB) about the most superficial aspects of their deliveries of LIVE BABIES.  I just want to scream, "You have NO F*CKING IDEA!  Try having your baby DIE!  THEN you won't give a sh*t that your makeup didn't look good during your delivery photos!"

I mean seriously.  These are people who know me, know my son died, and haven't ignored that fact.  And yet this simple realization is lost on them: That all that really matters is that your baby is alive and healthy.

Today, another such trigger.  A woman pinning newborn photography and commenting about how this time, all that she hopes for is a "normal hour" birth for her next baby, as her last baby was born in the wee hours of the morning.

Because she wants the pictures to come out with everyone looking bright eyed and bushy tailed, apparently.

Try having pictures of your baby dead, I want to say.  I'd give anything for one picture of my son alive, regardless of what time it was or what I looked like at the time, I want to say. 

But I don't.  Because then I'll just be "that crazy lady who can't deal".  And this is someone who really should know better.  She really should.  So saying something won't make any difference.  She obviously feels she is too good to have tragedy strike.  She is way too above simply hoping her baby is born healthy and alive.  She takes those things for granted, and simply ALL she hopes for is a good birth hour so the pictures turn out well.

It makes me want to scream and tear my hair out.

And this really isn't about her, or about anyone else in particular.  Because she, and the aforementioned woman, they simply represent the vast majority of society.  A society of seemingly blissfully naiive pregnant women who post photographs of jars of Prego spaghetti sauce to announce their pregnancies as soon as they pee on a stick.  A society that obsesses over nursery themes and picking the perfect shade of paint, a society that pays name consultants to select the perfect name for the baby, a society that spends countless hours researching and registering for products (most which are completely unnecessary) and throwing lavish parties weeks, even months, before the baby even arrives, not knowing what that outcome will be.

So why wouldn't they say superficial things?  They're a product of their society, right?  And society largely ignores the very real fact that babies die - that miscarriages AND stillbirths are more common than most people realize.  That all of this hoopla is simply setting women up to feel like freaks of nature and failures if the worst case scenario happens to them. 

I guess it's silly for me to think that maybe what happened to my son was something memorable to them, something unforgettable, something that would shake them to their very core and make them treat their own pregnancies with more caution and humility.

Maybe I am just in a place where I need to stay away from Facebook and Pinterest altogether.

My Forever Paradox

I wonder how I looked in those early weeks to outsiders.  How did strangers at the grocery store see me?  As a bereaved mother pushing a single stroller where a double stroller should be?  A woman with her heart completely torn out, fighting every moment to not go completely crazy and scream obsceneties at innocent bystanders?  A woman who would go out of her way to avoid even the mere sight of twins, any age, any gender combination?  A woman who had to make her husband go in to Babies R Us for returns and purchases, because she just.could.not.deal?  A woman who, while her husband wandered the aisles amongst blissfully naiive pregnant woman, would sit in in her minivan (specifically purchased for twins) and scream, rage, and wail, not even giving any thought to the fact that people might hear her? 

Did they see this complete shell of a person I was, just going through the motions, not really sure I even wanted to go on?  Did they see a woman who felt every morning upon awakening that she was punched in the stomach, heart torn out all over again, nightmare playing and replaying on some horrible permanent loop with the stop button nowhere in sight?

In the very beginning, I thought they knew.  I thought everyone knew. 

Everyone knew I lost my son, that I had been played a fool, that I had done seven weeks of bedrest only to lose him at the very end to something I had never seen nor heard of in the hundreds and hundreds of pages of pregnancy books and countless websites I'd read, that I'd had a prior loss and was just angry as hell at the world, that I was hanging on by a thread so thin you could barely discern it was even there.

It felt like a big neon sign was hanging over my head, flashing "Dead baby!", and it was all anyone saw, it was me, it was my life, it was my identity, it was everything I ever was and everything I had ever lost advertised in two words for the entire world to see, judge, and pity.

As the weeks wore on, suddenly it occurred to me that people really didn't know.  They really didn't know.  This very simple rational logical fact was so elusive to me for a while, until it suddenly wasn't.  And I didn't know what to do with this epiphany.  Should I be sad that they don't know?  Did I want them to know? 

I quickly decided that everyone should know.  EVERYONE should know.  Because why they hell not?  Why should I hide this simple fact?  Why should I allow strangers to ooooh and ahhhh over my little girl without any acknowlegment of my sweet boy?  It wouldn't be fair to him.  He was just as loved and just as deserving of recognition and attention.  I HAD to tell people.  It was my job as his mother.  It happened, and I wasn't hiding it.  Not from any random person who dared ask me about my daughter, even the random Home Depot worker just trying to make conversation while they rang out a few lightbulbs and waited for our charge card to go through.

When I was in that mode, it angered me whenever people who knew us would visit and NOT say something about our loss or ask us how we were doing or just ANYTHING.  You know?  Address the fact that we had TWO.  Dont' say "When she was born..." say "When THEY were born".  I mean it's no secret I had TWINS.  (To be honest, it still irks me when people use the singular in talking about the delivery.  It seems to deny his existence.  He was stillborn but still born!)

Then, something very unexpected happened.   I went to visit a family member at work, and everyone there oooohed and ahhhhed over our daughter.  They didn't say a word about our son, our loss, or ask how I'm doing.  And I waited for the anger, and waited, and waited, and....where did it go?  What was that I was feeling?  Exhilleration?  Joy?  Bliss?  Could that even be possible?  Of course, it only lasted a little while before I felt horrible again.  Worse than horrible, because how could I allow myself that joy when my son was dead?!  So now I had guilt upon guilt and the missing him and all that I usually felt. 

That one experience though, it made me realize that eventually, I would be able to find moments, pockets of time, where joy would be present.  I would enjoy my daughter at times without necessarily having to think about how much I missed my son.  That as the weeks, months, and years would trudge on, those segments of time just might be more than a few minutes at a time.  The thought was a comfort, even though I felt very conflicted by it, as I felt I was betraying my son by feeling joy.  But I was betraying my daughter by NOT allowing the joy to be felt when it was there.  So I've had to learn to just let be what is, to take the sorrow and the joy both, to hope that they both balance one another out somehow (not that having her could EVER take away the pain of losing him!), to just feel what I'm feeling and not be guilty about the joy.  So envious, always, of people who simply know the joy of their living children without the pain of having to say goodbye to a child muting that joy so often.

I realized then too that many outsiders would simply see us out with our daughter and think we were a new family of three, not knowing that we were a family of four minus one, which is very, very different.  And sometimes, instead of that angering me, I felt okay with that.  Even pleased with that, I must admit.  It felt like a rebellion in a way.  Like let me keep something, let me take what I can from this, let it be okay for strangers to just see us and not know, let us wear this identity as a family of three for a bit to just relieve some of the heavy heartbreaking burden of being four minus one.  Even for a few minutes, even if it's a lie.

At twenty months out, I'm starting to think the world really doesn't always need to know.  This doesn't define us.  Our daughter is her own precious individual human being and is no less for her brother having passed away, and she deserves to be loved, cherished, adored, and celebrated on her own behalf.  No asterisk needed, no footnote, no sidebar, no epilogue, just on her own.  I know that now, to the core of my very being, and it's not a defense mechanism, it is simply The.Truth.

And it does make me feel better, to some degree.

But still, I find it's such a hard line to walk.  Wanting my son to be "counted" and recognized as being part of our family yet not wanting that loss to define him, to define us, or to determine how we choose to be in this world as a family.  I feel like it's my forever paradox.

Therapist #3

Third time's a charm.  I really have very little to say about my last therapist.  She was much more into psychoanalysis, had specific things she wanted to work with me on, and was overall sensitive and generally helpful.  I shouldn't be using past tense, because technically I am still her client, but I am taking a break for now.  The sad thing is that the billing department keeps messing things up, charging co-pays that I already paid (with credit cards so I have proof of payment), and with some changes to my insurance as of April that I didn't realize would impact things I've had to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket.  It isn't a lot of money compared to the overall, I realize, but it wasn't something we had planned for and saved for because it had always been covered previously.  Yes, I still feel the need to talk to her from time to time, but it's sadly become more stress than it's worth with the insurance changes and billing mess ups.  Kind of another kick in the face really after everything else.  I finally find someone who's decent, but it's just a pain in the butt.  : /

So there you have it.  The story of my three therapists.  I'm sure some of you have been through many more than I have without any success, as I know from personal experience there are some bad therapists out there!

Therapist #2

So, after deciding therapist #1 was clearly not for me, I sought out a new one.  This woman supposedly specializes in women's issues and pregnancy loss but is also an actual psychologist and social worker, if I remember correctly.  Let's say I had high hopes for her.  My old OB had told me she'd heard some "iffy" things about this therapist, so at first I was skeptical, but after therapist #1 fell through I was ready to give it a go anyway.  I spoke with a couple of local people who had great things to say, so I felt good about my prospects.

At first, she was awesome.  She didn't just say, "You're so normal!  Everything is so normal!!!"  She was actually pissed off right along with me.  I was deep in the anger phase.  So deep in anger that it sometimes scared me.  And this woman would be all like, Yeah!  What happened to you is bullsh*t! (basically).  And that's what I needed at the time.  Someone to just sit and not tell me it's all okay, but that it wasn't okay, that it was a horrible injustice, that I had a right to vent and rage and just hate the world if that's how I felt. 

But how far do you get toward any semblance of "healing" when your therapist is all Yeah the world just sucks!  I mean it was refreshing in a way, but after awhile, I don't think either of us knew where we were going with our sessions or our dialogue.

She never actually had a "plan" for our sessions or topics she wanted to get at.  It was always So how are you doing?  And she'd let me bitch for a solid hour.  Great, but you know, I could talk to a wall for an hour and it'd be a lot cheaper.  I kind of thought that as an actual psychologist she would have some tools up her sleeve or some kind of methods to her madness, but it really didn't seem that way.  I should add here that I am a licensed school counselor, so I am familiar with a lot of methods used in counseling, and I just didn't see this woman doing a whole lot of "work".

At one point, when I opened up to her about my lack of faith and feeling God betrayed me, she actually did something that made my jaw about hit the floor.  She started going on and on about Judaism and how I should really check it out, how it doesn't contain x, y, z hypocrisies that the Christian faith does.

Can we say UNPROFESSIONAL?!  You do NOT try to convert your clients' religious orientation!  Basic ethics, lady!

She also pushed drugs on me, two different perscriptions.  One was an antidepressant, and the other was some sort of heavy painkiller.  When I asked her how I would know when I needed to take the painkiller, she said Oh just you know, when you feel like you want to just relax.  I said, "Well, I don't really like taking anything unless I really need it."  She said, Lindsay, you poor thing, you have been through SO MUCH.  You just deserve a break, you really do.  Taking this pill will be like taking a really good strong drink.  Just like, "ahhhhh" and relaxation.  Which is what you deserve.

Is it just me, or does she seem like a pill head to you?

Is it just me, or does it seem horribly reckless for her to have been prescribing me more than one medication that would have numbing effects?  Doesn't it seem counter-productive, in a way?

I almost stopped seeing her after that session.  But then I went back for one more.  At which point, she told me (with regard to losing my son), You know what?  It really could be worse.  You could have been pregnant with triplets and then had one of them born disabled.  And then have to watch the two healthy children interact while their disabled triplet misses out on so much in life.

First of all, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT COME FROM?  HOW IS THAT RELEVANT TO MY EXPERIENCE?
Second of all....No.

Just no, no no.

That isn't worse, not at all.

There are a lot of reasons why that is not worse.

That woman she speaks of did not have to bury her child.

I almost laughed in my therapist #2's face that day, truly, and I wish I would have.  I wish I would have laughed hysterically and told her that therapists are trusted professionals that are paid to say the right things in a world where most people say everything wrong or avoid us entirely.

Three strikes, three red flags, and she was out.

Shame on her.