First Sunday in the Octave of Miscarriage

Everyday is a different set of emotions, and we shouldn't expect to see it as moving forward or backward.  Emotions simply are.  We accept them, feel them, respond to them, and process them.  Doing otherwise may damage us in the long run.  

Yesterday was a pretty good day for me.  I latched onto future plans and started planning for some videos I want to make about miscarriage, to help others.  I am not an expert on anything except my own expirience, and if I can be of any help, I want to.

Today I'm not feeling as good.  I'm more inward focused and with drawn.  I feel the buds of anger forming in me, and of desperation.  I want answers.  I have no answers about why this keeps happening to me.  There must be some reason, other than being on the older end of motherhood.  I have had a lot of testing done and it was all completely normal.  My doctor set an appointment for July 29th.  I have no other contact with him before that.  Apparently, its now too dangerous to come into the office anymore, so I have to do a video conference with him.  This COVID nonsense is getting so ridiculous when you can't even see your doctor for him to help you stop having miscarriages.  

I just want some answers.  I want some hope.  I feel like he did nothing to help me other than throw some progesterone at me.  Surely there is something more that could have been done?  

Church isn't even a blip on my radar today.  I am angry at God.  When we found out we were pregnant, we got in the car and went straight to mass and got a blessing for our pregnancy, in Latin, at the altar, with tears streaming down our faces.  It was wonderful and hopeful.  And it didn't make a bit of difference.  

The world seems to be falling apart around us.  And within me, falling apart.  I know I must keep going, but it's so very hard.  I'm so sad and angry.  I wanted this baby so much.  I see pregnant women complaining about being fat and tired and it just makes me want to scream.  Why does God give me babies in the first place and not let me keep them?  Why are we told "God knows what's best for us" and then I am to assume that it's best for my babies to all die?  Is it bad theology, bad interpretation, or just bad in general?  

Someone told me that suffering is a mystery, and not something to figure out.  Good, because I can't figure it out.  I don't think I'll ever figure it out.  

Writing to this lovely rain track - check it out.  Very calming. 

Perfectly folded

In the evening, as the sun starts to think of sinking a bit in the sky, the breezes get a tiny bit cooler.  The cicadas are singing their unmistakable song of summer.  Families are starting to settle into dinner and watching TV together.  And a heaviness descends on my heart.  It starts small; almost imperceptible.  Then it becomes a few blinks of a headache, a fatigue, a "I just need to lie down for a bit".  Then, before you know it, hours have past, the sun has gone away, and my thoughts are hopelessly tangled up in despair.  Thoughts of "what if..."

"...maybe I should have stayed with my old doctor".
"What if I had started progesterone a few days earlier?"
"Should I have stayed on the paleo diet?"
"I did have a glass of wine last week..."
"Maybe this was my last chance."

Thoughts are invisible, but they are heaviest things in the world.

I see flickers of health in me, mentally.  But sometimes it is crying or acting crazy.  Or writing bad words over and over in my journal.  A lot of times it is avoidance, or transferring my feelings onto obsession with some unrelated thing - "I need to find the perfect PopSocket for my phone!".  Or "I need to read about the history of human interaction with sloths".  Today was "I need to organize all of my quilting fabric into perfectly folded five inch stacks.". 

All of this is an attempt to gain control over some small aspect of my life.  My heart has been drawn and quartered, I think, because I can't feel much today.  Not much at all.  Except a dull, heavy pressure. 

I want to fold myself into squares in lovely rainbow order.  I want to be organized and have my life put together.  I want to make baby quilts for my own babies, not just other people's babies.  I want all this stored up love to be tangible. 

God has taken my joys.  I do have a few more left, but they are small compared to my children.  So I focus on the tiny things - the mundane and meaningless things, because they are in my power. 

Another Loss

It's really interesting to me how I'm always too scared to announce that I'm pregnant, for fear of it failing.  When it fails, I'm okay with writing about it.  So guess what I'm doing today?  

I still have never announced officially that I'm pregnant, not any of the three times I've been pregnant in the past year.  I was always of the conservative mindset that you don't announce until the end of the first trimester when the "danger was mostly passed" (lol).  Now that I've been pregnant three times, and never gotten past 10 weeks, I cannot conceive of being past the first trimester.  I was talking with my husband yesterday, before I got the utterly shocking phone call that my HCG had plummeted, and saying that it's so hard to be hopeful because I literally cannot imagine having a huge belly at this point, or seeing a heartbeat on the scan, or taking a baby home.  It's a foreign concept.  

Pregnancy to me is like playing Stella in "A Streetcar Named Desire", which I did.  It's putting on a pregnant suit and taking it off a few days or weeks later.  It's acting.  It's not real.  

But the devastation that follows it is real.  Whew momma, is it real.  It's lying in bed, silently crying and scrolling though Twitter while I emo tweet what I'm feeling and delete most of them later on.  It's messaging a few select people who I only talk to when I'm trying to get pregnant or losing a baby.  It's seeing babies in public, at mass, the store...wherever, and feeling my heart rate spike.  It's the endless pregnancy announcements that feel like a lead weight in my stomach.  It's watching myself become a more and more bitter and angry person every time it happens.  It's seeing myself rapidly age in the mirror.  It's having to go back and tell a few people that my pregnancy will no longer be an issue in their plans.  And then the actual miscarriage - curled up with cramps as my body goes through a tiny labor, canceling plans because "I'm not feeling well", and having to put on a brave face to a world that didn't even know I lost yet another child.  

This isn't a fun post to write or read.  But I must get my feelings out.  COVID-19 and the ensuing societal political dog-and-pony show have taken away my coping mechanisms.  I need to GET AWAY, but where?  Everywhere has restrictions.  I can't go visit my friends in New Mexico or New Orleans because there is nowhere to go once we get there.  Restrictions, distancing, capacity limits.  Places closed.  Quarantines.  The political implications aside, wearing a mask is chipping away at my sanity.  I need to be FREE right now and it is a very visceral set of chains to me.  I feel the world is closing in on me and it's hard to breathe.

I stopped being open with the world years ago when the politics started heating up to the point where people couldn't disagree and respect each other.  Now that I've lost my jobs, my income, all of my babies, and my social life...I'll probably start writing here a bit more.  (I hope).  I need community even though I'm an introvert.  I need people to talk to.  I need support.  I have the best husband in the world, but the weight of all of this is too much to bear.  

Choosing Positivity

For a "deep" person like me, people who were bubbly and positive always seemed shallow.  As a depressed teenager, I was full of angst and classical music and nights were spent in a candle-lit bedroom pretending to be Desdemona or Juliet, or maybe Eponine from Les Miserables.  The real and important people were always depressed or fading away from life, and the fake shallow people were happy.  I know now that this was just a way for me to deal with my own depression and trauma from childhood abuses.  It's pretty clever how kids can survive so much.  

If you have been reading my blog, Twitter, or listening to my online rants for any length of time, you might know that the past year has been an

absolute beating for my husband and me.  Starting in July of last year with our first pregnancy after a year of trying ending in miscarriage a few days later, to our second miscarriage over Christmas/New Years, to this ridiculous pandemic, to me losing most of my income and being laid off from the gym, being passed over for a wedding, everyone else being pregnant but me...it's been quite the year.  

Now I have a bit of hope brewing.  I'm not fully ready to share, but it's come to my attention that what I think, speak, and settle into actually have some bearing on my life and well-being.  Just sitting and marinating in my own thoughts and feelings needs some direction, because my "default" is definitely negativity.  

"Choosing Joy" is no longer a happy platitude.  It's a freaking hard task for me!  It is something I have to take elementary school type steps to approach.  As for now, I'm just choosing to say "I am grateful _______ and I'm choosing to enjoy rather than worry".  It's good medicine.  

The hardest thing is to remember that this doesn't make me shallow, and that depression isn't "deep".  

Get a hold of life.  Do hard things.