Sunday, February 23, 2014

Hormones + mourning = mess

I am a blubbering mess.

I've decided to blame pregnancy hormones. Because it's the only reasonable explanation for why I've been bursting into tears at the drop of the hat. I am a blubbering mess. With heartburn.

With the tears has come full blown nesting. Which has unintentionally led to more tears. In rearranging a corner of our bedroom to make way for a new chair (for baby nursing), I discovered an innocent looking bag lurking in the corner. A bag, it turns out, used to throw stuff in hastily, rather than putting it away.

From the time of Harper.

There were receiving blankets from the hospital. Extra pumping supplies. Hospital socks. And a letter.

A letter to Shea. Written, by me, for his third birthday. This is my tradition: letters to my son on his birthday, and sometimes in between, so one day he can read and know what he was like growing up. How much his mother loved him.

This letter was written the night before Harper was born.

I specifically remember writing it. Purposefully writing it before the baby was born, because I wanted to capture that last moment of his being an only child. I had come home early from the TEDMED conference, skipped the party, so I could have those last hours with only Shea, and I wrote that letter late at night, after tucking him in.

I was a blubbering mess then, too.

The letter is mostly a love letter to Shea. But I do mention that I'm worried the new baby might have serious health issues, and that I'm worried how that might affect him, our family.

With everything that happened in the weeks after, I guess I never tucked it into his baby book.

It's hard to read now, because I can barely imagine that time, worried, but not knowing what was to come. Having no idea that I was writing to my son about a sibling who would no longer exist three weeks after that letter was written.

As Shea's fourth birthday approaches, I've been thinking of that annual letter again. As impossible as it is to capture in words everything he means to me and every way in which he's evolved this past year, it is more impossible still to express how much in particular he meant to me this year, this year when so very much has changed. How much he has kept me alive through the sadness, how kind and sweet and empathetic he has been, even though he doesn't fully understand why I'm mourning, what makes me cry. He is still there with a hug, with a smile, with an offer to help me feel better.

And I feel nervous, writing to him at the dawn on another baby's birth, worried I might jinx it all again.

The tears fall.

Other things that have brought me to tears in the past 48 hours? A note, unearthed from who knows where, that appeared on our dining room floor, which was once attached to a bouquet of flowers sent for Harper's memorial. A small miscommunication with Lou over when to meet up this afternoon. The happy thought of feeling my new son on my chest for the first time, and the joy and relief that will bring after all the fear of Harper's birth. Not being able to open a can with a slightly bent can opener. Estate planning, because it's the grown up thing to do, but no longer with the naive belief that bad things don't happen to good people. Frustration at the yard work needing to be done. Watching Shea fumble in his attempts to invite friends to play at the playground or the ice rink, and the sudden worry that time and society will change my kind, sweet boy into something less guilelessly friendly, less innocent.

The overwhelming urge to protect my children from anything and everything that might hurt them. Even after having been made painfully, horrifically aware that sometimes that's impossible to do. Knowing that no matter how much you do, children get hurt, children can suffer, children can die.

It makes me want to run upstairs and hug Shea and never let him go. But I resist, because he's had a busy weekend, a happy weekend, and needs his sleep.

And so I cry. Typing this, I am angrily wiping away tears, because I'm sick of this irrational crying.

I feel like I can't possible sleep until I purge these stupid tears. The combination of out of whack hormones and mourning is a powerful and unpleasant combination.

Ugh.





Sunday, February 16, 2014

Almost ten months

Dear Harper bean,

It is almost time to celebrate (to mourn?) another month's birthday that you'll miss. Double digits. Ten months since the day you were born.

I had some quiet time today, and it is during those quiet times that my thoughts often turn to you. Not that there aren't still noisier, more obvious reminders. A former colleague asking how the baby was doing. Shea asking whether we would plant "Harper's heart" in the spring - a paper heart filled with seeds sent by hospice. Thoughts about avoiding May 5th, the date of your death, when scheduling my c-section.

But it is during the quiet times that I think of YOU. As your new brother cheerfully kicks and wiggles, I remember those long, worried hours, lying on my side, begging you to make those faint reassuring movements. The days spent combing the internet, reassuring myself it would all be OK, talking to you, reassuring you it would be OK, too. The painful uphill journey of falling in love with you and the painful end-of-the-world feeling of letting you go.

There are still days when I wonder how life could possibly have moved on.

Sometimes I slip, and I think of the new baby as "bean". Such a natural name for a little one growing inside of you. But that's not something I want to take away from you, Harper bean. So much a part of your identify, in my memories.

I don't even know what I miss any more. You. Or the idea of you. All I know is that I still cry when I think about you. A lot of things still make me sad. A lot of emotions still feel out of control. Maybe it'll always be that way.

Ten months. We're coming up on the time period in which you've been gone longer than I knew you. Pregnancy plus two and a half weeks of life. Yet there are still days I can't believe it all happened.

Oh, Harper bean, as time goes on, I'm finding it harder and harder to sort through the jumble of feelings thinking about you triggers. Time is softening the edges, not always blunting the pain, but blurring the focus. So I have to squint to feel clearly.

But I can still remember what it felt like to hold you. I think I will always remember that.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

9 months and still counting

I wonder if the question, "How many kids do you have?" will get better or worse after the spawn is born?

I was faced with that very question recently, when I ran into a former co-worker in the grocery store, someone I once worked with on a daily basis but hadn't seen in a couple of years. "I notice you're expecting," she said, "what number is this for you?"

I totally blew it. Stumbled. Stammered. Finally blurted out, "I have a three and a half year old son, Shea." She probably wondered what sort of idiot didn't know how many kids she has. Maybe she chalked it up to pregnancy brain.

"I just don't being it up," Lou noted. "I don't feel like people have to know, like I have to explain it to them."

True for me, too, more or less, more and more over time. I don't raise Harper's loss with strangers or acquaintances. It's not a topic I raise unsolicited. I'm able to answer most of the inevitable pregnancy-related questions without batting an eyelash.

But it is the people I know well, or used to know well, who somehow are just not in the loop of bad news that throw me for a different sort of loop. When is it too much catching up? It feels dishonest to me either way: either I'm forcing it by inserting the "oh, by the way, 2013 was the worst year of my life because my daughter died unexpectedly" into a casual conversation; or I'm ignoring a major, life-altering event in speaking with someone who I know or knew well. Thus the stammer. And the obsessive re-analysis of the conversation.

Ironically, I spent the anniversary of Harper's death back on Georgetown's campus, teaching my class. At about the same time Lou and I were desperately driving to Georgetown in response to the doctor's call, I was driving away, to return home. Today reminded me of the power of keeping busy. It was a tremendously busy day, culminating with a three hour class, and I had very little time to feel sad, even as the date was the first thought on my mind when I awoke.

My only break for a few tears occurred, oddly enough, through a viral Facebook gimmick, which automatically generated a movie of your history on FB. My two most popular posts? "Two pregnancies. Exact same due date. Why yes, I DO have a Ph.D. in reproduction!" and "thanks to Montgomery County hospice, we're going to bringing our little Harper home on Monday!" That last one hit especially hard. I am still sad that we never had the chance to bring our baby home, although I wonder if that would leave my house haunted by ghostly memories?

Another grieving mother, who recently lost her beautiful baby girl, posted on the SLOS board about her daughter's death, ending with the plaintive question, "What do you do when you lose a child?"

I hate that I can answer that question.