Journeys: the day after

waking to a flat cloudy sky

the long dark morning of late fall, the slowest dawn

a stillness

it hits me that it was not a dream

my grandparents used to live on long island sound, on a bluff with a view out over the water. one cold winter, the sound froze.

and where there had been motion, there was suddenly a jarring stillness.

yesterday when I came home, alone, my eyes moved to all of his places-- seeking a glimpse

the kitchen under the highchair

the strange spot on the shoes by the door

the closet

the bed

the bathroom rug

the tub

all night my eyes kept vigil, seeking the tell tale slink or flicker of him.

"I see his tail" Della said once. And then said she was just pretending. But in that moment before she confessed, my heart leapt, as if.

as if.

today, I am busy and grateful for the busy. but my eyes seek the motion that has always been. the quiet company. My friend Lorraine reminds me that he is here differently now, and "here" has expanded into everywhere. But my eyes and heart ache for the familiar, the furry presence, the small reassuring movements of breath and tail and whisker.

raw

I am not sure where I am and have not known what to write that would not sound like craziness.

This old grief, this old vulnerability, they have one acute gift: the ttc trauma is barely on my radar. I feel as if we are taking this month off in terms of active intervention-- which, if the LH surge happens just on the wrong day, we will need to. The timing is potentially perfectly bad for my Darlin' who is in the end of his summer season.

So this old grief thing has me really off balance, and I feel raw and wired and ready to be wounded by a tone or misplaced glance. Last night I had a moment of near elation which is uncomfortable, this zigzag emotional landscape is not my favorite. I like joy, don't get me wrong, but big chemical joy feels like the far end of a swing before you jump. And I was right, sometime in the dark of the early morning I felt myself crash down.

Of course that is the time of reflection and insanity, 4am, 5... the cat insistent that I wake, the sky brighter than I expected and filled with the sound of rain. I pick up my BBT thermometer, press the button, hold it in my mouth while the cat pulls at the covers and yowls as if starving. I wait and wait and wait and cannot see the readout in the dark. Minutes pass. It never beeps. I try again. Nothing. I feel my eyes fill with tears of frustration as I set it back on the bedside table and finally, as I swing my legs from under the covers it beeps. And in that moment I am sadder than I can say-- this is how I know I am frayed.

I am trying to remember to breathe slowly, trying to be present, trying to focus on one thing at a time. I feel flooded by competing priorities, work is busier than I can keep up with, and yet it must all be done, right now, by me. And I am overwhelmed-- I feel lump-throated. This is vulnerable kate, this kate who has such a thin membrane and so little reserve to draw from.

So today, since I do not have the option of taking care of myself the way I need to, I cannot just go home and be gentle with my day, I will focus on one thing at a time. I will do the best I can with what I have and who I am today.

I just cannot wait to feel less raw. This is not my highest and best, and it is all I can do to remind myself to be gentle, be sensitive, be patient. It is all I can do to remember to treat myself as a beloved. These days will pass, they will, they do, they always have. I am astonished at the body memory of grief, the raw flayed feeling of my heart and memories. The incessant persistence of regret. All useless, all useless since there is nothing to be done. Nothing I can go back and re-do. Impossibility does not lessen the desire I guess. And that is frustrating too.

I used to have an image that encapsulated how I felt-- you drop something precious, your time-sense stretches and as you watch if fall, you know there is nothing you can do to grab it and yet you try, you try, you flail, you grasp and as your fingers touch the smooth surface you send it spinning, and it hits and shatters and there is no solace in knowing it would have happened no matter what- it still feels like failure, failure in the holding, in the keeping, in the dropping, in the saving.

So, me, kate, in the present tense, I wiggle my toes, do EMDR tapping, I will go get hot tea to fill my favorite mug that I will hold between cupped hands, I will try to be gentle with myself today, move slowly, careful of corners, I will retreat as I need to, I will extend gentle loving kindness to those who brush too hard against my raw self, they are not doing it on purpose, they do not mean harm, and yes, that means me too.

fucking august

Ahhhh damn it. How can a broken heart break more?

As you all may already know since I was missing yesterday and am one day behind, dearest Susan at sprogblogger learned that her miraculous FET has ended and she is now in a purgatory between knowing and waiting for monday's D&C. I hate this loss for her, I hate this more than I can possibly say.

As she so rightly said a few days ago when Mo found out her pregnancy had ended-- this is not about fairness or what is right or who deserves what, but holy crap.
Why can't it just work? Miracles keep me going, they make me hopeful, they make me think that THIS IS POSSIBLE. To have something, a positive, a growing pregnancy, a heartbeat, and all of that hope and to have it end-- gosh darn people. NONE of this is for the faint of heart.

I sit here and look at my nephew playing with legos on my rug. This is what we are after, this amazing hopeful thing we do and want, this vote of confidence that the future is worth it.

For all of you who have had and lost, and all of you who are waiting and hoping, for all of you with big beautiful bellies, and for all of you with someone playing legos on your rug,
I celebrate all of you, all of us. The sheer act of wanting is such an amazing act of faith, a manifestation of some trust that the world is worth it, the future is worth it, that this whole thing is worth trying for and fighting for.

Mo and Will's heartbreak

I am heartbroken for Mo and Will.
I don't even know what to say.

thunder

I feel such immense gratitude to you amazing people.

Thank you to my internet friends who have asked for folks to come by to offer support- and to all of you I do not know who took the time to say hello and send you sweet wishes for healing- Thank you so.

I hate how many of you have suffered losses, and OH how I celebrate those of you for whom this whole crazy thing has somehow worked or is working. And how I love those stories most. It gives me such hope.

Yes, yesterday sucked ass. It just did. It started badly with a horrible time before I inserted the magical cervical opening drugs- feeling to the very core of my being that I was destroying something precious. And it took all I had to just do it anyway.

The morning passed with emotions coming and going, and cramping starting up slowly, slowly strengthening. But nothing awful or unbearable except the knowledge of what was happening, what had happened, what needed to happen that day.

The ride to the hospital. Opening the door to surgery. The waiting. God how hard. And then, finally they called my name. The weigh in, the questions, the gown, the clothes you put in a bag knowing you will not be the same person that you were next time you put them on, the net panties, the monster pad, the IV, the anesthesiologist, the wonderful doctor, the time passing so slowly...

finally it was time, and by then I just needed to have it over with.

And I had asked for the kind of anesthetic that would make sure I would not remember anything. And I don't. Except the crazy weird compound lights on the ceiling of the procedure room that reminded me of insect eyes, and the piles of stuff in there like a storage closet but bigger, then waking to intense cramps and the relative bliss of fentanyl. 

I slept in 5 minute intervals for a half hour, maybe more, and finally they let my darlin in to be with me. I cannot imagine his purgatory of waiting.

I got home last night and slept for over an hour, passed out on a book on the bed, not moving. Then I had some food, then slept again- got up 5 times in the night to pee (thanks to that amazing IV hydration I am sure).

Woke today not dreading the day- since the worst in some ways has happened. I did not find out today, I did not have to have a D&C today. Today I did not need to lose any dreams or have anything bad happen to my body. Today I just needed to make it through moment by moment. 

I called my mom and visited with her which was blissful. She is wonderful company to me always, and today was no different. We hugged, and even laughed some, and talked and talked and talked and had quiet thoughtful times. She said that when she was having kids, a doctor once told her that if a pregnancy was going to work, there was almost nothing you could reasonably do to mess it up. But if it wasn't going to work, there was nothing you could do to change that either.

I was afraid I would feel physically empty after the procedure, or when I woke today- but I just simply ended up feeling less full. A subtle but critical difference for me. The side that feels bad is really my heart. 

I know this will take time and have horrible fits and starts-- I really do. As I said, I am familiar with grief. We have met before. 

But what scares me most right now is that we may not be able to get pregnant again. And I can imagine myself drowning in that if I am not careful.

There are beautiful things happening right now- there are. The sound of rain hammering on the roof. The scent of lilacs that my mom gave me. Right now it is thundering the first thunder of the season, the low grumbling rolling kind, that moves in circles against the hills.

tomorrow

Oh internet world and real life, thank you for your immense outpouring of kindness and support. I know that if love could heal all wounds, I would be whole.

After a night of hard window-pelting rain and very little sleep, I met with the doctor very early this morning for our pre-op discussion and examination. The D&C will be tomorrow afternoon. 

And I simply could not stop crying.

I am familiar with grief. I know how it moves in like heavy fog and swallows whole, and I know the teasing moments where it rests and light comes filtering in and it feels like maybe things will be ok, but they're not really ok, and in it comes again, resurgence, weight, unbelievable sadness.

And there are levels of grief here, for the pregnancy I thought was progressing (recent belly expansion and other symptoms I was told were just reactions to residual hormones), but mostly grief for the "baby", the potential person that I felt I was carrying.  And there is this other immense weight of knowing, at my age, that we may never get this far again.

 

Oh how I dread the feeling of empty that will come tomorrow after the procedure. 

I feel somehow as if as long as it is still inside me, I am still pregnant. Which I am not. And I have not been for a while. 

Through the tears of imagining LOSING the baby tomorrow, I have had to remind myself over and over and over that I already have. The baby is already lost. This little one only measured in the 6th week during yesterday's ultrasound. Meaning my miraculous ultrasound where we saw the heartbeat took place right before it stopped becoming.

But this is the horror too-  knowing I have been carrying a dead thing for more than 3 weeks, imagining it growing, healthy, alive. And I know it will be better for my body to let it go. 

So in some ways I want to just do this thing.

But I know tomorrow will just suck ass in every way- physically, emotionally, spiritually. I wish on myself a day that marches forward with quiet deliberateness, where things are orderly and get done as they need to, no drama, no surprises. 

I can say this: I know I hope to be pregnant again, for longer next time, say, a nice even 37 weeks...

but next time, I hope to revel more, to go ahead and wear those maternity pants, to go ahead and dream big, and touch my belly and wonder more and worry less because by worrying so much, and in not trusting or believing that it was truly happening, in some ways I missed it.

I am not sure it will ever happen again. But if it does, even though I may be skeptical and fearful and scared out of my wits that things will go wrong at any moment, I promise, in ways I was not able to this time, I will revel.

lost

it is

I am

we are...

I am broken.

Waiting to hear when they can schedule a D&C.