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it is dying, the little tree.

it is a clump birch, the smaller of the two that flank the lithe red maple in our backyard.  we planted the three of them on Mother’s Day the year that Finn died, eight days after.  his father dug the holes in the rain, i sprinkled some of his ashes in the mud. our parents gathered, and Dave’s sister and her husband and their baby, and my grandfather, and my mother’s friend who was once a minister, and he said a few words but nothing of god and i was grateful and stood like a stone, unweeping, unable to mourn what i could not yet believe was gone.

we called him Runt, when he was in utero…a pet name far more prescient than we’d ever dreamed, bestowed upon a seven week fetus we’d been told was lost, and then, miraculously, recovered.  small, but strong, the Korean doctors said.

the little tree has been the runt of the three since the day we planted it.

but we have not been such good stewards to it, beyond that first summer.  we are not gardeners, not so earth-connected, us, and though bits of watering and aerating have been done we have left it too dry, i realize now, for seasons on end, and pruned at the wrong times, and Dave tried to save it by butchering one and a half of its stalks this spring but the bugs have come and are eating it and there are pods i’ve never seen on its leaves, pods that have not touched the other, healthy birch, thriving twelve feet to one side.

last night in the late dark we wandered out to the yard.  it is quiet there, in that back corner, and i let my mind play ahead brash with hope to two healthy living children playing in the shade of those three trees until i looked up at the sky and the vision was shattered by the silhouetted leaves of the runt tree, all full of holes like pinpricks, being eaten alive.  and i knew, then, that there will not be three trees just as there will never be three children.

during WWII, Dylan Thomas wrote in the poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London,” after the first death there is no other.

i know this tree is not my child.  i know that the pests that feed upon its vulnerability are part of the natural order of things, that our neglect and hapless caretaking have not harmed the other two, that this small birch may simply have been weak, unfit, even.  but it hurts, no less, to look upon this death, to watch this one more thing i could not nurture, did not protect from harm.  and it will hurt, in the bittersweet way of blunt truth, to look into that corner of the yard in other summers and see two trees, one of each kind, their place in the yard forever slightly off-kilter without the invisible third to balance them.  the shadow tree, the first planted, will remain only as a scar of what was once loved and hoped for, invested in.

when it is gone, i will not mourn the little tree, the runt…it will go as trees go, robed as we all must be eventually in “the long friends, the grains beyond age” that Thomas called up.

but he wrote of death as a done deal, the destruction complete.  and when it is not, not yet, when the tree is still here and struggling, i mourn the runt and all it means to succumb again to the inevitability of its death.  heartbroken by its small stripped branches, my veins sing with useless tears, with the helplessness of my hands as they flail against what i do not know how to stop.

so, um…yeh.  the hospital in Halifax sent me home.

i am free, and grateful, and confused, and a little sheepish.  do you think a cervix can have Munchausen’s syndrome? or a split personality?

my doc here sent me because she can only check me manually, and she’s feeling a lot of softening and related shortening so far as she can tell.  a strong cervix should - so rumour has it - feel rather like the tip of a nose, firmish and almost cartilaginous.  mine does not.  or does, and doesn’t, and back and forth…but on Wednesday when i went for my checkup she declared it “mush,” more like an earlobe than a nose tip, lacking any structure.

i can feel the softening, the subtle but sharp twinges that i noticed but assumed were normal before all hell broke loose in my first pregnancy, the same ones that hearkened shortening and hospital bedrest when i carried O, the same ones that i thought i must be fabricating in my own neurotic brain last March when the routine ultrasound revealed my cervix disappearing at the bizarrely early mark of twelve weeks, necessitating cerclage. i feel ‘em.  they’re familiar…they don’t even cause panic.  i just mark them silently, note their frequency and severity.  they are not extreme.  and by Monday, i will have had five checkups in a span of two weeks, so it is not like they are going unmonitored.

but they are being dismissed by one half of my care team, as is the concern of the other half of the cross-provincial partnership.  because of ye olde stitch of steel up there millimetres from my bladder, all this softening doesn’t mean anything.  or so says Halifax.  they don’t even check the softening, so uninterested are they in texture, in whether i resemble a nose or an ear or a green alligator.  they are numbers people.  their magical dildo wand does not lie.

and according to the ultrasound evidence clearly provided by said dildo wand, my cervix was nearly a normal 4 cm long yesterday.

i try to imagine the look that must have crossed my face when this shocking (and fabulous) news was delivered.  i suspect i looked rather like some poor sot who’s just woken from a dream wherein he’d discovered himself onstage, naked, in a play he’d never learned the lines for, as part of an exam he’d never studied for, and unexpectedly eight months pregnant to boot.  the dreaming self feels trapped, helpless, afraid.  the waking man is befuddled and bewildered by the sudden change of states, but damn happy to give his head a shake and return to the status quo of mundane reality.

i am home.  i am relieved, beyond measure, to return to the relatively comfortable status of couch troll. but i am still a bit groggy from the dream, from all the drama.

i see my doc here again Monday.   i don’t know what to expect.  i have tried, so hard, to be patient and passive…to sit tight and trust my caregivers.  but i do not know if i can keep riding this emotional roller coaster of preparing to leave O behind, preparing myself for the terror of another micropreemie, preparing myself to weather the summer in a hospital that - all the other nights spent in there aside - is still and will forever be imprinted on me as the place where my child died.  i don’t know if i can handle this kind of mindfuck every week, not when each time i pack it gets harder, and not when it keeps being a bloody false alarm that one doc rings and the other dismisses.  living on orange alert is a wearying, exhausting thing.  i do not want to keep bouncing like a pingpong ball between dire prognoses and “oh, you’re fine.”  i want to be fine.  i want this baby to be fine.  but i am starting to wonder if perhaps we don’t all have a bad case of teh crazy, instead.

maybe this whole circus is some strange fabrication that my apparently-imaginative cervix has concocted to relieve the boredom of pelvic rest.  maybe my doc here is secretly pulling for some other contestant in the Miss Cervix Universe ‘08 pageant and is trying to sabotage me.  maybe i’m dreaming.  these seem like rational explanations, from where i’m sitting lying…just as rational as my cervix gaining a gorgeous three entire centimetres in 24 hours, much as i don’t want to appear ungrateful for the apparent miracle of the latter.  but it’s weird, folks.

in any case, if i am a loon i’m a loon whose carcass is happily back on its own couch, and appreciative - if embarrassed - about all the kind messages of support and love that were utterly unnecessarily sent its way.  except, well, they did make me feel awfully nice.  really, very, awfully, nice.

as you were.  nothing to see here.

the Wheel of Fortune is a lucky card in a Tarot deck, so long as it is not reversed.  in some incarnations of the deck, the wheel bears a circling sphinx, representing the riddle of fortune; in others human figures ride the wheel, some rising with the tide of luck, others falling.  my favourite version, though, is the one with the asses and jesters clinging to the wheel as it turns, riding helplessly, almost rueful.  they make me smile, in recognition.  when i look in the mirror these days, i see a donkey in a three-belled hat, a fool spinning at the mercy of the fates.

the only trick is to tell which way the wheel is turning.

a week ago, i was told all was magically and surprisingly stable in the cervical department, and that i would be home - unexpectedly, gratefully home, eating cherries rather than hospital gruel - for the month of June.

on Monday, my hold on the Miss Cervix Universe ‘08 crown got shakier, as did i.  my doc here reported shortening, softening…and we talked of steroid protocols and unplanned trips back to Halifax and stricter bedrest.  i looked around for evidence of sabotage from other, jealous contestants, but could see no one.  only bebe, head down and pushing.  and the harsh sounds and lights and the sheer fear of the NICU came flooding back to me, the team of yellow-gowned strangers rushing into your birthing room at the sound of an alarm, STAT, your tiny child whisked away in a trail of blood and fluid as you wait, helpless and unable to follow, and the clatter of the last-ditch oscillating ventilator as it tries to do what the child’s lungs cannot.  and i quaked and brayed my terror, remembering, projecting forward.

today, i went back to my doc here for one more check before packing for Halifax.  i knew baby had flipped, could tell by the respite of pressure, but had no sense whether that in itself would be enough to turn the wheel back, stabilize my fragile cervix back to the firm wunderkind that caused my perinatologist to brag about me to an entire waiting room.

for the moment…it has.

i have less cervix than a week ago, but enough that there is no real worry, no cause to flee to the region’s neonatal Mecca.  i have firmed up again.  and so i stay put for another week barring any further signs of pressure.  and i will eat cherries and jingle the bells on my hat, and though my card in the Tarot deck has always been the Queen of Swords, sharp and poised between insight and sorrow, i will hope instead to draw the World card of the major arcana…itself symbolic of a cervix, of a successful birth and conclusion to a journey, wherein patience pays off and the Queen at the centre of it all becomes a teacher and traveller, celebratory, complete.  i will hope that the wheel - and the baby - do not reverse again, and literally and figuratively head back downward, at least not too soon.

shuffle deck.  jingle hat.  stroke donkey ears.  wait.

pondering how to actually deal with things going right got me thinking about a random encounter i had in the grocery store a couple of months ago, back when i, um, used to go out.

i got told i hadn’t changed a bit, with a big ol’ perky smile thrown on the end of those words for good measure.  and i hated it.  because i don’t want what’s gone wrong in my life - and specifically, or for me, most significantly, the loss(es) we’ve endured in our road to parenthood - negated.  i don’t want that journey of coping and healing dismissed, written out of my history, my identity.  and yet neither do i want the role of garment render and teeth gnasher to become a crutch, an excuse for fearfulness, a cloak worn past its expiry date.

i has a new post up at Glow in the Woods.  all welcome. 

looky, looky mommy…that lady’s gone shack-wacky!

this is what the shrill little kiddie voices in my head have started saying.  it worries me.  when even the most tender and inexperienced of your personal imaginary voices notice that you’re stark raving mad a little peculiar these days, perhaps you need to get out more.

i’ve become grumpy, impatient, like an old codger in a home.  if i had a meal tray, i’d rap on it with my spoon and pester the nurse about why my mashed potatoes are cold and where are my damn peas and didn’t i ask to go out for a smoke or wait, was that yesterday?  i can’t remember.  the world has closed down around me, and the minutiae loom, suddenly irritating.  i am a Prussian officer, demanding that Dave empty that dishwasher now and stop dawdling about it and why won’t Oscar lie still so i can change the sodden rag that his diaper has become and doesn’t he know i can’t chase after him and is that fucking dishwasher empty yet?  if i have to do it myself, i will, you know.

but i shouldn’t, not really, and there’s the rub.  those who can, do.  those who can’t, harp. or rail at the dislocation and incompetence and sense of burden that overwhelms them sometimes…caught between the semblance of normal life still tangible around the house and the shifted reality underneath, snagged at the limits of their own patience.  there is no stress release here, no casual encounter, no random accomplishment, no exercise, no sex, no nothing.  and it is the helplessness, i think, that is spreading what’s left of me thin and raw…the subconscious realization that as we close in on twenty weeks we cross into the Danger Zone and are cast, supplicant, on the mercy of luck and fortune.

it gets wearing, and wearying, this lack of agency.

i do have a doctor’s appointment this morning, ending the nearly four-week drought between official visits.  seeing as i’m watched by two teams in two separate provinces, it’s by far the longest i’m likely to go in this entire pregnancy.

i hope i get a lollipop while i’m there.

three years ago.

it was three years ago today i left the hospital for the first time after nearly three weeks of bedrest. i’d been airlifted in during winter’s last April gasp, but in my hermetic isolation in ye olde Craftmatic, the ground had transformed into a mushy carpet, spongy with sprigs of green poking through it. i felt like Rip Van Winkle, utterly out of time.

we drove out of the city, to the old tower on its outskirts, the one i’d climbed as a child every time we visited. my legs were weak and i walked gingerly. i was not in pain, per se…just timid, afraid i would break. the tower was closed, too old, too dangerous to be left open for tourists any longer. i stood in front of it, staring, as if i looked long and hard enough i might catch a glimpse of a younger me, might disappear with her into a different time, any other time than this.

she did not materialize, that former self. and i realized, viscerally, that she never would again…that there was no going back. i had stepped off the side of my own flat earth.

i turned in the rain, then, and tested my footing on the slippery bank of overgrowth there that leads up and then down, eventually, to the harbour. i climbed a little, until i was alone on a low ridge, looking down through the brush on tiny sailboats, seabirds. and when i was sure i was far enough away that no one could hear me, i spoke into the wind, and spoke his name for the first time in the thirty-six hours since he’d died.

i had a son. his name was Finn.

it was only a whisper, spoken to raindrops. but i knew it might be a very long time before i had the courage to say those words aloud again, to risk exposing the gaping wound i had suddenly become, to risk being that crazy lady talking about her dead baby. i knew too that i needed, desperately, to mark him on the world, to tell someone of my joy and my pride in him, of my sorrow, to tell that he had been here.

my tears mixed with the rain and those eight words echoed.
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it was only in the year and more after his death that those echoes found expression anywhere, for me. it was here, where i could speak without having to meet anyone’s eyes, that i began to be able to write my way through the grief and love and anger that had left me unmoored, cut off at the knees. here, for the first time, i could own the whole of my story, find a balance within it - be the mother of a dead child without only being the mother of a dead child. and here, for the first time, i found people like me, mothers mourning and keening and raging and weeping, mothers bearing witness to lives too short.

i wrote to Finn on his birthday, i am okay now. i didn’t add that this blog has had a great deal to do with that healing - not just as a space to speak, but also because you have heard me, have taken in my darkest bleatings and said in return, received, here, listening. you have offered love. and more, you have offered that love to a child you never met, a child whom only a couple of people ever got to meet, to touch. my child. i feared him being forgotten, erased; feared never being able to sing him into existence, somewhere. thank you for being my somewhere. you have given me grace i had not imagined existed.

blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

the first few paragraphs of this post have two homes, today.

i am celebrating…it is May, the end of cruel April. i am still pregnant. i am beginning to hope.  but with the same words, i am also celebrating the start of a different kind of new beginning. six of us, all of us Medusas, deadbabymamas, are collaborating on a new blog called glow in the woods…what we hope will be a warm fire amidst the bleak cold of grief, a community for families struggling to get through infant loss, stillbirth, and sorrow. it would be in bad taste, i suppose, to call it our new baby…but it is May, people, and i am feeling more cocky and flippant than i have in a long time. please click over, come see us, and if you know someone who might find some solace in our company, please send ‘em our way, and our welcome. our doors are open.

…did i mention it was May? may it bring real spring, finally, and blessings to all.

it is your birthday, little one, and you are not here.

i made cupcakes last night anyway, and when your father and your little brother come home later we will go out into the back yard where your trees are budding, just barely, and have a little picnic and talk about you and celebrate you.  because it is your birthday, and you would be three today.

but you are not here.

i know the cupcakes are not for you.   these cupcakes are for the living.  they are an offering, i guess, a ritual, a way of honouring what we do not know how to touch.  they are a way for your father and i to tell your brother about you, now that he is getting old enough.  i do not really expect him to understand…i’m still not sure i understand, myself.  but he likes cupcakes, knows they are only for special occasions.   you liked cupcakes, too, back when you and i were a world unto ourselves: i will tell him, someday, that you two had that in common.  your little feet used to dance inside me, tapping out your sugar rush, making me laugh.  i used to tap my fingers back, in response, the two of us symbiotic and easy in our cupcake afterglow.

there is another little one there inside now, Finn, in that same fragile sanctuary, another brother or sister.  s/he too will have cupcakes tonight.  for you, for this special occasion, even though you are not here.  and s/he may dance or kick, just like you did.  and those cupcakes will be bittersweet.

there was so much i wanted to show you.  when you first died, i couldn’t look at things without showing them to you in my mind…these are clouds, little one, that’s a kitty and they’re soft, these are berries i don’t know the name of…aren’t they pretty?  i don’t know if i thought you could hear me, see through me somehow…i just…needed to tell you.  i still want to.  i want to show you the tulips that are coming up in the front yard, and the worms in the earth, and tell you how your mother loves you and just…be your parent, Finn.  because you are my child, you were my firstborn, my baby.  but you are not here.

what i can tell you is that we are not so broken, anymore, by your going.  that we are healing.  i didn’t want sheer bitterness to be your legacy, i didn’t want to honour you by becoming something less.  and yet it feels like such betrayal, for me to let go…to accept and say, it’s okay.  it was time when you went; i told you that then and i meant it, with my whole soul.  you were hurt, and hurting, and i could not help you.  you did nothing wrong.  i do not know if it will ever be quite okay that you’re gone…i doubt it…but it is easier, now.  do you understand?  and if i say, i am okay now, will you forgive me?  because even after three years, i am still afraid of losing you…wherever you may be.  i am still afraid of failing you.

i am still your mama, and proud of you.

i  love you, little one.  and down here with the tulips and the trees, we’re having cupcakes and remembering.  happy birthday.

two years ago this morning i woke up exactly 36 weeks pregnant, rolled awkwardly over, smiled at Dave as the sun poured in our bedroom window and the cat perched atop my enormous belly, purring, and said, “God, i hope i don’t go into labour today.”

he looked me cock-eyed.  i was almost ten weeks more pregnant than i’d ever been before…and while we’d spent most of January, February, and March silently hoping each morning that the day would bring precisely nothing in the way of labour, never before had i actually spoken the words aloud.

but he knows me.  “why today?” he inquired, with the exaggerated tolerance of one who does not expect that the answer will hold much relevance.

“it’s Hitler’s birthday.”

“yes….” and when i looked stricken, as if his lack of immediate and evident reaction was dooming our offspring to a life of wretched, hopeless flailing against an evil horoscope, he laughed.  “ummm, yeh.  but nobody knows that,” he said.

“well, i know it,” was my reply.  and then the floodgates of neurosis burst.  “…and Finn died on April 30th, and that’s the same day Hitler died, and i don’t want some weird kind of Hitler theme in my children’s dates!”  i finished on a slightly hysterical note, and then sulked righteously, feeling silly but strangely content, entrenched in my petulance and my warm spot in the bed.

i’ve always remembered dates without effort.  my fixation on them, though unintentional, was a strange, ever-present part of the way i coped with the grief and helplessness of the year between Finn’s birth and Oscar’s.  the dates were a grim truth or consequences game of life and death, a measuring out of patience and endurance: on this day last year, or when i last did this, or it has been twenty weeks since he died and in another twenty weeks this baby might have a chance at viability. but that morning, serious as i was about the whole Hitler connection and also my sneaking suspicion that it meant i’d truly turned the corner into crazy, the conversation was…light.  it assumed that a baby born that day - however unauspicious the date - would live.  it was, for the first time in almost a year, the closest Dave & i came to joking about birth.

and so we kept going.  “how do you know all sorts of other horrible people weren’t born on other dates that you have no idea about?” Dave countered.  he rolled out of the bed and picked up the laptop. he likes obscure historical information.  and before he went to work that morning, Wikipedia most kindly helped us identify not only a variety of pleasant, innocuous things which had happened on April 20ths of years past, but which famous folk had been born on each day of the following two weeks.  i set my sights somewhere in May.  and promptly went into labour about 8 pm that night.

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Oscar was born at 1:47 am the following morning.  he made it safely into April 21st, thus putting him in the fine birthday company of Queen Elizabeth II and Iggy Pop, whose sensibilities visibly compete in his cusp-of-Taurus soul.  he passed through me like a thunderstorm.  i went into labour at book club, eating trifle.  for an hour or more i sat with my secret, a Cheshire cat silently timing the increasing, regular contractions.  when i left, i don’t think anyone but me believed that i’d be having a baby that night.  i made my way home at ten, found Dave webcasting live, smiled and waved, sniffed the tumbler on his desk to see who’d be driving to the hospital, and went upstairs to pack my bag.  we took some last belly photos, laid down for a few minutes to watch the Lamaze tape a friend had sent months before, before another year of childbirth classes got cut short by my untimely admission to hospital for bedrest.  i wrote in my journal in the quiet of our yellow kitchen, posted a quick post on the fledgling blog.  and about twenty minutes too late, not long before midnight, we left for the hospital.  by the time we arrived, five minutes later, i was in full-blown, five-centimetres-dilated and hard contractions every minute kind of labour.  the second helping of trifle threatened a reappearance at every turn.  and then, without warning, when the overwhelming pain would not allow me to bend in the middle and thus sit on the birthing ball i’d been so hopefully looking forward to “enjoying,” i went into a complete, disassociative panic attack.  it was what i’ve since discovered is a classic post-traumatic-stress-reaction panic response, not uncommon in women who’ve had traumatic or ill-supported births or post-birth infant losses associated with their previous experience of labour.  but no one had ever mentioned such a thing, and it had not occurred to me to anticipate it, look it up, prepare for such an eventuality.  not until my labour ramped from zero to sixty in fifteen minutes and there was suddenly no respite from the brutal, muscular jaws of my uterus and my scarred cervix and i could not catch my breath, could not breathe at all and the fifty-one weeks in the interim were burned away as if with acid and i was animal and desperate and pleading and frightened, so frightened, and this time i knew exactly what the abyss looked like and i knew i was not strong enough for that.

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i went into labour twice with Finn.  the first time, they stopped it with drugs and they airlifted me and put me on bedrest and high doses of antibiotics and more than two weeks later i began to believe all would be well when i woke up one morning in my hospital room with a strange twinge in my belly.  they strapped on monitors and wheeled me down to Labour & Delivery faster than i could even rescue my long-distance phone card from my bedside table, so i had to call Dave’s sister, locally, and get her to track him down in Charlottetown where he was closing on our new house, our first home.  he had just set foot inside the door, had not even signed for the keys, when he turned around and hightailed it back out the door for that loneliest, scariest four-hour race to the hospital.  there was no single day where, even stuck in different provinces, we just got to celebrate being homeowners for the first time.  just like there was no single day where we just got to celebrate being parents.

i did not believe, i don’t think, that the timing could really be that impossibly bad; that of the seventeen days i’d been in hospital to date it would, it could be that one, that one with the carefully scheduled dryer delivery and the phone and internet hook-ups and all the necessary paperwork that Dave had to be there for.  i had accepted that the baby would be early, had thrilled to reach the 26 week mark the day before, representing a 75% chance of survival.  i was feeling positive, prepared to deal with altered timelines, expectations.  but not that morning.  just not that morning.  i spent the first hour or two of active labour in total denial, sure the meds would stop the increasing tide just as they had before.  when it became evident that they would not, and i knew Dave was still hours away, i moved from denial to shock.  then the pain overtook me.

when you labour that early they strap you to your back on a delivery table, because the baby must be monitored at all times.  i had back labour.  i had scar tissue on my cervix that was preventing dilation, even though my contractions came a minute apart for almost two hours straight.  i had young nurses who were competent but inexperienced, unable to rise to meet me and hold my eyes through that fog of pain.  when i broke with all my own preconceived notions and begged for an epidural, i discovered the main body of anesthesiologists for the hospital were on strike, and due to some c-sections that morning it would be close to two hours before i could expect one.  it was exactly two hours.  Dave arrived ten minutes later, and for a window all was calm.  then the baby’s heartrate dipped badly, and suddenly it was rush and bustle and there were noises being made about a c-section and i said yes, yes please but the doctor, white-haired and cold and never met my eyes said no, no we’d have to do a vertical cut and it’s just not worth it for this baby at this point and i remember blinking, yet another shock because clearly my baby needed to come out and i didn’t give a shit about me thank you very much and i was honed in utterly on the 75% chance of survival, you see, because we’d already had a bad enough day so surely all would be well if we could just get the baby out.  and an older nurse who had come in a moment before with the 3 pm shift change, curly-haired, she looked me in the eye for what felt like the first time all day and said meaningfully do you want a second opinion?  and i said yes and then there was someone else there and he wanted to just check one more time manually and i felt nothing, numb, but he said the cervix is gone - the scar tissue had torn, finally - this baby is coming! now! and an alarm and two quick pushes and my eyes locked on Dave’s, beseeching, and in a rush of blood i saw one small, perfect ear as ten people in yellow gowns and masks rushed into the room and they whisked him away, our tiny son, the baby i had just birthed.  it was 3:24 pm.  he lived for eleven hours.

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so it was that i went into Oscar’s birth, exactly fifty-one weeks later, four weeks early, assuming that it couldn’t help but be better, that so long as i came out with a live baby on the other end all would be well.  and yet the irony is that i walked out of Finn’s birth broken-hearted but feeling nonetheless amazed and proud of what my body had done, however insufficiently.  i was awed by the fact that i had borne him, made him in the first place, from that perfect ear to his tiny toes, replicas of his father’s.  in the hours before he died, i was so high from the sheer wonder of having given birth that had you handed me an ashtray instead of a baby to hold in those moments, i think i’d have cradled it tenderly, fallen in love.  for months after he died, one of the only ways i could manage to treat myself with any care and respect whatsoever, to stave off the bleakness and the craving for destruction was to remind myself, “i am Finn’s mother.”

Oscar’s birth did not leave me with the same sense of anything, except ultimately, relief that he was safely out and then bewilderment and guilt that i could not summon the same high for a successful birth as i had for the doomed one. O’s delivery was quick and dirty and out of control, a clusterfuck of interventions i didn’t want and didn’t believe i needed, and it culminated not only in a third-degree episiotomy - done with scissors i still see in flashbacks - that i begged them not to do and that caused me raw pain for a year afterwards, but worse, in being rushed off to the OR only minutes after birth to have the stitches ripped open again because the placenta did not disengage.  i had good nurses, good solid nurses, and Dave with me until the moment they took me away, but they could not reach me where i was, in the grip of visceral flashback.  i was helpless, and then acted upon, quickly and without my consent, because all was happening so fast.  i did not get to hold my baby for more than a minute.  i did not get to nurse him, to do more than glance at his small self, to breathe.  after the placenta was scraped out and the hemorrhage stopped, i was left alone in Recovery, shaking and utterly beaten by the panic and a sense of shamed, helpless violation and failure, and once again, shock, that i could have managed yet again to be so completely unprepared for what birth would bring.  and sure, somehow, that when i emerged from that dark night of the soul, that this baby too would have disappeared forever, another tiny ghost ripped away.

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he did not, bless him.  he was there, squalling and puffy, three hours later when i finally got to cradle him for a moment, hours again after that when the morning shift ultimately brought him back for me to try to nurse.  and so i landed, finally, shakily, gratefully, in the place that comes after labour, in the land of the living and of moving forward, of babies and spit up and sleep deprivation and smiles and joy and bittersweet milestones.

but labour, to me, is like another country, that only those who have been there can begin to imagine or describe, and that never turns out quite the same in any two depictions.  only now, a full two years after the night O was born, can i look back on that birth and say, with any conviction, all that matters is a healthy baby.  it does, beyond all measure.  and yet i hate the phrase, wince each time i hear it.  because being torn and broken and alienated does matter, does impact how a person experiences new motherhood, no matter how truisms may shame or belittle her experience.  birth can be a trauma and wound in and of itself that requires processing and grieving just as real and profound as that demanded by loss.  birth for me has been a profound and great and terrible thing, a wild horse that brings me to my knees.  every minute of it, both times, was worth it, to meet my babies, to watch my beautiful living boy try to blow out candles for his birthday.  i will do it again, without hesitation.  and yet i am terrified, utterly. i am afraid of more shock, more surprises.  i am afraid of a reprise of the guilt of having my body fail one child and my endorphins fail to soar at the birth of the other, afraid of what possibly could go wrong that i haven’t even thought of yet.  i am afraid of being that afraid again.

i wonder, sometimes, if it is like this for everyone, each in our own way.  and i wonder, in some small, fool part of me, if hoping that the third time’s a charm will make everything easier when the time comes around again.

hopefully it will be months and months away from April.

the place lurks in the dustier corners of my brain, almost like a dreamscape…a warren of banally familiar rooms and hallways examined in tedious detail over months of enforced, enclosed exposure…and yet i do not think about its innards, have never even tried to connect all its pieces and the experiences they represent into any kind of coherent whole.  it is too much to try to take in.  it sits there, institutional, a monolith acknowledged only at the surface, in donations at the local Dairy Queen and testimonials of happier endings from telethons and fundraising letters.  from the first time we drove out from under the parkade barrier, new parents and childless all at once, this hospital has been an indelible, impossible temple of our past and our possible futures, both.  our first child lived his entire life here.  he died in my arms in a rocking chair nurses set out for us, a tableau wherein all but us knew their parts well.  at his death, it was decreed that any future pregnancies - those that got to the twelve week mark, of course - would be monitored here, on an outpatient or inpatient basis as required.   this hospital is the place we faithless hopeful turn, no matter how uncertain its promises or fraught with pain and memory, no matter how incessantly bad its food, year in, year out.

the first time i came here i was airlifted in, all urgency, to wait in isolation for weeks for a birth that turned out worse than we’d ever really believed it could.  the second time i came packed, warned by my doctor at home that the next regular checkup would likely result in preventative hospital bedrest.  it did.  i stared at the walls for weeks on end, grappling with fear and boredom and the assaultive power of memory to overwhelm one with something so mundane as the shape of a drawer pull, the baby blue of a ratty curtain.

and so i came this Tuesday for the standard ultrasound, at the appointed time in the expected place, and still i was struck by the utter weirdness of being there and how i felt like a sad, small child, inanely proud at knowing where everything was, which doors in the Fetal Assessment Unit lead to where.  the 7th floor, Fetal Assessment and bedrest ward combined, have seen more of me than some apartments i’ve rented.  and were looking to see more…that ultrasound’s results were not so standard after all, and so we agreed that i would return the next morning, to stitch my weakened cervix in an effort to allow this pregnancy to reach viability.

a cerclage is only minor surgery, maybe fifteen minutes.  it means two days in hospital at most.  and yet the night before i was clingy, anxious, almost desperate to get things in order. some part of me expected to stay, to be removed from my life for weeks or months, held in stasis…and i felt helpless, unprepared.  i have been expecting a stint in this hospital during this pregnancy, only later…just as i expected a stint for the last pregnancy, which - had all gone differently and November not brought miscarriage - would have come about now.  so the place has been looming large in my expectations for months…but i was not entirely ready, not at all.  the place is too much to ever be fully ready for.

i went in Wednesday morning, checked in, had blood drawn.  the admitting clerk directed me to the third floor, which took me aback, because in my mental map of the place, the third floor is the NICU.  Finn died there.  we have been back since, to see other babies…but like the college room where you lost your virginity if you were a late bloomer like me, the place remains quite singular in my mind, a stage for that one event.  i recalled, on the way up the elevator, that the convenient maze of protection my memory has put up around its unrevisited sore spots had utterly blanked the fact that he was also born on the third floor, that that’s where L&D is, too, a wing of the hospital i’d never been back to despite all the months i spent there pregnant later with O. 

he was born in room 310, i saw as we rounded the corner.  the nurse led me through the wing.  i paused for a second in front of that room i hadn’t seen in almost three years, in front of the door, compelled to look in and yet awkward about barging in unannounced on someone else’s labour.  i wanted, i think, to see if i could see some shadow of my child more clearly there, the little son i barely glimpsed at his birth; if the configuration of walls and light and machinery would trigger some gift of recall my conscious mind cannot.  but i did not.  i got corralled, instead, down the hall to a small utility-type holding cell with a stretcher in it, where i dolled myself up in a johnny shirt and spent the next two-and-a-half hours lolling about on the cot and left the past behind and forgot, for awhile, even to fret about the present.

the surgery went well.  my doctor announced three times that it had been a really good idea to do it now rather than later, which i found oddly comforting even though, really, it’s news more dire than one would hope for.  recovery was odd.  they’d given me a spinal and my hips and legs were so utterly deadened that i kept reaching my hand down to my meatlike thigh and wondered why they’d entrapped me in a fat suit.  my brain was convinced that my poor legs were all cramped up in frog-fashion and that i desperately needed to straighten them, even though they were actually sticking straight out in front of me and i couldn’t move a muscle in any case.   my nurse was kind.  the lady on the other side of the curtain had twin girls.  we listened to them, all new and healthy, and the new mother lamented that she’d been told she’d have to stay three nights with them because one was small and i bit my tongue and tried to focus on the sound of the babies, telling them apart, wishing them well.  her luck does not take away from mine, i whispered to my meatloaf frog-legs.  we are just both here.  we are just both here.  now move.  one foot twitched, at a bizarre angle.

they were supposed to move me originally to the seventh floor, the bedrest floor, to stay.  then the sixth, where Dave & Oscar had been waiting, unbeknownst to me.  then word came back that i’d be going to the one floor in the hospital that i have no association whatsoever with: the fifth floor, the nursery floor, where moms who’ve delivered normal, healthy babies go.  i thought this was entertaining.  but my room on the fifth floor wasn’t ready so they wheeled me back out to the third floor L&D ward.

i had forgotten the room, but i knew it, well.  it’s a birthing suite, not that different from 310 three doors down where Finn was eventually born.  the night i stayed in it, three years ago, was the very first night i spent in this hospital, flown in with my water broken, Dave rushing by car to make it from Charlottetown.  i remember it as low-lit, with many nurses coming and going in hushed tones, checking for contractions, to see if labour had stopped.  i remember trying to come to terms with what 24 weeks might really mean and whether i could comprehend what it would mean to us to have a child with serious disabilities and struggles ahead of him or her.  i remember trying to comprehend the possibility of death, and mostly failing.  i remember seizing, though, as best i could, on the fact that labour had stopped for the time being…and very consciously deciding that i would not let my fear overcome me, that i would love and attend to the baby within whatever might happen, that whatever time we got together, i would not turn away from.  i did that, and i never regretted it.  but i realized Wednesday, staring at the same walls, that it was not a decision i could ever truly make again.  i am institutionalized now, broken, in a sense, no longer whole enough or naive enough to be able to summon that purity of spirit without cringing in fear of the after.  i whispered an apology to the stitched-in fetus for what i wish i could give again but can’t, and waited for them to take me upstairs.

and i whispered again to my still-tingly legs, this time about the two versions of myself, there is no comparison.  shit luck does not always mean shit luck.  we were just both here.  we were just both here.

Bon is still in the hospital, she’s holding up fine, at first blush the proceedure was successful and she’ll be back online tomorrow… I reiterate. bon is good.

and there, my friends, ends the coverage of your regularly scheduled programming.

When we decided to take another walk down the road that never seems to follow any path that we expect were were a little… timid. Three tries: eleven starkly beautiful hours with our 2 pound warrior in 2005, 36 anxious weeks of waiting the O-man in 2006, and an early term miscarriage late last year. Not terrifyingly great odds when you add to the fact that I’d had two early miscarriages in my first real legal partnership.

One of the things that was obvious from the get-go was that this was going to be 40weeks + of … something. In saner moments I’ve wondered whether we really had enough left to go through the process. The waiting can be excrutiating, the potential for loss a pall over the days as they pass, the possibility of a 10 + week convalescence for bon in the same place where Finn’s short life was lived and where she spent 9 weeks with Oscar’s pregnancy. And she smiled, and we shrugged our shoulders and decided that it was worth it.

But nobody told me there’d be days like these

Two days actually. It all started yesterday, with dropping bon off at the hospital. She was going to be in for 2-3 days, and the O-man and I were going to get our chance to try out 2 full days chillin’ with each other. We could be doing it for ten this summer… so practice is nice. We’ve been staying at my sister’s place while she’s in Florida and it pretty much has everything that you could ever want to entertain a two year old. Plus, plus I say, that’s not all, oh no, plus we are in Halifax, which has much better shopping than our quaint little home town.

but then oscar got sick

For those of you familiar with bon’s literary jaunts here on the crib, you’ll realize that when the O-man gets sick, there’s about a 50/50 chance that it will necessitate a trip to emergency. But, no problem there, the emergency is in the same hospital that bon’s is staying in, no biggie. We muddle our way through the morning, the O and I, with only a seemingly short visit from

the home alarm installation team

They came by about 10:30am, we chatted, and they figured they’d be done by about 12:30pm… no promises the very effective man says, but we’ll do our best. So, they start out by doing all the installations in the room that O will be sleeping in and we head off to the grocery store.

which was a howling disaster of snot filled chaos

but we managed to get ourselves together and back to the home range in time for lunch… this is rarely a problem for O, and, true to type, he gobbles down the goodies i managed to grab while fending off the little coughing dervish. We head upstairs, he yowls a bit for mommy, for daddy, for the neighbours… but it’s with that tone that says he’s really not pleased with the whole jigger, but that he’s fine. and he drifted into a cough filled, semi-peaceful sleep

until they started testing the alarm bell

It seemed that due to some unforseen challenges they weren’t going to get done before about 2pm, thirty minutes after the alarm bell sounded and twenty nine minutes after the O explained in no uncertain terms that he was done his nap. All counted 45min - not enough for O. So we head to the hospital to bring bonnie her stuff… I had no one to send in the short term (lots of fine folks in halifax, but most of them work and the phone numbers and contact info for bon’s blogger friends are all in HER head, which i had no access to) So I arrived there and quaranteened the O man for an hour it took them to figure out where bonnie was going to be. We moved into her room to be, found she wasn’t there, got her phone hooked up, stuff unpacked, requisite chocolate and room warming present purchased and O entertained (barely) for another hour in our little room

and then they moved her

Pack everything back up, head up one floor and find bonnie… we had a pretty nice time actually, as I’d brought the computer and a video (thanks for the suggestion dad) and O watched richard scarey’s best abc ever while bon and I talk about how she’s feeling (crampy but good)… we had supper, and we went home… and home, well, we made it through. I try not to watch the clock on nights like that, but i watched the clock all the way to bedtime.

and oscar was up most of the night (not to mention the toast fiasco, apparently toasted spelt bread tastes like melba toast)

So we ‘woke’ up this morning and the little bugger is hitting the high point of his illness - and he’s really being a trooper about it, but he is ill and 2 - and tried to pull together some semblance of a morning… and I discover that I’m not really feeling well. Just kinda lethargic, which i pass off as a lack of reasonable food, sleep and stress. So we skim by the hospital, hand off some more food to bon to supplement the cinamen and sugar on white bread that she apparently doesn’t think qualifies as a nutritious breakfast (I ask you, who puts that on a menu). And we head home

to the sound of chainsaws ‘trimming’ trees in the park behind the house 

Amazingly, Oscar gets to sleep. And stays asleep. And I sit down with a banana and a beer… no joke, i figure enough food to count (it’s two fruit!) and enough of a sedative to get me to sleep. Or, potentially, to give me some kind of vicious food reaction. (not susceptable) So I crawl up onto the couch, manage to make to ill-runs to the bathroom before O wakes up…

and well… the day continued. There’s a part about almost fainting in the Subway, and curling up with Oscar while he patted my head, my father having heart fibrulations which meant they couldn’t come and a family member put into paliative care.

But that’s not what I broke into the blog talk about. 

Today, I got my parent badge. Barely able to stand, sore all over, I managed to feed and ‘entertain’ my child. It puts me into a long line, through thousands of years and millions of similar moments, of parents getting it done, of being tired, sick, starving… and finding enough in themselves to do what was necessary.

It wasn’t near the worst day of my life, but it was the day where i caught my own eye in the mirror the most. (minus, of course, my teens) I found myself looking into myself, muttering encouragement, finding clever solutions to getting O to stay in a room with a couch. I know there will be many more of these on the horizon,

but today, i know a little more about courage. watching O try to comfort me while he was sick, seeing bonnie in the bed desperate to find a way to make the day easier, and, inside me, something more fulfilling then the thousands of hockey/soccer/rugby games that I thought had tested my endurance.

I lurk, and find encouragement in all your voices, and am finding not just Oscar who is already wrapped into my life, but the ‘act’ of parenthood, swiftly becoming something that is very important to me.