cribchronicles.com

if there were no calendars i would have no sense of how to tell my story, any of it outside the press of now, of in this moment I Am.  a chorus line of dates has spun through my head since childhood and even my I Am is always counting, ordering, tallying the numbers according to who I Was, trying to leave a trail of breadcrumbs hardy enough that maybe someday i can find my way home.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

my baby is six months old.

six months ago this morning i was in labour, water broken nearly twelve hours, cerclage finally wrested from me by two grunting doctors while the blessed anaethetist stroked my hair (erm, hairnet) and tried to get her drip to keep up with the escalating carnage below.  in the end, the double loop of wire ended up in a waste disposal somewhere, too much scar tissue on it to be offered as a prize. and i didn’t care.

the prize, of course, was Posey, born seven or so hours later dark and lusty and shouting, on the very last dregs of that epidural cocktail so that i felt the asunderness of it all but maybe not it all and i was present to my body and hers as she slid from me and somewhere in those moments of gasping i glimpsed something powerful and primal and i understood it can be good like this and some part of me sighed and let go.

or almost. the letting go is the way i’d like the narrative to read. it is so close to truth.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

four years ago this morning in the same hospital i lay on an ultrasound table twenty weeks pregnant for the first time all nervous and excited and a little puzzled because this was my first Canadian ultrasound and in Korea where i’d been until a few weeks before they’d always let me see the screen but this technician was gruff and closed like a box, four walls sealed tight and grim.  i was anxious because the day before i’d had this sudden gush that had first embarrassed and then frightened me and i was eager for the reassurance and i smiled at the lady, that Nurse Ratchitt with her jellied wand but she did not so much as make eye contact. there was Stan Rogers playing on the radio – the Mary Ellen Carter, of all ironies – but when i singsonged, oh, i love this!, still shocked to be back in a country where music i recognized played on the radio, the technician said nothing.  when i mentioned the incident of the day before and asked if she could check my bladder – because i wanted desperately to believe it had been my bladder that had failed me in front of thirty high school students, the alternative being too terrifying, too oh Bonnie stop being dramatic – her monotone response was only, the requisition doesn’t say bladder. when after what felt like an eternity of her cold and silent machinations over my belly, screen turned away from me, i got up the courage to ask, is anybody awake in there? because it was my first pregnancy and i still had not really felt the baby move, she answered, could be.

could be. huh. as in, fuck off and shut up, it’s not your turn and i will give you information when i damn well have to and not before and don’t go getting uppity and asking QUESTIONS. when she did turn the screen to me it was with a perfunctory baby looks fine, see? lots of movement and fluid looks fine and i am not permitted to tell you anything else.  and i smiled with relief and tenderness at my wiggling, floating cargo but went home shaking, feeling almost violated and utterly dismissed and disappointed.

and then he died, my Runt, our Finn, eleven hours after he was born because it was fluid and his lungs had been damaged in their development by its absence around the twenty-week mark.

and it’s not exactly that i blamed the technician once i dug her up from the bowels of my memory in the aftermath. stunned and heartbroken, i gave her very little thought. logically, i understood that it was quite possible that despite her appalling bedside manner, she’d been thorough and no fluid loss had actually been evident. certainly i’d had a fluid ferning test done at my doctor’s office the same day as the ultrasound and they’d found no evidence of amniotic leakage. perhaps she’d just been having a bad day, or is a generally unpleasant person with a shit-ass personality. perhaps she did not actually dismiss my concerns the way she dismissed me, the human being. whatever.

i still, in a very off-hand, not terribly time-consuming way, hated her with the fury of a thousand suns.  from that day to this.  not even for the what-ifs so much as for the simple fact that as Finn’s mother, i resent the fact that she got to be one of the few people who ever had the privilege of seeing him, even in utero, and of being a part of his story.

she is the piece of damage and mistrust and resentment i didn’t let go of when Josephine was born.

whoever she is, that technician, i don’t want her anymore.  i’d like to leave her here, in hopes you will receive her, take her from me, help me let her go.  is that possible? can you just drop someone from the calendar of the mind? can i drop the little tic in my head that says March 10th…Posey’s half-birthday, oh, and that was the day of that awful ultrasound with that raging fascist…

right, letting go.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

friends of ours had a baby boy last week, their third baby, second son. we were pregnant together the first time, back in Korea…even had accidental back-to-back appointments at Our Lady of Mercy Virgin Mary Gynecologist and Obstetrician – which is, you have to admit, the funniest name EVER for an OB office – on the very day they found out Euan was a boy and we saw Finn bounce and wiggle his fingers at us for the very first time.  we moved back to Canada shortly thereafter; they went to Australia. we have not seen them since, not in person…but they were brave ones, staying close in touch even when the unspeakable came between us.

their little boy’s name is Finian. he will be called Finn. he will be my boy’s namesake.

and that this fills my heart only with joy and the happy kind of tears is a sign, i think, that there has been healing, and luck.

there appears to have been a rip in the space-time continuum because both my children are currently sleeping. in the daytime. in their beds.

lest you think i exaggerate the rarity of this blessed event let me explain that the younger one is just learning to nap like a civilized infant whilst the elder one is – cue wails from the maternal peanut gallery – in the processing of outgrowing his tenure as a civilized infant and instead barreling whole hog towards being either a Big Child or a pirate, depending on the day, and neither Big Children nor pirates nap particularly well, unfortunately. i suspect it’s all the swaggering and roaring, in either case, but at the moment both my offspring are dozing and i am lying here on my side on the couch sans the company of short people and thinking that the gray light flooding in the window makes it feel rather like the beginnings of bedrest last year and wondering if i’m any different now than i was then.

i wonder this because i have this pesky attachment to the idea of myself as a dynamic, improving being. it’s the old modernist myth of progress boiled down to the individual level, where i get all twitterpated each time i become conscious of some personal failing as personal rather than the only reasonable and normal response to a given situation – oh, huh, not everybody goes into paroxysms of fury at drivers who fail to signal? – because, my stars! the emancipation! the agency! i can shed this flawed skin and emerge from my chrysalis new and delightful and better! now with more cowbell!

sometimes the change is real. i can learn. i now reserve all my turn-signal righteousness for my poor, beleaguered mother, who – as she is also capable of learning, if not of turning on her blinker before she engages the car in a turn – now simply refuses to drive me anywhere. win win, jolly good, pip pip.

but mostly i suspect that the idea that we are ever-improving beings is shite. it’s a dangerous siren song, and one so ubiquitous that as a culture and a species we repeatedly steer blindly towards the paths of our own demise. we choose short-term gains in spite of long-term damage and in almost all areas carry on as if nothing rotten is ever really going to happen to us. we’re engaged in progress! we’ll be fine! i know all the seventy-three reasons why high fructose corn syrup is bad for my glucose-intolerant self and my goal of looking less than four months pregnant again someday and my commitment to avoiding the agro-industrial complex where possible, but i saunter by that pack of Nibs in the store and damn! they are just so shiny and purty i swear they hop into my cart of their own accord. every time i go grocery shopping, it’s like groundhog day in the candy aisle.

some self-sabotaging habits are easier to make fun of than others.

from the time i was four, i wanted a little girl of my own. i had Finn and lost him and broken/brokenhearted realized i wouldn’t have traded him for a thousand girls. then Oscar, and i adjusted my expectations and the joys of a baby boy became the rhythm of my days and i understood, for the first time, that my preference had been a prejudice passed down and picked up, and i was shamed. then a miscarriage, and i began to bargain with precisely the sort of god i don’t believe in for just one more baby and damn the vagina i’d be more than blessed with another sweet boy and i meant it, i really did. except that underneath there was still a wistful part of me that ached – and seethed with a dirty, private jealousy – each time someone i knew who’d wanted a girl just…had one…seemingly magically, first try, no complications, as if plucked from the sky. i figured that this embarrassing allergy to other people’s good news was me being ungracious about not getting what i’d set my mind on all those years ago. and i’d wallow a bit and then kick myself and give thanks for my wee pirate-in-training and within a day or two the ugly green head of my jealousy and self-pity would bury itself again and i could get back to going about my life.

then i found out Josephine would be, indeed, Josephine. and i was amazed, because wanting her had come to seem like wanting the sky. and i said, self, take note. sometimes it comes easy. remember. you did not need to adjust your expectations. so get over yourself. a persecution complex ain’t pretty.

last spring i lay on this couch and wondered if maybe i’d be a better human once my heart’s desire of this healthy baby girl got safely here and the quavering over whether it would ever happen for me ended, once and for all.

i can report that the answer is…um, alas, nope.

one of my most beloved old friends is having her first baby. she’s 38. she’s always wanted a girl, and said on the phone last week that she was sure it was a girl, that she hadn’t really given any thought to it being anything else. turns out she was justified.

this baby will be loved and delighted in, by me almost as much as by her parents. she & Josephine will be close in age, and i know that my friend will be a beautiful mama, a good mother. but my first, visceral reaction? the same old jealousy, green and slimy and bilious. i cringed at the pique and said nah. really? but before i could even get the rejection formed it had delivered its soliloquy of woundedness and petty pity. why so easy for her? she didn’t even know she was pregnant until she was almost three months…she did all the things i never did, and bang, she gets her heart’s desire, nonetheless perfect and healthy.

oh, ugly. why not her, after all? i don’t know better people than her. and we all have our lucky breaks and our broken places and this friend of mine deserves all the joy in the world and i’d give it to her if i could so what in hell is this curmudgeonliness? i lack for nothing. there is no zero sum economy. life is too short to compare. adjusting one’s expectations can be good for growth. and yet there it is, the jealousy, naked and quivering. it helps nothing; i do not want it. but like groundhog day, it pops up. and i need to unlearn it, somehow.

she will not know, my friend, not from the face of genuine celebration i turn to her. it is not her burden. i don’t want it to be mine. but change is not so simple as skipping the Nibs aisle.

oh frail human. the same mistakes over and over, the same songs and refrains of willful blindness and short-term self-interest and stupid jealousy that sometimes i get so full to boiling i just want to spit.

today is the day after groundhog day, and i wanted to wake up different.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
i hesitate to publish this. jealousy is like the final frontier of friendship taboos…especially the messy stuff, the real stuff that runs way deeper than the cultural cache of yo bitch! your kids are sleeping?!? hate hate hate that counts as sisterhood these days. and i know – both out here and among real-life friends who struggle with IF or have lost babies or unlike me did not get one of the gender they’d set their heart on – that i risk revealing myself as an ungrateful moron when a sweet pirate and a baby girl sleep upstairs.

i sat with friends a few weeks ago, all of us mamas a few times over, and a pregnant one (not to be confused with pregnant friend above) recounted the drama of telling her infertile SIL about her news, after SIL had responded to another family pregnancy announcement by crying all day. the pregnant one found this frustrating, hurtful. i found it heartbreaking.

both are true, i think, depending on where you’re standing. i believe we most of us have our heartbreaks, and also that we’re responsible to those we love to try to fix our shit, try to be as good as we can be. i despair at how often it feels like we’re just groundhogs running on hamster wheels, stumbling over the same old thought patterns and habits and emotional minefields, blind and unable to flip the calendar over to a fresh page.

is it just me? do you have responses – emotional and otherwise – that you’d like to leave behind? how do you do it?

it feels like rage.

like metaphorical acid reflux, lava-hot. it splashes up without warning, spatters out of me in mutters and expletives and tears, my face raw and shocked.  i am all powder, fuse worn down to a nub.

i am fine, and insane, all in the span of thirty seconds.  and when i am fine i think the insane is probably a drama queen, self-aggrandizing and blown out of all proportion.  and when i am not fine i think we cannot all get out of this alive.

it is lack of sleep and the bitter loss of the happy, weary infancy i’d dared think we’d finally gotten, third time lucky.  it is two weeks of asthma attacks and flu and both children up several times a night, in addition to the colic, the brutal colic, the sweet-merciful-Jeebus-seriously-who’d-i-torture-in-my-last-life colic that stomps on my last, frayed nerve and breaks my heart and makes me feel helpless and cruel, a mockery of comfort and motherhood.  it is the laptop broken and the furnace rusted out all at once and all the lightbulbs burnt in chorus and the diamond earring lost raking leaves, my only diamonds, ever, gone…like money hemorrhaging, like lurking failure and chaos have found me easy prey.   it is the call i got yesterday that Oscar’s ear surgery – scheduled for this Thursday – has instead been postponed to the day before Christmas Eve.  because heck, when better to trek to the hospital with a two year old and infant for the day?  what else would i be doing that time of year?

it is all these things, and none of them.  it is that they all add up.

one last straw, again and again and again, and in my head i listen for the laugh track and hear only crickets and then the anger surges and i am awash and afraid all at once.  i see red, literally.  i flail, inside, look for things to throw and then despair even of that release because, fuck it everything’s broken anyway.

everyone else’s happy babies send me into paroxysms of mourning and self-beratement.  the warm buzz of the early, contented-ish weeks and you deserved a break this time around has fallen silent.  i did not deserve a break, after all.  apparently if i can squeeze out a live baby i should expect no further mercy from fortune.  apparently it is my lot to watch helpless and frayed as my children suffer, one after the other.  colic is better than tubes and a ventilator and blue-black toes and death, i know.  i know.  and yet it all feels bizarrely similar from where i sit watching my days unravel…the useless mother, unable to comfort, unable to protect.  perhaps that is where the rage comes from.

there are few witnesses, save for a screaming infant and the little boy.  i hide my face from them, afraid of this ugliness, this fury.  i do not want to be this way.  i do not want to mark them, leave them pocked with  acid.  i do not want them scarred.  i do not want to excuse rage as a reasonable, acceptable response.  i do not want to be what i am right now.

it will end.  the part of me that is fine and rational intones this.  the insane part knows that doesn’t matter in the moment, unless it ends now.  another month, perhaps, given that she was nearly a month early….in the grand scheme, it seems so little to endure.

but in the moment, exhausted, choked with bile, it is too much, too unfair, too big, and i wonder if the next cry or the next stupid broken household item will be the one that breaks me, and i long for a protector myself, for someone to rescue me from this powderkeg while i am still fine some of the time.

unstable/embittered but housebroken thirty-six year old, up for adoption.  seeks mother.  will travel. likes pina coladas and predictability.  free to good home.  bonus miniatures included, requiring tlc and earplugs.

this morning, scrubbing vomit from Oscar’s dismantled bed and diarrhea from the playmats downstairs, shaking out the day’s third load of innards-encrusted laundry before noon and sanitizing my chapped hands one more time to try to protect the howling Posey from her brother’s ongoing misery, i located my brain.

it’s been AWOL, lost in the buzz of sick kids and late-onset colic and seasonal sadness and the secret certainty that i am utterly useless, overwhelmed, depressed.  whatever you call it, it’s ugly.  it’s been a perfect shitstorm the past couple of weeks, all of a sudden, out of the blue…a swell of internal and external afflictions that coincided like Murphy’s Law personified.  and i’ve become like an old-school tv after the channels go off for the night…all snow, no picture.  blank.

when i found my brain this morning, it was rocking in a metaphorical corner, musing.  why do we use the word “uncle” to indicate surrender? it asked me, rather plaintively.  who’s Uncle? whose uncle? i shrugged, waved at it, happy to note that it was thinking about something, at least.  i told it i’d ask you guys.

who, tell me, friends, is this mythical uncle we can surrender to?

and will he pick up the pieces for me, do my laundry, help me pet one child to sleep without the other screaming like a banshee?  if i surrender, if i admit i’m failing here, will Uncle step into the breach?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i am not sure why i’m even telling all this, except to get it out, to put it somewhere outside of me so it does not leak out at midnight when i’m trying to settle a baby who’s cried all evening long and suddenly find the tears pouring hot down my own face.  i am not as alone as i feel,  nor as bad as i sound.  but i am overwhelmed.   and the chiropractor hasn’t helped the colic, and Oscar’s sitter now has the flu, so for the seventh straight day here we all are, crying.

sometimes it steals up on me, like that six-foot rugby chick from my misspent youth, the one with the steel cleats and the hamhock legs. out of the corner of my eye, i catch a glimpse, a shadow…and then WHUMPH. she hits me like a train.

i’ve been hit enough times to know what’s happening, but by the time i figure it out, i’m already flat on my back, dazed.

grief sneaks up on you long after you think you’re done.

the sadness is quieter now than before, harder to recognize. the steel cleats that shredded me have been traded in for ballet shoes, blunt and hard yet graceful, somehow. still, it feels like being trodden on, ground under. i try to acquiesce, go limp, play dead…long for twenty-four hours to simply lie on my couch and breathe, to come to terms with this ever-morphing, gruelling visitation. but there is no sanctuary, no retreat…either from grieving or from living. and so, quietly wretched, stretched between despair and normalcy, my fuse grows short…even the simplest things overwhelm me. can you not see i’m busy here? i want to shout to my sinkful of dishes, my dirty sock pile, my beautiful, living, demanding, non-sleeping children. can you not see this weight perched on my chest? can’t you see that i am not okay?!?

but i am pinned under, and my voice does not carry. grief beats out a merry rhythm about my head, brutalizing and relentless. all is grey.

a year since the ultrasound said blighted ovum. a son whose traces i can no longer feel, connect to. an emptiness i am still bewildered by, after all this time. November again. so much promise lost, so many expectations adjusted. and yet, and yet…so many blessings, so much busy-ness. i believe myself healed. almost always, i feel it. but oh, when i don’t, when old grief sidles up by surprise and takes me out at the knees, i lose my bearings. i get scared, fear she’s brought friends, and luggage. i panic.

in my very first-ever rugby game, the only team sport i ever played, the ball made it out to me at wing only once. and i caught it, an impressive feat considering that i have the hand-eye coordination of a hippo and was actually in motion at the time. pride and delight swelled up in my chest – i was high on accomplishment. and then the steel-cleated she-behemoth was right there, out of nowhere, about to flatten me, and i turned and fled. in the other direction. ahem, you know, towards the other team’s line. my fight or flight instincts are damn clear, and i know when something’s bigger than me. except the she-beast caught me anyway and ran right over me, taking the ball with her. WHUMPH. and my coach pretty much made me the waterboy after that.

i’d like to run, right now…to flee. especially since i know i can’t just lie here until grief passes on to elsewhere again. but if i tried to outrun her, she’d only catch me. somewhere or other she catches us all.

so instead i will pick myself up and go feed the baby and say a quiet thankyou for all that i have that i do not deserve and i will try to keep my mouth otherwise shut so i do not snap, so the grey does not escape. and i will be quiet, quiet with this old companion i never invited, until again she takes her things and leaves me in her wake to find my peace.

October 15th is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day in the US. i don’t think the day has any official status here in Canada, and this year we’re too busy reeling from a ‘more things change the more they stay the same’ election up in these parts to see much in the news about it, even if our government were on board. but the Wave of Light that marks the day is an international affair. at seven pm tonight, across every time zone around the world, people are invited to light candles in honour of little ones loved, missed, remembered.

the candle i light for Finn will be propped in a kitschy Hallowe’en pumpkin candle, because Hallowe’en floats Oscar’s boat these days. it’s in questionable taste, perhaps…but that’s what you get for being born into this family, i figure. if Finn were here, we’d be planning his costume this time of year, and he and his younger brother might be torturing each other deliciously with scary talk of ghosts. instead, our ghosts are all too real and yet all too absent. and with the candle, i am trying to say you’re a part of us, son, wherever you are, whatever you’ve crossed over to. you are loved, always. you are not forgotten. there is nothing else left for me to say, any longer.

i don’t write much about Finn these days. i have reached a place where i am no longer blown apart, where the scars have closed over and left me once more whole, if tempered; rent and healed and beyond the fire now. i do not grieve like i did…do not rail and wail and gnash my teeth at the universe, do not ache with a hurt too big. i am no longer the subject of that crushing blow of loss. i’m shamed by the selfishness of the implication that i ever was…because it was him who was the subject of his own death, after all, but i grieved for my self just as much as i grieved for him.

it is harder, sometimes, to reconcile with life, with living, than it is with death.

it was hardest for me to reconcile with the silence that came after his death, with the unspeakable awkwardness of the world with the fact of that death. my childless motherhood was the darkest place i have ever been.

i am not there, and so i do not write of it. partly because the need doesn’t spring raw and desperate from me anymore…and i am wary to disturb the peace. but i wonder, too, if it is unseemly to keep revisiting the subject…if it tires people to hear of a dead baby when i have two lovely living ones. i fear judgement and others’ sense of decorum just as i fear betraying the memory of a child who has only me and his father, really, to remember him at all. the fact of his death still sits awkwardly with the world, i know…i am reminded each time i broach it and am met with an urgent subject change, with others’ discomfort. it does not hurt me anymore…but it is sad. and it silences.

this afternoon, holding Josephine close at the end of a mommy-baby yoga class, October light slanting in on the hardwood floor, i breathed in the traces of newborn scent that still linger in her hair and thought of him. firstborn. the first newborn head i ever nuzzled like that, only gingerly, extra-tenderly. for months after i kept his tiny hat from the NICU and i buried my face in it and drank in the faint traces of him. it was proof that he’d been here. and yet it was a secret act. i did not want to be the crazy lady with the dead baby.

what Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day and the Wave of Light does is allow me to bring Finn – and my love for him, all that broken, bittersweet love – out of that darkness and silence, that private closet of sorrow. it legitimizes the breach of decorum, takes the onus off the individual, points out that this kind of loss is not so isolated and unusual as our happy-ending culture would like to believe.

with a Hallowe’en candle it includes him, holds him in the light.

as do we.

we left Korea for good that winter.

the fall beforehand was golden and rushed, one of those queerly vivid transition epochs where the body and mind are open and receptive, future utterly unknown and thus all changes possible answers in masquerade.  it is heady, that hurtle towards the break, and for me it was a productive time -i started writing professionally for the first time in years, took up jogging for the first time ever.  looking ahead, i tried to lay ground. looking around me, with eyes that knew i was leaving, i tried to store all that i could of the city and culture, the small apartment with its sliding glass doors, the autumn light pouring in, the sweet-sour tang of mokkoli and cheom-chi kimbap, the hectic market across the street, laden with strange fruit that had become familiar.

in casting ourselves upon the fates that fall, we went whole hog.  i threw out the birth control pills, had my cystic ovaries checked at Our Lady of Mercy Virgin Mary Obstetrics and Gynecology – the head OB had learned his English at a Catholic college in the United States, he informed me proudly – and one Monday morning in November, watched two clear blue lines materialize on a pregnancy test i’d had to play charades to acquire from the apothecary’s on the corner.  there is a lot of vocabulary that a life spent in classrooms and bars does not necessarily teach.

every season of life has its soundtracks.  this one was a single CD, a nothing-else-quite-like it literate and intimate collection of folky imagery-laden songs that a friend who lived in another city had brought one weekend in October, that we played all through that fall and early winter as we planned and packed and i threw up.  those songs, with their quirky rhythm and their haunting, non-linear stories, were burned on me in those months just as Korea was.  i was wax, taking everything in.  and all my hopes and anticipation sang in me to those tunes and words, lullabies to the little life inside around whom all the changes centred.

we brought the CD back to Canada, though the light was harsher here.  the last time i played it was in the hospital after my water broke too too early, headphones stretched across my belly.  i was still hopeful, the laws of inertia internalized to such an extent that continuing to hope was not so hard as it has been ever since.  i chose, the first night after my airlift, in the 3 am quiet of the hospital room, to tune in to the baby inside, to spend what time we had left together present to him or her.  i sang to him, spoke to her – we had been told girl, then boy, then girl again, that time ’round – played him music.  for that three weeks, i was tender and more in-the-moment than i have ever been in my life, connected and maternal in ways i hadn’t imagined i had in me.  until he died in my arms.  all those months of hoping and planning, all we’d tried to build toward, all the light and song packed into that period, dissipated into ash.

last night, Dave and i were watching back episodes of a tv show on the computer.  in the climactic moments, a song started up, a song neither of us had heard.  but he recognized the voice…the same singer whom, as if by unspoken, accidental agreement, we have not listened to in over three years.  my ears perked up, and just the familiarity of a single word, characteristically pronounced at the end of a line, assured me he was right.  the scene unfolded on the screen in front of us.  but i didn’t see it anymore.

i saw a small apartment with muted light falling over a sleeping mat, a huge desk rescued from the side of the street one evening.  i saw the campus-issue furniture and the pillows brought back as bounty from Thailand, the coffee grinder propped up against the yogurt maker and the funny little packets of bacteria bought at the same apothecary’s as the pregnancy test.  i saw ashtrays and ESL books, plastic tables set outside the neighbourhood corner store for drinking at, neon signs advertising singing rooms, internet cafes, chicken.  i saw rows and rows of persimmons, ripe to bursting, and crisp pears that look like apples, and packets of salty seaweed for snacking on.  i saw, though i had not known i remembered.  and i felt it all again, the hope and the shattering that followed, as if the episode we were watching were one from our own lives.

and i wept, because i knew the ending to all that risk and hope and openness.  because it was like watching a replay of my own personal train wreck, and i could not shout out a warning, could not do anything but sit and let the brokenheartedness of it all wash over me.  and because it was beautiful, too, to have it all come flooding back, to remember what it felt like to be in that skin and that mind, faithful for the last time to the belief that all will ultimately be right.

i like to think i’ve healed.  but not once in this pregnancy, or with Oscar, have i stretched headphones over my belly, unselfconscious, and sung to my child.  not like that.

i don’t even know if i should try.  i don’t know if i can.  i wish i could, though.  i realized last night that i wish i could.

the longer this pregnancy continues with merciful uneventfulness, the more amazed i am.  and the more nervous.  a new and different low-grade panic wells up in my gut these days…not miscarriage, not genetic disorders, not uber-prematurity and brain bleeds and oscillating ventilators. just…birth.

there’s clearly got to be a birthin’ around here sometime soon.

(me and my pet Volkswagen and an – uneaten – magic mushroom, three weeks ago at 29 weeks…by the lovely and talented Kate)

everything’s dandy with the bambino, and the weeks of crisis delivery prognoses are creeping past, therefore…the more my razor-sharp neuroses get to hone in on me.

it’s not the fear of the unknown, but of a three-peat.  experience says i deliver fast, and early, and my babies have big heads for their gestational ages.  i have a scarred cervix that tends to resist dilation, then tear.  my placentas don’t detach properly, causing retention once, hemorrhage the second time ’round.  and my body – this time, as each time before – is weakened at its core from extended bedrest.

i feel silly about my fear…ashamed, even.  but it is real and grows bigger as i do.  birth has marked me in ways i do not like.  i do not want to dwell on those wounds, or give them power…i’d like to get beyond them.  but i am not sure i can until this baby is born and this third birth confronted and endured…and hopefully celebrated.  my fear is that the birth will add to the sum of baggage i need to unpack, rather than – perhaps? – being healing.  i’d like healing. i’m just afraid to ask for what seems like so much.

i had what was pretty much a post-traumatic stress reaction in labour with Oscar.  flashbacks, full-blown panic attack.  on top of that, i had complications that knocked out my pelvic floor: some clitoral tearing, a vaginal and bladder prolapse, an unwanted fourth-degree epiosiotomy that went straight through my perineum and then tore four inches up.  i was stitched three layers deep, stem to stern, and then had to be torn open again when they whisked me off to surgery to retrieve the hemorrhaging placenta.  barely a quick photo with my newborn before being rushed off for the d&c, then three hours alone and shaking, still panicked, in recovery…that, after having lost Finn only hours after his birth, was probably worst.

i had a birth plan for O’s delivery…written to try to remind myself that once we passed 35 weeks the birth needn’t be the powerless, frightening, emergency event that Finn’s had been.  it wasn’t a complicated plan…my only caveats were to avoid episiotomy and to be with baby after birth for at least an hour, for bonding and an attempt at breastfeeding.  neither worked out, though in the first case no one ever explained why, despite my shouts of “no!”.  the whole thing still turned out to be a powerless, frightening, emergency event.  had any of it been necessary to safely deliver Oscar, my sense of violation wouldn’t have mattered worth shit, to me…but he was fine through the whole blessed mess.  i felt like a piece of meat, ravaged and dismissed.

i do not have the powers of self-delusion to simply compose another birth plan and assume it’ll go better this time.

i see my OB Wednesday, for the first time since Halifax released me.  i want to talk about birth…about what options are reasonably open to me, about what factors are controllable and what odds i have of a different type of birth than the last two.  we haven’t talked about it yet because until last Friday there was an assumption i’d deliver in Halifax…though the Halifax team were hoping to get me past 32 weeks and so didn’t want to talk about it, either.  but now i’m set to deliver here.  with whoever’s on call, because that’s how the system works.  and i wake up at night sweating.

i know my own fear is my worst enemy.  i also know that i can’t think myself out of a post-traumatic stress reaction, especially if this labour comes as fast and strong as the last two.  i’ve played with the idea of just asking for a c-section, except i doubt the likelihood of me making it to 38 weeks without going into labour.

i plan to take Evening Primrose Oil from about 35 weeks – orally at first, to help break down scar tissue, then vaginally after 37 weeks.  the cerclage, according to Halifax, will come out at 36.

i’d also – if i have a vaginal birth – like to try delayed cord cutting in hopes of preventing placental retention and getting to actually hold this child and be with her for the period following her birth.  it’s the one thing i ever really invested in, in terms of having my babies come into the world…the skin-on-skin of that first hour or two, reprieve from the work of birth.  if the baby has any issues, obviously that dream flies out the window, but if we can get to 35 or 36 weeks it’s far more likely to be me and my complications that lessens that possibility.  and thus i’d like to do what i can to help the placenta separate cleanly.  but there’s resistance here towards delaying cutting the cord, particularly with an early-ish baby.  my OB might respect my wishes, but the other docs?  i haven’t been overwhelmed with some of their listening skills.  thus i wonder if an induction – so as to be sure i’m with my own OB – might be wise, despite my aversion to the idea?

i did perineal massage when i was pregnant with Oscar and am willing to do it again, but don’t know what impact the significant epiosotomy/tear scar has on its effectiveness, especially when it so clearly did sweet f#ck all last time?

i want to know what you know.  i’m going to end up making what decisions are open to me based on odds…odds of a joyful, peaceful, non-brutalizing delivery, however it comes about.  the more people’s experiences i become familiar with, the better sense i’ll be able to gather of what those odds really are.  Dr. Google isn’t really helping.  so please.  no holds barred.

have any of you ever had a fourth-degree tear or episiotomy that didn’t open or need to be opened again in a subsequent birth?  if it did, how did the healing go the second time around?

did any of you who’ve had a cerclage try Evening Primrose Oil (or something else?) to help minimize scar tissue on the cervix?  do you think it helped?

any experience with delayed cord cutting, or with retained placentas and other methods of trying to minimize the likelihood of that happening?

has anyone who’s had a prolapse not have it happen again in a subsequent delivery?  were you able to do anything to impact how that turned out, one way or the other?

anybody able to compare a prolonged transition-type labour (contractions a minute apart for an hour or more) with an induction?  i know the latter are supposed to be really hard to tolerate, but i’m wondering if my own labours aren’t perhaps already on that track already?  would pitocin intensify that?

any general advice regarding planned c-sections vs. induction vs. taking one’s chances with the on-call docs?

is it common in many places to be allowed to hold your newborn for the stitching period after a c-section?  (it is in Halifax, not here.  policy.  bah.)

does anyone know if ativan or some other anti-anxiety medication can be safely given during labour if panic and PTSD symptoms set in?  i know it’s safe (or at least given) during pregnancy, but i’m curious about whether it’s usable so close to delivery.

i know birth is not a controlled event.  i also know that nothing matters more than taking home a healthy baby.  but i am still hoping, nervously, that maybe i can come out of this birth able to focus on that baby and not on my own mental and physical damage.  i’d like to ask for a positive, empowering, affirming experience…but i’ll happily settle for less than wretched.  so…keeping in mind that i live in a province where midwives are not certified and where the doula i met with told me that with my history she might not be able to do much to mitigate the physical repeat of past complications…tell me what you think makes sense for me.  and tell me what you can about what’s been positive for you, in birth…please…no matter what the circumstances.

(just…pretty please…don’t tell me just to relax and it’ll all be fine.  i will personally chew your arms from your body so that you can never, never type again.  :) )

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.