The baby is gone. It died last week, without me having any idea, with no change at all for me, except me suddenly feeling less shitty and first trimestery. This is - would be? - the tail end of the first trimester, so I didn't really feel suspicious. Just relieved that the glory days of the second trimester seemed to be dawning. Oh, fuck me.
Today and tomorrow its body is being removed at the hospital. At the moment, that's what I'm fixed on, as a goal and as an idea - the removal, and not being pregnant anymore. My body still feels pregnant. Spending the day and the night crying and mourning after finding out at the gyno's yesterday morning hasn't brought my body up to speed with what's happening. I'm still ravenously hungry, still sick in the mornings, still exhausted. It's a very distressing contradiction and I need that to be over.
Otherwise, it's hard to quantify what I'm feeling. Relieved for the baby. A missed abortion and the odoema on the ultrasound indicated it probably had terrible chromosomal problems. This way it was never in distress, never alone, never in pain; just in a warm safe place and then it wasn't alive anymore, because it was a baby that just couldn't be, anymore than what it was over those 11 weeks that it was; that was all it could have and I hope it was enough for the little soul. I guess it was. My body has struggled to keep this baby. But this baby was not to be kept.
The terrible sense of loss I feel is seperate from that "this is the best thing for the baby" feeling; it's the loss of a possibility of a person that has been taken away from me. A timeline that was meant to last from next June until my own death, just gone.
I don't know what happens from here emotionally. I'm trying to be on my guard about falling into anxiety over getting pregnant again, anxiety during any future pregnancies, some sort of magnified anxiety over Godzilla's safety and well-being now that he is again for the moment an only child. Anxious over anxiety. For fuck's sake.
I have an urge to get extremely, extremely high, which I'm not going to do. I also have an urge to take a big trip somewhere - just do that running-away thing - with my family, though, which is nice; no urge to scarper. I want to go to one of the temples in Japan that allows mothers to honour their dead babies because as fucking culturally foreign as Japan and Buddhism is to me, there is NOTHING - nothing - a big fucking fat terrible cultural void - that addresses this sort of tragedy in Europe and North America, and that makes me furious.
I don't want to deal with this by myself. I resent any suggestion I should. I need help.
Today and tomorrow its body is being removed at the hospital. At the moment, that's what I'm fixed on, as a goal and as an idea - the removal, and not being pregnant anymore. My body still feels pregnant. Spending the day and the night crying and mourning after finding out at the gyno's yesterday morning hasn't brought my body up to speed with what's happening. I'm still ravenously hungry, still sick in the mornings, still exhausted. It's a very distressing contradiction and I need that to be over.
Otherwise, it's hard to quantify what I'm feeling. Relieved for the baby. A missed abortion and the odoema on the ultrasound indicated it probably had terrible chromosomal problems. This way it was never in distress, never alone, never in pain; just in a warm safe place and then it wasn't alive anymore, because it was a baby that just couldn't be, anymore than what it was over those 11 weeks that it was; that was all it could have and I hope it was enough for the little soul. I guess it was. My body has struggled to keep this baby. But this baby was not to be kept.
The terrible sense of loss I feel is seperate from that "this is the best thing for the baby" feeling; it's the loss of a possibility of a person that has been taken away from me. A timeline that was meant to last from next June until my own death, just gone.
I don't know what happens from here emotionally. I'm trying to be on my guard about falling into anxiety over getting pregnant again, anxiety during any future pregnancies, some sort of magnified anxiety over Godzilla's safety and well-being now that he is again for the moment an only child. Anxious over anxiety. For fuck's sake.
I have an urge to get extremely, extremely high, which I'm not going to do. I also have an urge to take a big trip somewhere - just do that running-away thing - with my family, though, which is nice; no urge to scarper. I want to go to one of the temples in Japan that allows mothers to honour their dead babies because as fucking culturally foreign as Japan and Buddhism is to me, there is NOTHING - nothing - a big fucking fat terrible cultural void - that addresses this sort of tragedy in Europe and North America, and that makes me furious.
I don't want to deal with this by myself. I resent any suggestion I should. I need help.
4 commenti:
Ah jeez I am gutted to read this. It's shit.
My missed abortion was 1996. The routine antenatal visit turned into one of awkward silence and grim faces. There was no heartbeat. I went home to wait on the D&C hospital appointment.
My body ejected most of the products before I got there. I remember studying the wee foetal sac like I was back in biology and could make a meaning from it.
There's no meaning. It just is.
We planted a tree in memory and it's still growing for the wee one who couldn't make it.
I had the 'scrape' and then no period - I was pregnant with Evan less than 4 weeks after the miscarriage. My laidback man boy.
Go howl and rage Jess. Allow yourself to grieve and take comfort from whom and where you can.
And then go get pregnant.
Oh no. I'm so sorry. Since this happened to me more and more women who it has happened to have passed on their experiences, and it's just. So. Shitty.
At least with the missed abortion thing, we get more resolution than most women this happens to. I keep catching myself falling into the most stupid,banal thoughts - did I put too much chili on my pasta a couple of weeks ago? Should I have been sleeping more? Should I have stopped breastfeeding Godzilla as soon as I was pregnant? - and while I can shake myself out of them pretty easily by remembering "no, you were pregnant, it was just that the baby couldn't keep living" - I guess a lot of women have to find another way to deal.
At the appointment in my case, the doctor was able to tell me, before I even knew what I was looking at on the ultrasound screen, that "it wasn't okay". Germans have two very specific and discrete states of being: okay and not okay. So as soon as he said that, I knew it was dead. No awkward moment of silence, so lingering moment of torturing hope somehow stretching out into a small eternity. Nope. Just a German telling me it wasn't okay. And that was a good thing. The way these people talk like hatchets being thrown really has its uses from time to time.
Brutal honesty. Nowt better. Sometimes.
I like the German language - the way it shapes thinking and personality (ah jeez, racial stereotyping and anecdote) - the way there is a no-nonsense statement of facts. None of the British crappy shame or embarrassment or squeamishness.
I do remember the wondering if it was something I'd done. I hadn't wanted to be pregnant quite at that moment. It wasn't 'convenient'. I was doing a post-grad and had two kids and no money and was caring for my father-in-law and was breastfeeding a 2 yr old and had smoked a joint and... But there's no convenient time if that's the case and it had bugger all to do with what I'd done or not done.
Be kind to yourself. Let yourself be cared for. Take care.
Beer and chocolate are helping. I think. They're not hurting, anyways.
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