the dichotomy of tears

April 29, 2015. The week we found out!

My wee little babe is the size of a peach this week. Since we just announced our pregnancy publicly yesterday, I have a lot of backlogged thoughts, emotions, experiences, vomiting... and I suppose this is the time to share some of those things. (I'll skip the vomiting).

For a while, I had to fight against my initial urge to feel guilty about being pregnant. It felt like I was painfully breaking out of the cocoon of heartbreak, a place that I felt was safe and familiar. I had friends there. Other mothers who had been permanently bruised by the loss of a beloved child. It was a congregation I didn't take lightly. I felt comforted by them, held by them. Sharing about my miscarriage with others who had experienced that same loss opened up my heart in a very raw and very real way. When I found out I was pregnant again, I had a rush of fears. Would I be banished because of this new life? Should I have waited? Would my friendships change? Would they feel a twinge when I told them the news, or be able to share this happiness in all of its complexities? I felt torn between rejoicing and grieving anew for the baby I had lost. I wanted to stay the same, but push forward. I wanted to hold onto the memorial I was holding in my heart, but I also wanted to celebrate new life. I was two different people, two different desires residing on a crossroad of complex emotion.

On June 3rd, at my 10 week mark, my husband and I were able to go to my very first prenatal appointment. We saw the same doctor that I had visited right after my miscarriage, and she was ecstatic to see me again and to congratulate us. It was incredibly nerve-racking. I still felt full of fear. I had this weird, irrational fear that they would tell me I wasn't actually pregnant after all - my body had tricked me. I had tricked myself. But in that bright room, feeling naked and vulnerable in my thin fabric patient's gown, my doctor navigated her handheld monitor across my skin until we all heard the whoosh whoosh whoosh of our miraculously tiny baby's heartbeat. We just cried and cried. We cried tears for Poppy, and we cried tears for our new baby whose heart was beating for us, with us, within me. The tears all looked the same, and they all came from us, but they meant very different things.

I have learned that complex emotion, that layered and turbulent crossroad, is beautiful. And I don't mean that in the fluffy, hippy way that people sometimes use the word "beautiful" (I mean, people love to say that birth is beautiful, but I'm certainly not paying anyone to see that business, not even my own). I wish there was another word, a better word. Complex emotion is...worthwhile. The fight, the questions I ask myself, the answers I discover, it's all worthwhile. I can't quite bring myself to say that birth itself is actually beautiful because it totally freaks me out, but it is worthwhile. It's not pretty, it's worthy. Because it hurts and it's earned and it hurts hurts hurts and it produces stunning, glorious, fresh life. The complexities of life are hard and they're worth feeling. They're the dichotomy of tears.

I own the grief and I own the joy, crying tears for both and feeling for both.
I don't have to choose, because I am all of it all at once.

beautiful things

post: why we camp,

This has quite possibly been one of the darkest weeks of my life.

It's difficult because it's almost entirely internal. I can write about it and try to express it, but I place a mask on my face every single day as I go to work and interact with others. I focus on small things and make jokes to my friends and watch comedy shows and movies constantly. It's a very lonely feeling, a very personal struggle. I tend to cry on my way home from work and before I go to sleep. Those are the moments when I have time to myself to grieve. To be quite honest, I have been listening almost exclusively to Enya (a sure sign of brokenness) at work and hardly getting anything done. These days are very blurry and strange. I feel very tired. But I also know that life must go on and time is passing by whether I want it to or not. I realize I'm taking this very hard, and I must pull myself out of it somehow. 

Grief, prayer, acceptance, tribute, hope, love. 

Back in November I wrote a blog post called Stamps of Life. Something led me to reread that piece this morning, and I am now a puddle. Oh, my little November self, if only you knew. Thank goodness you didn't, because you were able to write something that your February self needed very, very badly. 

Here are some of my stamps of life. 

Beautiful moments, scenes of love, colorful pictures of memories that last and transform. 

Oh, Lord, you make beautiful things. Beautiful things out of the dust.

chapel hill

post: wanderlust wednesday

fall in virginia

bazille and camille by claude monet

parliament building in london, england

spring in virginia

ceiling details in florence, italy

smokey the cat

post: cypress gardens

epcot center, disney world

bike in paris, france

blowing rock, north carolina

the cayman islands

post: to be a writer

animal kingdom, disney world

dalkey, ireland

kilkenny, ireland

no matter how small

This post is one of the hardest things I've ever had to write. I know I don't have to write it, but part of me needs to. I have struggled with these words for days. But in the end, I needed to write them down as a part of my personal grief therapy. Maybe I won't hit that Publish button, and this will simply sit in the archives of my unpublished posts until blogging is no longer a thing. It will simply be a long-lost cyber diary of my heartbreak.

But if you're reading this, here it is.
There is an ache that far too many women know: the ache of losing a child you never get to hold.

Part of me knows that miscarriages are incredibly common. I've been continually hearing phrases like, "they're completely normal", or "they're nothing to worry about." That breaks my heart. I also know that it's quite common for women that suffer through miscarriages to go on and have healthy, happy children. But even so, the statistical probability of having a miscarriage is crazy high, which is why I was always terrified of them. As soon as we found out we were pregnant, that fear gripped me like a physical force. It was something I dreaded and continued to pray against and lose sleep over. And then it actually happened, and I wished that I could go back to sleep and live in that world instead. I think a small subconscious part of me thought that if I was afraid enough, and prayed enough, that God would spare me from it. A very sad, naive thought, but it was there nonetheless. I felt betrayed and abandoned by my own body, grasping at smoke and screaming at no one in particular for the injustice of my absolute helplessness. I had no control, no ability to save my baby.

I didn't have any children until about one week ago. That's when that little miracle happened, and I received the promise of one. That positive pregnancy test (5 of them, actually, because I couldn't actually believe it) threw open the doors of dreaming and scheming and squealing. My husband and I had one perfect week of picking nicknames and slowly sharing our happy news with our family. I have a list on my phone of 21 little nicknames we called my stomach in those first few days. The name that stuck was Poppy Seed, because at 4 1/2 weeks that's exactly how big our teeny baby was. Indescribable, to think of life at that scale. 

On the morning of February 19th, about 80 hours after that first positive pregnancy test, I wrote this:

Sometimes I'll wish myself into thinking I have felt something in my belly. Oh my gosh there's a baby in there. But really it's just gas. It's a big letdown. I also love it, because it's mystifying that life exists in there, so small and invisible. I can hardly sleep and I'll wake up and shock myself by whispering, "you're pregnant, lady" and myself responds like, "WHAT".

There's also a lot of fear involved. We've told a really small number of people, mostly just family, and I'm terrified of having to tell them I made a mistake. That I somehow had a rather record-breaking number of false positives. I'm afraid that if I snore too loud or stand up too fast the baby's just gonna fall out. Peace out, mum. 

On a more serious note, we've known and loved and grieved with a lot of women who have been through miscarriages. That is a very deep fear of mine, one that I simply have to pray through. I was halfway through a turkey sandwich today for lunch when I had this crazy epiphany that pregnant women aren't supposed to eat deli meats, and I practically spit out my food mid-chew and proceeded to only eat the bread and tomato. I then Googled turkey deli meat for way longer than necessary, scaring myself silly with all of the horrors of deli meat poison. I guess it's a thing. I'm already making mistakes and I just have to remind myself that humans make babies. Therefore the process is never perfect. I am just another freaked out mother-to-be that is resting restlessly in the hands of God, hoping that I get to meet this little alien on this earth and love him for as long as possible.

It turns out that my wishful "as long as possible" was just that one perfect week. In the wee hours of February 22nd our Poppy Seed went smoothly to be with Jesus. I am now a mother with a ripped-away promise, like a rugged square of quilt torn away from its center. Some people may think that a single week isn't long enough to be so attached to a child, to fall in love, to actually be a mother, but I disagree. I think that's the core of the tragedy for me, this absolute emptiness I feel, the sharp and painful halt to all of our hope and love. I am torn between loving and hating the comfort I have received from beloved friends that have experienced this same pain, knowing they share and grieve my loss but also wishing that none of us had to. I felt an instant connection to a teeny, tiny life growing inside of me, and that baby will be a part of me forever. A person's a person, and Poppy was our person. I don't know if she would have looked like me, if she would have had Dusty's eyes, if she would have loved cats. I have no answers, about gender or anything else. I just know that I loved our week together, that it was far too short, and our hearts are broken without her here.

My husband and I have been clinging to each other. Through the pain and the sadness and even the embarrassment that I feel, which is silly but it's there. I have never felt this close to him, this intricately connected in the complexities of happiness and grief. Our dear Poppy was the flower that brought us immense joy. We were completely unprepared for this goodbye, but are doing our best to embrace the stages of it. It's so important to us to grieve her as a person, as our child, because that's what she was and will always be.

My sweet brother said, "Praise God for the hope we have in Christ. Our family in heaven is growing."

That is as solid a promise as I could ever possibly hope for. Poppy, my darling, we will never stop waiting to meet you. This world is dimmer without you in it, and heaven is blessed to know you first.