Hiatus

I haven’t written a word for this blog in months, largely because I’ve been so busy with school that I haven’t had a lot of time to stop and think. Over the summer I enrolled in two back-to-back intense undergraduate classes, first in chemistry and then in biology. The classes were three to four hours long, every day, and I would then come home and spend the rest of the afternoon doing the readings and homework.

I then started grad school in late August. I enrolled in two classes, by far the most intense I have ever taken. Every week I read hundreds of pages of the textbooks and scientific papers. I also read three books, gave four presentations, wrote an 8-page research paper in addition to five shorter essays, and took four exams. In addition, I spent the fall completing master naturalist training through the state of Maryland. For 12 weeks every Monday, I took 6.5 hours of training at a local nature center on topics ranging from tree identification, mammals, and reptiles and amphibians to interpretation, stream ecology, and humans’ effect on the environment. I’ll be an intern for the next year and then graduate to certified master naturalist, putting my training to use volunteering at the nature center and working on local environmental issues.

So there’s all that, but truth be told, there’s another reason I haven’t been writing on this blog. In July I found out I was pregnant again, and I’ve honestly been afraid to write about it, or even to tell many people, for fear of jinxing it. I’m a rational, scientific-minded person and I know it’s ridiculous to believe in jinxes. But just like those commercials from the 80s (or was it the 90s?), this is your brain on pregnancy loss. Scrambled and fried with heaping helpings of paranoia, fear, and anxiety.

I’m currently 27 weeks and 1 day, and it’s another baby boy. I’ll write more in a future post about how the pregnancy has been going (in a nutshell, fine, with the exception of my mental state). In the meantime I’ve been jotting down a few of the things that have happened over the last several months and wanted to share them here.

When we found out about our miscarriage in April, the OB who delivered the news was not unsympathetic, but she was also very matter of fact. And the office seemed to immediately kick into a precisely programmed, finely tuned sequence of paperwork and scheduling and instructions. It wasn’t that they didn’t care at all, but everything just seemed so … routine. And miscarriages are way more common than stillbirth, so that’s understandable to some degree, but miscarriages are still a big deal when they are happening to you. And it doesn’t excuse insensitive behavior. At the hospital, the anesthesiologist commented on our private room, as if we had scored some sort of sweet deal. Then he remarked on how nice the weather was and that he couldn’t wait to get home so he could go outside. This was right after the nurse had forced me to state that the reason I was in the hospital was for a D&C following a “missed abortion.”

In the weeks to follow, we received far fewer cards, phone calls, and messages of support from family and friends than we did following Luke’s death. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed since joining this sad club of women who have lost babies, it’s that people seem to have far less empathy for those who’ve had miscarriages. Apparently it’s much easier to empathize with someone who’s had bad luck versus bad DNA.

With this pregnancy, I was at the dentist a few months ago and after I told them I was pregnant, the inevitable question came up of how many children I have. Since it’s a medical office I felt I had to give full disclosure, so I stated that my daughter is 3 and my son was stillborn at 37 weeks. This was the first time I had seen this dentist, and right away I didn’t much care for him anyway. He had perfect hair and seemed like just another 40-something, white male toolbag. This impression was confirmed by his response to my disclosure, in which he, without missing a beat, replied, “Aww, that’s too bad,” and then in the next breath, “I’m sure she’ll love the baby. My kids are 5 and 2 and they’re best friends.” Shut up, asshole. Take your perfectly spaced kids and go f yourself. My daughter can’t be best friends with my firstborn son. Because he’s dead.

When I was interviewing to get into the aforementioned master naturalist training, one of the questions was to describe a time where something didn’t go as expected and how I handled it. All I could think was, “Well, I was pregnant, and the pregnancy had supposedly been going fine, and I was three weeks away from my due date, and then my baby died. How did I handle it? I spent the next year-plus consumed by grief and anger and anxiety. So, I guess I handled it pretty shittily.” I can’t remember what answer I gave instead.

On a related note, I was eating lunch with some of the other students in the training program one day when this annoyingly self-absorbed 20-year-old decided to embark on an elaborate retelling of how he was once called to substitute in an intramural college soccer game and had to dash across campus to catch the bus. He attends Cornell and, in true Andy Bernard fashion, is always reminding us of that fact, and as he told the story I got the sense that this close call with the stupid soccer bus just might have been the most dramatic thing that has ever happened to him. There was more than one person at the table, so I was able to sneak away without being rude, stuffing down the urge to mutter, “Man, that’s soooo rough. There was this one time I had to check into the hospital to deliver a dead baby. That tooootally sucked.”

Luke’s first birthday in August fell on a Sunday. We visited him at the cemetery and added a few items to his box. We brought cupcakes, mostly for Zoe’s sake, and read a few books. Because I’ve lived and breathed his loss every day since he died, it honestly didn’t feel that much different than every other day. It just felt like a pathetic little commemoration, and I wish we could have done more to honor him.

More than a year after Luke’s loss, most of the people in our lives have moved on. Only a few hardcore carers still ask us how we are doing. Hardly anyone included his name on Christmas cards, which were full of cheery messages that failed to acknowledge how shitty and sad we might be feeling given the huge hole in our family where a 1-year-old boy should be.

After a year of needling our hospital to acquire a Cuddle Cot so families experiencing perinatal loss can spend more time with their babies, the hospital finally installed one. They ended up paying for it so we didn’t have to conduct any fundraisers, which was great on the one hand, but on the other hand, the other loss moms and I who’d been working on this weren’t really able to participate much in the endeavor in a way that would have allowed us to commemorate our children. The hospital didn’t even coordinate the cot into their annual perinatal loss ceremony for Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month—at which they released balloons, which I hate, and despite my asking them not to, so I didn’t/couldn’t even attend. Maybe next year I’ll organize a ceremony of my own.

We recently attended a birthday party for one of Zoe’s classmates. It was at one of those indoor bouncehouses where the kids run around like maniacs for an hour or two, then retreat to the party room and eventually collapse into a sugar coma. In the waiting area before we went back to one of the rooms, an old codger walked up to Zoe and one of her little friends. I think he thought they were sisters or something. But for some reason he asked Zoe, “And where’s your brother?” Zoe didn’t know how to respond, and in my mind, I told him, “In the f’in ground. Now shut the f up and go away.” Why do so many old people lack filters and common sense?

Until next time …