I can’t help being what I am

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My dad came and picked Deven up on Saturday to keep him for the week. As soon as they left Vance and I were completely overwhelmed with the realization that we were alone, with no kid, for almost a whole week. Holy crap, what are we going to do? We looked at each other and repeatedly asked “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” THERE WERE SO MANY THINGS WE COULD DO. We could watch TV and not have to worry about it being turned on and off. We could watch porn on the big screen tv if we wanted, we didn’t have a kid! We decided to play video games instead. Of course.

But we got tired of that. So we went to the liquor store. Vance bought a small bottle of rum and a six pack of cokes, and said “we’ll have a couple of cokes to drink” and I was all “YEAH! We don’t have a kid, why not!” Vance laughed at me.  Because, you know,  everytime I open a can of coke I get lectured by my two year old about the dangers of too much caffeine and high-fructose corn syrup.

We’ve spent the last two days doing whatever the hell we wanted. I did the laundry and played the sims 3 with reckless abandon, Vance mostly sneezed and played Dragon Age. It didn’t matter, the point is, nothing that we did was dictated by the demands of a small child. I love this freedom. I love being able to come and go as I please, something I took for granted when I was  childless, and even more so when I was pregnant. I would go out and about and see other moms and be all “I can’t wait to push my baby around  the mall”, but of course now I know. Now I know those women probably had to arrange that outing around feedings and naps, had to pack half of their houses just to walk around a damn mall. The moms of older babies had to be ready to drop everything and run as soon as a tantrum started. Boy, I sure was stupid.

But I love my baby. I love having me-time, and Janette-and-Vance time, but I miss him so much. I miss his little voice and his chubby cheeks, I miss him running around the living room giggling. I always worry about someone else taking care of him, but I especially worry when it’s my dad and stepmom. Deven has just learned how to unlock doors and turn knobs, and they have a pool! Oh god, I can’t even let my mind go there. I know I have less to worry about since they would never volunteer to take Deven unless they had absolutely nothing else going on, and I know my stepmom is very good about keeping her eyes on him.

I do appreciate this freedom and the opportunity for Vance and I to spend time together, but I can’t help but feel like a little part of me is missing. When I pass Deven’s nursery I feel the need to poke my head in there and check on him. When I don’t have a lunch to prepare, or a diaper to change, or a hug to give, a boo-boo to kiss, or even a punishment to deal, I feel damn near useless. Sometimes I complain that I feel like I have lost touch with who I am, that I am just a stay-at-home mom, and thats never what I wanted to be. The day that little boy was born, I was done for. I have been marked for life, I am a mom and there is nothing in this world that is going to change it. It is a chronic, debilitating, progressive condition with no cure. You can’t take my kid away from me for week and change anything about my life, or make me feel anything remotely like how I felt before he was born.

Anyway, I’ll see him again on Thursday and feel more like myself again. We’ll eat turkey and then we’ll come home and we’ll go crazy all over again.

Strategy

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I’m doing better each passing day. I’m still a little sad when I first get up, and I tear up when I see certain things that remind me of being pregnant  (like that damn Duggars tv show), but for the most part I am able to distract myself. I play with Deven, I work on my homework (which I am beginning to get BEHIND on), and when I can’t keep my mind away from the subject of being pregnant I just think about the future. I think of it in terms of what if this month it just didn’t happen for us. Yes, I mean, like, completely denying what just happened, just thinking of it like October, much like September, we were unsuccessful in conceiving a baby, and I just think about our strategies for trying again the next month. Only thing is “the next month” probably won’t start until after Christmas because it can take up to six weeks to get a period again. Yeah, I was pregnant for all of a week, but your body has to reset everything once it is over. It will take twice as long to recover as the damn thing lasted.

I saw my Doctor for a follow-up to the ER visit. Yesterday my Doctor ordered a second blood test to check to see where my HCG levels were, and this time I didn’t panic. I prepared myself, I thought. I drank a lot of water, I tried to tell myself that I was going to be just fine and that there was no need to be nervous. I sat down in the chair and they poked me in the same places, the same veins that were butchered in the ER and again they could get nothing. I actually started crying from the pain of my bruised arms and the frustration how this horrible ordeal only keeps sucking harder. They stopped at less than a teaspoon of blood because my veins refused to give any more and I was in physical pain. This is what makes Doctors and medical staff run in fear. My hypochondriac nature is nothing in comparison to my body’s resistance to giving up certain information. This what makes me an asshole patient in the eyes of the lab staff, and I’m not even doing anything wrong. This, and when I start whining about feeling all faint and seeing spots. If only there was some other way to gather certain information that was less difficult to obtain.

I talked to my Doctor and throughout the visit I couldn’t help but think, “God sure is being an asshole lately” as I stared down at her giant pregnant belly. Of course I’m happy for her that she is having a baby, it just seems kind of comical to me that she was the second member of the medical personnel that has helped through this to be pregnant. Most of what she told me was pretty predictable, such as, “You have done absolutely nothing to cause this” and “This probably won’t happen again.” She assured me that I am not alone, that a lot of women have gone through this, but just choose not to talk about it.

I don’t really want to talk about it with anyone else, except for Vance, and even he doesn’t fully understand what I am feeling or what I went through. It is obviously awkward talking about it with someone who has never been there. You feel insane amounts of grief, but it’s not as though anyone else really has any connection to your loss. It wasn’t a person that anyone else knew, there really was absolutely nothing about it that was relate able to anyone else. It is incredibly hard to understand grieving over something that never had a name, never had a chance to live, unless you’ve been through it yourself.

When I was pregnant with Deven it used to annoy me to no end when my mother-in-law would refer to the baby inside of me as “Deven”. It was like, “Excuse me? I was not aware that you were on a FIRST NAME BASIS with the squirming child that has no idea who you are and who is leaching off of ME.” Maybe I’m just weird or selfish, but I didn’t feel like anyone else had any right to address my unborn baby in any way that made it seem as though they had any kind of relationship with him. He lived inside of me, he changed my body, I was going to be the one forcing him into the world, no one else on this earth knew him better than I did and I wanted people to realize that. I think that’s at least part of the problem with dealing with miscarriage. I think that may be why women grieve so hard over something that small while everyone else just sort of looks uncomfortable. No one else could see the effect that pregnancy or that baby had on you, but you were so aware of it.

Most people just say, “you will try again and you’ll get pregnant” but this is going to leave an indelible mark on my future pregnancies. I now know exactly how fragile life is, how easily it can end, and how incredibly hard and  isolating it can feel when it does. But you know what? I will choose to hang on to the joy, the beauty, and the love, and the life that comes with pregnancy. I have total faith that in the near future we’ll have another baby. For now I am still mourning a loss.