Parallel Plans

Dave and I had our 24 wk growth ultrasound on Friday. Twenty minutes before the appointment was to start, I was convinced our baby boy was gone, or at least dying. He hadn't moved much that morning, and I was convinced I would show up for the appointment with eager anticipation, only to have the ultrasound tech tell me there was no heartbeat.

The ultrasound went great.

Trauma and PTSD are powerful grips on the heart.

I am in a strange place.

Today I received some fabric samples for my baby boy's crib bedding. I was convinced for a long time I wasn't going to set up his nursery until he was here. After some thought and reflection, I think it will be really good for me to focus on this in preparation for his arrival. I am hoping to keep the fear and panic at bay so that I can do that for him.

Today I also bought some cupcake cups and decorations (owls, of course) for Georgiana's first birthday in heaven. God, it pains to me even type those words. Today is one of those barely breathe kind of days, where the sheer sorrow of her death is enough to overwhelm me completely.

I came home and set the cupcake decorations next to the fabric samples on the kitchen table. I wasn't even thinking about it, as I was tidying up, coming home, and cleaning the kitchen. When I was finished, I looked over at the table and realized the two items were sitting right next to each other. And it was too much.

Her birthday: I don't even know how I feel on this. I have received a couple of disappointing responses to this from close family members, and have tried to let the anger and disappointment go on that. It's much easier said than done. I feel torn. I want to celebrate, and I also want to crawl into a hole and maybe never come out. March looms, and there's nothing I can do about it other than admit myself to the crazy ward and beg for medication until April. I'll get an idea for her party, and then I think, no, that will make me too sad. Or, no, that will make someone else too sad. This is so hard to do. Life is so hard right now. How can I have so many years left without her?

My son, his nursery: He doesn't feel real in a lot of ways, although I know he's real because I feel him move. I have dozens of pictures of his face, more in fact than I have of my daughter at this point. I thank God for his little nudges, and then I go into near panic attacks when he goes to sleep and doesn't move for awhile. Three months left, and...I don't know. Women have done this before me, so I'll do it too.  I need to go into the nursery and separate out what he can wear that I had for her, and then figure out where to put the rest of her things. Or the rest of the baby girl things. Whatever they are at this point. It's too much right now, so the door stays shut.

Parallel plans, and my heart feels torn not just in two directions, but in a dozen different directions. I am taken back to the last day I saw her coffin above ground, and I wonder how I have survived. When the heart smashes and breaks and never goes back to what it was, how does the body survive? How is it that we survive this?

The One Where I [Almost] Saved Her [Him]

I had a nightmare last night. If I mention that to the non-BLM world, the comment at this point is, "You're pregnant. Don't pregnant women always have crazy dreams?"

Alright, listen up, world that knows pregnancy but not baby loss: You want to talk about crazy dreams? Talk to a mommy who has lost a baby and is now pregnant after loss. Or even better. Just talk to a baby loss mama. You don't even need pregnancy thrown in there.

The dream world is interesting. In the beginning, I used to beg God to let me see visions of Georgiana in my dreams. I still long for that, but it doesn't seem that's going to happen anytime soon. Instead, my mind replays her death in my dreams. Either (1) I tell someone (usually urgently) that she died; or (2) she dies; or (3) she has just died and I am looking at her in her coffin.

I know. Fun.

Now that I'm pregnant, a lot of different elements tend to mesh together, and my dreams are a place where all my sorrow and fear come to the forefront to play out in scenarios. In my dream last night, it was a replay of what happened with Georgie, only different. I was in the hospital and my water had just broken and I was bleeding (this happened with Georgie, only after we found out she was gone). Only this time it didn't seem to be odd to me that I was bleeding. I kept saying to the doctor that we were going to save this one. I can only assume I was talking about the little baby boy currently growing inside me. At the end, I gave birth.

And at the end, I had no idea whether the baby (Georgiana or her brother? Not sure, the dream wasn't clear) lived or died.

I woke up to that. My heart started out heavy this morning.

I went to work and had an email from a friend from the BLM community. She had her rainbow baby. I was so happy about this. This is a woman who has tried for a living child for probably 8 years or so. She had several fertility issues, miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy, and then lost her little girl at 22 weeks. She has had a very hard road, and her little rainbow boy is just beautiful. My heart felt lighter.

I then received the news that another good friend of ours lost her baby boy this past weekend. He had several health issues that were diagnosed in the womb, so it wasn't necessarily a surprise, but you all know that really doesn't make a difference. My heart is so heavy for her and her husband. I just think back to where I was, almost a year ago, shattered in pieces and trying to find a dress for my daughter's funeral.

No words of wisdom from this post. Just a lot of sadness.

My Thoughts

Exactly.

Distractions

I've been trying to keep myself distracted lately. Dave and I are still working through Friends, and our next plan is to watch The Borgias, which he got me for my birthday.

Most days I can keep my you-know-what together. Other days (mostly nights) I can get on what feels like the verge of a full blown panic attack.

Like the other night. I woke up at 3 am, convinced baby boy was gone. He had hardly moved the day before, so the panic had been building. I laid there for about an hour, going through all the scenarios in my head, steeling myself for the worst.

I decided to get out of bed and use the Doppler. The dogs came with me into the living room, I put the wand on my belly, and heard what I thought was his heartbeat.

I went back to bed and tried to will myself back to sleep. It didn't happen. I started to wonder if maybe the sound I heard was the placenta, or my blood flow, or worse, my heartbeat. I started Googling these sounds to try and figure out if I heard his heartbeat.

Suffice to say that I didn't go back to sleep until 7 am, only to wake back up at 8 am. Bleh.

SO I am trying to keep myself distracted. I'm sort of decorating the house we just moved into, although we don't have a lot of extra money, so that's a little limited. Another thing I've been doing is trying new recipes.

In the past couple of weeks, I've made

-chicken enchilada casserole
-Thai marinated steak salad (this one was delicious, I could eat it every day)
-dijon mustard chicken
-french toast
-BBQ chicken in the slow cooker
-spaghetti and meat sauce


I also eat a lot of this (though with turkey bacon):

It seems like it's all this kid wants to eat.

Other than that, my wonderful husband and sweet doggies Quatro and Bing try to keep me distracted too. Quatro (the little black and white one) has been my buddy for a long time. 

Bing is the sweetest dog I've ever known. He's a little shy with strangers, but all he wants is love and affection all the time. His body has some genetic issues which have made him a little more high maintenance than the average dog, but by the time we realized that about him, we already loved him, so sending him back to the breeder just wasn't an option.

Bing is also special to me because he came into our lives the same month Georgiana did--July 2010.  We bought him the week before I found out I was pregnant, though it's very likely he and Georgie actually did show up in our lives during the same weekend, maybe even the same day! I've always called him Georgie's dog. I know he would have been a great companion to her. He used to lay in her nursery after she died, when even I couldn't go in. It just broke my heart. We also got both of their names from the same book, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (Bing is short for Bingley). He's connected to her. 

Living with sweet dogs like this tends to make me agree with C.S. Lewis's proposition that dogs also go to heaven. It seems to me that God made dogs just for us humans, and I love the thought of all of us together in heaven one day, with Georgie running and playing with her Bingley dog. 

So here are a couple of examples of what these sweet dogs have been doing lately to keep me distracted. The top video is an example of a nightly occurrence with these two. It's pretty hilarious, and it doesn't just happen in our bedroom. They chase each other all over the house. 

Enjoy!

And the second one, taken last night...

A Few of My Favorite Things

Today just felt hard. I'm frustrated and tired, and the end of May feels forever away.

This morning, I checked baby boy's heartbeat. All was well. My plan was to post the video, but of course by the end of the day I'd convinced myself something was wrong and I shouldn't post it.

I've now checked the heartbeat again.

Okay. Still there.

Still there. Still there.

And I really love this picture:

The Space of a Year

So much has been happening with me and Dave since I last posted.

In the middle of December, we moved into a new house! We are loving it. It is our first true home and I am just loving it. There are many things to do. (1) Get some new furniture; (2) Curtains; (3) Picture project for my hallway walls. It's a cozy, beautiful place, and it houses our little family of us and two dogs quite well.

Our Christmas had hard moments. My worst day was about 3 days after Christmas. Go figure. Christmas was hard too. I woke up that morning and just felt...flat and sad.  The anticipation I had always felt waking up on Christmas morning was gone. Who knows if it will come back? Probably with Georgiana's siblings. I hold onto to the hope of those future times during these quiet and often deeply sad days.

A little rainbow crept into our lives in September, unbeknownst to us. God knitted him inside of me and started a growing little life and a heartbeat. I found out, quite to my surprise, during an October OB visit where I was going to talk to the doc about "trying again." When the doctor told me, I had such a freakout that I (1) forgot to make my co-pay; (2) forgot that I had valet'd my car at the hospital; and (3) convinced myself, after leaving the doctor's office, that they obviously had taken the wrong urine sample and told me the wrong news. Never mind that I was 12 days overdue. So I immediately drove to Walgreens, bought a pregnancy test, used it in the Walgreens bathroom, and stared in shock as the word "Pregnant" popped up on the screen. I now had physical proof in hand.

We have slowly told the world. We are due at the beginning of June, but will schedule a c-section at the end of May. It's been hard. It's been wonderful. We have hope. And we have fear. And the two fight each other, in my heart and soul, every day. Some days feel impossible. Other days I am given more rest for my mind. Early in December, I contracted a horrible stomach flu that landed me in the ER, terrified. After telling the doctor our history, he ordered us an ultrasound and there on the screen was our dancing baby, looking like he was having a great time and not concerned at all about what was happening with us. It was kind of like a "chill out, mom!" kind of moment. Even I laughed, as sick and freaked out as I was.

So far, so good. We have made it past 2 good blood tests, a low progesterone scare, spotting (yes, I nearly lost my mind that week), and just the general panic that comes this time around. I broke down and bought a fetal doppler. The sound of his heartbeat is enough to sustain me for the day, usually. Baby is looking good, always active, always moving around like he is just loving life. I say he, and there is an indication he might be a he, but we'll find out for sure this Friday.

Hope remains. And blessings too. We are once again given a blessing from God that we do not deserve, and we pray pray pray that He lets us keep this one until old old age. The thought of having a little brother of Georgiana's fills me with a cautious joy. I know she had a hand in it. And I love and desperately miss my beautiful little saint in heaven.

I ask you all for prayers for this little one, for God's grace and protection. I am so happy (and terrified) to share the news with you all.

Here I am with my 18 week baby bump with Georgiana's beautiful Christmas tree we put up this year. All I can say is that I sustained Etsy this year with my ornament purchases for this lovely little tree. During a melancholy Christmas season, this tree made me happy. I'll post more on it later.

Mourning Clothes

Well, it's been awhile.

It's not that I haven't had things to say, it just seems to take a lot of energy to express them sometimes. So I think of an entire post in my head, and then by the time I want to type it, my motivation is gone.

I face this Christmas with an odd mix of anticipation and intense sadness. I've seen some Christmas lights, heard some Christmas songs, and seen some decorations, and they make me sad. But I also still love them. So it appears that my ridiculous love for Christmas is still there, despite the heartbreak I feel at facing this first Christmas without my baby girl.

I have decided to do a tree for Georgiana. My plan is to do this every year I am still on this earth to honor our girl. I bought a white one, with pink lights, and pretty much just bought any ornament that I felt had some connection to her for me. Some were obvious picks--owls and butterflies in the colors of her nursery. Others I'm not really sure why I chose them--a hot pink deer? Who knows, but it made me think of her. My husband and I both love animals. We think she would have grown up loving them too. Maybe that's why. I really felt in so many ways that I knew her, that I knew what she would have been like. I'll post pictures of her tree soon.

So onto the title of this post. Mourning clothes. I have always admired the way traditional Jews mourn their loved ones. They truly shut their houses down to grieve, to create "a time to mourn." After Georgie died, I had maternity clothes and a few items I had bought to wear after (presumably) we were all home from the hospital. I couldn't bear to look at any of it, let alone put it on my grieving, defeated body.

Our wonderful families did many things for us in those first few weeks, and one of those things was my grandmother going to the mall to buy me some soft, stretchy items, that also had some fashion, to wear in those horrible days following the most horrible day/night of my life.

I have worn them ever since. Not all the time, but most of them have become a regular part of my wardrobe. Many times, especially in the last couple of months, I have thought to myself that I should let them go, that it's actually not doing me any good to keep wearing them.

I finally decided this weekend that I'm going to box them up before Christmas and give them away. In a sense, the mourning clothes are at an end for me. I have started to realize that the mourning really does not end. It lessens and begins to live alongside other things, like tiny glimmers of hope and life moving on, and the intense, fierce love that remains inside of me for my daughter. But the clothes, and their connection to that time, need to be boxed up and given to someone else, for my sake. Hopefully I'll get a few new items for Christmas.

The same goes for most of my maternity clothes from my time with Georgie. I have about 3 items I'd like to keep with her things, and the rest I've decided need to go to someone who needs them more than me. I will never wear them again, even with future babies, and they really aren't doing any good in a box.

Now, onto something beautiful and precious to me: Georgiana's birth announcement.

I struggled a lot with this the last few months, whether or not to do an announcement. I wasn't sure how to do it that wouldn't be overwhelmingly sad. I didn't know if it was fair to send that kind of announcement, uninvited, to people. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, I would have done this anyway, if she had lived. It became very important to me to have one for her, but it was a very very tough decision for me.

A wonderful friend of mine offered to make them. I have known she and her husband for several years now, and they are both so special to Dave and me. She was so excited when she found out Dave and I were going to have Georgiana. She has mourned with me, and has loved me and been such an incredible friend throughout this whole, awful year. She is a very talented graphic designer, artist, and she made these for me, and refused to let me pay her.

She has a great company that I'll tell you all about soon when she gets her website going. It is very special to me because she has a baby shower invitation based off the one she created for Georgiana's shower. All the proceeds from any purchase of that invitation will go to Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. I know that will really hit home for so many of you BLMs, how she has reached out and made our grief and what is important to us part of her business.

I want you all to see this, because many of you won't receive one in the mail. So without further ado, a true piece of heavenly grace: