the other day, at work, amidst fetal heart tones echoing into our office, i read a chart that noted a patient had five miscarriages...at age 19. another patient that day was pregnant after a miscarriage her very last cycle...at 17. i share an office with the manager, and she suddenly said, in a voice all too recognizable (or at least what i imagine all our voices to sound like), "i should have been a young mother, too."
she went on to explain that she was married young and stationed far away with her military husband. she called them miscarriages. the reality is, i'm sharing an office with another dead baby mom...two dead baby boys at 6 months each. she went on to have two healthy boys who are now in their late teens...
but now, now that she also knows how i met our boss (ahem...in the ER with a dead baby in my belly), the discourse has changed a bit. when she talk to me, she often talks about her FOUR boys. she talks about how it happened, how she often thinks about what could have been if she was back in the states during (especially) her second pregnancy.
i don't think i have to say i was shocked, i guess still a bit shocked. there we sit, TWO dead baby moms in a big bustling OB office. i guess it slaps me into reality; i guess it shakes me out of my pitiful head. i don't have to tell you how many times i've heard the heart tones and felt like i heard a totally different sound than anyone else (in the world) in the office.
what's more, what made the discovery of her dead sons even more surprising, is that she'd been telling me about other, bigger, tragedies in her life...the BIG ones. her son was almost (and i mean skin of his teeth close) killed in a car accident at 16. a few months later, when he was just out of the woods, her niece (who lived with her at the time) was diagnosed with leukemia and died about a year later at 17. it's amazing what we as mothers have to endure and keep functioning (or pretend to).
meeting her has pushed me into a new place: RELATIVITY. here she is, two dead babies, her first two, and they play second to a whole other set of fucked up experiences. it begs the question, in my mind, if all i want is to move past this horrible fucked place of dead baby, what more horrible tragedy must befall me? knowing that anything is possible, how much longer can i entertain the doom-and-gloom? how much longer, in good conscience, can i allow my dead baby to take from my alive ones...not to mention from myself?
i don't have to wait for the next shitstorm, the next living hell.
i've felt a shift in my brain. not sure how long the flesh is going to take, but i am willing to let the residual dread live there instead of up front and center. it may be total and utter denial, but that's ok. for now.
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This is why I'm working on a post right now about how I can only live 14 days at a time. Sucks royally.
Wow, that's a lot of tragedy for one person. It's hard to imagine anything dwarfing the deadbaby thing. But I guess sooner or later, we'll see how that works.
It's awful when you realize that this may NOT be the worst thing that ever happens to you. Frightening really. Keeps me up at night sometimes cuz I don't know what I have left to cope with anything else. FUCK.
I know a db mom here, IRL, whose son hung himself in their backyard. The fact that she still gets up everyday and does all that she does, blows me away.
No one said it would be easy, but Jeebus, seriously?
I totally get this post. I don't remember when it happened, but a little while back, I stopped stressing out about things, the dread was gone, things changed. I let things go almost effortlessly now and I try and live in the present. For the most part, I am succeeding. Not planning, not living in the past. It's definitely a newer thing for me. I'm reading a book that has some meditations that help
Knowing that having had a tragedy in your life already doesn't protect you from having other tragedies later is a truism, of course. Doesn't make any of the tragedies less tragic or less painful. But sometimes gives us a hell of a whiplash-- if what we end up doing with that knowledge is looking around every corner for the next brick to fall on our heads. I kinda thought I would become less paranoid if/when the Cub made it here safe. But turns out not exactly. Working on writing about that, but even writing of it isn't easy... Eh...
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