Emotional Eating Wins Again!

Today there was a baby shower at work.

I went, I stayed for a few minutes, held the baby (they waited for the shower until after the birth because Mom and Dad wanted the gender to be a surprise), then I had to come back to my desk. I feel kind of guilty for saying that I am kind of glad I got out of there. I just hate how everyone is always “SO WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO HAVE ONE!?” and “Doesn’t this just make you want a baby!?”

If they only knew! But I’m really good at faking it when I need to, so it was natural for me to just smile and laugh and kind of play (coyly) along with everyone.

I ate too many M&Ms, too many mixed nuts, and while I had intended to only eat the top half of my cake (you know, the part with the frosting), EE got the best of me and I snarfed it all down. And I don’t even care.

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In TTC news, well, we’re TTC again. I have been taking ClearBlue Easy ovulation tests every day. There’s a different pee stick every day for 20 days. The pee sticks click into a digital “reader” and if the proper hormones are present in the urine, the reader shows a little smiley face. No smiley face on my pee sticks yet. But if anyone was watching me do these things in the morning, I’m sure they’d get a kick out of it. I stumble to the bathroom, half asleep, fight with the package of the little tester stick, fumble trying to get it “clicked” into the digital reader thing, and by the time I get all that done and start pulling my panties down to sit on the toity, I’m literally about to wet myself.

Baby blue.

I didn’t realize it had been so long since my last post.

I don’t know why it matters; no one is reading anyway.

For some reason, I’ve really been struggling again this week. It’s frustrating because I keep thinking that I’ve been able to let go, only to find out that, nope, my grip is as tight as ever.

Actually, part of the reason is that I spent all of last week thinking I might be pregnant again. I was starting to get sort of excited. Last Friday night, my sister-in-law and her family were over and I held their 7-month-old girl, gave her a bottle, watched her sweet little face as she ate, her eyelids getting heavy as she got “milk drunk,” almost falling asleep and flashing a sleepy, milky little grin when the bottle was empty. I was thinking, this will be our baby in a few months. Then, a little while later, I went to the bathroom and discovered that nature’s pregnancy test was showing a big fat negative. Stupid. Period. JERK.

Sunday, we had a baby shower for our pastor and his wife, who adopted a newborn baby boy a month ago. I was completely fine with it until just before it started, when I got choked up over something else. Once the tears came (for something COMPETELY unrelated to babies), I had to excuse myself to the ladies room, and I couldn’t make them stop. My string of thoughts went from the thing that had made me cry in the first place to “OH CRAP, there is a baby shower today” to “OH CRAP, I just started and I am not pregnant” to “OH CRAP. REMEMBER that miscarriage a few months ago!?”

I would be 35 weeks this week. My belly would be touching my keyboard tray right now. I’d have to scoot my chair way back.

I hate having to pretend to be “okay” all the time. Okay with my job. Okay when I’m angry. Okay when other people’s big, pregnant bellies are in my face. Okay when someone asks me to hold their baby. Okay at baby showers. Okay giving my 7-month-old niece her bottle. Okay with everything else.

I don’t want my life to be just “okay.”

I’m trying really hard to CHOOSE happiness, and some days I am successful at it. This week has just been difficult.

 

Stuck in a Moment*

This sounds crazy, but sometimes I imagine my mind being a vast forest, with a meadow and a lake and lots of beautiful trees. And sometimes I imagine a person walking through this forest and finding things deep in the recesses of my mind.

Last night, as I tucked my daughter in, I felt the wanderer walking about in my head, touching on several things but finally resting on a memory that I think of as the last time that my life could be described as easy.

August 15, 2009. The day before my miscarriage. I don’t recall exactly what I did for the better part of that Saturday, but I know that at around 3:30 I took a shower and got myself ready to go to a wedding shower for my best friend's sister. I wore the same dress that I'd worn for our anniversary dinner, the same shoes even. I ate only vegetables and the tiniest piece of cake, and was careful to remember to drink water and not tea because I didn't want the caffeine. It took quite a lot of strength not to tell my BFF what we were planning on telling our families the very next day. I was so excited I almost couldn't contain it! I think before I left I said something like, "I'm going to call you tomorrow and tell you something." She, probably rightly suspecting, asked if it was big news. I just smiled and said "I'll tell you tomorrow." I went home that night and had some special time with my husband. Saturday, August 15, 2009 honestly could be described as having been a perfect day.

Sometimes it almost seems like that was the last perfect day. Don't get me wrong, there have been lots of good days since then, but overall it seems the gray days have outnumbered the sunny. Sure, I'd given birth at age 18, grew up super fast and lived a very grown-up life while most of my friends and peers were in college or at parties. I'd dealt with the loss of my brother and grandma within two years of each other. But August 16, 2009 seems like the day I truly became an adult. Since then, our struggles seem to have increased tenfold. It was like a dark day came and stayed.

Mr. Me assures me that we’ll get back to where we were five and a half months ago, that we will be able to reclaim that innocence and that excitement and joy about life. I know he’s right, but it seems like it will never happen.

 

*U2

It gets easier to deal with, but it doesn't go away.

People still constantly ask when we’re going to have a baby. If they only knew what we’ve been through! Maybe then they wouldn’t ask.

 

But I don’t want the attention. I don’t want anyone to know because I don’t want their sympathy. I don’t want them to say “Oh I’m so sorry” while I nod and say “It’s okay” and follow it up with a moment or two of uncomfortable silence, after which they’ll say one of the insensitive comments I’ve gotten used to hearing from some of the few people who do know what happened.

 

Still, it seems as though people just expect me to be completely over it. Well, I don’t know if that will ever happen. And truthfully, I worry about what it will be like if this should ever happen again.

 

***

 

It’s been five months and two days since we lost our precious baby. In the days that followed, as we held hands and cried in bed together, we resolved to plant a memorial apple tree somewhere on our four acres. We had a place picked out in our back yard, but the proposed privacy fence will get in the way of the sun on our little tree, and then a greenhouse employee informed us that apple trees should be planted as far away from cedars as possible because of something called “cedar rust,” a tree disease that will kill pretty much any apple tree with which it comes in contact. Given the number of cedars on our property, well…then the planting season passed. It looks like we might finally get to plant our tree this spring. I have a feeling we’ll buy our tree from either Lowe’s or a local greenhouse, and I’m quite excited by the knowledge that in a few short months they’ll have their baby trees out.

 

 

 

Things I'd like to say to people who will probably never read this anyway:

Telling us that we can try again IS NOT COMFORTING.

Telling us that we’re still young IS NOT COMFORTING.

Saying “Oh this was just a practice run!” IS INCONSIDERATE AND RUDE.

It is best to say “I’m so sorry” and be a listening ear or crying shoulder. Really, there is nothing else you can do.* Don’t tell me I can try again, or “next time give you should try giving up caffeine” (I did that, jerk), or “Such-and-such is a known cause for miscarriage!” Those are all JERKY THINGS TO SAY and give no comfort; they only make me wish I could punch you or scream “shut up!” at the top of my lungs.

Just say “I’m so sorry” and stop talking before your foot finds its way into your mouth.

*Although, I will say, I got a couple of really thoughtful notes and cards from friends, and one very dear friend who lives out of state sent us a Dean & Delucca chicken pot pie, which was very sweet and thoughtful…Plus it arrived on one of those bad days, and it was so wonderful to not have to cook that night.

Margaritaville

 

This is probably stupid…but when I had a BeautiControl spa party back on July 20 (I remember because it was the last thing I did that I considered birthday celebration related, haha) I got the BC Margarita Party Set – foot scrub, foot crème, body lotion and lip balm, all of which smells like a delicious margarita. Seriously, if I didn’t know any better I would stick the end of the tubes in my mouth and EAT THIS STUFF because it smells so wonderful.

 

I think I will always associate that smell with our first anniversary. I remember getting ready for dinner at a winery with a little restaurant inside and going into the bathroom in our hotel room and slathering myself in the lotion before I put on my pretty summer party dress, and using the lip balm before and after we ate.

 

It will always remind me of how our table was in the perfect place on the deck, far enough away from the speakers that the live band didn’t make us want to die…how the temperature was PERFECT and there was a nice breeze… It will remind me of the chicken cob sandwich I ate, the LandShark beer my husband drank, how effortlessly handsome he is and how he looked at me that evening…It will remind me of how I breathlessly giggled as I turned down the wine at the winery, knowing I was probably pregnant (my boobs were sore and starting to get big and I just had “that feeling”)… It was such a great evening overall, made all the more magical by the secret knowledge that something was happening in my body.

 

Yeah…I would definitely go back to that, as long as I didn’t know what would happen a few short weeks later.

 

A few things:

 

1.       Well, the bill I got the other day may be taken care of. A mistake on the claim that the physician group submitted is to blame. I’m waiting for them to fix it. Maybe I won’t have to pay after all.

 

2.       Now, I’m going to just put this out there, knowing full well that it’s been called one of the worst shows on television and knowing that sometimes people who watch it are perceived as dumb, but our little family regularly watches America’s Funniest Home Videos. In fact, we watch it just about every Sunday night. I would even go so far as to say that it’s one of my favorite shows because, really, it’s nice to be able to laugh at other people’s stupidity, or mishaps, or cute kids, or hilarious things that pets do, and for the hour that I’m watching AFV, I’m not stressing out or thinking about sad things and whatnot.

So anyway. One of my favorite things in the world will now always be tied to one of my darkest days. On August 16^th, after I forced myself to eat the cold burger and melty milkshake, I trudged from the bed into the living room and plopped down on the couch with my husband and we watched America’s Funniest Home Videos. This does not seem like such a bad thing except that if you’ve ever watched an episode of AFV, you know it’s to the top with videos of babies doing cute or funny things and, well, perhaps four hours after you’ve found out that you’re losing your baby, videos of cute and funny babies is not something you should watch.

I was thinking of this last night as I watched AFV from the kitchen as I was making taco soup and a video of a toddler girl pressing her face against a glass window played. Even four months later, it makes me a little sad.  

 

3.       I hosted a small Scentsy party Friday evening, and my friends were sort of perplexed as to why all of the soda in the fridge was caffeine-free and why I make decaf tea and don’t drink coffee unless it’s decaf. I felt I had no choice (I’m a terrible liar anyway) but to explain that I’d given it up last May in order to prepare for having a baby. The Scentsy rep, who I have only known a short time but already adore, and my Granny, didn’t know about my miscarriage and started talking about how caffeine consumption can lead to miscarriages.

Now, see, I can type miscarriage on this blog, and email the word…for some idiodic reason I can’t bear to say it aloud and when I hear it, it sort of makes me cringe a little on the inside. So, to hear these two ladies throwing it out there so freely was a tad too much for me. I noticed that I had stopped making eye contact and fell silent. It was like I couldn’t talk even if I’d wanted to. And what would I say? “Oh, well, I gave up caffeine and still miscarried.” No…I don’t know.

I thought I was doing everything right – exercising, eating healthy, giving up caffeine and taking prenatal vitamins and an iron supplement…and it still happened to me.

 

4.       I feel like I’m in a very thick fog. Okay, some days are stellar and others are crap. Some days I feel like I’m over it and don’t think about it at all. But there are days, weeks, when I can’t help but go there, to my sad place, and sit down and get comfortable. It’s up and down, round and round, and I try to do it quietly so that no one knows or is bothered or made uncomfortable by my sadness because, really, no one wants to be around a sad person. It’s just no fun. I feel forgotten, lost, unloved, and alone. I know I’m none of those things, but no one remembers (or seems to remember) what happened but me.