Hurricane Season of the Heart and Soul

A couple of weeks ago, I was fine.

As the end of this first week in June nears, I’m realizing that I am pointedly not fine. There’s a date approaching that’s been making my stomach turn a little lately and it seems that with every day deeper into June I go, my heart clenches a little tighter in my chest.

There’s a pressure change occurring in there.

I’m having a very hard time seeing new babies right now. It makes me feel like a jerk, but that’s the truth.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fine.

Right now, seeing someone’s brand new baby or hearing about them approaching a due date or going into labor stirs strong currents deep within.

An emotional tidal wave has been building in me recently, deep inside, hidden under cover.  The sunny, blue skies you can see from up here are foul trickery.  Not even I was really aware that such a storm was gathering until just recently as little leaks have sprung here and there.

Every time I think of the baby boy I thought I was going to birth this month, I feel the lip of the wave pushing higher, the base of it growing stronger.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fine.

Today, there was more than a small leak. There was a huge gushing surge. I broke apart a little bit under the sudden forceful gale.  Something tells me it was just the leading edge.

I drew up the pieces again and stood tall.

Generally, I fill my days with other things of a mostly jovial nature. The biggest part of my every day is more important and precious than anything else, and in that I find solace.

He needs me to stand tall.

Still, the wave is pressing.

But in a few more weeks, I’ll seem fine again.

I just wish I really was.

Thoughts From The Abyss

Late at night on Sunday, December 7th, I wrote this article, for Deep South Moms Blog, about what it feels like to face the holiday season with the first instance of the due date of my miscarried baby looming. When I miscarried back in April, I knew Christmas Eve would never be the same. That is when that first lost baby was due.

As I wrote the piece, I was reflecting on how far I’ve come since those first few days after losing the baby back in April. The utter hopelessness. The anger. The confusion and pain. I realized that the pain is so deep, it’s as if it will never go away completely… but over time, it somehow becomes easier to live with, and serves to remind me to be more thankful of the loved ones I still have in my life.

It has been almost 8 months since that first miscarriage, and I was just feeling like I had come out on the other side of the deepest of the immediate grief. And I knew that it was in part due to the passage of time, and the love and kindness of family and friends. In part it has been due to my being lucky enough to be able to write about my feelings and emotions here, and receive support from all of you. (Have I said thank you? Really. Thank you so much.)

I was feeling something I haven’t felt for awhile.

Hope.

But what’s really bitter now is that a large part of my renewed hope came from the fact that I had a new life within me. A life that was crossing into the second trimester of a pregnancy that I had not even expected, but that I was starting to believe was meant to help me heal.

I spent weeks upon weeks feeling tense. I spent almost 3 months checking my underwear multiple times a day, and staring at the toilet paper every single time I wiped.

Slowly, so so slowly, the tension had just started to recede.

I had seen and heard his tiny heart beating, quickly, with vigor. He was healthy, and moving. He was ALIVE. He was going to make it, damnit. He really was.

Surely, so so surely, the tension has just started to recede.

I found myself leaving the restroom and realizing, after the fact, that I hadn’t looked at my underwear. I hadn’t checked my toilet paper.

I believed. I wasn’t just saying I believed. I really did.

It felt so good.

And then on Tuesday morning, December 9th, everything fell apart around me (us).

It was as if I’d been walking carefully on a thin sheet of glass suspended over a black abyss for months, but somehow, I’d just started to believe it was cement, and I started tap-dancing. The bottom fell out – the floor exploded, and all I had to grab for as I fell were shards of glass that cut my hands as I dropped into the abyss.

No heartbeat on the fetal doppler for us to hear.

No little, pulsing muscle in his tiny chest for me to see on mini-ultrasound.

My lovely doctor trying so hard over and over to find it. My lovely doctor getting visibly frustrated, upset, but still trying and trying. My lovely doctor giving up and telling me she was so so sorry.

Ohhh, my inability to believe this was happening… and ohhhh, my immense guilt over believing for so long that it would end this way, anyway.

And Oh, my Anger that it actually did.

My hope? Gone.

No heartbeat on a full blown ultrasound.

I stared at the screen, at his tiny body inside of me.

People, he looked beautiful and perfect on that high-tech ultrasound screen. I saw his little body facing me, as if he was looking at me to say goodbye. His tiny little arms and legs were there, framing the perfect little body in the middle.

Framing the perfect, little, middle part, where everything was silent and still.

Not really so perfect at all.

Every night since then, I’ve stayed up late, so late, doing ridiculous things like working on my website redesign. Things that I can blur my mind with. I’ve stayed up until my eyes just couldn’t see straight anymore, until I just couldn’t hold them open anymore, so that when I did lay down in bed, I’d fall right asleep.

I’m not ready for the thoughts that will come in the quiet darkness.

Every morning when I’ve awoken, I’ve had that horrible moment when I realize that, Yes, this reality is my reality. There is still a dead baby in my womb.

And when they take him from me on this Tuesday morning, I don’t know what I’ll have left to do but start to move on.

And that is the saddest thing of all.

Who’s bakin’ one?

After I told the blogosphere I was pregnant, I started noticing that I seem to be bumping into quite a lot of preggies around The Interwebz!

And there are so many of us all milling around that I’m having a hard time keeping track.

So, if you’re pregnant, Belly Up to The Linky!

Leave your name and due date in the name form on the linky (and your URL in the other, of course).

If you don’t have a website, you can still enter name and due date in the linky!

(Please only sign the linky if YOU or significant other are pregnant.  In other words, when baby is born, YOU will be a parent.)

Maybe we can all have a chocolate night together. Or Tums. Whatevs.

You may now peer into my uterus.

For some reason, the really cute widget that lets you see the alien baby in my uterus right now is being CRAPPY and it’s not working properly in the post. “No Widget Found,” it stupidly proclaims, when I try to include it in my post.

So click over to the website and look at my sidebar so you can Peeping Tom my uterus.

And you know you want to. Come on. Admit it.

It’s official – this lil’sprout is very, very new!  The pregnancy is considered to be 5 weeks along, although the baby has only been growing for 3 weeks.  (It has always annoyed me that the extra time b/w first day of last period and date of actual conception are added.  That is NOT how old my baby is, you crazy fools!)

*ahem*

So, like I was saying, Baby Number Two is 3 Weeks old.

Due dates are pretty notorious for actually meaning “this is the time of year AROUND WHICH your baby will be born.”  So, with that in mind, our official due date for Baby #2 is December 24, 2008. 

Yes.  Christmas Eve.

Please, save your groans.  If your birthday is in December and it has ruined your life b/c of the whole Christmas gifts instead of Birthday gifts/No one really cares about my birthday,Waaah! Thing, please save all your reprimands for someone else.  Someone who won’t think long and hard about mailing you a box o’ dog poop.

Honestly, I’ve been talking about mailing someone a box of dog poop for irritating me in some way or another for years now, people.  For YEARS.  And I have yet to do it!

Don’t pick Pregnancy Time to test me. 

(By the way, have I ever mentioned that I become a totally defensive, boorish, fight-picking hag when I’m pregnant?  No?   Well,  I do.)

*pause*

(Ok, so I just have something to blame my usual personality on when I’m actually pregnant.  SHUT.UP.)

So, yes.  I’ve worried a little bit that my kid will be very annoyed with me for letting Daddy “bang me and knock me up” at this time of year.

But in the end, I’m sure I will do SO MANY MORE things that he/she will hate me for.

So, I’m going with not caring about this one right now. 

Cool?  Cool.

Now give me something to eat. I’M STARVING.

Where I go on and on about baby making and blahblahblah…

So, if you read yesterday’s post, you know that I am pregnant. *smirky face bursting with happiness*

Or, as John enjoys saying, “I banged you and got you knocked up!”

Either way.

A few of you have asked if we were trying.  The answer to that is actually both yes and no.

See, when I got pregnant with Braden, we were REALLY trying.  I was taking my basal body temperature every day at 6am before I started moving (thermometer and notepad on bedside table) and then charting it online to create ovulation prediction graphs.  I was using ovulation predictor kits – Pee on a stick every day and it will say YES! or NO! so that you know if you should RUN HOME AND DO IT. 

I was testing and charting my cervical position, openness, and mucous, for crying out loud!  You haven’t lived until you’ve swished your finger around in there thinking, “is that high and medium or medium and open?”  and “I think this is egg-white mucous, it’s pretty slimy….”

THAT’S trying. 

This?  Well, this was basically trying the relaxed way.  As in, I stopped taking The Pill at the end of January to regain my libido and shrug off the worst of my depression.  (And it worked! Hurrah!)  But John and I discussed everything in detail, and decided that we wanted to get pregnant sometime this year, anyway… so we figured we would just forget about trying NOT to get pregnant.

So basically… we tried by not NOT trying.  Hah!  Looks like it worked for us.  We feel incredibly blessed and are grateful beyond words.

The other question I’ve been getting is: when’s the due date/how far along are you?

I would love to tell you… but I cannot do so yet with certaintly.  (And the control freak in me is positively FREAKING OUT ABOUT THIS, by the way.  She’s just having seizures and melt-downs, pulling her hair out in clumps and FROTHING AT THE MOUTH.)

My last cycle was only 3 weeks long.  Usually I’m a 4-weeker.  Ovulation is generally during the second week, if nothing is fertilized, my period happens in week 4.  Last month, “my period” happened in week 3.  This both weirded me out and upset me.  See… that tends to be a bad sign, because if your cycle is too short, you don’t even have the chance to become pregnant.  Stick that together with what I learned from my Endocrinologist – women with Hashimoto’s (like me) often have trouble conceiving – and you had one worried Baby Momma.  It was also right when we were moving out of Mold House… so I was already stressed.  So, I just assumed my body was BLAH and I didn’t even take a test.

But upon reflection?  That could have been implantation bleeding.  Implantation, you see, occurs 6-13 days after ovulation (like, possibly in your third week, fyi).  Well, that last “period” was also very light and very short.

The point of all of that drawn-out blahblahblah?  It’s possible we conceived either Mid-March or Early April.  And we’re not absolutely sure which!

Sooooo.  The Carrolls are packin’ it up early Tuesday morning and heading to the lab at the OBGYN’s office.  There, blood will be drawn and tested for pregnancy hormone or hCG.  If the hormone levels are very, very low, the nurse says it is almost certain I conceived just recently.  If they are above “10,000″ (direct quote from her) it indicates a pregnancy further along, and I can have an ultrasound for precise measurement.  She says the labs should be back by Tuesday afternoon, so I’ll keep you all posted.

And before long, I may even be able to put up one of those cheesy sidebar widgets where you can watch my Floating Virtual Baby grow and imagine you’re seeing into my very own, real, wet and slimy uterus!

YAY!