Another rather miserable day, not only because of the grey clouds leaking fat bellied raindrops that land like drunken thumps but more so because I can't take The Toddler out to dance in puddles. Stupid ankle.

Whilst raiding a box of 'stuff' or 'Junk' as The Husband would label it for a battery charger of all things (LeapFrog, I curse thee for not providing an AC adaptor with the leappads) I came across a familiar carrier bag.  Just looking at it quickened my heart and made something jagged and tangible stick in the back of my throat. I touched it and swallowed a succession of three ineffectual breaths before looking inside.  I didn't need to look for I knew what lay inside yet it was some emotional dare egging me on.  Inside were four positive pregnancy tests with marker penned dates from June 2009 on them.  The lines were still bright and teasingly pink.  The tests looked virtually knew as if they'd been pee'd on yesterday.  For those who're new to my blog, do the maths.  The Toddler wasn't conceived at that point.  These are the tests from my lostling.  (follow the links if you're morbidly curious to the relating entries) I still have the tests.  I still have the virtually empty set of pregnancy notes too.  I can't not have them because it's all I have other then sadness to remind me that although only six weeks of pregnancy, it was my baby and my baby was real.

Although expected, you cannot prepare for the vicious accuracy of grief.  Although an old wound, it still bleeds when poked.

I've always struggled dealing with this particular grief.  I miss what could have been.  I want that baby. However, it would have been impossible to have had that baby and The Toddler. Such a mind tangle.  I couldn't imagine life without The Toddler and had we not lost a baby, he wouldn't be here for he was conceived about 8 weeks later, give or take.  That's exactly it though isn't it.... something was taken and something was given.  How I wish for the impossibility of being able to have both babies.  How do you begin to mourn the loss of something so precious that lead to the creation of something so beloved?

Still, at least I still have two legs, unlike poor Pat.  The beloved Toddler 'accidentally' snapped his leg off.  Yet another toy that has survived over 6 years and two children only to be destroyed by The Toddler of destruction.

....It's a good job he's cute.


I miss you lostling.  Always loved & never forgotten.

Recovery

I'm beginning to debate the luxury that i do not possess of having the time and space to be utterly broken yet with two small children the only time that is truly mine to feel, to think and to realign myself with my life, to reconnect the link of the present with the future is when I finally collapse in bed in the dark. My eyes ache from seeing the ghosts of events replay behind closed lids. My heart is heavy and pulped, swollen and bruised like some over-ripened fruit on the wrong side of rotting.

& yet I'm doing okay. I am.

I feel stronger and brighter, I'm mending the bones of this broken soul and teaching it to walk again, into the future where it belongs.

I have my daily wibbles that are at times unexpected and catch me off guard, they last but the blink of an eye and yet in this insignificant flicker of time the world spins and turns black as i simultaneously slump and stumble into it and out of it.

I opened my handbag today and out spilled the lovely positive pregnancy tests, four of them joyously dated with black marker. My fingers tripped across them, stung by the shock of their touch, whilst these sad lips twitch and strain trying to once again make that smile that these sticks once put there.

& yet it's only seconds and then I'm okay again. I'm okay. (& if I'm not, i will be)

Walking around a supermarket today (yes for two days running now I've managed to actually get dressed and brave the world) I inwardly flinched as the corners of my eyes briefly touched upon the beautiful baby clothes.

The Toddler is a Tonic and The Child is , shall we say, a uhm..distraction. Both welcome in their own way.

For the first time in my life I shall be taking a cheap and sensitive (oh the irony) pregnancy test soon and hoping for it to be negative. My hcg was quite low the day before The World Ended so i'm quite positive that within a few days it should be back to a non-pregnant and that will be The day The World Began Again. I have a feeling due to the slowing down and diminishing of the main symptom (c'mon you really don't need me to spell it out) and a certain levelling out of emotions that my hcg must be very low indeed now.

Although there will be an eternal inability to forget (& in a morbid dance around the facts, why should I? I wouldn't have traded those few weeks of happiness for anything) I do have a readiness to move on. My future is waiting patiently, but it is whispering that bit louder for me to step towards it.

& I'm feeling readier with each passing day. I'm stronger now. The vicious laceration of grief is now some rich deep bruise that hurts to touch as i wear it like some blue dress that becomes a new skin.

With each pregnancy I've felt the fear of this and yet reflecting it was only this pregnancy where somewhere I think I always knew that we wouldn't get our happy ending, it was a stubborn feeling of impending doom like a red stain on a white carpet that I couldn't blinker out.

Life goes on. Wish us luck that it won't take us long to fall again, & please....from the bottom of my heart, make our next one a sticky one.

I'll never forget the one we loved too much & yet we have so much more love left to give.

Shit happens

Sometimes you remain cynical and profess a lack of faith in the universe due to the constant occurrence of bad shit happening to good people and yet some small crevice of our emotional manor is reserved with that tiny flicker of hope, because without hope we sink with hope being the one float and weapon that we have in this life. It glows like a shard of someones soul that you once borrowed and never gave back instead you carry it in a pocket of your heart as a torch to ward off the darkest places you travel through. Everybody needs to believe in something.

& yet sometimes that light gets snuffed out, irrevocably so. You begin to lose faith and you start to rewrite the autobiography of the universe in which it is unveiled as the archetypal villain that you never quite wanted to believe it was.

Miscarriage doesn't just rob you of a baby, a dream, of hope, of completion, of potential it digs and burrows further, excavating to the depths of your plundered heart until it starts to hack at it's very foundations and removes it's innocence.

With pregnancy comes an air of innocence, you fear the worse but it is over-ridden by the joy and expectations that the odds are in your favour and that no matter how much you fear, it will be overcome. Until the worst happens it remains the unknown something that's shaded and blurred at the edges as you lack the knowledge and experience to sketch in the vivid details. When you've had one or two or even more successful pregnancies under your belt the fear only intensifies and yet it also remains more abstract the stringer it gets the more detail it loses because the comparison, the success, is real and tangible and overpowers it. No matter how much you fear somewhere, this faith in the universe prevails and you believe, that things will be okay, because they have been before and because they have to be again.

However, once this faith is broken or should i say smashed it takes with it this exuberant innocence. The excitement of a BFP turns into some morbid petrifying start of an unknown journey that's stripped of light and becomes dark and eerie. The fear is now real. The fear is now everything. The knowledge of it going wrong is now stronger the the hope of a happy ending. Hope becomes at one with the faeries and daydreams and fear takes root and strengthens and that becomes your reality. Reality always wins over the dreams. Instead of squealing with delight and bubbling with nervous excitement that you have achieved a bfp the thought of it is now just the start of a journey which is weighted with a sadness so great that you can still feels it's once raw bruise turn hard and sharp inside you. The moment is now edges and bladed waiting to cut through. Before every twinge you feared was a miscarriage, afterwards every twinge is just the start of the end. You've lost that quintessential hope that bobs you above the fear that turns the inevitable into the malleable changeable hope, that things will and can be okay. The prospect of a future pregnancy is no longer exciting, it's something you must face and endure without that torch to guide you through it, without the innocence that can blinker your eyes. You're forced to walk down that path with your eyes pinned open, unable to even blink for a second from the fear as you wonder, can you revive hope? Can the need to believe that things could maybe be okay resuscitate and re-inflate that which gets us through?

So you wait, with baited breath and swollen heart for the universe to realign and correct itself and you realise that maybe, just maybe you had a tiny shard of hope hidden all along and the only question that remains is...is it enough? enough to see us through this?.

Is the need to believe strong enough to overcome the death of belief?

& like a soldier we have a choice we can flee or we can fight asking yourself do you believe enough in the cause to stay and fight? Do you believe that you can change things?

Somehow I believe that I will have another baby so I'll fight, with tooth and nail because I want one too much to not fight. I guess to overcome our fear, we have to face it.

Without our innocence.

& with the realisation that, shit happens.

This is my truth.

When I first started this blog is was never supposed to be a journal,it was supposed to err on the side of being somewhat decidedly impersonal, more a mocking commentary on daily life so to speak.

However, I'm finding it difficult to detach and comment upon the now without indeed being very much personal.

I know it's impossibly awkward to read about difficult topics such as miscarriage but I would be doing myself and the death of a baby disservice through not writing about it. I make no apologies for frankness and debilitating honesty yet remember always dear readers, you have control and choice, you can choose to not read. It is neither pretty nor eloquent, I cannot wrap it up in witticisms or bows.

The Husband and I got married 5 years ago today, i was 32 weeks pregnant with The Child at the time. Five years later fast forwarding to today and The Husband is bone tired, I'm still in the process of miscarrying, The Child is off school ill and The Toddler has a squirty bum (probably not at all helped by her fruit fetish, yesterday alone she consumed a banana, a pear, a punnet (yes as in whole) of blueberrie's some more blueberries, some blackberries and two kiwi's, not bad going for a 2.5yr old) I've been bleeding too heavily to buy The Husband a card and we don't even have the pennies to have a takeaway tonight. Obviously this is not the Ideal anniversary, quite far from it.

My heart is broken and yet the pieces of it keep breaking too.

One minute i'm muted and rendered rigid by the grief and the next I find it hard to reach it, to touch it and I feel monstrous for feeling okay so soon, and then like a wave it crashes over again.

I feel emotionally raw and swollen swinging like some shivering pendulum between a grief so thick and so black that it crushes me in it's blackness and a numbness, so acute that I want to smash my bones into pieces.

It wasn't just losing my baby it's all the hope, dreams and potential that a pregnancy represented.....it was hope...hope that things can get better, hope for a new start, hope for fixing me, hope for completing our family...and hope that maybe, just maybe something could go right for us. I was happy for the first time in so long. I feel like a massive part of me has died. I can't stop crying. Is it possible to have loved someone *too* much?

I am well aware that in some sense I could indeed count my so called blessings so to speak. I have two beautiful children and yet how does it make it easier? to know how perfect it turns out when pregnancy goes right? Surely it serves only to increase the intensity of this because you are most aware of exactly what you've lost? I'm thankful that i've been saved some of the physical trauma through losing so early and yet it does little to minimise the tragedy of it. If an 8 year old child died, would it be any more tragic then a three year old? So in that vain of thought it should thusly follow that a 6 week fetus is just as meaningful and emblazoned the same raw potential and capacity for inspiring love as a ten or 12 week one.

Like most events in life this one too holds it's own soundtrack and that is 'Fix you' by Coldplay. I try so hard to appear okay for the sake of the children, so late at night is my turn, when I curl in bed and collapse into the grief, rendered paralysed and voiceless by it as the song plays on loop with the masochistic film playing behind my eyelids starting when I first saw them two precious lines on a test, I can tap into the excitement ,the happiness and it's in such vibrant technicolor and in sentimental flashes this short journey drops like treasured polaroids onto the floor of my mind....right up until the end, until now and every day just adds another scene. I still have the tests.

I can't believe this is happening to us and yet part of me knew, knew that this always would happen to us. I always knew this was lurking in the proverbial shadows of our discontent, to strike us down.

The Husband says we can try again. The Husband says he really wants to try again.

The epu said that we have to wait three months?! 'so that we don't see you back here with another miscarriage' Well that was thoughtful of them. Upon researching however, there is no solid actual evidence for waiting any allotted amount of time if you've had a complete miscarriage other then to make it easier for the medical profession to 'date' a future pregnancy.

This grief will always be here, it will never ever leave me. I don't want to replace this baby but whether i wait 1 month or 1 year i'd still hold grief for *this* baby but it doesn't mean I can't *love* another baby too. This grief will own a part of me forever. I'm scared of seeming callous for thinking about the future already when i feel so choked up in the now, i'm scared people will think i didn't love this baby..that i'm not broken in pieces because of this baby if I am thinking of having another so soon. I want that sense of completion, that hope and potential of a pregnancy again....you can have many kids and love them all, it's not like a husband dying and then remarrying the next month....it will be a whole new pregnancy and baby, and will never ever ever ever erase the one i've lost, but is that so wrong? to have both? To still grieve over what i've lost and yet to want something new? a future? Some positivity? is it wrong to even be thinking about this whilst i'm still in the process of mc'ing? I'm not for one instant implying i'm ready to start again, only that surely the only basis of readiness is ones own feelings after taking things one day at a time? I guess in my mind the baby i've lost and pregnancy are separate entities that can co-exist.

So I guess perhaps in all this for records sake I should include the bare bones of the facts, for posterity. You may want to stop reading, about now. This may get physically and emotionally graphic.


I have two fabulous kids The Child (4.5) and The Toddler (2.5) and i finally after a lot of arguments got The Husband to agree to have a third. I was breastfeeding The Toddler up until about ten days ago and as such didn't get a visit from old Aunt Flo from Nov 2005 (when I got pg with her) until about March this year and that was then a 56? 58? day cycle. So imagine my surprise when on day 39 of my next cycle i got a bfp on the 8th June! Over the moon doesn't even begin to describe it. It was a faint line on an cheap strip test. Took a FR and got definate line. In that week I took that one IC, 4 FR (each day they got darker) and 2 cbddigi's.

I got insomnia (first pregnancy symptom i get in pregnancies) , nausea, tender breasts, hormonal, forgetful, cravings for chicken, wee'ing loads ....classic pregnancy symptoms.

On Sunday (22nd) I got blood streaked CM when i wiped. Great thing to happen on fathers day. Obviously I panicked but I had pink spotting and spotting like this with The Toddler and scans at 8w and 11w showed she was fine and I still had pg'cy symptoms. The next morning I had it again so I went to the doctors who then got me a scan for 2pm that day (Monday). On the way to the hospital (two buses) i didn't feel nauseous for the first time in over a week (i'd been getting awful nausea when traveling) and the symptoms just didn't seem there but i wondered if it was because I was so scared.

At the EPU they scanned me. By my dates I was 5+6 (adjusted date as i knew roughly when I ovulated and it was long cycle) but off that wheel of doom they use they said i was 7+3. They tried an abdominal scan (which i knew would show nothing) and she said i had a retroverted uterus (my uterus is retro, how positively funky). She did an internal scan and couldn't find anything, not even a sack. Nothing. She tried to check my ovaries to rule out ectopic but could only find one of my ovaries so thus couldn't rule out ectopic. I remember joking 'Anything else missing in there? the count is so far at one baby and one ovary missing' They took my blood. They called later that night and said my hcg level was 116 and I had to go back in on Wednesday, 48 hours later, to repeat and see if they raised or lowered.

When I got home i had a lot more bloody cm and wondered if this was from the internal scan poking round in there.

I laid in bed last night crying, crying so hard...I knew it wouldn't stay, i knew it was leaving me and yet i was begging out loud...begging for it to stay, to not leave me.....because I love it...because i love it so so much...i had my hand on my empty womb trying to hold in what wasn't there anymore. & when i woke up, i was bleeding. I wanted to catch the blood, i wanted to hold it in....to try and physically keep my baby....and crying only made me cough and coughing only made me bleed more

Since then it's just got heavier. I remember sitting on the toilet and just howling, these primal sobs that picked me up under the skin by my bones and dropped me again and again until I broke against the floor of grief. I'm thankful i'm not in too much physical pain but it is like a very heavy period messy period that just keeps getting worse and worse and worse . It is getting heavier, I'm too scared to leave the house in case it soaks through my clothes....everytime i stand up or cough i feel a small gush.

& i'm seeing babies everywhere, especially on tv. You think it's bad when you want to ttc and everyone seems pregnant or has a baby but can't...and it seems bad when you are ttc and everyone has a baby or a bump....but that's nothing compared to having it in your grasp and then having it taken away. To love someone so much, too much....and never meet them. To have hopes and dreams and aspirations for them.....and then they die. I hate the word miscarriage ...my baby DIED. F*cking died before it even had a chance to live.

It's not fair.

There, I've said it. it's not fucking fair.

If dreams fix your heart, what fixes you when it's your dreams and your heart that are broken?



"When you try your best, but you don't succeed
When you get what you want, but not what you need
When you feel so tired, but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse

And the tears come streaming down on your face
When you lose something you can't replace
When you love someone, but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

And high up above or down below
When you're too in love to let it go
If you never try you'll never know
Just what you're worth

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

Tears stream down on your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
Tears stream down on your face
And I...

Tears stream down on your face
I promise you I will learn from my mistakes
Tears stream down your face
And I...

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you"

-Coldplay

This is too hard.

Goodbye my precious baby 23/06/2009 - - - You were loved too much.