On your 3rd birthday I decided to start a new plant for your little brother. At first I was going to start a cutling from your plant, but in the end decided it would be best to keep your plants separate.
It wasn’t a sad or happy day. It was just a day that just happened to be your 3rd birthday.
I miss you all the time boy.
While the relationship I have with both my sons will never actually end, it only feels right to put this blog to rest. It’s been a stretch to keep it going this long. It feels like a good time to go.
If you happen to be curious about us, you can probably find us here.
If not, well, it’s been quite an adventure hasn’t it?
It’s strange being on “the other side” as I’m calling it.
The other side of motherhood.
The other side of happiness.
The other side of grief.
Today I have cried several hundred times more than Lou.
I know it’s mostly hormones, but grief is certainly mixed in too.
I felt like a pro at babyloss. After three years and two losses, babyloss was the only thing I seemed to be good at.
But now I’m on the other side and it’s new and scary – just like the early days after our loss.
Somehow I miss the attention of being pregnant (like before).
I miss all the hustle and bustle of doctors appointments and all my other weekly tests.
I’m pretty much feeling exactly like I did shortly after losing Evel.
HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?
Did we not bring home a living child?
Damn you hormones and grief.
Damn you!
Our Evel-Boy is a big brother to a tiny little man.
Louis “Lou” Venture was born on July 6, 2012 at 6:31 p.m.
It took him nearly 3 minutes to take his first breath and I cannot even revisit all the terrible thoughts I had during the silence. But he’s here. There is now a living baby that lives in this house. It’s nothing short of a miracle.
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The hub and I had a terrible time agreeing on baby names. Not knowing the gender made it even harder as we had to pick out and agree on two sets of names. I really wanted his first name to be Venture as it means “Brave the Danger.” There was never really a danger-free time with him, and even now that he’s home I still feel like hidden dangers are lurking around. Danger good and danger bad.
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The new-ness of his arrival is over now. Dad left today and now it is time the hub and I navigate on our own towards parenthood. He (the hub) has been “taking a nap” for the past 4 hours upstairs while I have been tormenting my boobies to make more milk for this tiny man downstairs. I have to supplement with formula and each time I make a bottle I find myself crying. My happy pregnancy hormones are running dry and those icky postpartum blues are trying to creep in. (Don’t worry, I’m not afraid to talk to my doctor about PPD if that is the case, although what new mom doesn’t just suffer from sleep deprivation?)
As always I aim to write what’s really going on, not just the happy rainbow and sunshine update.
…we are happy. Very happy.
All this feels so new, yet oddly familiar.
I have been a mom all these years.
Thanks to everyone who walked this journey with us. You made it that less scary. Now we get to talk about living baby stuff like poop and sore nipples and how many times you get peed on in a day.
If we were to use this pregnancy as a measurement of time, Evel was already dead, I was home, had just started this blog and knew somewhere in my broken heart I wanted to help others who wouldn’t be waking up from this nightmare either.
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I want everyone’s attention, but wouldn’t know what to do with it if I had it.
I want to know how this will end.
I want to know this will end differently than before.
I have no choice but to live my life either with this child, or suddenly without. There is no alternate ending in real life.
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I put together a bassinet today. Twice actually.
Backwards the first time.
I laughed because it’s just my luck.
It’s like somehow screwing in a light bulb upside down, or trying to stick the bottom of a bottle in a baby’s mouth instead of the nipple.
This white, flowing, beautiful bassinet disconnected my hands from my brain.
I was tightening when I needed to loosen.
I was thinking of the crib I had assembled nearly three years earlier.
A hand-me-down crib a baby had grown out of.
A hand-me-down crib my baby never grew up in.
I thought I could use that same crib, but I can’t.
It was the one big-ticket baby item that tricked us both into believing we were going to have a baby in this house.
Every time I see it in the closet I want it to disappear.
So now there is a bassinet.
A white, flowing, beautiful bassinet with a little canopy and air vents and storage on the bottom.
I hope I won’t regret throwing the box away.
Had to count on my fingers and toes right where I am. It’s been since last year I’ve calculated the exact date (and even then realized I got the exact date WRONG. Oops). So to save us all the trouble of calculating, I’m two years out.
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I grieve in color now, instead of gray scale.
I can see and feel the yellow of the sun and the blues in the sky.
I can see pink and purple flowers everywhere — even in my own front yard.
I still wonder what color my son’s hair would be now, or what shade of blue his eyes would have been. I still cry when I think too hard about it.
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In real life, my son is my secret. He’s a complex part of my life that most people will never be able to comprehend.
He is mostly forgotten in the terrifying kind of way by those who knew of him. His sweet existence is like the horror movie we are known to love.
He was loved and wanted, and had a room and toys and a crib and a mom and a dad and a grammie and a grandpa — yet it feels like everyone abandoned him — left him to be alone forever. We felt shunned and lost and it was so hard to find our way back to life.
But in my e-life, he is a legacy. I get to talk about him pretty much every day. He doesn’t come out of a horror movie. He isn’t scary. He is NOT forgotten. He is remembered and admired and held dear by so many. He makes his mom and dad and grammie proud. He is our boy, and I wish this could translate back into my REAL life.
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I’m also pregnant again which makes this project that much harder to tackle. I try to keep grief out of the picture and give this person their own space. Only 38 days to go and for the most part I think I’ve done a good job.
I’m hoping that in 2013 I will be able to talk about both of my children — even if one will be missing while one will be wobbling around the house.
This weekend a girl I work with is headed up to Chicago for the first time on a special bus that specifically (and only) goes from Cincinnati to Chicago. The two (major) cities of my life.
We’re friends on FB and she’s constantly updating her profile with pictures and places. Places I’ve been, some more than once.
She’s in art school studying to be a graphic designer (too).
She lost her mom (too).
She wants to move to Chicago, just like I wanted to move to Cincinnati.
I’m jealous of her youth. Her ambition. Her travels. How excited she is by life right now. How many possibilities are beaming off Lake Michigan for her.
I was her once.
Literally a lifetime ago.
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Now I have the brown and dirty Ohio river to look upon. I have twice weekly trips to the same hospital my son was unknowingly stillborn in. I have a beautiful house surrounded by rotten kids. I have no friends to call up and come over to help me get through these last weeks of crazy pregnancy hormones. I can’t even calm my nerves with fucking chocolate!
Sometimes I deeply regret ever moving away from “home”, but I know it was time to go.
I don’t want my tale to be of just two cities. I want more. I need more. I don’t want to be grounded anywhere for too long. I don’t want to raise a child where my first child died. I want to start anew.
A tale of three cities.
Four cities.
I want my child(ren) to be adventurous. Dream big. Don’t get stuck. Don’t let someone stick it to you. Don’t sit around and cry or be jealous. To get off your ass and do something.
I feel like I need to do something . . .
For those interested I started a new muchness challenge to help count down the days until Buttercup is here (hopefully 60-70 days)!
It seemed fitting to start the challenge at 30 weeks, since 30 is burnt into my brain now.
I’m trying not to plan anything to far in advance, but just know I have an ENTIRE nursery to re-design! :)
Hope you follow along!
Link: http://julie.findingmymuchness.com/
Stumbled upon an online article on infant loss and subsequent pregnancies. Wasn’t particularly thrilled with the article, so I started cruising the site. They had a section where you could click on any gestational age and see a picture of a baby. I instantly clicked on “27” followed by “37”. The ages of my two children.
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Everything about this pregnancy is different than Evel’s. I can’t help but sort through some of the differences.
Physically, Evel’s pregnancy was textbook perfect, according to my doctors. Yet, emotionally it was everything but perfect. Was a complete wreck 36 of the 37 weeks (we won’t even mention how I felt after his death). Suffered from deep bouts of pregnancy depression. Felt completely disconnected to him. Sometimes even despised him. Never felt quite ready for him to arrive. Nothing seemed to feel “right” when it came down to it.
With Buttercup, everything is different. Even with all our little obstacles like being on Lovenox, tumbling down stairs, breaking toes, having gestational diabetes, being on a strict diet, we get along fine. Sometimes I can close my eyes and imagine myself holding him/her. I can browse baby websites and picture myself owning the things I’m looking at. I am planning. I am optimistic. I will do anything to bring this baby home with us.
I find myself feeling so incredibly guilty. Guilty that I never had confidence in my son and that it has taken nearly 3 years to admit it. Guilty because compared to Buttercup, my son almost never moved around. I should have known something was wrong early on. Guilty that maybe if I would have recognized the warning signs, I could have pressed for some kind of extra monitoring.
Guilty that my son is dead, period.
Slowly but surely I am learning to incorporate him into this pregnancy. I needed to keep them separate, both here and inside my head for awhile. Perhaps once I started working on this guilt, things got easier.
In the end he’s the great big brother of all times. He paved the way for Buttercup — in so many wonderful ways.
Doubt I would have figured it out on my own, but today is April Fool’s Day — I can’t help but remember our miscarriage (baby).
Word on the babyloss scene is it’s very important to assign a name and gender to any miscarriage, regardless of how early you lost the pregnancy. I never did that. It always hurt way too much to think about. And now it’s too late to go back and think about it. Its been two years now. It feels like a lifetime ago.
I regret ever being pregnant with that baby. I admit that I was substituting my grief for something other than emptiness, failure and sadness. Wanted to give myself something to look forward to besides birthdays for a dead son. Wanted to bring the sparkle back. Wanted to get away from the darkness for awhile.
…it didn’t work.
The exact opposite happened.
The ultimate April Fool’s prank.
Ha ha — you’re having a miscarriage!
Yeah. Real fucking funny, universe.
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I try not to look back on my life in numbers. Like, technically I would have two kids bouncing around this house and a third on the way. There is no way in hell I could wrap my brain around that, yet my heart knows what that might have felt like.
Today, while people are coming up with funny pranks for each other, I’ll be thinking of the cruel pranks life pulled on me. Two years in a row . . . hoping to not make it three.
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