Welcome To Miscarriage Club – It’s Bigger Than You Think

Tags

baby loss, community, grief, miscarriage, pregnancy, silence, social mores, speaking out, stigma, support, taboos, talking

Miscarriage is like a secret club – you aren’t supposed to talk about it to anyone who isn’t a member.

There’s a slight problem with that.

If no one talks about their miscarriage, how do you know who you can talk about your miscarriage?

The stigma about talking about miscarriage goes so deep that you aren’t even supposed to tell people that you’re pregnant until the highest risk of miscarriage passes because otherwise you might have to tell them that you had a miscarriage.

And you don’t want to do that… for… some… reason…

Once that dangerous first trimester, which I hate so much, is passed, and your chance of miscarrying goes down drastically, well, then you can risk it.

Here’s the thing – why don’t we want to tell people that we miscarried?

Why should we walk around keeping pregnancy a secret lest we end up having to talk about miscarriage with our neighbours and coworkers?

But the social pressure is strong.

In fact, if you tell a lot of people that you are pregnant before 12 weeks along, people raise their eyebrows. “She’s feeling pretty confident,” they think.

Well, I told a bunch of people. And it wasn’t because I was feeling confident. I knew the risks, and I had my reasons.

First of all, there’s the nature of my work.

I work with xrays and pesticides and vaccines and all kinds of things that are bad news for a developing baby. I could go around making excuses for not helping people with xrays and suddenly pretending to be too busy to help with anesthesia, or I could tell the damn truth.

So I did.

Then there’s the basic rule of “only tell the people who you would also tell if you miscarried.”

Well, hell, that’s a lot of people. After all, I knew that if I miscarried, I would blog about it, so I might as well tell you guys I was pregnant. And since I get, like, 500 hits a day, that’s a lot of people.

And then, of course, I would never hide something as important as a miscarriage from my family, or my friends, so I told all of them, too.

And my daycare ladies, well, they nagged me constantly about giving Owl a sibling, and I knew that if I DID miscarry, I would find that nagging very painful, and I knew that they would never knowingly cause me pain… so I told them I was pregnant, and then I told them when I miscarried.

They won’t tease me about giving Owl a sibling now, and that’s for the best for all of us, I think.

Really, the only people who didn’t know that I was pregnant, or that I had miscarried, were my dog training clients, the clients at my work, and my more distant Facebook friends.

And lately, I’ve been wondering about why I even bothered hiding it from them.

Because now I have to make excuses, and put on a pretence, and I hate it.

I hate getting cheery facebook updates from people who don’t know what I’m going through. I hate having to tell clients that I can’t make their appointment and need to reschedule because I’m going through a “minor surgical procedure”, and do they mind rebooking for next week.

And for what?

Why am I shielding them from my loss? Why is my loss a kind of taboo that one is supposed to consider too private for discussion? Why should I act like everything is fine when it isn’t? Why is their discomfort more important than my grief?

And there’s something else -

If I hadn’t told so many people, then I wouldn’t have received this immense amount of support.

If I hadn’t told the people at my work, I wouldn’t have gotten flowers, and I wouldn’t have been told “take all the time you need!”

In fact, one of my friends got fired for missing so many days after her miscarriage. They didn’t know she miscarried. They just knew she disappeared for a week while still on her first three months probation. So they told her not to come back in.

If I hadn’t blogged about it, my neighbour who reads my blog wouldn’t have known I was pregnant, and we wouldn’t have been able to go knock on the door and hand Owl over so we could go home and cry the day we were told that our baby had died.

If my friends didn’t know, they wouldn’t be texting me offering help, or bringing me baked goods.

And most importantly – if I hadn’t told all these people, none of them would have told me about their miscarriages.

When I went back to work last Friday, three women told me about their miscarriages (and there were only like 8 people there that day).

Even some friends who had never told me about their miscarriages suddenly came out and told me that they had had one, too. If I hadn’t told THEM, they would never have told me, and we would have gone through life neither knowing that the other shared a similar experience.

And I think about two friends of mine, who both miscarried within a short period of time. They both told me, but they didn’t tell each other. And so they both lost a chance to share their grief with a friend, to help each other through a hard time. To this day, they still don’t know that they have this pain in common, and I am bound to secrecy by both of them.

One of these same friends never told her own family. Her grandmother and her mother-in-law both nag her constantly about having children, and can’t understand why she’s touchy about it.

Why cause yourself that kind of pain, and why allow loving family members to unknowingly hurt you again and again? Isn’t that cruel to both yourself and them?

Why do we keep this kind of loss so private?

If someone’s parent dies, they post it on Facebook.

If someone’s cat dies, they post it on Facebook.

But when your baby dies – that’s not something for other people to know?

What are we afraid of?

Is it fear of hearing stupid remarks?

I don’t think so.

Anyone who has lost a pet can tell you that you WILL hear from idiots who have never had a pet saying things like “it was just a cat”, or “just get another one.” And those words are hurtful, because our bonds with our animals are real, and losing a pet can hurt more than losing a relative.

But people still post it on Facebook, even knowing what kind of idiot remarks they might hear.

Is it a feeling of failure?

A lot of women feel guilt after a miscarriage. I thought it too, you can’t help it – your first thought is “what did I do wrong”?

It’s not helped by the fact that assholes have tried to prosecute women for miscarrying.

But the fact is that miscarriage is not the woman’s fault.

The lady at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre said something I will never forget:

“We see a lot of women here who are pregnant and don’t want to be. And you wouldn’t believe the crazy stuff they have tried to make themselves not be pregnant… but they still are anyway. Trust me, nothing that happened at your work could have caused this.”

Miscarriage is almost always caused by chromosomal abnormalities, “a mistake of mother nature,” as they called it when I went in for my D&C, or sometimes a structural abnormality with the uterus or cervix or some other medical cause.

It is nothing the woman did wrong.

So why stigmatize it? Why turn it into a silent shame?

Does it sometimes hurt to talk about? Yes. But so does any loss. That’s why people will ask “do you want to talk about it?” when you are grieving. But this is the only one that you’re not supposed to tell people about.

The fact is, I can’t come up with a single reason that really makes miscarriage different from any other loss, except this:

People don’t talk about it.

Because we don’t talk about it, no one knows how to react to it.

Society isn’t set up for it. There are no “sorry for your miscarriage” hallmark cards. There is no accommodation in corporate culture for giving the father-not-to-be time off to grieve and help care for his wife. You can’t get compassionate leave: that only applies to the death of a family member who has already been born, and no one gives you a death certificate after your D&C.

And so we’re trapped in a circle of hurt – we don’t talk about it, so no one knows how much it hurts, so no one gives any accomodation for it, so no one talks about it.

Meanwhile women who work with each other every day may never know that they have both suffered a loss. May never have even spoken of their loss to anyone. May be grieving alone, thinking no one could understand.

Until one day, another woman comes in with the courage to say, “I lost my baby.”

And then the stories come out, and we hug each other, and we cry for our babies… together, as we should be.

I’m going to start using a twitter hashtag: #talkaboutmiscarriage.

Because we need to.

The Truth Isn’t Comforting – What Not To Say When Talking About Miscarriage

Tags

grief, miscarriage, sympathy, truth, what not to say, words

A lot has been written about what NOT to say to someone who has just lost a pregnancy. Goodness knows I’ve read variations on that post many times, on various infertility blogs.

But now I’m getting them said at me, and PH is hearing them a lot at work.

And it’s funny, because all those bloggers are right, they are very unhelpful things to say, and they can be hurtful to hear. PH especially gets angry when he hears them, which is unfortunate because his workplace is being much worse about this whole situation than mine is.

I try to take them in the spirit with which they are offered, and ignore the actual words.

I know that the person saying these things is trying to be sympathetic, trying to make me feel better. So I try to shut out the hurt, because the words DO hurt, and just appreciate the sentiment.

Because the thing is, most of those things that people shouldn’t say but do… are TRUE.

I try to remind PH of this when someone comes out with one. “We’ve said that ourselves, remember?” and he’ll grudgingly say “yeah…”

But being true does not make something helpful.

For example, here are some common platitudes that always show up on those “things not to say” lists, and which PH and I have both had to hear many times:

MAD

Tags

anger, grief, miscarriage

I don’t handle disappointment well.

Never have. I get mad. I want things undone.

I think Owl gets this from me.

He wants to do everything by himself, and if we thoughtlessly pick him up to hurry him, or don’t put him down immediately when he asks, he freaks out and tries to retrace his steps.

He isn’t satisfied with simply doing the rest by himself; he has has to undo what has already been done. He has to take the socks back OFF, or go back to the bottom of the stairs and start again, or run back to where I was standing when he first asked to get put down. If we don’t let him, he has a meltdown.

Sometimes we let him redo things. Other times we let him melt down. It really depends on whether it was our own thoughtlessness or his stubbornness that resulted in our rushing him to begin with.

Well, I wish I could have a meltdown of my own.

I hate the first trimester, and I’m pissed that I did 10 weeks of it for nothing.

I am PISSED that I have to do it ALL OVER AGAIN if I want to have a baby.

I am PISSED that I have lost TWO MONTHS that I can’t get back.

Even if I conceived a bare two weeks after my D&C – and they recommended we wait a month before trying – we couldn’t possibly have a baby until the end of February. More likely it’ll be March, April, May… a whole frigging year. By then Owl will be three and a half, way bigger than the spacing we were hoping for.

And that makes me MAD.

I am MAD that I lost those months.

I am MAD that the soonest we could possibly have a baby is much later than we wanted.

I am MAD that I can’t go back in time and try again.

I am MAD that I no longer have a maternity leave to look forward to – that I will be working until some time in the nebulous future, as opposed to a set time in December.

I am MAD that I was expecting a baby born in the year of the Snake, but now will be having a child born in the year of the Horse. Not because I actually believe in Chinese horoscopes but because I HATE CHANGES IN PLANS.

I am MAD because I was slightly hoping for an Aquarius baby, because I’m an Aquarius, and was slightly disappointed to be getting a Sagittarius instead and now, thanks to the timing of the miscarriage, I STILL won’t be able to get an Aquarius baby. Not because I believe in astrology but because I WOULD LIKE A BABY FOR MY BIRTHDAY.

I am MAD that I don’t know when I will bring home a sibling for Owl.

I am MAD that I won’t be bringing a newborn home to meet the family as planned at Christmas.

I am MAD that no one will ever wear the little Christmas pyjamas I bought (and a little afraid that someone will because it will take us a whole year to get pregnant again).

I am MAD that the baby will likely be walking and talking before PH’s family gets to see it, because we can only afford to go home every second Christmas or so.

We promised them a newborn for Christmas, and they aren’t getting one.

We promised OURSELVES a newborn for Christmas, and we aren’t getting one.

And there’s nothing I can do to change that.

I can’t retrace my steps and do it over. That’s gone, lost.

And I’m MAD.

Baby-ectomy Complete

Tags

D&C, miscarriage, recovery, sedation

Well, it’s done.

I had my assessment first thing in the morning.

They offered to do a second ultrasound, which I accepted – not because I really hoped they’d find anything different, but just for peace of mind – and it was slightly healing because they did the things that didn’t happen in the first ultrasound.

They let PH come in. They let me see the screen. They showed me the still grey jelly bean, and the place where the heart should be beating. They showed my blood pulsing through the uterus and placenta – and not through the grey jelly bean.

Then they looked at my ovaries, and showed me the corpus luteum, the place where this baby started, still there, still producing hormones, supporting a baby that will never be. They also showed me other follicles, which they said were fresh ova, waiting to be released.

I looked at them. Maybe one of them would become my baby.

Then they re-presented my options to me – wait to miscarry naturally, get a suppository to induce miscarriage, or have a D&C. They said that the baby was far enough along that they didn’t recommend the suppository option, so really it was wait it out, or D&C.

We already knew what we wanted. We had already waited nearly a week, and who knows how long since the baby actually died.

My options were to do it with nothing but a whackload of ibuprofen, with sedation, or with full anesthesia in the O.R. The first seemed not medicated enough, the last seemed far too medicated. So I asked for sedation.

To get the sedation, I had to go upstairs to a “secure area” where women were having D&Cs for “all sorts of reasons”, so in other words, a shmashmortion clinic.

So they took me up there and PH sat in the waiting room and read the “Men please read” materials there about how to deal with your wife’s shmashmortion.

They ushered me in, told me to take off my bottoms and put on a wrap around skirt and stuff my undies, complete with a pad, in a front pocket for easy access. I hate situations like this because I never know whether they want me to take off my socks. This time I decided to, and they didn’t correct me the way they corrected another girl who took off her shirt. So I guess that was ok.

Then they put in an IV and gave me a bunch of pills to take.

They left me sitting in a little hospital bed for a while under woollen covers, then they took me into a room and had me lay down with my legs in stirrups.

They injected the sedation and inanimate objects began to move a little bit.

I was conscious through the whole procedure, but I wasn’t really aware of it. The nurse had found out through small talk that I work at a vet clinic and was full of questions about what that is like. I think we talked about it through the procedure but I don’t remember anything of the conversation.

I just remember the OB-GYN announcing that it was done after a very short period of time, and he carried a metal bowl out of the room. The sedation made me less afraid to ask the question I thought might horrify them:

“Can I… see it?”

And to my surprise, a casual “sure,” came out of the next room. A few minutes later they brought me a sort of tray or bowl filled with water, with little pinkish bits of stuff floating in it.

They pointed to one strand that looked like all the other strands and said “we think that’s it.”

It didn’t look like anything. Certainly not a baby, not even an embryo. I felt better about the fact that it was being thrown away.

They must have put my underwear on me, or had me put it on myself, but I don’t remember that. I do remember them asking if I needed a wheelchair, but I said I could walk. They led me to my hospital bed, and I lay down and closed my eyes, and tears squeezed out from under my eyelids.

I was comfortable in that sedated space. The fentanyl kept me from feeling any pain. The sedative made me feel pleasantly drifty. I kept drifting off into a sleepy land of no pain, occasionally weeping quietly, and the nurses would stop by now and then to take out my catheter, hand me some crackers and water, check my bleeding and so on.

After about a half an hour they said I could go. I put on my pants and shoes, and shuffled out to the waiting room where PH was waiting. He helped me to the car and took me home.

The pain started in the car as the fentanyl wore off. I wished I had more of that, and more of the sedation, so I could keep drifting in that fuzzy place where sleep seemed to accessible.

Instead I took a bunch of Tylenol 3 (of which we have a lot at home because PH has health issues) and zoned out watching Firefly, trying to keep myself distracted, while PH reheated my magic bag for me occasionally.

It hurt. Not like menstrual cramping, but not as bad as labour either – more like very early labour where you have a dull discomfort interrupted by sudden sharp pains.

The T3s would kick in for a while and then they’d start to wear off and the pain would come back. At one point I actually got up and walked away, half expecting to walk away from the pain, as if it were just an uncomfortable chair or something.

I don’t know whether the pain was really that bad or if there was a psychosomatic component as well. Maybe knowing that it was the ache of my empty womb, the feeling of my body going “wheredafuck did you put my babby?” or “whatthehell just scraped my uterus?” made it worse.

I don’t know.

But I spent the day in front of the TV, which I never really do. When PH finally took over the remote and switched to stuff I didn’t care about, I went to bed. I slept until 8:30 this morning, and I felt better when I woke up.

The pain is mild today. More slight cramping and psychic discomfort. But I’m feeling angry, too.

My baby is gone.

Really, my baby never really was - doomed by bad chromosomes never to have a future: a mistake of mother nature that never had real potential… but I thought I had a baby, I thought it had a future, and god damnit, I want that back.

Stages Of Depregnanting

Tags

D&C, dark humor, miscarriage, missed miscarriage, silent miscarriage, stages of grief

(Warning: Morbid humour and dark imagery ahead)

So, you may want to ask me, Carol, what’s it like having a dead baby inside you?

It’s a little weird, folks, it’s a little weird.

I’ve never had a standard miscarriage, which I am sure is much more traumatic in many ways.

Our baby loss has come gradually.

On the one hand, I hate having it be drawn out.  Our dreams and plans for Christmas have already been dashed, but I can’t put it behind me and move on, because that actual loss of the baby hasn’t happened yet.

On the other hand, it’s helping me draw out the denial stage of grief, which is my favourite stage.

Nor have I been following the stages in a classical manner. This seems to be my progression thus far:

1. Grief

The moment the radiologist left the room, I starting sobbing.

That night, I clutched the little Christmas footie pyjamas I had bought for 0-3 month size and wept into them. PH ended up slipping it from my hands when he came to bed and found me clutching it, and discreetly put it away.

2. That River in Egypt

We left Owl with our neighbours for the first hour and a half after we got the news, while we digested it, and cried, and called people. Then, when we went to go get him, I almost talked to them about “when I am on mat leave” before remembering that I won’t be going on mat leave this year.

I went out and bought myself icewine, because if I was going to be sad, I might as well be sad with wine. If I liked raw fish or blue cheese I probably would have picked those up, too.

But it took some mental strength to actually DRINK it. I still felt pregnant (because I WAS still pregnant. With a dead baby) and it took some fortitude to actually take a sip because a part of me was still screaming “No, it could hurt the baby!”

Then, when I went back to work, we had a patient with fleas. I went to grab the siphotrol to spray the hell out of that exam room afterwards, and for a moment I was like “I’ll have to ask someone to do this for me,” before I remembered and grimly surrounded myself with toxic fumes.

It’s just hard for part of me not to hope that twenty minutes of minute examination by trained professionals may have missed the fact that my baby really IS alive after all.

I don’t think this denial is all that unusual, because the woman at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre said that we can request to repeat the ultrasound before going through with the D&C. I guess a lot of women ask “can you please double-check?” in the hopes that their baby might have risen from the dead.

I would take a zombie baby. I’d lovingly spoon-feed it brains and keep it out of the sun and name it Igor if it would just grow and be born.

3. Morbid Curiosity

There are two reasons why PH and I are going for a D&C tomorrow, rather than wait for me to miscarry naturally or take a suppository to try and help it along.

First, a D&C seems like a faster step towards getting it all over with. This lost pregnancy has derailed our plans significantly, and now the earliest we could humanly produce a sibling for Owl is like, March of next year.

Second, we had no idea what to do if I miscarried at home and actually found the embryo. We were both agreed on the fact that we didn’t want to flush it down the toilet like a dead goldfish (even though we know that after the D&C it’ll just get chucked in a bag of biowaste and incinerated).

But, since the D&C isn’t until Tuesday at the earliest, there is the chance that I could miscarry before then (although unlikely, since as we already know, my body takes a lot of coaxing to go into labour).

So then we had to talk about what to do.

PH rejected my suggestion of getting a jar of formalin from work and preserving it (perhaps to donate to a high school or something – we wouldn’t keep it. Uck).

Neither of us wanted to bury it in our backyard because our backyard is on a crumbling retaining wall and will probably have to be ripped up some time in the near future.

Nor did we like the idea (which we found on Google) of putting it in a nice pot and planting a pretty tree or shrub over it. Because we can’t keep plants alive, and then what do you do with a dead plant in your dead baby pot? I wouldn’t want to dig that up to replant something new, would you?

(Then again, maybe all our plants have been lacking in the past has been a couple ounces of human flesh…)

We eventually agreed on burying it under the kitchen window. IF it came out at home, IF we saw it, and IF it was in a remotely entire state.

But the whole thing freaks me out because I AM AFRAID OF DEAD BODIES and now I have one inside me.

Now, mind you, dead babies aren’t really scary, but the radiologist did say that it “looked a little unusual” and was “a little cystic” so I take that to mean that it’s a warped and monstrous thing with, like, two heads or something.

Oh, and according to the lady at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre, my baby died at 8 wks 4 days, so probably about a week or so ago (it’s hard to know since the whole reason I went in was because we weren’t sure if I was 9, 10, or 11 weeks pregnant at the time, so it may have died three days before the ultrasound, a week and a half before the ultrasound, or two and a half weeks before the ultrasound…).

So is it, just, like decomposing in there? Because as bonded as I was to the idea of my sweet little Christmas newborn, having a tiny little rotting mutant inside me doesn’t make me feel good at all.

So I may have started Googling aborted embryos at approximately 8 weeks gestation, just so I could get an idea of what I had going on in there.

Some of them were cute. Others were not so cute, usually the ones who had “already probably been dead for a couple of days”. Hell, mine has been dead for a week or more.

I really hope it stays in, because if it comes out I know I’ll examine it in minute detail and that might scar me for life but I wouldn’t be able to help myself.

5. False Acceptance

I think this is just another kind of denial, just a little deeper-down. You see, there are times when I think that I have accepted it. I haven’t cried about it in a couple of days, and I can drink wine or take Tylenol 3 (which I have been taking to help me sleep because f*** health, that’s why) without mentally wincing. Instead of forgetting that I am not having a baby, I am starting to forget that I was having a baby (if that makes sense).

But I don’t think the acceptance real.

For one thing, the whole thing has been very cerebral. I haven’t actually miscarried. I have changed from thinking of the contents of my uterus as  an alive and twitching future child into thinking of it as dead mutant tissue, but nothing has physically changed.

I think that having it physically ripped out of me on Tuesday is going to be a shock.

Finding The Words

Tags

grief, loss, magnetic poetry, miscarriage, organization, poetry, words

We all handle grief in different ways.

Some people shut it in and try not to think about it. Some dwell in high drama.

Some, like me, try to catch the emotions in words so that we can examine them and then release them like fireflies from a jar.

…And some, like Perfect Husband, alphabetize their mag po.

It did NOT look like this when I went to bed last night.

…Or is that just him?

 

A Miscarriage Of Justice

Tags

attitudes towards pregnancy loss, baby loss, gender inequality, miscarriage, silent miscarriage, work

What I have been hearing:

“I’m so sorry, honey, let me give you a hug.”

“Carol! What are you doing here at work? Go home! I would be at home curled in a ball with some Valium right now.”

“I can’t believe they couldn’t get you a D&C before Tuesday! Making you wait like that… That just seems… inhuman.”

“I’m so sorry, I know what you’re going through, truly – the same thing happened to me.”

“I miscarried, too. I woke up one night and the baby… well, it was an embryo but you could tell what it was… fell right into my hand…”

“I hemorrhaged for days after my D&C… I was devastated and hormonally crashing. You’re going to need a few days to recover.”

“Just remember that it is a surgery, so don’t push yourself too hard after.”

“Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t a real loss. Take time to grieve.”

What HE has been hearing:

“If your wife lost her baby yesterday, I don’t understand why you won’t be in on Tuesday. I need more details before I can approve the time off.”

“I’m told you were a little rude with your boss yesterday when she asked you for more details about your absence. It really hurt her feelings and I think you should apologize.”

“You took off yesterday and you’re going to be gone again next week?”

“A D&C is a nothing procedure. What do you need Wednesday off for?”

“Don’t you think you’re milking this a little?”

What I have been getting:

What HE has been getting:

Dirty looks

Scoldings

Passive aggressive remarks

Newsflash, World:

We BOTH lost our Christmas Baby on Wednesday.

F*** Cheery Ultrasound Techs

Tags

first trimester, missed miscarriage, pregnancy, ultrasounds

I went in for a dating ultrasound yesterday because, without boring you with tmi details, we weren’t entirely sure when I conceived.

The ultrasound technician was a chirpy young thing who addressed me as “mom”. As always, she made PH wait outside while she did the scan. As she ran the probe over my belly, she asked me why I was there.

“Hmm, I do think your dates are a little off, it seems pretty small,” she said. “Have you ever had a vaginal ultrasound?”

“No.”

“Well, you did a great job of filling your bladder but I’m going to ask you to go empty it, because I need it completely empty for the vaginal scan. Just let me take what measurements I can here, and then I’ll ask you to run to the bathroom,” she said cheerily.

She clicked away while she asked me questions – date of my last period, how sure I was about that, etc.

Then the questions began to get weird.

“And you had a positive pregnancy test?”

“…Yes…”

“And what was that? Urine?”

“Yes, a stick at home. I took it the same day my period didn’t arrive and it went positive right away…”

“And have you had any cramping?”

“…A tiny bit, a few weeks ago, but no spotting.”

“Okay, Mom, you can go empty your bladder, and then we’ll do the vaginal scan,” she said cheerfully.

So I went pee. But on my way back, I sought out Perfect Husband in the waiting room and told him that I was scared, because she was asking weird questions.

“Am I allowed in NOW?” he asked, squeezing my hand.

“Nope.”

So I went back in, and she had me take my pants off and stick a wand up my hoo-ha.

“Now, this won’t hurt you or the baby,” she assured me.

She spent  good ten minutes wiggling the wand around and clicking measurements on the screen, which was pointed away from me. I love how they hide the results of your own frigging scan from you. It’s my body isn’t it?

When she was done she told me that I could clean up and get dressed, and she would go and fetch “Dad”.

She ushered him into the room a moment later, and told us that she would be right back.

It’s at that point that you start trying to talk yourself out of paranoia.

After all, we had had a scare about the baby in our last pregnancy. Having read Marley and Me makes you more aware of what can go wrong in a seemingly healthy pregnancy.

But on the other hand, why did she ask if I had had a positive pregnancy test? She was clearly measuring SOMETHING on the screen, so there must be something in there. What a weird question.

“If there is something wrong, I would hope they wouldn’t just put us in here and leave us hanging with no warning,” PH said. “If she was that cheerful at me and there is something wrong…”

“She probably isn’t allowed to tell us anything. She probably has to hunt down some doctor to say “yep, that’s a dead baby,”" I said.

But we were still dealing in hypotheticals. I have anxiety. I live in these hypothetical scenarios where terrible things happen.

I’m not used to them actually happening.

So when she returned, still chirpy, with a radiologist in a white coat, my heart sank but I still didn’t really believe he was going to tell us terrible news.

He would tell us the baby might have Down Syndrome. He was going to say that the baby was due on Christmas Day instead of the 4th. He was going to tell us it was quadruplets. He wasn’t going to tell us that…

“So, I’ve reviewed the scans and unfortunately, the embryo is not living,” he said calmly and briskly.

“Oh.” I said in a small voice.

We proceeded to nod calmly while he told us that these things happen, that it probably happened a while ago, and it is usually due to a chromosomal abnormality. The embryo looked a little malformed, a bit unusual, so that was probably why…

“In what way?” I asked.

“Sorry?”

“What’s different about it? It’s okay, I understand the big words.”

He looked uncertain. “There’s not really much to tell you, it’s very small, only about the size of a peanut. There just seems to be some cystic processes going on. Anyway, I’ve called your midwife, but unfortunately I had to leave a message…”

His cell phone rang. “Ah, that’s probably here now. I’ll be back in a moment.”

And he left.

PH held out his arms to me, and I began to cry.

The radiologist came in a few minutes later and we sat up and wiped our eyes and nodded some more as he told us that the midwife was making up a referral to BC Women’s hospital where we could go to discuss our options, which would likely involve either taking drugs to miscarry at home or having a D&C. He said she was going to call me. He told us to take our time and to leave when we were ready. He said he was sorry for our loss.

We dried our eyes and left immediately. The midwife called and told me that it was called a missed miscarriage, that the people at the Women’s hospital would go over the options in detail, that she had sent a referral and we would probably hear back from them the next day. She told me that it wasn’t my fault. PH squeezed my hand as if to say “LISTEN TO HER”.

We had to pick up Owl from daycare right away. We took him right to our friends and neighbours’ house and asked them to take him for an hour. Then we went inside, and cried, and made phone calls.

My Christmas Baby is gone, but my body still thinks it’s pregnant. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been going through nausea and exhaustion to build a placenta for a lump of tissue that isn’t going to use it.

It’s hard to accept that no one will ever wear the little newborn sized Baby’s First Christmas outfit that I picked up at a swap meet a few weeks ago.

It’s worse to think that I can’t even get pregnant again until I get the remains removed, because my body doesn’t want to let go.

I can’t blame it though.

We’re having some trouble letting go as it is.

The No-Cry Sleep Solution For Toddlers And Pre-Schoolers, and an Owl Sleep Update

Tags

books, Elizabeth Pantley, night time, no cry sleep solution for toddlers and preschoolers, parenting, reviews, sleep training, sleeping alone, toddlers

It’s about time I did this review.

I had been holding off until I actually felt like taking the book’s advice.

And I finally did.

And now Owl goes to sleep ALL BY HIMSELF.

For those who have The No-Cry Sleep Solution, you’ll find that this book is much the same… with one important difference.

The No-Cry Sleep Solution is aimed at little babies, babies who are young enough to be below the recommended cut-off for cry it out, according to child psychologists.

I admit to being a little dubious about the Toddlers and Preschoolers edition, because honestly, I think that crying isn’t so bad for kids that old.

If anything, a certain amount of emotional distress is necessary to the developing toddler brain.

But Elizabeth Pantley mirrors my own beliefs back at me perfectly:

I’m a firm believer that babies should never be left to cry until they fall asleep. I also believe that toddlers and preschoolers should not be left for endless amounts of tears and anguish, contrary to some sleep books, which suggest doing this even to the point of vomiting. There are hundreds of ideas for helping a child sleep better without resorting to shutting the door on him and wringing your hands while he wails for hours. I have learned, however, that allowing an older toddler or preschooler a few minutes of fussing or moderate crying is not necessarily evil. Many loving, attached parents have put together complete and considerate sleep plans for their children and allowed a small amount of tears along the way.

[...]

There is a huge difference between putting a child in a crib, shutting the door, and abandoning her to hours of crying versus creating a complete and thoughtful sleep plan that includes a loving before-bed routine and then allowing a few minutes of protest at the time the lights are turned out. There’s also a considerable difference between letting a tiny baby cry in the night and letting a four year old cry when he’s put to bed but would rather stay up and watch a movie. [...] So if your no-cry plan turns into a little-bit-of-cry plan, don’t feel like you’ve been a failure.

A lot of the ideas in this book were either ones that I was already carrying over from the original book, or were aimed at a child much older than Owl.

Some tips were ones I had instituted on my own, based on my dog training experience.

For example, she suggests setting a clock radio to go off in the morning and telling the child that they can’t get out of bed until it goes off, thus sending a clear signal about when it is ok to get up.

Well, we have a clock that we turn on at night, which we call “Mr. Sun.” 

Mr. Sun goes to bed with Owl, and we wave night-night to him. He winks, closes his eye, turns into a star (it’s weird to say the sun turned into a star since the sun IS a star, but you know what I mean) and glows blue. In the morning, at the time we set, he lights up and turns into a glowing orange sun again.

Owl learned back in the night-weaning days that Mr. Sun was the signal that meant his fussing would be responded to with more than a simple “Shh, it’s still sleepy times, I’ll see you in the morning.”

His first words in the morning are always “MR SUN IS AWAKE!!”

So that’s that covered. We brought Mr. Sun with us to Disneyland and learned that Owl actually does wake up and lie quietly, waiting for Mr. Sun to turn on in the mornings.

But the place where we have gotten stuck is sitting with Owl until he falls asleep.

We did wean him off of being sung-to.

PH put his foot down last year and refused to continue to feed our extrovert’s need for human interaction any further. If he tried to talk to us, we’d walk out of the room for a minute or two.

THAT caused some “moderate crying” as Elizabeth Pantley would call it.

But he learned, and for months and months and months now I have sat quietly in his room, reading to myself, while Owl drifted off to sleep.

And I knew that it was time to make the next step.

Most of Pantley’s sleep plans involve steps. Wean off of one thing, and then another, and then another. So, we had weaned him off of being nursed to sleep, then we weaned him off of needing us to sing to him… but then we stopped.

It’s not Elizabeth Pantley’s fault.

We were just tired. And I didn’t really mind sitting and reading for half an hour or so in Owl’s room. It was easier than introducing a new battle.

But, honestly.

We really did want to have a kid that you could just kiss goodnight and walk away from, and we both knew perfectly well that it was our OWN fault that we didn’t.

Owl had successfully weaned off of nursing at night. He had successfully weaned off of singing and endless recitations of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. There was zero reason to believe that he wouldn’t wean off of human company while falling asleep just as successfully.

We were just… tired.

And lazy.

And so, I put off this review as well because she tells you exactly what to do about that in her book (she has a whole chapter on it, called “Mommy, Stay!”: Needing A Parent’s Help To Fall Asleep) and I didn’t want to admit that I knew what to do but wasn’t doing it.

So we finally did it.

The “I’ll Be Right Back” Trick.

Pantley recommends weaning the child from the staying routine by making frequent trips outside of the room and quickly returning. The child gets used to you coming and going, and knows that you always do come back. That’s the first step. Over time, you just stay away longer and longer.

Owl was used to this a little already.

Knowing that this was the next step, I did make a point of leaving the room at least once during the evening: fetching my book, running to the batroom, etc. He usually waited patiently for my return, as long as I wasn’t gone too long.

But that was as far as I had gotten.

Because I am lazy, and tired.

Anyway, last month we told Owl that he was a little boy now, and it was time for him to learn how to fall asleep by himself. So we would be giving him chances to fall asleep by himself, but we’d keep coming back to check on him.

Pantley recommends this as a way to be clear about things.

Once you decide on how you are going to handle bedtime, communicate the news to your child. 

Makes sense.

We told him that when he could fall asleep by himself, he could have a little boy bed, that he could get in and out of all by himself.

“Oooh! Little boy bed? I get in by myself? Ooh! OKAY!”

Owl loves his independence.

That first night, I kissed him, told him I’d be back in a couple minutes, and left the room.

Zero protest.

Nada.

I went in after a few minutes and sat down for a moment, then got up again.

“Mommy, I want yoooooou,” he said as I started to leave.

“I’ll be back in a minute, bud,” I said.

He waited patiently.

We repeated this, oh, maybe four or five times.

The last time I went in, he was asleep.

Seriously? It was THAT easy? I had been geared up for tears and war.

The next night I stayed away for five or ten minutes at a time. He was asleep by the third check in.

The night after that, he was asleep by the second check in.

The night after that, I kissed him goodnight and left without making any promises of return at all.

He fell asleep.

HE FELL ASLEEP.

I CAN NOW KISS MY CHILD GOODNIGHT AND GO DOWNSTAIRS AND WATCH MY HUSBAND GET TEARY OVER UNDERCOVER BOSS IN THE EVENINGS LIKE A NORMAL HUMAN BEING.

I can’t tell you how freeing that is.

We started on Wednesday. On Sunday, Owl demanded his prize, and we delivered.

Little boy bed it is.

And he climbs in it on his own every night.

And he falls asleep on his own every night.

And he doesn’t get out of it until Mr. Sun wakes up.

HALLE-EFFING-LUJA.

…And there wasn’t even any crying.

Pitaless Cravings

Tags

cravings, food, pitas, pregnancy, restaurants, the pita house, Vancouver, wolfville

I didn’t have a lot of cravings in my last pregnancy, other than a brief longing for all things red. 

That was mostly because I was too nauseous to really enjoy eating much of anything.

I’m a little queasy this time, but I definitely have a craving.

It’s something I’ve craved before.

In the small town of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, there is a tiny little pita and juice bar with about three tables in it. It used to be called The Main Squeeze until they noticed that their pitas were more popular than their fancy juices. So now they’re called The Pita House.

They have this chicken club pita that tastes like God.

This is a picture of a SMALL. The large is DOUBLE THIS SIZE.

It’s a giant pita stuffed to overflowing with chicken breast, and bacon, and cheddar, and onion, and romaine lettuce, just DRIPPING in creamy garlic parmesan sauce.

Oh, and they’re ENORMOUS. An 8 dollar large gets you two meals.

AND I WANT ONE.

Now, mind you, I always want one. Every time I am back in Nova Scotia for a visit I go to get a fix. Last time I was home was a year ago, when my Aunt was sick. I was only around for a couple of days, so I ended up making a desperate phone call the morning I left for the airport. When the manager (who recognizes me whenever I come in) answered the phone I was so relieved.

“Oh GOOD, you’re open!”

“Actually, no, I’m just prepping, we don’t open for another hour,” she said.

“No! I’ll be at the airport by then!”

“Aw, swing on down now, I’ll make you one. What do you need?”

That woman is an angel.

Unfortunately, angelic as she may be, there’s still no way for her to make me a pita from the other side of the continent, which means that I have a PROBLEM.

Vancouver has a LOT of restaurants. Like, A LOT. In fact, I’m really not sure how it sustains that number of sushi joints. In a two minute drive from my house, I can think of FIVE sushi joints, just off the top of my head.

But do you know what I don’t have within a two minute drive?

A pita joint.

You know what I don’t have within a 20 minute drive from my house?

A PITA JOINT.

It makes no sense that a place as obsessed with healthy food as Vancouver (where they even put lettuce in donairs) doesn’t serve pitas.

I stopped a four, count them, FOUR, sandwich places today. NONE OF THEM sold pitas. Only one sold wraps, and those were pre-wrapped things on a glass shelf generically labelled “lunch wrap”.

And do you think I could stand the thought of eating ANYTHING else for lunch?

Nope.

Didn’t want McDonald’s. Didn’t want pasta. Didn’t even want a BLT sandwich.

I wanted a garlicky, creamy, chickeny, bacony PITA.

So I had to drive for a HALF AN HOUR today to find a pita place, because for some reason there are THREE pita places all within a few blocks from each other in Burnaby, even though there are NO OTHER PITA PLACES for a 40 minute drive in any direction.

First there was the awkward explanation to the staff about what I wanted, since they didn’t actually make it.

They were very understanding. The word “pregnant” has that effect on young twenty-something women. They think they’re seeing their future, and it makes them afraid.

Anyway, they sold me a chicken caesar pita but let me personalize it from their subway-esque make-your-own-wrap bar. Then they suggested combining schwarma sauce with caesar dressing, since they didn’t have garlic parmesan.

I tipped them.

I drove another half hour home and gobbled the damn thing. It was good. But it wasn’t GREAT. It wasn’t stuffed. It wasn’t dripping. It had way less chicken.

But I take what I can get.

Problem is, I want MORE. In fact, I want nothing else.

And I can’t drive an hour to get a pita or two every day.

Oh, and I hear what you’re asking – why not make my own, right?

I’m wiped. I’m just, like, completely exhausted all the time. I don’t even have the energy to sweep the floor. The house is a mess. I feel drugged. I find myself longing to curl up on the floor of a run on a dog bed at work (I don’t, though).

Just the thought of trying to put together a pita makes me want to go have a lie down.

…First world problems are hard.