I Need Something More Healing Than Positivity

Tags

depression, loss, miscarriage, positivity

I’ve been avoiding Facebook lately.

Not for the reasons many people take a “break” from Facebook – privacy issues, fury at the commercialism, etc etc.

I love Facebook, privacy issues and all. 

It’s the positivity I can’t handle right now.

I find Facebook to be a relentlessly positive place.

People who I know are having relationship issues post lovey-dovey facebook statuses at each other. It’s weird when you see a couple bickering bitterly and then the next day read “So happy to wake up next to my husband! I love you honey bear!”

And other people, usually fellow depressives who are in denial, post these relentlessly, shamelessly inspirational images that make me want to smash things.

As Hyperbole and a Half points out, positivity looks really, really, fake when you’re feeling depressed.

And people keep talking about BABIES.

May has brought an explosion of babies. Oddly, one of my best friends just had a baby and I have NO problem with those pictures/updates. I love looking at pictures of her newborn, and it helps that it has mostly been just pictures, not statuses going “OMG HAVING A BABY IS SO THE AWESOME”.

But other people keep having babies too, and people are happy about them. Two of my friends have received new nieces in the last couple of days. Other statuses have enthused about even more remote babies – friend of friend babies, new puppies etc.

And I don’t want to read them.

I don’t know why I have no problem looking at my friend’s newborn babies, but can’t stand to hear about a friend’s friend’s friend’s new baby boy.

Maybe it goes back to the whole silent miscarriage thing. Social taboos keep me from Facebooking about my miscarriage, and so Facebook is a place where everyone pretends everything is all right.

Since I don’t like making fakey status updates when I’m miserable, and I’m not really supposed to Facebook about why I am miserable, I haven’t been posting.

Meanwhile, all the people who do know about my miscarriage are happily posting cheery Facebook updates and it just feels like the entire world is ignoring what just happened to me.

And it’s my fault, really, because I COULD go and Facebook about my miscarriage. I probably even SHOULD.

But that wouldn’t stop the fact that life goes on for other people, and they won’t and SHOULDN’T spend all their time gnashing their teeth and bewailing my unhappy fate.

Nor is it like I need more support.

All the people who I’m even remotely close to, physically or emotionally, already know and are here for me. Posting about my miscarriage now would just feel like needless moping/buzzkilling.

So I’m just not spending much time there, in happy positivity land. 

And I don’t mean that I’m moping – PH and I have been laughing a lot actually. We need it – it’s therapeutic. But the stuff that makes us smile is more cynical, more dark – something we are more akin to, right now.

Stuff like A Softer World, which is like instagram for depressives.

Some of it makes me smile:

And some of it actually does inspire me much more than the oppressively cheerful stuff does:

I have also restarted my antidepressants, which is helping.

When I take them I feel more accepting of my loss, more able to look ahead and go back to normal life. My baby died, it sucked, let’s make another.

But it still happened, and I’m not forgetting.

I don’t think I will totally lose all the anger until I am 10 weeks pregnant again and have a baby with a heartbeat.

Or maybe until I hold a new baby in my arms.

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?

 

Miss Pepper

Tags

cats, death, grief, illness, kittens, loss, pets

When I was just 15, my parents surprised me with a kitten. I guess they were suffering from a combination of empty nest syndrome (I was away on a class trip to Quebec) and anticipatory loss, because our dog was dying of cancer.

I had wanted a cat for years, but my parents weren’t cat people. When I was 10, my friend’s cat had kittens and I fell in love with one of them but my parents resisted all my pleading, and he went to someone else (I recently saw a cat at my work who was a dead ringer for that kitten – I think part of me will always be looking for him). They had let me have mice, gerbils, birds, fish, and a dog, but they drew their line at cats.

So when I came home from Quebec and found this tiny ball of fluff waiting for me, it was a dream come true.

“She’s yours for the next 20 years,” my parents warned me. “When you go to university, THIS goes with you.”

“Of course!” I said reverently, fingering the wispy tail.

But it didn’t work out that way.

Life’s Little Losses

Tags

babies, balloons, death, goodbye, loss, parenting, toddlers

For the last couple of months, Owl has really latched onto the concept of “broken”. He attaches the term to anything that is not as it should be in his little toddler eyes. He announces it in a shrill little voice, preceded by a worried “uh oh!”

Shoelace untied?

“Uh oh, BROKEN!!”

Blanket came off in the night?

“Uh oh, BROKEN!!”

Toy train track got disconnected?

“Uh oh, BROKEN!!”

So then, the other day, he started playing with the balloon that he brought home from The Hair Cut Incident, batting it around the room. Beloved Dog began batting it around, too, which Owl thought was just hilarious. I watched them playing keep-it-up together, warning off the dog when he got over enthusiastic.

Eventually the inevitable happened – The dog’s paw hit it too hard and…

POP!

The balloon disappeared, leaving a few shattered fragments of blue latex in its wake.

“Uh oh, BROKEN!”

Owl ran over and picked it up.

“Oh, honey,” I said, “it popped. Balloon’s all gone now.”

“No, fix! Mama fix!”

“You can’t fix a balloon once it’s broken,” I explained gently, as he clutched the limp  bits of balloon. I pried the balloon from his fingers. “It’s garbage now. I’ll go throw it away.”

“No!! Broken! Mama fix it! ME FIX IT!”

I relented and let him reclaim his bits of balloon, and he spent a good two minutes desperately putting them to his lips one by one and making puffing air noises, as he tried to breathe life into them the way he has seen me do with balloons in the past.

“That won’t work, honey,” I said, “once balloons are broken they can’t be fixed.”

Eventually, wiping tears from his face, he consented to my throwing away his balloon. I felt like I should be holding a funeral service.

“Bye, balloon.”

“Bye, bye, bayoon.”

I think we have some leftover balloons from the birthday party around somewhere. I should blow another one up for him. It’s good to move on.