In Which I Try To Use Worry As A Weapon To Fight Off A Bad Ultrasound Outcome…

Tags

20 week ultrasound, anxiety, baby, defects, fear, miscarriage, pregnancy, worries

My 20 week ultrasound is tomorrow, and I’m doing my Anxiety Girl thing.

Back when I was in my Generalized Anxiety CBT group, they talked about how pathological worriers will often suffer from the superstitious belief that  their worrying is actually productive.

Then I raised my hand and told them my own personal theory of worrying, which stunned them for a moment, and then the leader said,

“That is the most COMPLEX rationalization of anxiety I have EVER heard.”

Wanna hear it?

Of course you do.

Okay, as you may know, one of the many bizarre and perplexing things suggested by Quantum Mechanics is that we could very well exist as one universe in a vast multiverse – that there are alternate universes created on a quantum level for every possible outcome. There could be thousands of YOUs out there, all living similar but slightly different realities.

And yet we only experience it as one lifetime, right? My particular consciousness is separate from the consciousnesses of all the other Carols out there – thousands of things could happen to various Carols throughout the multiverse but I will only experience one of those.

Maybe in another universe, my last pregnancy didn’t end in a miscarriage.

Maybe in another universe, I stayed with my first boyfriend and never married PH.

Maybe in another universe, I didn’t contract that weird disease (I went back to the internist the other day, by the way. The rash keeps coming back, so I spend half my time scratching off my own skin, and lately I’ve been hearing wooshes in my ears…).

Anyway, here is my theory: if I concentrated hard enough, maybe I can CHOOSE which reality my consciousness stays in. Maybe by WORRYING that a certain bad thing will happen, I can consciously AVOID it happening to THIS PARTICULAR iteration of my consciousness. Of course bad things still happen, but aren’t they always different bad things from what we expect? Aren’t we always blindsided by the one thing that DIDN’T worry us?

My GAD group used that as proof that worrying doesn’t help. I suggested that maybe it means that our worrying needs a broader spectrum.

Of course, it’s crazy, and the CBT stuff helped me drop a LOT of that. I don’t worry nearly as much as I used to and look what happened! I had a silent miscarriage and walked around with a dead baby inside me for weeks.

So, this time of course I was terrified of a bad outcome and my 8 week ultrasound was clear. The baby is still alive – I can feel little kicks and twitches at night and sometimes around noon. But all kinds of bad things could happen at tomorrow’s ultrasound. The baby could be hideously malformed. It could have soft markers indicating Down’s Syndrome, or worse, another Trisomy that is seriously deadly. Heart defects, spinal defects…

So far I have googled Trisomy 18, Trisomy 13, Anencephaly, and have read over 20 personal stories from people who had horrible news from their 20 week ultrasound and either ended up deciding to terminate or carrying to term and then taking photographs of their dead/deformed and dying baby. For some reason, ALL OF THESE people are deeply religious and use the word “sweet” and “angel” multiple times.

Not sure if seriously defective babies are some kind of Trojan that Jesus uses to infect people or if only religious people have the strength to document their experiences. Could be both.

I’m also wondering what we’re going to do with Owl if the news is bad. We haven’t out-and-out told him that I’m pregnant. He has noticed that my stomach is getting bigger and has asked several times if I have a baby in there. PH finally  told him that my body is TRYING to grow a baby but we don’t know if it has been successful yet. This prompted him to say loudly “You can’t be making a baby, Mommy! Daddy’s PENIS isn’t in you VAGINA!”

We were in Cost Co at the time. Several people looked around. Kids are great.

Anyway. We told him that tomorrow we will go see a special doctor who can look in my belly and tell us if there is a baby in there. In an ideal world we will be able to bring him in, tell him he is going to have a little brother/sister, and show him the baby on the screen.

But if it’s terrible news, how do we keep his infernal curiosity silent long enough to receive the bad news, discuss the options and digest it all? How do we explain to him that yes, there is a baby in there, but it may not be okay? What do we say to him when we’re told that it’s a boy/girl but it has a hole in the heart/no brain/appears to be an octopus?

 

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

Now if you excuse me, I need to google more weird things that can be found on a 20 week ultrasound so I can ensure that our baby doesn’t have them.

Not Dead Yet

Tags

eight weeks, heart beat, miscarriage, pregnancy, ultrasound

We haven’t really been taking my pregnancy seriously yet. After last time, we are a bit more guarded in our hopes and expectations. By which I mean that we make constant dead baby jokes and PH’s repeated imitation of our embryo is basicly an elaborate death pose.

But, that being said, we went in for an eight week ultrasound and the ultrasound technician told me right away that he had found a heart beat.

At eight weeks, there’s not really much else to say about a little gray jelly bean on the screen. It measured eight weeks two days, which means that my estimated due date is spot on, which is pretty unusual, and its tiny heart is beating.

Or it was, as of that particular day.

In our minds, it could have stopped the next day, or the day after that. So we weren’t super excited, and we still haven’t talked much about our plans for April, when our still-considered-hypothetical baby should be born.

I have lost all trust in my body. When I was pregnant with Owl, and again in my second pregnancy, I assumed that if I was experiencing pregnancy symptoms and not having cramping or bleeding, that the baby was probably okay. When we had that brief no-heartbeat-on-doppler scare we acknowledged the possibility that the baby might NOT be okay, but a reassuring ultrasound was all we needed to get us expecting a baby again.

This ultrasound was reassuring, sure. We were definitely relieved to hear that our baby wasn’t dead…. yet. But we can’t get that “yet” our of our psyches.

Sure, my abdomen is already starting to expand, even though the scale reads the same as it did a month ago, so clearly my uterus is growing.

Sure, I am experiencing that terrible first trimester exhaustion that is not really describable to people who haven’t experienced it. My doctor even said to me, “you know, my patients always talked about that first trimester fatigue, but I didn’t really understand how deep it goes until I experienced it for myself.”

And while I’m not having much morning sickness, I do experience low grade nausea at several points in the day.

But you know what? My pants got tight last time, too. I had morning sickness last time. I went through all of the sucky aspects of the first trimester, and experienced them for weeks AFTER my baby had already died.

I don’t think I’ll really believe it until I can feel the baby move and KNOW it’s alive.

 

In Which I Turn My Blog Over To A Three Year Old (hopefully temporarily)

Tags

conception, confusion, crazy, memory loss, memory problems, miscarriage, referral

Okay, so, clearly I don’t have anything in me any more.

I don’t mean no writing inside me. I have LOTS to write. But no energy to write with. Anxiety that makes me avoid even logging on. I’m not even keeping up on my favourite bloggers – so if I haven’t commented on your blog lately, I’m sorry. I’ll catch up some day.

Strange things are beginning to happen to me.

Twice in a couple days I discovered that something I REMEMBERED doing had not been done. The first couple times, they involved the computer system at work so it was easy to dismiss it as a glitch.

But then the other night, I went to make myself some lemon sparkling water. I pulled a new bottle of club soda from the cupboard, put some lemon juice in a glass and mixed up a drink, which I drank at dinner. Then I went for a refill.

The bottle sitting on the counter where I left it, but was still full, and the top was still sealed.  

…So I must have put in the lemon water and added tap water from the sink to make my drink, even though I had JUST PULLED OUT a bottle of club soda. Then I drank the whole thing without noticing that it wasn’t fizzing.

But the kicker was last night. I put Beloved Dog out the front door for his evening pee and put his food in the microwave to warm up, part of my night time before-bed routine.

Later, reading in bed, I realized that I had NO MEMORY of having let him back in again and put down his food.

I jumped out of bed and ran down the stairs, calling my dog’s name. No response. The front door was closed – normally I leave it open until Beloved Dog comes running back in, anxious for his dinner.

I yanked it open. Beloved Dog wasn’t on the door step. I looked in the microwave – there was his food.

How long had he been out there? An hour? He could be anywhere.

I ran upstairs, still holding the container of food, to throw on some clothes. PH stirred. He asked what I was doing and I told him what I had done.

“Beloved Dog’s in his crate, I put him there when I came to bed. Don’t you remember?”

No. I didn’t. I don’t remember letting Beloved Dog inside again. I don’t know why I didn’t get his food and feed him like I do every night when I let him inside. I don’t remember.

I wish I could say that it’s pregnancy brain, but if so, it’s remarkably early – my period’s not even due for another week.

Assuming it shows up. My period has been irregular ever since the D&C. I actually went to my doctor three weeks ago and asked her for a referral to a specialist, because I’m still not pregnant and this month my period was been a whole week overdue before it decided to make an appearance, which then barely lasted two days.

My doctor wouldn’t refer me. She said the tests are far too invasive to do without good reason, and that lack of pregnancy isn’t a concern unless you have been trying unsuccessfully for over a year.

“But it’s been a year. You took out my IUD a year ago.”

“Yes, but you conceived.”

“It wasn’t a full pregnancy.”

“But it shows you CAN conceive. So you have until June before it’s really a year without conceiving. Come back in June, if you’re not pregnant, and I’ll refer you then.”

I don’t want to be referred in June. If there’s something wrong that’s causing my irregular periods and lack of conception, I want to know now, not in June. And if there isn’t, I’d like to be reassured now, and not in June.

She gently reminded me that stress can cause irregular periods and suggested I be sure to exercise and take prenatal vitamins.

She’s probably right. It’s probably just stress playing havoc with my periods. There’s probably nothing wrong. But I felt really depressed after that appointment. Because I hate maybes and probablys.

I would rather have the invasive tests to get a definite answer. I would rather speak to someone who could advise me in greater depth about why I am not pregnant.

Maybe it’s all moot. Maybe the recent false memories and lost memories are early pregnancy hormones at work.

Or maybe the stress is making me crazy.

Either way, I’m failing at entertaining you all lately. So I’m going to start letting Owl entertain you instead with his elaborate story telling. Stay tuned.

F*** You, 2013

Tags

2013, 2014, depression, miscarriage, new year

Good riddance, you sucked.

Were there good moments in 2013?

Sure.

Peak of the year – February 2013

Our trip to Disneyland was unbelievably awesome.

That was in February. It’s all been downhill since then.

I remember feeling so very lucky when I was pregnant. I remember how PH trawled three supermarkets to find the fixings to a chicken club wrap when I was craving them.  I felt so lucky that I had such a great husband, that I was pregnant with my second child, that I had been voted Employee of the Year, that I had gotten a trip to Disneyland.

I didn’t take it for granted.

I felt blessed.

Then it all fell apart.

I lost the pregnancy, and then I lost my husband to depression – hopefully temporarily.

I lost my patience with Owl.

I lost my interest in my job.

I lost the energy to train dogs.

I lost the will to care.

I lost hope in conceiving again.

I’m just lost.

Although I did gain ONE thing – weight!

So I kept my resolution.

I’m hoping that passing an arbitrary point around the sun will somehow turn the luck around.

Welcome, 2014.

Please give me my life back.

F*@# The Might-Have-Beens

Tags

depression, family, introversion, miscarriage, parenting, vacations

I want to talk about the awesome week I just spent in Ontario with my mother’s side of the family. I want to talk about potato canons, and drunken mistakes with chinese lanterns, and 1000 piece puzzles, and the weirdness of hanging out with a bunch of cousins who share many of my nerdy ways.

But I can’t get up the enthusiasm because I’m too exhausted.

That week WIPED me. And I clearly didn’t have a lot of energy going into the vacation.

Oddly, the exhaustion is not directly due to the fact that I spent a week in a cottage with 20 relatives.

A significant portion of my mother’s siblings and their children are introverts. So while they enjoyed each other immensely, no one was surprised or disapproving if you wanted to disappear to your bedroom for a while, or take a book down to read at the beach (I walked down to the beach with Owl one sunny morning and found SIX relations reading on lounge chairs and no one in the water).

But I was trying to do several things at once:

Hiding

Tags

depression, dreams, miscarriage, work, writing

Life is… challenging right now.

Perfect Husband is depressed. He has always been prone to it, and I think the miscarriage and the lack of support at his work and who knows what other factors have helped spur it on. I haven’t seem him this bad in years, so I am trying to give him breaks wherever possible. He does as much as he can, but he doesn’t have much emotional or physical energy right now. What he does have, I want him to devote to getting better.

Luckily, I think I started taking my antidepressants again in time, because I am not depressed.

But I am sad at times.

I get sad thinking about how, a month ago, we were happy and expecting a baby.

Now I have no baby to expect, and a damaged husband, and we are focusing on getting through life one day at a time. We’re short on money, because we’ve been eating out a lot rather than trying to summon the energy to cook. We’re trying to stay cheerful for Owl, but it exhausts us and when he is asleep we collapse into introverted silence.

I had a midwife appointment booked for today. In a parallel universe, maybe I will cheerfully attend it.

I am worried about my husband. I am worried I won’t get pregnant soon, that I’ll never have a second child or that Owl will be half grown by the time I get pregnant, when what we really wanted was a playmate for him.

I am worried that I WILL get pregnant but that PH’s depression won’t improve and I will be functionally a single parent with two kids.

Thinking about life scares me right now.

So I’m hiding.

When Owl is asleep, I spend a lot of time re-reading and editing my NaNoWriMo story, which is now complete with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Working on it helps me dwell in a dream world where I become a rich author, can stay home to write all day, and support PH so that he doesn’t have to go to work in that poisonous environment. Instead he could coach children’s soft ball and soccer teams, umpire sporting events, practice his curling skills, and do the other things he loves to do but has no time or energy for.

If I could just become a paid writer… do what I love and need to do and get paid for it… stay home all day on the computer…

So I dream.

Even though I know that it is just a kind of a joke of a story and unlikely to ever make me a penny.

What I should be focusing is on reality – washing the dishes that PH can’t wash, folding clean laundry so we can stop living out of a hamper, and pursuing new dog training clients to replace the money we have frittered away.

I need to stop hiding in dreams.

I May Be The Only Person In The World To Get A Greeting Card Like This

Tags

awkward moment, funny greeting cards, greeting cards, miscarriage, strange cards

When I mentioned that there are no “sorry about your miscarriage” greeting cards, I forgot that I lived next to a greeting card artist.

My friend and neighbour has an Etsy site called Awkward Moment Cards, where she sells her hand-crafted and quirky greeting cards for all sorts of weird occasions. The stock changes as she gets new ideas and bored of old ones, but here are some examples from her current line up:

If you’re looking to announce that you’re gay, send someone a picture of Dr Phil wagging a disapproving finger, or a “Happy Birthday Freak” card (no comma because there is an actual freak on the card), you go to Awkward Moment Cards.

So I was delighted but not altogether surprised when I received what very well might be the world’s first Miscarriage Greeting Card:

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.

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 to each other, 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: