A painful number

I had to work for most of the past weekend. I've been really enjoying my job again lately, so in itself this wasn't going to be a big deal. On Saturday night, though, I worked with one of my colleagues who is pregnant. I've mentioned her before in terms of an awkward conversation we had when no one told her I'd also recently had a baby.

I've been trying very hard to show interest in other people's pregnancies, usually as a way of staving off the awkwardness of not mentioning the elephant in the room, so to speak. As I currently know a lot of pregnant people, this results in me talking to people about their pregnancies a lot, which is hard because I have to be constantly reminded that so many other people are in the enviable position of assuming they get a baby at the end of their 40-week pregnancy and are able to excitedly plan for it. I can't begrudge them this innocence, as I, too, had it not so many months ago. I wouldn't wish them to have the carpet pulled from underneath them like I did, but I also wish I didn't have to constantly re-live the tragedy of my pregnancy in comparison.

At any rate, I was making polite conversation and genuinely making an effort to let her talk about her excitement. Amongst chat of her finding out the baby was a girl, her house renovations and decoration plans, she casually mentioned that she was 23 weeks pregnant now. That part of the conversation hit me like a brick and upon hearing it tears sprung instantly to my eyes before I even had a chance to consider my reaction.

23 weeks. 

That's as pregnant as I ever was, as I ever might be.

Max's beautiful 23-week feet. They couldn't be any more perfectly formed.

To this girl, it feels like there is still such a long way to go. The terms 23 weeks; the 'threshold of viability'; neonatologist; survival rates; significant disability; neonatal death, mean nothing especial to her. But just hearing the phrase was enough to take me right back there, to the day I found out what the significance of that gestation really was. 

She either did not notice my reaction, or she very politely ignored it, but it stayed with me the entire night, and has done pretty much every moment since then. Every chance I had I couldn't stop staring at her tummy. She'd only just begun to look pregnant. When Max was born, so had I. All I could think about was that I knew exactly what her baby looked like. As she sat casually reading a magazine her body was doing important work in preparing her baby's major organs for life outside the womb. When I see her again in a fortnight, her baby will have already passed the point that Max never got to reach, where the odds of survival if anything went wrong became pretty good.

I said nothing to her of my thoughts. I did not remind her that when I was 23 weeks pregnant my baby was born. But I did tell her one thing. I said 'you should take some photos of how lovely you look right now. Take some photos of your tummy. You might feel silly doing it, but you'll never regret having them'. And I left it at that. 

I don't have a single photo from the time I was pregnant. Not even a casual one. It's one of the things I regret most now that I have little to show for the fact that this momentous thing happened to me. I have no stretch-marks, no stitches, no baby to prove it. I had been so sick and so miserable for most of that time that documenting the process seemed like the last thing on my mind, even though I'd started out with the good intentions of doing so in a journal.

Perhaps my prolific posting on this blog is my way of ameliorating that regret. I now have a constant desire to document my journey, and Max's story. I've never before stuck with any 'project' as diligently as I have this blog. Sadly, I feel it's one of my greatest achievements to almost-daily check in here and make something of my experiences. It's as if I'm desperate to make up the lost ground.

I've been thinking a lot lately of what the purpose of this blog actually is. Since I felt the need to make it private as a way of protecting myself from the judgement of people who might either wilfully misread me, or tragically misunderstand me, it's something that's been on my mind. Why am I writing? Who am I writing for? 

A baby is born to my oldest friend

Today is the day that my oldest friend's baby boy will be born - her second child. Pregnancy and birth, as I have learned the hard way, are experiences over which we have much less control than we realise, and in some cases, frighteningly little knowledge of what to do when things go wrong. There is little uncertainty surrounding this baby's entry into the world, though. He will be born via elective c-section - his mother's way of controlling what has long been for her an overwhelming fear of childbirth. Before I became pregnant in July last year I used to share this intense fear of natural delivery. For years my friend and I joked that we must plan to get pregnant at the same time one day so as to be able to  have side-by-side caesarians, like truly civilised women should.

Years later, through some stroke of fate, my friend did become pregnant very shortly after I did - a period of only a fortnight separating the gestational ages of our babies-to-be. But this is where our imagined similarities would end. I knew from the beginning we would not share the same birth experience in the way we always said we would. In part this was because I'd by then undertaken a significant amount of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy that taught me to better manage, instead of avoid, the sources of my anxieties, including childbirth. I was still afraid of the unknown - of pain and of tragedies that might befall me - but I knew that I had become resourceful enough to face the complications life might throw at me with courage and strength.

What I didn't know was that the differences between mine and my friend's experience of birth and motherhood would soon become more manifold, more significant, than this, when during the last week of November, long before he was expected, my baby was born, and died in his father's arms. He was born for no known reason at 23 weeks gestation - what the doctors like to call the 'threshold of viability' - and though he fought mightily, he really did not have much of a chance. Today, in contrast, my friend's baby will be born and all expectations point towards the fact that he will live - not just for a day, as my baby did, but through all the days to come - the days that my baby, too, should have lived.

There is no doubt that the excitement of my friend and I expecting a baby at the same time has come to have a very painful, awkward, complicated flip side. Through no fault of her own, my friend has become the unfortunate donkey on which I pin the tail of my very profound anger and grief. Her very presence in my life, and the soon-to-be presence of her little baby, are unavoidable, physical reminders of my tragedy. She has what I do not, not because she wanted it more, or deserved it in some way that I did not, but because of the unfathomable logic of a universe that deals with the game of life and death as if all of its players are numbered cards, some of whom will land face up when the deck is scattered and some of whom chance says must inevitably land face down in the mud.

'Why me?' - the refrain of my life since my son's death just over three months ago - has this week turned instead to 'why her?' Why should her baby live if mine cannot? Why should she have the enviable gift of two healthy children and two uncomplicated pregnancies and my only experience of birth so quickly turn into, instead, into a death? I don't consciously hate my friend for her good fortune, and neither has she given me cause to. More than anyone she has recognised and tried to mitigate the pain that her pregnancy might have caused me over the last couple of months. She has been respectful, thoughtful, she has given me space and managed her own pain, fear and regret at my baby's passing so that I might never have to know or hear of it. She does not deserve the place she has taken in my imagination as victorious opponent instead of faithful friend. But there she stands, nonetheless, so far away from me in thought and feeling that it's hard to tell if the distance will ever, can ever be bridged.

I am awaiting, every minute, the message that will tell me her baby boy is here. I will be relieved, and I hope, happy for my friend that she will not have to suffer as I have. But I will howl and protest too, loudly and unapologetically. The sense of injustice I feel at my son's death has spurned too raw and festering a wound not to call forth such a primal, seething rage.

In my moments of fear and despair about this little boy's impending birth I've invite the dark-faced, winged goddess of Nemesis - of divine retribution - to visit upon me and restore equilibrium to my world; to better balance the scales of justice; to relieve me of my overwhelming indignation towards my oldest friend and her innocent baby; to re-distribute the cards of fortune so that neither she nor I must face each other in such regrettable opposition. But despite my cries Nemesis does not appear, as per her myth, to untangle the messy threads spun so unfairly by the fates. I am alone in my bargaining - there is not a single soul on earth who would trade me. My baby has died. This baby will take his place.

So I wait for news of his birth as if he were the last remaining germ of bubonic infection, set on killing us all so that he, instead, can live. And as I wait, I commit a thousand apologies to the wind with which he'll today come rolling in. I'm sorry, my friend, that you and your baby must, because of me, suffer so the loss of a friend, one who cannot be there for you as you celebrate your son's birth. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

* Note: A little while after writing this I heard news that baby Issac Lucas Gourlay-Hutchison was born at 8.24am weighing 7lb. 8oz. A healthy baby boy.

Another day, another baby

Another day, another pregnancy announced. This is now two at my work out of eight staff. The girl in question was not working with us last year, but I knew her from the year before. Someone had given me the head's up that she was pregnant and I was hoping my boss might have told her to go easy on the pregnancy-related conversation in my presence. But no, she did not. The poor girl was blissfully unaware that I'd had a baby until I had to tell her why I had difficulty discussing her 16 week old pregnancy. I don't feel as if I should have to sit there and cry silently, and I would have liked if someone had taken her aside and given her the information to save me from constantly having to worry that someone's going to say something unintentionally inappropriate or upsetting to me. I'm surrounded by adolescents at work and it's really hard to manage my emotions around them all.

It was, as you can imagine, a complete conversation stopper. She didn't ask me any questions or say anything much at all really. I told her I was happy to hear about her experiences but that I wanted her to understand why I was sometimes distant and often upset. We work very closely together with our colleagues at my work. There are two of us each shift working side by side, so it is not the kind of situation where you can avoid someone or just not talk to them. We talk most of the night, so these things just have to be out in the open, I feel. I did find it awkward having to tell a pregnant person, though, knowing that an appropriate response must be even harder for them to muster than the average person.

A thoughtful friend from work (who is leaving at the end of the term to take up a teaching position in an international school in Seoul), gave me a really lovely little book on grief just after this awkward conversation last night. It was a well-timed gift! Many of the quotes inside resembled very much many of the things I've been learning along the way:

• that you must make time and space to feel and to grieve
• that distractions aren't always a good thing
• that grief can manifest in so many physically, psychologically, spiritually intense and surprising ways
• that it is long-lasting
• that it comes in waves - one step forward then two, sometimes three steps backwards
• that it's important to forgive yourself for the things you did or did not do for the person you lost
• that you must be compassionate and gentle towards yourself and patient with your many unanswered questions

These are things you need reminding of a great deal of the time when you are overwhelmed by the intensity of your experience. I was glad to have this little book of heartfelt treasures with me at work, especially as I was up until midnight, alone in the dark in a big scary old house, waiting for some girls to come back from a concert. Those conditions provide the perfect breeding ground for regrets and recriminations to start sneaking in and I already hadn't had a good day.

So thank you, Esther, for the very special book and your very kind thoughts. I will miss you!

The thoughtful book Esther gave me

When the whole world is expecting a baby

Francheshca from Small Bird Studios knows exactly how it feels to lose a baby. She lost her little baby too, due to a gene malformation. She has managed to use her grief in a positive way, to help her create beautiful things and to create a community of women who have suffered similar losses. As well as providing blog and web designs, predominantly for other 'baby loss' mothers (as we are called), she has also developed the outstanding range of sympathy and remembrance cards I mentioned in a previous post. There seems to be nothing this woman can't do, and I find reading her updates and looking around her beautiful website to be really inspiring.

She recently posted about what happens to your daily life when you lose a baby. I was particularly struck by her descriptions of the daily occurrences that you have to face or fight - the unexpected baby-related mail or online newsletters that continue to be delivered; the daily walk past your baby's empty room filled with his little toys and clothes and carefully-chosen furniture; the pregnant women that are suddenly everywhere you turn. "It seems like the whole world is expecting a baby," she writes. Doesn't it just.

I can't escape the gestating or the recently gestated, and the sight of every one of them is like a serrated knife stuck straight through my gut. Only yesterday, yet another friend of mine announced her new pregnancy to me. This will be her second child. She has been a great support for me over the last couple of months. As we work together, she has also been a really helpful conduit between work and home, especially when Max first died. She refrained from telling anyone else before she had the chance to tell me about the pregnancy in person, which was extremely kind and thoughtful. She also expected, and understood my tears after she shared her news. She did not make me feel selfish or strange that her good fortune caused me so much distress. Even so, I still wish she were not having a baby. Where I used to fear news of death, I now fear news of birth for it is far more painful - indescribably so.

I've managed to block the updates of most of the people I know who are expecting babies from my Facebook news feed, but that doesn't protect me from what may come in the near future, and it doesn't stop me torturing myself by deliberately visiting their profile pages like some sort of self-flagellating sicko. I have a 'no junk mail' sticker to stop the tides of Big W and Babies 'R' Us catalogues from ending up on my doorstep but I can't stop the mummy joggers/power walkers who come past my house every morning with their brand new prams. Short of locking myself away I cannot avoid the reminder that everyone else has something that I do not; or rather something I did have but that was cruelly stolen away.

My boss saw me crying and gave me a hug. 'You'll have your turn again' she said. What was meant to comfort, though, yet again caused pain. I don't want a fresh start. I want the baby I began with; that I went through so much sickness and suffering for, the little baby who was conceived in such a happy and joyful time of our lives, with hope and anticipation. I want that baby back. I want that baby back so desperately.

Read Francesca's article and know that her sentiments are exactly my own. I only hope that I can use her example to create something of beauty out of the despair of my loss.