Losing sight of the bigger picture

Mia Freedman seems to be writing a lot of articles that really resonate with me lately. This one - a column published in the Sunday Herald Sun today - spoke volumes about how much your priorities change once you've had a baby die and been forced to take stock of the fact that so many facets of pregnancy and childbirth can go so awry - and usually the ones you were least expecting.

The article talks about the rise of what Mia calls (controversially, no doubt) 'birthzillas' - women who are obsessed with controlling every facet of their experience of childbirth, and who define themselves, and others, by the choices they do or do not make in regard to how to get a baby from the womb to the cradle.

Mia defines birthzillas as women who 'appear more interested in having a birth experience than a baby'.  As I found out when watching many friends become pregnant and give birth over the last couple of years, there are a few main 'tribes' that women seem to fall, or be coerced into. Just personally I've known three home birth advocates very well, an elective C-section mum terrified of labour, numerous women who've suffered through a birth in the absence of pain relief due to overwhelming fears of being permanently paralysed by an epidural gone wrong, and a few who have, refreshingly, given little thought to their birth plans and just turned up on the day to do whatever it was that needed to be done. Women bring so many different beliefs and such different histories to childbirth, and often it is confusing to get access to reliable information about the real risks and benefits of various alternatives. It's little wonder that women, in the most vulnerable time of their lives, cling to the birth plan in order to retain some kind of semblance of control. 

I didn't get time to make a birth plan. And even if I had, how would it have helped? I'm sure as hell that no one tells women they need to make a section for what they want to happen in the event that their baby dies. And therein lies my new problem with birth plans. They encourage women to think they have control and choice. Except that sometimes you get no choice, either in how you give birth to your baby, or more importantly, to whether your baby lives or dies. No one prepares you for that, either in a birth plan or otherwise. A dead baby certainly puts the birth wars in perspective, doesn't it? Don't expect a mother of a dead baby to pfaff around discussing with you what drugs you're going to say 'yes' or 'no' to, or whether you want to give birth in a bath or on an organic cotton rug made by a remote Ugandan tribe. The only thing she's ever going to say again is 'get my baby out alive'. She'll never understand why that's not your greatest concern, too.

When I thought about birth before I had Max my only birth plan was to get a rather large laminated sign that said 'EPIDURAL, ASAP'. I'd long been terrified of the pain of childbirth, I'd been told one-too-many horror stories, which are impossible to forget once you've heard them. When I was younger I always thought the only way I'd get a baby out of me was through an elective C-section, but I got braver and more sure of myself as the years passed, helped in part by very many years of therapy that helped me learn not to catastrophise things so easily, which anxious people often do.

Having my baby at 23 weeks, when I'd only just started feeling him move and kick, and without ever having attended an antenatal class, was obviously not part of the plan. When I arrived at the hospital to find out that my cervix was already 4cm dilated and I'd likely been in labour for the last 12 hours, I could hardly believe it. Yes, I'd been in pain, but it was not the kind of pain I'd expected labour to feel like. Why hadn't anyone ever told me what to really expect? No one was more shocked than me to find out that I was already in the throes of the experience I'd feared and dreaded my whole life. 

Did it matter that I wasn't at all prepared for labour or birth? That I had no calming music or essential oils? That I didn't have a change of clothes let alone a pocket full of affirmation cards to get me through? Not in the least. The only thing on my mind was what was happening at that exact moment. I had no ability to think even five minutes into the future. I took no notice of who was around, or what the room was like. I remember none of the details. And no, I didn't get an epidural. And not because a nazi midwife refused to give me one as I'd always feared, but simply because I didn't even think to ask. I instead availed myself of the pethidine injections they so kindly offered and later on, a self-administering Fentanyl drip, whose button I broke by trying to make it give me a bigger dose.

While I was not as obsessive as some women in planning the minute details of my birth 'experience', I did naively think that I would have it all under control in the early days. I couldn't have been more wrong, could I? Birth, for me, very quickly became a matter of life and death, and something I feared for reasons very different to the ones I'd initially feared. On that day I feared that if my labour progressed at 23 weeks my baby would die. And he did.  My greatest fear came, tragically, true. But Max's birth was what it was. Despite the horror and shock of the event, he experienced a predominantly calm and peaceful entrance into the world and I have only warm memories of those hours. No screaming, no crying, from either he or his mother. I did what I had to do for my baby in the most excruciating of circumstances. It's that fact which I'm most proud of. I couldn't have cared less how he got into my arms, so long as he could have got there safely.

I think, like Mia says, that women need to take a step back from their often polemicised views of birth, as I had no choice but to do, and see it for what it is really about: the safe delivery of a healthy child to a living mother, whatever the best way is for that to happen. Let us never forget that a living, healthy baby is not a guarantee.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't

I was really surprised to find this week that a new post on MamaMia had quoted the article I wrote a couple of months back. It was an article about Lindy Chamberlain, talking about the way her stoic public face in the aftermath of baby Azaria's death helped to cement her guilt in the eyes of the Australian public.

I clicked on the headline because I'm interested in the way that the tragic Chamberlain case has recently brought discussions about the 'right' and 'wrong' way to grieve into the spotlight, with most commentators, and many member of the public admitting they were wrong to have judged a woman's innocence or guilt on the basis of how she endured after her daughter's death. I didn't expect to see my own name mentioned in such an article, but there it was.

The writer, Rebecca Sparrow, had used my article as an example of how women like Lindy can be vilified for not emoting enough, but how women like myself can be vilified for being too honest and emotional. I am very thankful that the short-lived online pillaging I received had no lasting impact. I did not have to serve a jail sentence for grieving the 'wrong' way, as you could say Lindy did.

I'd be interested to know what this great, unknown, Australian public believe is the right way for a mother to grieve the death of her baby. Because I sure as hell desperately looked for a rule book in the days after Max's death that would help me know what to do and I couldn't find one. No one came out of the woodwork to show me the way forward. I have had to stumble my way through step by bloody, ugly, step.

People can be quick to judge, but they are never so quick to help when they see someone suffering. Have you noticed that? And not just in this situation. I read in the paper today of a man who had collapsed at the Melbourne Uni tramstop with chest pains. No one went to his aid because he was homeless and looked scruffy and dirty. Tens of people walked on by, knowing that a fellow human being was suffering, and not even taking the slightest effort to acknowledge it, let alone alleviate it.

I was kind of hoping that my article would disappear into the ether, never to be heard of again after everything that happened when it first came out. But it seems that it will continue to resonate with others, and for that I am grateful. This gives me confidence that I should try and find an outlet for the article I've written on the importance of holding your baby after they have died, in response to the publication of recent research suggesting that doing this inhibits your ability to properly recover from your loss. As if that was ever possible in the first place!

So far, a few days after my post was again mentioned on MamaMia, I have had no new contacts from any haters, so I guess this is a small victory, huh? But even if I do, well, the haters are gonna hate, aren't they, no matter what the sentiment expressed. It does not mean that what has been written is not still valuable and necessary. It is my mantra to try and remember this each time I put my words out there in the public eye.

A letter to the baby she never got to meet

Mia Freedman writes beautifully to her daughter on MamaMia this week. Her little girl would be turning twelve years old had she not died mid-way through her mother's pregnancy.

I can't imagine what it will be like to have had so much time pass; for life to have changed and gone on in so many other ways. I will bookmark this as I'm sure I will benefit in new ways from reading it at times in the future. Get your tissues ready and go read her letter. I have not read Mia's books but I'm feeling more and more like doing so, so I think I'll try to get my hands on them this week. However, Leslie is also hassling me to hurry up and read The Hunger Games so we can go and see the film, so poor Mia's books might have to wait a week or so because I steadfastly refuse to see the film before reading the books!

Howls of protest, discordantly received

I’ve written on this blog previously about my friend whose baby was due at the same time Max was expected to be born. I had, ever since his death, known that this would be a hard thing for me to come to terms with. Newborn babies in general are hard for me to see or hear of at the moment. A trip to the supermarket is enough to do me in at times. That this baby would be born at exactly the same time Max should have been felt like an extra blow. My friend and I started our pregnancy journeys within a fortnight of each other, but finished them in tragically incomparable circumstances. She was setting up a nursery at the same time I was packing one away, surrounded by clothes and toys and bedding that would never be used.

As a way of dealing with my feelings towards this other baby’s arrival, as well as to help my friend better understand why her joy could possibly cause me so much sorrow, I wrote my feelings down. This is what I do. It’s how I make sense of what is happening to me. It’s how I stop the thousands of thoughts and feelings from suffocating me.

In the piece I wrote, I wanted to express how sorry I was that I could not feel happy at my friend’s news; how guilty I felt that our friendship should have to suffer a dislocation of experience so extreme that we might never be able to look at each other the same way.

I knew that her son would always be to me a reminder of everything I’d lost. I knew that she might always look at me with relief that it was my baby who died and not hers.

I wanted to walk away, to never see her again, to save myself that pain. However, our friendship is an old one, based on a shared history that goes back eighteen years, and I did not want to lose this forever because of something that was not her fault. We have grown apart a lot already over the years, and I knew that any further distance we created might mean the difference to us staying in each other’s lives or not.

The piece I wrote was published on Mia Freedman’s website, MamaMia. After I wrote it I realised that I had inadvertently given voice to some powerful emotions, and that I’d expressed a side of grief that no one else was talking about, but which I was sure was universal. The conflicted feelings I had came from too primal and raw a place to have just belonged to me. I felt, instead, that I had simply named and acknowledged feelings that was there in us all, but which perhaps remained unrecognisable until you were forced, like I had been, to weigh up your remaining fortunes after a bloody battle. The overwhelming theme of those feelings is shock and injustice, underpinned by a desperate desire for a re-match; to deal out the deck again in the hope you’ll get a better hand. 

My post on MamaMia

I have learned over the past four months that grieving for a lost child is the messiest kind of grief of all. Its faces are many and varied - they are unfamiliar, surprising and constantly distressing to me. The grief of losing a child is infected not only with the expected sense of loss, and longing, and sorrow, but perturbation that an innocent, dearly-wanted baby must lose his life before he even had a chance to defend it.

When you realise that a child can die for no good reason, from indeterminable causes, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, you’re right to get angry, surely. I’d question anyone who did not feel overwhelming indignation at this fact.

The anger you feel is not directed at any one individual, but at the world at large. Every pregnant woman, and every new mother represents the things you feel you will never now enjoy. Every newborn baby stands in for the child you have lost. These are entirely irrational thoughts, but you can’t escape them, now matter how hard you try to reason with them, because reason had nothing to do with putting them there in the first place. Grief did, and grief doesn’t play by the usual rules of reason and intellect.

I was very careful to write in my article that I was never angry at my friend, personally, for her good fortune. I wished her no ill-will. How could I? She’s had her own misfortunes in life. Her baby was as wanted and loved as Max was, and she was my oldest friend. She did not deserve anything less than a beautiful healthy baby. But neither did I, and I was angry at the universe for ‘choosing’ me to suffer, and for putting two old friends in the emotionally fraught position where they’d always now face each other from opposite sides of a tormenting barbed-wire fence. What I wrote was an attempt to show how people can begin a journey from the same place, but end up in two wildly different destinations, despite having done the exact same things, having had the exact same thoughts.

Losing a child, as those who have lost know, and those who haven’t must be able to imagine, does make you question things, not least of all why so many people around you - it seems, everyone but you - gets their happy ending (or at least what seems to you to be a happy ending).

Part of the same question of ‘why me?’ that is the perfectly understandable cry of newly bereaved mothers everywhere, is unavoidably ‘why her?’. Not why this woman or that woman in particular gets to keep their baby, but why any woman does if all women can’t. I guess what I’m trying to say is that your grief doesn’t discriminate between those you know and love and those you don’t; those who are 'deserving' and those who are not. All you can see is a storm of ‘other’ women, everywhere you look, that have what you don’t, for no better reason than they were lucky and you were not. There’s no escaping them for they are, literally, everywhere. You haven’t a chance to withdraw, as you still have to go to the library, the supermarket, to your friends' celebrations and events, yet neither have you the strength to face them head on. All you can do is lay down before the lucky ones and submit and howl at the injustice that has put you there on the ground underneath their feet.

That is what I did in my article. I laid down any protective pretense I might have had and I said to my friend, ‘this is all I’ve got. I have not the strength to give you the congratulations and attention you deserve from a friend. I cannot be a friend at all. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, but I’m sick and I’m scared and I’m lonely and I want my baby safe with me as you have yours. Can you understand?’.

The sentiment of my words was only ever that I desperately wanted my baby back so we could enjoy our children together as we’d always planned. To my utter surprise and ensuing distress, however, my friend did not receive my sentiments the way I’d intended. She read my words as expressing that I did not believe her baby deserved to live. She told me that I had deliberately been trying to cause hurt to her and her family, that I was cruel and undeserving. Her sentiment was, I felt, that I was a very bad loser, as if we’d just had a game of tennis and I’d thrown my racquet in disgust at an unfair umpiring decision.

But this was no game! My baby was dead! I’d never even wanted to be in that match, especially not playing against my oldest friend, knowing one of us most lose. To be considered a good player in the game of ‘life’ was it now my social responsibility to walk away quietly and grieve ever so politely and prettily so as not to upset the spectators who’d hoped for a nice day out?

I did not take this confrontation well. I had literally nothing left in my emotional reserves by the time she’d emailed me to berate me for my selfishness and cruelty. It was Easter and I was suffering. I wrote back over and over how sorry I was that she’d so fatally misunderstood my words. I tried over and over to explain myself. I took responsibility for hurting her even though it was never my intention, but she just found more reasons to berate me: I did not say the right thing in a text message I sent her after her son’s birth. I should not have shared the article with my friends and family on Facebook. I had not respected her boundaries. In short, I should not have so unforgivably encroached on her perfect moment. She did not want to share my pain with me or forgive me for its ugly expression as my other loved ones have so generously done so.

In the end, my friend could not understand what I’d written, and I could not understand how she’d read it as she had. She felt judged. I felt offended that someone who has known me for a lifetime could think I’d be capable of such deliberate cruelty. I realised that she did not know me at all, and I suddenly felt like I’d exposed my innermost feelings for nothing. I felt so vulnerable.

But it hadn’t been for nothing. By the time the article had been up for even a day it had received so many comments from people who ‘got it’ that I couldn’t legitimately have those doubts. The article was read, by most, as it was intended: to express how much I wish I could have celebrated with my friend and how much I wished for my baby to be returned to me.

Aside from these published comments on the site itself, which were numerous, I received private emails from many more, including well-wishes from a number of support organisations, including Heartfelt and Bears of Hope, who had shared my article with their followers. They were, each of them, expressing the very same thing:

‘You gave my feelings a voice’; ‘I know this experience’; ‘I was afraid to acknowledge this side of my grief’; ‘I thought I was the only one’; Thank you.

So where did this leave me?

Well, it left me quite shattered, trying to balance the regret at having hurt my friend with the relief I felt that I had found myself part of a community of people who actually understood my feelings. I was also thankful that I had, in my honesty, helped countless other people that day feel acknowledged and understood in their grief.

For these reasons I could not regret having written it, despite the hurt it had caused the person for whom it was intended to move.

I sobbed that day, Easter Monday, in a way that I have not since the day of Max’s funeral - until I’d made myself sick. Until I thought I would not recover. Here was just another face of grief for me to encounter, that of feeling misunderstood and judged, and, regrettably, that of losing a friend. It was unbearable. I was inconsolable.

On a practical level, I did not have the physical energy to defend myself against my friend’s accusations and had already given so many apologies that I did not know where to go from there. My instinct was to protect myself from further misunderstanding and judgement and to withdraw from all contact - with everyone.

I didn’t want our friendship to end as a result of the thing I’d written to save it, but I knew that after this she would never look at me the same way again, nor I , her. I felt very unsafe, as if this confrontation was just the start of a thousand more walls that would crumble around me.

To my surprise, nothing else did come crashing down after I stopped replying to those messages. I removed her from my Facebook list for my own sanity, though I felt very petty for doing so. I no longer wanted to feel guilty for implicating her in my public displays of grief. Facebook is supposed to be a place for you to connect with your friends and family and I felt I could not do this if I had to veto what I posted.

Also, I just wanted her to go and enjoy her newborn baby instead of fighting with me. I had only the briefest moment with my child. To think someone lucky enough to keep theirs would be wasting that valuable time arguing semantics and demanding the moral high ground on the internet was further upsetting to me.

What I did realise, later that week as I dealt with the anxiety of this fallout, is how unprepared we really are, as individuals, and as a society, to experience and adequately respond to expressions of grief and sorrow in any meaningful way. We are unwilling to witness grieving in its messiest, bloodiest, rawest manifestations. It confronts us and scares us and raises our defences. As a result, we judge it, we stifle it, we don’t want to be infected by it when it inflicts others, or included in it alongside the ones we love. We want only to know of the nice polite tears, not the primitive wails. We want to see the recovery, but we don’t want to sit with people while they break - the most important job of all.

I am as guilty as the next person for wanting to avoid distressing feelings. The difference is that now I have no choice. I don't have the privilege of asking to be kept out of this grief, or out of the grief of my friends and family who are also suffering Max's loss, and in many cases, suffering at the very thought that I should suffer so. In the same way, they are implicated in this sorry affair whether they like it or not. 

My mother is helplessly watching her daughter in pain. Leslie is bearing the weight of dealing with his own feelings as well as mine, which are not as easily hidden. Kate, I can only imagine, is struggling with many more memories of the traumatic circumstances of Max's birth than I have. She did not have the benefit of pethidine to make her memories fuzzy, but she does not regret being there, as much as she has every right to wish she'd never met me and ended up in that room. My dearest Anika feels like she can't act upon her desire to have another baby without pouring salt into her best friend's stinging wounds. We are all affected by the pain of those we love, for that is what love is - for better or worse, whether its the love of a spouse, a daughter, or a faithful friend.

This is why I feel the only answer to my friend's request to 'keep her out of it' is to keep her out of my life altogether. Max's life, and his death, informs so much of who I am right now, and I imagine who I will be from now on. She and her baby are part of this grief whether they want to be or not. I'm sorry for that, but I can't change it. The first real obstacle I've faced on the road to accepting this 'new' me has been the acceptance that not everyone I love will be able to give me the support and understanding I need. Sometimes they won't want to, and they'll just want to be happy and forget about me. I can't blame them for that, but I wish I could say I'd been more prepared for it.