This probably won’t sound like a big deal to anyone else, but I did something today… I actually wore a bathing suit to the beach… Without something over it. One may ask why this is a noteworthy thing, but it is, it just is. Grief has made something so small, so seemingly insignificant, a big deal to me.

Since I started this grief journey, my body image and opinion of myself have plummeted. I blame it on grief. Grief rocks your world, it changes you. It magnifies your insecurities and steals away your confidence because it goes hand in hand with vulnerability. I believe that grief from infant loss is an even more menacing monster, at least when it comes to view of oneself. It has been that way for me. As a woman and mother of an infant that is no longer here, I have struggled with my body image. (I’ve talked about this in a previous blog, which you can find here) Since I carried Lucy to full-term, I have ALL of the physical evidence of being pregnant and giving birth. Even a year later, the stretch marks and extra weight hang on. Things haven’t shrunk back to their original places, and everything looks a little different. Totally normal, but it doesn’t feel normal when there’s no beautiful baby on your hip after a pregnancy. I think that many (or most) moms are probably hard on themselves and their postpartum bodies, but in my experience as a loss mom, I think this has been amplified about a thousand times. It may sound like a mere excuse, but this grief has made it extraordinarily difficult to whip my body back into shape. The depression has been so intense and it’s been tough to motivate myself to “get my body back”. I have tried to remain active over the past year, but it’s not always consistent. Sometimes, I have a hard time even getting out of bed, so a workout doesn’t always feel feasible. I have decided to quit giving myself so much crap over this and give myself a little bit of grace. I will eventually get back “in shape”, whatever that new shape is.

I have been so cruel to myself. I’ve insulted my character and my body on a daily basis. I have sneered at my reflection in the mirror. I have said the crummiest things to myself, things that, if spoken by another person, would have been absolutely unacceptable. I’ve even been saying these things aloud, where Chris can hear them. You’d think it would have been a wake-up call when my husband told me that he’d kick someone’s ass if they talked to me like that, but no, I still continue to verbally abuse myself. Somewhere deep down, a part of me still blames myself for Lucy’s death. The abruption happed inside my body, so it must be my fault, right? That’s what I have been telling myself. That resentment of my own body manifested into the awful self-loathing I’ve been engaging in for a year now. I know that I’m doing it, yet I cannot stop. It’s truly a terrible thing, and something I am having a rough time overcoming.

This is another piece of this that may sound weird, but I am sharing it nonetheless. On Lucy’s birthday, I was doing an ordinary task when this routine of self-loathing I’ve been engaging in took a positive turn. I was drying my hair with the hairdryer, just thinking to myself. I was thinking specifically about how I do need to listen to Chris and my therapist Julie. They both keep telling me, “BE NICER TO YOURSELF”. I know they’re right, and I know that what I’ve been doing to myself is not okay. I was pondering that when, somewhere from another part of my mind I heard, “Do that for my birthday, Mommy”. I know this sounds crazy, and maybe it was just something that was working on a subconscious level, but it felt like something Lucy was trying to say to me. To be kinder to myself, that she would want that. I won’t do this for me alone, but when the added idea of doing that for Lucy becomes part of the equation, well… how can I ignore it? Back when I first realized I was pregnant with a little girl, I remember trying to have a pep talk with myself about how my daughter would be learning from me. If I couldn’t say kind things to myself and my daughter heard those unkind things, how might she talk to herself? I tried to tell myself that I would eliminate all of the negative self-talk for my daughter. When she died, I guess somehow that promise to myself changed, even though it shouldn’t have. I feel now that I am working toward more self-acceptance, because that’s what I’d want to teach my daughter if she were here. So now I am bound to it. I have to try.

Today, when we decided we’d take our dog Waggs to the lake, Chris encouraged me to put my bathing suit on so I could go in the water. Typically, I’d say no; today, I hesitated and thought I’d try doing what’s difficult instead. And you know what? No one cared! No one judged me, no one thought I was disgusting, no one gave it a second thought. It was all fine. I wore my bathing suit in public, and none of those people looked at me and said, “Eww”, or “Oh wow, that woman is obviously a loss mom”. No one at that beach knew anything other than that there was a nice couple on the beach throwing a Frisbee for their dog enjoying the summer day. There it is… one more step toward self-acceptance. I can wear a bathing suit at a public beach. I can talk kindly to myself. I can accept that I’ve been through hell and am still going strong. I can change the way I view myself. I can be a loss mom and still feel good about myself. It all probably seems simple to someone looking in upon my situation who’s never lost a baby, but to me, it’s been a year of trying to accept and love myself again.

I am one step closer. One step closer to being my own best friend again.

A squinty-eyed sun photo, but proof that I am working on accepting myself for who I am now, even in a bathing suit!

Lucy’s first birthday is less than three days away… how can it have been a year already? As Thursday approaches, I feel the renewed sorrow and fear creeping in. I am depressed, irritable, tired, discouraged. The sadness and anger keep coming in separate waves, though sometimes crash over me at the same time. This is so hard. I can’t escape; all of my thoughts are consumed by missing her. It hurts so much.

Chris and I have both been feeling the stress of what this week brings. I know his birthday yesterday was particularly hard for him. Deep down, we’d both hoped that maybe this month would have brought a birthday gift for him and Lucy… but no such luck. Right now, we’re just immersed in the hurt of it all, wishing that instead of a quiet household, that our little one-year-old would be causing a joyful ruckus. The pain is pretty raw right now.

I did see my Lucy in a dream the other night. Since losing her, I’ve had many dreams with babies in them, but rarely have I had dreams with Lucy in them. That’s always broken my heart a little. But this time, I am certain it was her. It was a very brief dream, but it gave me so much. In the dream, I think someone handed Lucy to me. She was about a year old, so I held her on my hip. I said something like, “Lucy! It’s you. Let me see your eyes, baby… you’re so beautiful, I love you so much!” I had never had the chance to look into her eyes when she was born, so I have always wondered. She had her daddy’s deep-set eyes, all steely blue. I could see she had my face shape and chin, and a sweet button nose. Her hair was a dark blonde, curling just so around her little ears that looked so much like mine. She tipped her head back with a gleeful laugh, the most beautiful laugh (I have always longed to know what her laughter would have sounded like). She put her little hands on the sides of my face and looked at me, eyes shining. Then it was over, and she was gone. I woke up with a surge of emotion- love, pride, happiness, sorrow, longing. Missing her, yet thankful for a visit. My sweet one year old… I know it was her. So much love.

Right now, I am doing my best to survive this week. It’s definitely turning out to be as hard as I’d imagined, and then some. I’m looking for Lucy’s light, and it’s the only thing getting me through.

Today I went on a solo shopping/browsing expedition to a couple of my favorite stores looking for crafty ideas, fun back-to-school finds, and some essentials I’d run out of. It was nice not being in a hurry, and I was happy to putz around and just look at things.

Of course, these types of excursions can be emotionally risky for me.
A few tears spilled out at Hobby Lobby when I stumbled upon a couple of the same decorations I’d bought for Lucy’s nursery last summer. I averted my eyes from the cute baby girl in the checkout lane. I speed-walked past the baby department at Target. My pulse quickened when I saw a mama blow raspberry kisses on her sweet toddler’s cheek. I pretended that none of those things truly caused me any pain. All of that is normal for me now, and it is what it is. I have come to accept the emotional risks of going out in public, and usually I can handle them well.

Sometimes though, something catches me off guard, and suddenly, I can’t handle it well.
I navigated down the greeting card aisle to search for the perfect birthday card for Chris, since his birthday is coming up. I fought the little waves of sadness that washed over me when I realized that many of the ‘Husband’ birthday cards mentioned family or being a great father. I brushed them aside and was determined to find the right one. With a sigh of relief, I’d finally selected the right card for my darling wonderful husband. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed right away, but somehow I’d missed the trigger. I looked just to my right and felt my breath draw in sharply as I beheld the kids’ birthday cards and the innocent “Cute little ONE” birthday card, just waiting to be picked up for a sweet cake-covered ONE YEAR OLD. A one year old that isn’t my Lucy.

Right there, staring me in the face, is the reminder of the day I’ve been in denial of…

Oh, my heart. My poor tired heart.

The lump clicked into place in my throat and my lower lip started to quiver. Right there in the aisle at Target, the tears of grief demanded to be let loose, and I obliged. I think I’ve been in a state of denial about Lucy’s birthday, but I felt the reality of it come crashing down in that moment. And you know what? I felt sorry for myself. I felt sorry for Chris, for Lucy, and for myself. Not because I was crying in public, but because I couldn’t pick out my first birthday card for my daughter. Because I won’t ever get to give her one, or celebrate her milestones with her. Because I’ve lived the last year in the grip of grief, depression, and with an ache that won’t subside. Because sorrow is what I feel when I wake up, fall asleep, and every moment in between. Nothing can change any of that. Nothing can bring our baby daughter back.

In spite of doing well, of healing, of moving forward and trying to live again, the pain still takes my breath away.
It still paralyzes me. I still find myself submerged and sputtering in the inevitable crashing waves of grief, no matter how well I’ve been treading the waters of it. This is my life now, and it always will be. It’s not fair.

How I wish with all of my heart that my little girl were here with me, where she belongs.

This morning, yet another clinical reminder that Lucy is gone came in the mail. The last payment for pathology services on the day Lucy was born; this bill seems to have fallen through the cracks because of a hiccup with her name. Because we were between two hospitals, some details may have been lost because of the chaos that surrounded our situation. At Bronson, they knew her full name was Lucille Rose Orlaske, which is also what appears on her birth certificate and our insurance. At U of M, she was referred to as Lucy, because that’s what we were calling her. Both are her names, of course. However, this caused quite a jumble for us in the early months after Lucy passed away because we had to figure this out… we hadn’t realized initially that there was confusion with her name, which led to all of the billing blunders that needed to be sorted out. Our insurance was rejecting bills addressed to us for Lucy, because they had it in their records that she was Lucille. Unfortunately, this led to us needing to have difficult conversations with insurance people, hospital billing, etc. The only one I ended up handling over the phone was the ambulance bill (from the transfer to U of M), and having to explain pieces of our story in order to clear everything up proved to be very difficult and emotional. I’ll never know how Chris had the strength to handle all of the rest of that… it was terrible. We did find that nearly everyone he spoke with (and me too, with the ambulance billing) was deeply compassionate and did whatever they could to help clear things up. I guess though, who could not be moved at least a little bit by our sad story? We also had our HR person at school going out of her way to help us fix it all with insurance. As horrible as it all was, having to make those calls, we were lucky to have been met with kindness on all fronts. The details that we had to tend to in addition to coping with Lucy’s death are simply horrific, and they aren’t things that most other people even realize must be dealt with. It’s not a quick or easy process, and each one continues to remind us of the unbelievable, unimaginable situation we’ve found ourselves in. Sometimes, the horror of it is still hard to believe… it’s hard to believe that this unthinkable thing really happened. To us.

Looking at that bill just now, seeing her name in print like that, reopened a few wounds that have been trying in vain to heal. That’s the name she would have written on her homework, or heck, on the walls of her bedroom in non-washable marker… the name that she would have shared when first meeting someone, or announced over the loudspeaker at her first athletic event. Just there, typed, in print. Part of me is truly comforted by seeing Lucy Orlaske on that piece of paper, just like that, in an ordinary way. Proof that she existed. It was hard to seal the envelope up and send her name away like that, the very last of the bills we’ll ever receive for her care. Funny how the simplest of things seem so monumental in a scenario like ours.

The last few days for me have been plagued by flashbacks of the time leading up to Lucy’s birth. Days I’d forgotten about this time last year are suddenly crystal clear in their details, sending me right back there to those moments. I look back upon myself in those days now with such pity, such sadness… that woman, my past self, had NO idea what was going to happen in just a short time ahead. I feel so sorry for her because her greatest happiness was about to be snatched away. She just kept moving through those days with the purest oblivion, only anticipating the happy moment when her newborn daughter would be handed to her, the moment when she’d get to look at her husband through joyful tears with a smile to light up the room as they met their daughter for the first time… All of which she would be cruelly robbed of. That person is now just a memory to me, like a heroine in some whimsical fiction novel with a happy ending I read long ago. I suppose she once existed too… where has she gone? Vanished into the wind.

As the days forge ahead to August 10th and 11th, I feel myself slipping. The grief, and its accompanying depression, is swelling, and the longing I feel for my baby only grows with each beat of my heart. Right now, the passage of time is not easing the pain, but magnifying it. I miss her terribly… both Lucy and the me I used to be.

Her beautiful name.

In my last post, I said I was doing okay, that I didn’t splinter into pieces at the knowledge that there’d be no rainbow this month. But the truth is, everything I experience is accompanied by sadness. While the darkness might come and go, the sadness remains. It remains because no matter what I’m doing, it’s not as it should be because of all we’ve lost; there’s always something missing. The coming and going of each month with no rainbow baby in sight only seems to enhance the sadness. Yesterday, the sadness hit me with a renewed intensity that I hadn’t expected. I didn’t want to get out of bed, I never once felt calm throughout the day, always on the verge of tears. The emptiness threatened to swallow me up, and I willingly allowed it. That’s the thing about grief, it’s not linear. You can’t always predict when it will hit, whether it’s days, month, or years after the fact. As Lucy’s first birthday quickly approaches, I find that my grief seems to have been renewed, and along with that, I’m not reacting to additional setbacks all that well. I just can’t seem to catch my breath from grief, nor can I see Lucy’s light as vividly as I thought I could before. That scares me. It makes me feel vulnerable, uncomfortable, restless, quick to anger… I don’t want these things to be true, but it’s just how it is right now. I’m doing my best to see the goodness and the glimmers of light and love around me. I know that it’s always there somewhere, but it’s hard to see when the emptiness becomes so vast. I’d like to think it won’t always be this way, but I know that the ebb and flow of my grief will continue throughout my lifetime. There’s nothing that can be done immediately to soothe the pain, nor is there anything anyone can say to make it better; it will always be within me to some degree. For now, I just have to make it through each day as well as I can, trying to be the best person I can be considering the circumstances. In spite of how hard I’ve been on myself lately, I can at least admit that I’m doing a good job of surviving. To look at me, you’d almost think I’m okay, that I’m thriving even. I’m still doing good things, and some doors are even opening to new opportunities, like being asked to join the writing team over at Still Standing (truly, it’s the first thing I’ve been genuinely excited about). I don’t want to seem ungrateful for all of the wonderful things that still exist in my life, but I have to be honest and say that no matter what, nothing’s ever going to feel quite right without Lucy. This has all changed me so much, and there’s no going back to being the person I once was. For now, all I can continue to do is just keep getting by the best I can.

I really miss her today.

One thing has not changed a bit since we lost Lucy. That thing is disappointment. Obviously, losing Lucy was the hardest, most crushing disappointment of our lives. The weight of the disappointment that comes from knowing we will miss everything with our daughter is excruciating to deal with it on its own. The other repetitive disappointment we’re facing is our trying to conceive journey. Chris and I are desperate to become second-time parents to another child; it’s the only thing that allows us to look ahead to the future. We keep trying to remain hopeful and optimistic, but all we get is more of the same. More disappointment.

Month after month, I’ve come to simply expect that we will again be disappointed with another negative pregnancy test. I’ve gotten tired of squinting and looking in vain for a phantom line that could be there or not be there. I’ve gotten used to the sinking feeling that comes with seeing red yet again, signaling the start of yet another ttc cycle. I realize that putting expectations, like hoping to conceive again, into the universe is only making this more difficult and disappointing each month, but when you’ve been through something like we have, it’s the only thing that helps us see beyond the wall of grief. I keep trying to tell myself to have patience, to “relax”… others keep implying these things, so I guess I’m trying those thought processes out for myself. So far, it isn’t working any better for me in my self-talk than it does when other people say those things because they don’t know what to say. I guess I just don’t even know what to say about it anymore. I want to “move forward” and stop living my life in two week increments, but it’s next to impossible. We’re coming up on nearly a year here… and all we have to show for it is more of the same.

Another part of this that’s difficult is the question, “Are you thinking of trying for another baby?”. As if we haven’t thought of this novel idea yet. Enough time has passed so people naturally start wondering this, and I do know that they never ask with negative intent, but to have that question posed more and more frequently only adds to my frustration that we just haven’t been able to get there yet. It’s just one of those little things that rubs salt in an already festering wound. Again, more of the same.

I did not splinter to pieces this month, because honestly, I expected another negative outcome. It’s hard to anticipate anything else right now, because all we’ve acquired is disappointment. It feels like defeat. I’m fighting more cynicism, sarcasm, and irritation along with this frustration. I don’t want to be that person… I still want to become better, not bitter. SO, I’m doing my best to just accept that “more of the same” is where we’re at right now. I will attempt to maintain some positivity and optimism as I look ahead to another two week increment, but it’s more difficult to resist becoming totally jaded with each month that passes by. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from losing Lucy is that we simply cannot control what happens. The same is true for trying to conceive Lucy’s sibling- we can’t control when it happens, no matter how much we try. It must happen when it happens. It’s tough to let it all just flow, when so much has been taken from us already. But, I’m accepting that I really just don’t have a say or a choice in that aspect of our TTC journey. My plan this month is to focus on myself. I am still my own worst enemy but now it’s time to spend more energy on becoming my own best friend again. Maybe if I do that, it will be less of the same and more goodness instead. Lucy’s light continues to work its way into my life more all the time. I suppose it’s time to pay more attention to it, to let it help me become better, even through further disappointment.

A common sight in our trying to conceive journey… more of the same…

Facebook has been an incredibly useful tool in my post-loss life. It has been a way for me to reach my network of friends and family easily, a chance to keep up on where everyone else’s lives are going, and it has also provided me with opportunities to connect with other women in the infant loss community. It’s given me a way to share our story with others, which is priceless. All of those things are positive reasons to keep a social media outlet like Facebook in my daily life. It has actually helped me tremendously. However, the downsides of such an avenue of communication for someone who has lost their newborn baby are also numerous. I know that when I check my Facebook, there is always the risk that I might see something that saddens me, and I accept that. Sadness is honestly one of my predominating feelings for obvious reasons, so I’m not afraid of it. What makes it tough though are the multitudinous baby product advertisements that pop up in my newsfeed. It’s a lot like the random assortment of infant-related mail that shows up in my mailbox at home- unexpected and hurtful. Just another reminder that any of those things are useless to me because fate decreed that my baby would not survive.

On Facebook, there’s the option to “Hide this ad” when you click on the little down arrow at the top right corner of the ad. Upon first using that option, I was pleasantly relieved that, like the ‘unfollow’ button, you could choose to unfollow an advertisement. After that click, however, you have to take another step and answer the question “Why don’t you want to see this ad?”. Instantly, the painful answer, “because my baby died”, forms in my mind. I can almost see the words as if they are listed in the options that you can choose from. But, alas, that isn’t exactly an answer they’ve formulated, nor is it one they’d truly want to hear. No one wants to hear that. One potential answer option is “It’s offensive to me”, and that doesn’t quite fit, and though it’s hurtful, it obviously isn’t intended to be. There isn’t an option to write an answer, so the closest answer I can select is “It’s not relevant to me”. The trouble is, it IS relevant to me because I DID have a baby, and I WANT those things to be a part of my life. But instead, I must give a generic answer, because it’s the easiest way. The team behind the scenes (whom I believe must analyze page interests and likes and then figure out which ads to target my page with) then promises not to show as many ads like that in the future. It rarely works though, because more baby ads inevitably show up again. There’s just so much of it out there in the world. This isn’t meant to bash on Facebook at all. I use it every day, and of course there is always the option for me not to look at it. The point here is that our society as a whole, along with social media networks, often don’t think about infant loss. Though it happens more often than you’d think, it’s just not something the majority of the population experiences. There’s no option to be exempt from advertisements, pages, mailing lists, emails, etc. because your child died, but maybe there should be!

Being a bereaved parent hurts enough on its own, and there will always be certain things that are difficult to see, but the extra, constant baby reminders add another unnecessary layer to it. But, if I’ve learned nothing else as a grieving mother, I’ve certainly learned that the world is an unfair place. Life is unfair. Life after loss is even more unfair.

Today was going fine and I was feeling good. The summer weather is nice and mild right now, the birds are chirping, I planted another beautiful rose bush in Lucy’s Garden (given to us by a kind friend), and I’ve been feeling altogether light-hearted, which is nice for a switch. But when I went to grab the mail, I was accosted by an absolutely malicious (albeit unintentional) surprise as I shuffled through a few pieces of junk mail. Oriental Trading sent me not one, but two copies of their “First Birthdays” edition catalog with an adorable, smiling one year-old on the cover. Ouch. How they even knew that our child would have been nearly one, or how I ended up on their mailing list, I’ll never know. I realize that once upon a happy time, I registered at places like Babies R Us, and that by doing so, I was magically part of a network of all things baby. That was all fine and good, until my baby died. Things like this have sporadically shown up in our mail over the past ten months, and it kills me every time, twists the knife just a little deeper. I no longer feel okay at the moment, as that stupid catalog has reminded me that there is no first birthday party to plan, there is no smiling Lucy getting ready to dig into a ‘smash cake’. I have unsubscribed to several email promotions and flyers over the past months and some have been nearly impossible to get rid of. It’s frustrating because there’s no true way to know just how many places were given my information because I created a registry, and no telling how long I will be tortured by stuff like this. I know that Chris and I are not the only loss parents dealing with this mailbox conundrum, I think all loss parents are faced with this. It leaves me wondering what can be done about it. It seems that once you’ve signed up for anything baby through a website or any other organization, there’s no backing out, no matter the outcome of your pregnancy. All that does is add more painful complexities to the parents trying to cope with loss. If only I were a tech wizard, I could maybe figure out some online list loss parents could put themselves on that could unsubscribe them from the most common or notorious baby-related sites and mailing lists. Maybe it’s time to put that idea out into the world and see if anyone can come up with an easy solution. It sure would help the baby loss community from feeling as if they’re ‘going postal’ every time an unwanted, hurtful reminder shows up in their mailboxes!

On a much more positive note, a few weeks ago, I thought I’d try my luck and apply to be an ongoing contributor for Still Standing, the online magazine. I truly didn’t believe I would be accepted, but was absolutely ecstatic that I heard back from them with an invitation to join their writing team! I hope that I am able to contribute some meaningful pieces that will comfort others as I have been comforted through Still Standing. I truly feel honored that this opportunity has presented itself; it’s one of the few things I have truly felt excited about in the past ten months. If you’re reading this and are not familiar with Still Standing, it’s an online magazine focused on those surviving child loss and infertility, and has many contributing writers who share articles written about the topics that resound with the loss community. You can find the website here: www.stillstandingmag.com. It’s absolutely worth a look, and I can’t believe that I will be able to join with the voices of these wonderful writers. I hope that I will not disappoint them!

Okay, now back to trying to heal my fresh wounds from today’s mail…

A painful, unexpected reminder.