An original post for Bridges:
"They" tell you a lot after your babies die. They are the ones with experience, albeit rarely firsthand, on the matter. They are the counselors, the doctors, the "neonatal loss coordinators" (seriously), the authors of entire books on the subject. These are the dead baby experts.
They tell you that there are stages of grief and that you will likely go through them all, not necessarily in order (which begs the question why they even created the order). They tell you that it is not recommended to get pregnant again too soon. They describe the chances of a subsequent loss. They forecast how you may expect to feel, how your grief will change, lessen, over time. How babies, pregnancies, other reminders, may be painful (as if you needed a book to know this).
What they don't tell, however, is how much the things completely unrelated to loss, pregnancy and babies will hurt. They don't tell you how the most minor day to day disappointments will become magnified exponentially. They don't tell you that you are going to become a freak. They don't tell you that you can spend an entire day being normal, engaging in banter, functioning undetected in society, when a closed drive-thru will send you hurtling into an abyss of grief.
I have cried over traffic, I have bawled because my cat wouldn't snuggle with me, and I have refused to speak to DH for hours because he drove recklessly. I didn't used to be a mercurial person. One would think that suffering a tragedy such as the loss of a child (or two) would put life into perspective, perhaps lessen the impact of the smaller slights. It doesn't.
The other night, after a 12 hour workday, the one thing I was looking forward to was Taco Bell (don't judge - sometimes a little toxic cheese product just sounds too good). We got there and the drive thru was closed, so we went elsewhere. Thanks to delays and traffic it was another 20 minutes before we were home. DH sensed my disproportionate disappointment over the lack of chalupas, and told me that it wasn't that big of a deal. The next thing I knew I was prone on the bed, heaving sobs which I literally couldn't stop, no matter how hard I tried. Everything was just too much.It wasn't just the Taco Bell, although I'm sure in years to come DH will derive great pleasure telling people about the time I had a nervous breakdown because the drive-thru was closed.
It was (is) just everything, every extra hour I worked and didn't want to, every minute spent in traffic, every call that hadn't been returned. It's as if rather than putting things in perspective, losing our Doodles has thrown my gauges all out of whack - anything bad is very bad. A part of me is just screaming that it isn't fair, that I have already gone through losing my babies, I shouldn't have to deal with all this other crap on top of that, and so each minor inconvenience, disappointment, annoyance becomes another straw on the already severely injured camel's back.
So here I am, trying to nurse the camel back to health, and hoping someday it will be able to carry the load to which it had grown accustomed. I don't know how I'll do this, but I'm willing to give it a shot.
Busted is the contributing editor for Loss. She writes daily at Busted Babymaker where she tells her infertility story as well as the story of the Doodles, her boy/girl twins (Noah and Talia) who were born at 23 weeks due to placental abruption.
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