I will never “get over” my miscarriages. Regardless of the fact that I now have 4-month-old babies — two of them — it still hurts. A lot. The pain is less fresh, but it’s there. It’s like an injury that you’ve recovered from but if you move in just the right way it hurts all over again almost like it did the first time it happened.
The pain of my miscarriages is the reason I keep finding excuses to avoid my back yard; I can’t bear to look at the rosebush we planted in memory of our first baby, or the stump where I planted the tulip bulbs my best friend gave me in memory of our second baby. The flowers are beautiful, and they make me feel like I am going to vomit because every time I look at them I feel scared and I can’t explain why. Not scared like, I am in imminent danger, but scared like, When is the next bad thing going to happen and will it happen to my babies?
The rosebush in particular is like the sword of Damocles following me around. I have never seen a rosebush grow so big so fast, and it is right outside my bedroom window. It’s so tall that it’s fallen over, but I can’t bring myself to prop it up. What if I try to fix it and it dies? What if I try to fix it and it completely take over the side of our house? Both scenarios fill me with dread, so I leave it alone. I keep hoping Daddy-in-Training will notice and do something about it, but of course neither of us knows anything about rosebushes so I don’t see that happening. And until he reads this blog post, he will have had no idea why I’ve left it untouched because this is the first time I’ve been able to articulate it myself.
Sometimes in my dreams I am still pregnant, and I start bleeding. In these dreams, I am hugely pregnant, with a giant roiling belly, and the blood is a gush that pours out of me. This is not what I experienced when I miscarried. The first time, I was about 5 and a half weeks and the second about 7. My belly had not yet swelled, though that second time I had already begun to become violently ill. (In retrospect I realize this was a foreshadowing of the hyperemesis that would debilitated me during my third pregnancy.)
The first time, the blood told me what had happened. As a result, I dreaded every trip to the bathroom for the 36 weeks and 3 days I carried Miles and Emmett. I winced in the middle of the night when I turned on the light to check for blood after peeing. Every. Time. The second time, it was an ultrasound with no heartbeat where one had pulsed strongly only a week earlier. This is why my heart stopped and I felt like puking (more than normal, that is), for the moments that preceded the thrub-thrub-thrub that told me the boys were okay, still there, still alive, with every doctor visit.
I think of these things as I lie in bed. Sometimes I wake up in tears with a vague feeling of emptiness, of missing something, but I can’t pinpoint why I am crying.
When I look at my boys’ sweet faces, I am consumed with love for them, and gratitude that I get to be their mommy. But I am constantly terrified that I will lose them, too. Some days I am better at managing these feelings than others — days I am well rested and have showered and have some hope of getting to the gym or at least the end of the driveway. I consciously focus on the joy they bring me and how much fun it is to mother them. When fears begin to creep in, I think about the logical reasons why nothing will happen so we can just relax and have fun. Most days it’s okay.
But other days, like the last week or so, I can’t stop thinking about loss. When I hear or read about other moms losing a baby, or most recently losing two, it feels like I got punched in the gut and I can’t remember how to breathe. It feels like it’s happening to me all over again, except with the added grief I experience at the thought of another woman with arms aching for life that is no longer there. It’s unbearable. I am sick over it. I don’t know how to deal with it.
I don’t know how to fix it — and right now I’m not sure I want to because I’m afraid it will mean forgetting my first babies and hardening my heart against what others are suffering. There must be some balance between debilitating fear and grief and complete lack of emotion, but I don’t know where it is. I just know there is no “over it,” because it changes you, and life After never goes back to life Before. How could it?