"Real"

It's the loneliest feeling in the world, grieving for someone no one else knew but you. I wrote that as a comment the other day, I just typed it out without really even thinking about it. But when I reread it, in my futile attempt to prevent commenting with glaring typos which, without fail, I always do, the words affected me. Even though they had come out of my own head and had landed on the screen from my not so nimble fingers typing them out, they bothered me.

All week I have been thinking about them. The idea that this horrible grief is made worse by the fact that I can't share any memories of my baby with anyone. I can't say, "Oh, remember when Caleb...." nope, nothing. Sure, I could drive down to my doctors office and ask my favorite ultrasound tech if she shares my same memory of how hard it was to get "the baby" to stay still so we could get a clear picture of him, but it's just not the same thing is it? I can remind my husband of the nights when I would sit in bed and watch "the baby" kick, and that's about as close as it gets. Watching my belly shift and bob as this tiny creature explored his surroundings. Everyone else has only dreams of him, hopes for him, ideas of who he might be. But he wasn't really "real" yet, to the outside world. We didn't even know if he was a boy or a girl, he was still, just "the baby".

So this grief thing becomes everyone feeling bad or sad, for me, because I lost the baby. While my grief is because my baby is lost. That's the lonely part. No one can ever really miss him because no one ever knew him. Not what he looked like, how he smelled, how his tiny hand felt wrapped around my finger, how his chubby little foot looked when I lifted it up to look at his toes, how much he looked like his big sister. None of it. My husband has been telling me this since day one of this nightmare. He said, "It's not the same for me. I didn't have the same attachment, he wasn't living in me, I didn't know him like you did." When he first told me that, I was really angry. I thought it was his chicken shit way of copping out on grief. I would argue with him, "He was your son too! You saw him, you felt him, you did too know him, he was real!" I wanted him to acknowledge that he had lost his son too, I wanted him to hurt like I did, to feel like I felt, to miss him like I did. I did not want to be the only one who felt the way I did. But now I know, what he already knew, I was on my own and no one was ever going to know the loss I had. No one.

When I asked my husband if it ever bothered him to answer the "How many kids do you have?"question, he said he didn't even think about it. He always answers "two". He said it's not that he doesn't believe or feel that Caleb was his son but that now, he has "two" and that's it. Like they say, you can't miss what you never had, right? Who the fuck are 'they" anyway???

I suppose my trying to talk more about Caleb IRL is my way of making him 'real' to the outside world. On Friday, I talked to two of my friends about him. One just listened, it was a brief conversation but I felt so much better saying out loud what I was thinking in my head, rather than just burying my thoughts with random chatter as is my usual M.O.. The other, my pregnant friend from ballet, actually asked more questions, including the "are you thinking about trying again?" one. I shared some of my delivery story with her, especially the parts where my OB became the worst doctor in the world with her infamous "If you do this vaginally you'll feel great! when you leave the hospital", said to me in her office upon learning our child was dead and discussing 'delivery' options and "Well, you only had 1/2 a VBAC." said to me in the moments after I delivered Caleb. I think my friends comment was, without misquoting her, "What a fucking bitch." and she then offered to help me find a new, nice OB should I ever manage to get myself pg again. That's the first time I have ever told the story out loud to anyone outside my family. Saying it out loud, to my friend, made Caleb feel more real to me and I hope real in some way to her. It gave him a moment, the briefest of life experiences. It gave life to him outside my belly in the strangest of ways. I imagine in my head, my friend relating the story to someone else, which means she will talk about him, even if it is only to say "When my friend delivered her stillborn son...", and even though they will never know Caleb, they will know he existed and that he was real.

Sometimes I compare myself to someone who suffers from "phantom limb" syndrome. A victim of a horrible, tragic set of circumstances who has some part of their body, a leg or maybe an arm, removed and yet still reaches out at random moments, years later, to scratch an itch on that same leg or arm because they can still feel that limb. In the same way, I have had a part of me, who was this whole other person, literally ripped from my womb and I know for the rest of my life, for as long as I draw breath I will always feel the pain, the ache of his absence and I will always, always know, that something is missing. And that he was real.

“What is real?” asked the Rabbit one day.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse.
“It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for
A long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you
Become Real.”
“Does it hurt? asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.
“When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once”, he asked or bit by bit?”
It doesn’t happen all at once, you become. It takes a long time.
Generally by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off,
And your eyes drop out…But these things don’t matter at all,
Because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people
Who don’t understand.
“…once you are Real, you can’t become unreal again.
It lasts for always.”

The Velveteen Rabbit