Oh yeah, that's why I left you.

Just hearing about this travesty, so pardon me if I am behind the curve. After seeing it on the news and then reading about it, beyond all of the head smacking and genital bashing I would like to partake in at the moment, the only thing I can say is, boy do I feel good about my decision to walk away from that place.
My apologies to those of you who read here and are still members of that particular group. But it is actions such as these, piled on top of the YEARS of inaction and worse, deceptive actions in the molestation scandals, that have alienated so many, myself included, from them. Them being the powers that be, (yes, I am talking to you Mr. Pope and your cronies), that feel entitled to hold everyone, except themselves that is, up to some arbitrary, man made standards and laws, while calling it "the word of God" and then deciding whether or not one is worthy of worshiping with you. Hypocrites. Shame on you.
When I am done fuming I may write more about this. Right now I am far too angry to be constructive.

Sophie took a trip away this past weekend. She was remembering her beautiful daughter Jordan, who took her last breath just a little over nine months ago. While she was there she also remembered some of our lost babies. And this is what I saw today when I went to read about her trip.

And I cried. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you.

Incomplete

Before, way before, when my life was moving along according to 'plan', I used to walk by the extra room in our house and wonder if someday, maybe, I'd get that last baby. We never decorated the room, when we bought the house we moved each of the kids into their own rooms, put ourselves in the Master and then sort of left the definition for the last room up in the air. It became a junk room with a desk and a computer and all the crap I didn't know what to do with or didn't want to deal with, ever. Occasionally it became a guest room, for the husband...not for couples counseling but for sleep deprivation issues(mine not his) related to his snooooring. It was never painted and the wallpaper was half way torn down by me in a late night I'm not sleeping so I might as well get something done stupor(obviously before the idea occurred to me to throw the husband out when the snooooring was bad). I always had it in my head that maybe, eventually, it would be a room for another baby. I was waiting for the green light from the master snorer. Which came some 4 years later. Yeah, we move quick, don't we.

I've had three pregnancies since then, one miscarriage, a stillborn son and Cason. I guess in the card game of pregnancy you could say I have a Full House. In total, I've been pregnant six times, My two other C's and another miscarriage. Maybe that makes a Royal Flush? The room has been successfully converted into a nursery for Cason although he only ever spends time on the changing table, not sure when I'll let him sleep that far away from me, but that's a post for another day.

Back then, before, I thought once I had that third baby I would feel it. "It" being the knowing feeling that would come telling me we were done with babymaking. I expected a comfortable peace, a settled in sense of a job well done and maybe even some nostalgia for the end of my fertile self. I thought the third would finish the sentence, put an ending to the story, that the extra room would get an identity and I would feel complete.
Maybe that would have been the case if things had gone according to plan. I never got there so I will never know.
My third child is dead. My fourth child is here with me and still I feel the ache from within calling for another child. And it seems I will never really be able to finish the sentence. In the beginning, in the days right after Cason was born I thought I really wanted another child, to get pregnant right away and have one more, one whose existence wasn't wrapped in all things dead baby. Never mind how unbelievably terrifying the mere idea of being pregnant again was (and is) to me, I just wanted that other baby. Now, while I still like the idea of Cason having a sibling that is closer to his age (all this loss has created a pretty decent gap between him and his sister and more so his brother) I realize that the real longing is for the one who got away. I won't ever get to be finished because one will always be missing. There is no sense of peace, no feeling of that job well done and certainly no nostalgia about the state of my fertility. Instead there is a feeling that I escaped something, that I got away with something, that I am where I wanted to be but I don't belong there. My outsides don't match my insides anymore. I am a misfit. I am and will always be incomplete.

The eyes have it

Niobe has an eye catching post up. Here's my answer....sorry about the sad state of my gazers. Went to an all '80's gala last nite and had to break out the purple eyeliner and the ridiculously heavy black mascara to go with all the Aqua Net. But, hey, they bring out the green in my hazel duo dontcha think???

Dead babies last forever

"My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at the table or in the pleasure of love, none even in books or poetry...Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?"*

It was serendipitous, stumbling across this quote when I did, just after posting the picture of the tattered and dying rose** that has somehow managed to bear new life from the center of it's withering bud. It answers the question. From somewhere deep within, where no beauty can be seen, the potential for new life waits. What it will look like, the new life, that is the million dollar question. That is the mystery that is grief.

It's hard writing here now. I feel the need to be more careful with my words. To censor thoughts and feelings so as not to wound, albeit without intention, another. I am keenly aware of the divergence of our paths, those of us who have somehow stumbled our way onto the road of life with a live baby after, those who are well on their way to that path and those that are not, some by choice, some by cruel design, some a combination of the two, choice and design. And of course, none of these women got there because they happily decided, "Hey, no more babies for me, I'm done!". And really, for some the decision hasn't even been made by them, but for them and in direct opposition to their wants and hopes and dreams.

The idea that any of us really gets to choose our path is ludicrous isn't it? We all know, or think we know, which path we want, but the reality of it is that we end up on whichever road fate decides and the only real power we have is how we choose to live while we walk. It's not good or bad, it just is what it is.

A year ago today I was at my lowest. It was the end of a cycle, one where we had 'really' tried and still nothing. I had visions of the rest of my life, or at least my ovaries lives, being nothing more than rounds of trying and 2ww's and pissy trips to the store to buy tampons and alcohol, lots of it. I saw myself in DBL watching and reading as slowly each and everyone of the women who I had come to know would become pregnant and get her 'almost happily ever after' baby. I envisioned myself the ancient gatekeeper to DBL, welcoming the new members with my tale of woe, only to them it would be a cautionary tale, the story none of them really wanted to hear because I didn't get my live baby ticket out of Dodge. No one would want to be near me. Or at least they could explain me away by rationalizing that I was afflicted with that "AMA" syndrome, more commonly known as advanced maternal age, which must be why I didn't get the baby. She's all dried up they would say, she waited too long, that won't happen to us....we hope. I imagined it because it was what I did when I read. I tried to find reasons to explain to myself why someone else's tragedy wouldn't befall me IF I got there, you know, pregnant, again. Sometimes it worked, most times it didn't. We all know there are far too many more stories where there just is no reason why it happened than there are ones where we can blame someone or something, anything. And beyond that even, nothing is guaranteed, nothing certain, not when it comes to live babies anyway.

Off I went to the store, bought my industrial size box of tampons, vowing not to have to come back and do the walk of shame month after month, and I dove into a glass of 'make it all go away' when I got home. It was the last month I had to do it. And we all know what happened after that.

Now when I write, I find myself writing to that me. The scared, desperate and hopeless me. The me I was a year ago, not the me I am now. Because I can hear the chorus in my head of the ones who are 'there' when I write otherwise, either in a post or in a comment. "Easy for you to say, YOU have a baby now." "You don't know what it's like anymore, you got out easy." "Don't blow sunshine and glitter into my world, you didn't have it when you were here and you didn't want to hear it either." I can go on and on but there's no need. You get it. And maybe it's not what anyone really feels but it must be close on some level.

I suppose the dbl club is an evolving one with many rooms. We all go in and gather in the front room, our eyes moist, glazed and shell shocked. We cling to each other, fighting for every breath. We talk because finally we have found others who know. Slowly we find comfort, we get comfortable, we move, we explore our new surroundings, we seek out others who have been there longer, we look for ways out or at least other places to go, we gather information, we garner strength and we welcome those who come after hoping to show them the same warmth that we found when we entered. And after a while our stories change, our needs change, our voices change. We all still share that horror of a common bond but now we find ourselves different again, each one of us unique in our grief and our life after. There is a room for each of us to be sure, no one will ever be alone and there is comfort in that.

In a way I think that getting a baby after has inflicted a kind of survivors guilt in me. The feeling that I was a part of the horrific crash that devastated all of us but somehow I walked away less damaged or less entitled to feel damaged because I have a baby now. And in reality, having the baby does make it better. It just does. There. I said it. It doesn't make the grief better but it does make the living with it better. Infinitely better. And that's the part that brings the guilt. And I don't write this as a complaint or a whine or anything of the sort. It's an observation. A feeling. A way of being. For now. Something else I've learned along the way, everything is temporary around here.

Except for the dead babies. They last forever.

*St. Augustine

**See my last post

Valentines Day Hope

I'm not a fan of roses on Valentines Day and certainly not red roses...way too cliche for me, BUT this one I had to share. It reminds me of me.

Honest Scrap Award

Thanks to the lovely CLC for bestowing upon me this little ditty. I've been held hostage of late by a little volunteering commitment and am way behind on my blogging so I am going to skip the part where I actually choose more blogs to pass this on to as most of you have already had a chance to do this, BUT, if you haven't and you are here reading this, then consider yourself duly nominated!

The rules of the award:1) Choose a minimum of 7 blogs that you find brilliant in content or design.2) Show the 7 winners names and links on your blog, and leave a comment informing them that they were prized with "Honest Scrap." Well, there's no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.3) List at least 10 honest things about yourself.

1. I love to eat in bed before I go to sleep. Diets be damned.

2. Sometimes after partaking in the aforementioned activity I will, shudder, skip brushing my teeth. Eee gads! I know. But I am obsessive about scrubbing them during the day, to the tune of 5-10 times a day so I figure I make up for it, right?

3. I love playing Puddle of Mudd, 'She hates Me' really loud in my car and always giggle when they get to the chorus. If you don't know it, find it:) and see how immature I really am.

4. In my last 'honest' list making post I wrote about the sad state of my not so sexy underwears. Now I will add the absolutely not sexy decades old sock collection to the list. I tried to clean out the drawer but decided I would have to buy too many pairs to replace what's in there, so I just put the forlorn, faded, and ever so shriveled foot covers back in to their cavernous home. I suspect one day all of the misfit toys will come to rest here too.

5. I will wake the husband out of a sound sleep to get a spider off the ceiling. It sucks for him as I am up ALOT at night these days and I am not always in our room either, so I have seen a good number of arachnids wandering the likes of our overheads and it isn't a safe place for them. Really.

6. I have become addicted to reruns of The West Wing and also replays of Mad Money and Remember the Titans. Why, I have no idea. Late night nursing and plot lines I can follow without too many functioning brain cells would be my guess.

7. I hate when police cars drive behind me. Could be the expired tags but more likely it's the leftover fear of a teenager who drove way too fast, way too often and didn't get caught nearly enough times to make her stop.

8. I am already one month behind with my new year's resolution to read at least one book a month. Which proves to me why resolutions suck. They make me stress out over things I don't need to stress out about and they put way too much pressure on me to do things that I would normally enjoy doing but now feel pressured to do which stresses me out and then I feel pressured....see where this is going.

9. I can't remember the last time my husband and I went out by ourselves. Seriously. Except for doctor visits and hospitals that is and really, that doesn't count now does it?

10. I want another baby. Can't decide if it's really another baby I want or if this is Caleb and the grief coming out, either way I am not going to have another baby so this is a new layer of longing and sadness I am learning to live with.

Somethings never really change do they?