Roller Coaster Weekend - FAIL

First there was this...

Then this...

And if you think you see a line... you don't. Because then came this:

Pregnancy = FAIL

Game called on account of I'm broken... :(

Pain

I took my nineteen year old daughter to get a tattoo tonight. A pretty involved tattoo. Which meant a lot of pain. She was incredibly stoic about it, and as I watched, I saw the little three-year-old she had once been. She always hid her pain, even then. She once got her finger pinched in a folding door, and instead of coming to get me, crying, she just hid in the closet until it stopped hurting. (I found her just a few minutes after it happened - opened the door to get something and there she was, cradling her hurt hand...)

Watching her, remembering, got me thinking about pain. We all respond to pain - physically and otherwise - so differently. Like my daughter, I'm good at hiding mine. I'm not outwardly emotional. But I feel, and I know she does too. Deeply.

Her father and I divorced ... it's been ten years since then. We've been apart now longer than we were together. At the time, the pain was so great I thought I couldn't bear it. When the rift and wound was fresh, driving down familiar streets, past places we lived together, was incredibly painful. I drove through some of them tonight and realized... my pain has ebbed. In fact, what I experience now isn't pain so much as it is sadness, some nostalgia, and a little regret.

 It's faded over time. As I watched colors bloom on my daughter's skin...a back I soaped and rinsed 1,000 times in her life...I realized that the bright pain I still feel over William's death would disappear like that. Like my daughter's tattoo...colors would bleed and fade and slowly disappear, leaving the ghost-image of what it once had been.

Some day I really will look back and remember William differently. I felt that tonight, watching my oldest daughter bear her own pain and wondering what life had in store for her. At nineteen, I had yet to experience my greatest pain. Today, at thirty-nine, I'm not sure I have yet. But I have had my share. The longer we're here, it seems, the more life gives us. Our souls, like tattooed bodies, blooming bright, colorful pain that burns and slowly heals over time until it fades into the outline of our memory. Still there, always there, but never quite the same.

No, we are never quite the same again.

Magical Thinking

I took off my "memory" necklace for the first time in seven months the other day. Had to get a thyroid ultrasound (and just seeing an ultrasound image again was traumatizing enough) and it was in the way. We're still trying to catch an egg and get pregnant again, although every month that goes by, I wonder if it just wasn't meant to be and William's death was meant to be a big STOP sign from the universe.

I took off my necklace and had never felt more naked. And as I held it in cupped my hand and the ultrasound tech did her thing - looking for nodules or anything that might be causing the thyroid issue - I wondered if I should just put it away. I put away both William "reborns." They don't "sleep" next to my bed anymore. They're put away in the, as of now, unused nursery, and we have to make a special trip to "visit" them if we want to. So far, I haven't.

William's picture is still up, along with his ashes and the little momentos and statues we received after he died. They're all still there and I plan to make a permanent place for them. Soon.

But I wondered, holding that necklace into my hand, if it was my holding onto William and his memory that was keeping me from getting pregnant. Strange, the things we think, the associations we make.

Two women, now, who have come onto a loss board I frequent, who lost term or near-term babies after I did, have now gotten pregnant. That's hard. I'm happy for them, but looking around and wondering...why not me? Why is this so hard? I've never had a problem getting pregnant before. Quite the oppoosite.

Of course, I did get pregnant two months ago. It just didn't... take. What's wrong with me? All the tests they give me, everything keeps coming back normal. The issues I have (thyroid) are "under control" according to the tests, and shouldn't be preventing me from getting pregnant. So they say. But then again, they can't find any reason my baby died, either.

And it's now been seven and a half months since I held my dead son and I'm not pregnant again.

It must be my necklace. That must be it, I thought, clutching it in my hand and watching the ultrasound screen, wishing we were looking at a baby and not my thyroid gland.

The tech said everything looked "normal." No nodules, thyroid wasn't enlarged. Of course.

So I put my necklace on again and no, I haven't taken it off. What does magical thinking get me, anyway? Nothing. Which is what I have. Nothing.

It's hard to hope, it's hard to "stay positive." I told M. that I "feel" pregnant this time. I don't know, yet, not quite testing time... but I do. I feel pregnant. Of course, trusting my body is a big issue anymore.

He replied, "I hope you are...but I don't think I'm going to get very excited for a while."

That makes me sad. I understand it completely, and feel the same, but how awful that we have to hold back, hold our breath, hang onto memories and hopes and scattered dreams. I don't want to live that way, and I'm not sure how to avoid it.

If only I had a magic wand...

The Alternative

On Halloween, I walked the neighborhood with Vampiress and the Grim Reaper, all too aware of how light I felt. Last year I was pregnant, and my pelvis felt soooo heavy walking the streets. I was exhausted after our night of trick or treating last year.

This year I wasn't pregnant. This year, I should have been pushing a fat pumpkin in a stoller, but I wasn't. 

And then November 1 was the seven month anniversary of William's death. All Saint's Day. My first son's birthday followed on November 2. He turned sixteen. 

And life just keeps moving. 

My husband always says, "Well, that's better than the alternative."

Hm. Maybe. There are days I wonder.