Targeted Marketing Sucks

I've been doing lots of Internet surfing the past few weeks, and most of my searches have involved both pregnancy and birth...since they're inevitably a part of a stillbirth.

Yahoo, apparently, thinks this is an open invitation to bombard me with their advertising.

I don't know which is worse, this "First Reponse" ad:

Or this "March of Dimes" one:

Targeting marketing really, really sucks.

The Unborn

The Unborn
By Sharon Olds

Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads,
Like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them.

Sometimes I feel them waiting, dozing
In some antechamber - servants, half-
Listening for the bell.

Sometimes I see them lying like love letters
In the Dead Letter Office

And sometimes, like tonight, by some black
Second sight I can feel just one of them
Standing on the edge of a cliff by the sea
In the dark, stretching its arms out
Desperately to me.

Dear Abby: Bite Me

I haven't been here long in "dead babyland" (and if you haven't heard the term yet... don't ask) so most of you who've been here a while have probably seen Dear Abby's view on stillbirth baby photos. 

My husband hadn't seen it, though. And when he did... well... let's just say I think he's entering the "anger" portion of the Kubler-Ross grief stages... 

Here's his response: 

Dear Abby,

Regarding your column entitled DESK PHOTO OF STILLBORN BABY CREATES AWKWARD OFFICE ISSUE:

For the record, I am a licensed pscyhotherapist and grief counselor with over a decade of experience, and also the father of a stillborn son.  Although you were smugly well-mannered in acknowledging that a person's desk, in most cases, is essentially private territory, you were surprisingly presumptuous and uneducated in suggesting that the woman who kept the picture of her stillborn child on her desk should put the picture in a drawer or in her purse.

If the woman had a picture of her deceased husband or parent or cat on her desk, would your response be the same?  If the woman had a picture of her child with an unfortunate visible  degenerative birth defect, or her sister who had been severely burned on her face, would your response be the same?  If the woman had a picture of her grandparents with tattooed forearms who were later burned or gassed to death in Auschwitz (yes, such pictures exist) would your response be the same?  If the woman had a picture of the starving, bloated and fly-specked child she sponsored in South America or Appalachia or Somalia, or a picture of her gay brother near death with Kaposi's sarcoma-ridden AID's, would your response be the same?

Shame on you for being primarily concerned about the shallow discomfort of the woman who feels awkward when faced with something that she is in denial and defensively offended about.

You and the woman who wrote you the note in question need more education about denial, defense mechanisms, respect, empathy, acceptance, grief, death, dying and stillbirth, and in humanity and compassion.

M.
Licensed Psychotherapist
Grief Counselor
Father Of A Stillborn Son

One of Those Days

He doesn’t ask me how my day was when he comes home.

He doesn’t have to.

He can tell just by looking at my night table.

If the Kleenex are piled high, he knows. 

It’s been one of those days.

Two Weeks

Grief makes one hour ten.  ~William Shakespeare

Time.
Goes.
So.
Slooooooooooooooooooooooow. 

Yesterday was my first day alone, really alone, and it wasn't a good one.  Z. and D. went back to school, M. went off to work...and I stayed in bed all day. I ate something around noon. I brought it back to bed with me. Finally, around 3pm, I took a shower. The kids were due home around quarter to four.

And still, I didn't really get out of bed. I stayed there while they went to play outside. I got up to get them snacks, dinner. I forgot to eat again. Drank a glass of milk. That was good enough. Stopped the gnawing.  Then back to bed. Listened to the rain. Watched TV. Flipped channels, mostly. Surfed online, reading more blogs, doing more research on stillbirth. 

And every time I looked at the clock, I was surprised how little time had gone by. A minute. Two. Ten. 

And today, William would have been two weeks old. How can two weeks have passed? How can it feel like an eternity and yet like yesterday, all at once? It's been two weeks since I held him, kissed the soft spot on his head. Just two weeks since the dreams of our last baby were born and died all on the same day.

His ghost is everywhere, all around me. I wake up in the morning and see the shadows beside my bed and think it's his cosleeper, and he must be sleeping in it. I stand at the sink doing dishes and my belly doesn't bump up against the counter anymore...but there's no baby in a sling there, either. In the morning, as the kids are getting dressed and ready for school, I sit on the couch where I found out he was gone, and remember how he used to kick me every morning. I think about how I used to imagine nursing him there on the couch while they got ready, but there's no baby in my arms, at my breast. He's just a mirage, a flicker, a glimpse out of the corner of my eye.

Two weeks gone. I don't know how I've managed to get here. And I have no idea how to get through the next minute, the next hour, let alone the next day, the next week, the next year... the rest of my life... without him. I don't know how I'm doing it. It defies all logic and reason. 

Addicts say recovery is one day at a time. Grief isn't like that. It's more immediate. It's one breath at a time. And every single one is like sucking in razor blades.

Startastic

My seven year old daughter knows me pretty well. Whenever I make some wry comment, she turns to her six year old brother and says, "Mom's just being 'startastic!'"

Yeah. That's me. Always appreciating life's little ironies.

Today, I was sitting on my bed, packing away all my maternity clothes, and I happened to look over at the box with William's ashes in it. For the first time, I noticed the word there:

CREMAINS

Oh, isn't that just the cutest thing you ever heard? Right up there with "Bollywood" and "Mockumentary." How quaint.

*ahem*

And then, I was researching something about stillbirth, and came across this little fact:

"Because many families invest thousands of dollars to prepare for the arrival - then, sadly, the funeral - of their stillborn baby, Governor Janet Napolitano signed into law SB1003, a one-time tax exemption for families who experience stillbirth during the year in which their child was born."

Aren't they soooo lucky in Arizona?

Oh don't mind me... I'm just being "startastic"...

Mars and Venus

I don't understand men.

I don't mean I don't love them, or deeply appreciate them and their differences from women - I do.

But sort of in the Venus/Mars tradition, I often feel their masculine viewpoints are so alien from my feminine ones that they're actually as unrecognizable to me as hearing someone speak another language. I just don't get it.

My husband told me last night how he looks at William's death, and I was left literally speechless.

"I've never been a believer in 'shit happens,'" he said. "To me, that's the coward's way out. To say that William's death was an accident... well, there are no accidents. I have to take responsibility for the worst possible scenario, and that would be the fact that I could have done something to prevent what happened. Not to take responsibility for that would make me a coward."

woppitywoppitywoppity < --- sound of my head shaking in disbelief

"So, you think you could have done something to prevent his death?"

"I know I could have," he said. "We all could have. You could have, the midwife could have, the doctor we saw for the ultrasounds could have. For example, you could have spent the entire nine months on a fetal monitor, and it could have prevented his death."

Okayyyy...

Any men out there who can explain this perspective to me? Because I go immediately to believing that a) I did something to kill my son (which is, as he says, the worst case scenario and a possibility) and b) my husband blames me for killing my son (which is an even worse case than the first, and a possibility...)

He obviously blames himself on some level - and believes he could have done something to prevent it. His "taking responsibility for that" probably does make him more courageous than I am. The thought that I could have prevented William's death leaves me shaking and paralyzed with regret.

His logic went on to say, all death is preventable, except for death by old age. Every death, he argued, could be prevented by a different choice. A differently lifestyle, a different diet, a different way to work. But of course, we can't always live our lives that way. We'd end up like the boy in the bubble. We can only make the best choices we can with the information we have, based on our own values and beliefs, right? And, he said, if those choices cause something bad to happen, then we have to take personal responsibility for that.

Not to do so would be cowardly. Like his mother, he said, telling herself "stories" about God taking angel-babies back to heaven before they're born. Or those people who have said, "It was meant to be" or "It was for the best." Denial. Coward's way out, he says.

Well, then, I guess I'm a coward. Granted, I'm not telling myself stories. I'm looking very closely at what happened, and wondering what I did, what I could have done. But how can I take responsibility for something I don't know could have effected the outcome? Hindsight is 20/20, and everything I could have done is just conjecture, isn't it? Just Monday morning quarterbacking, to use a masculine metaphor.

I do get that he's taking things to their absurd, logical conclusion - this was all, actually, in defense of having another home birth, if we decide to have another baby. In some weird way, this argument was meant to justify our choices, to say that we made the best ones we could, with the information we had, and we would have to do that again, if we chose to have another baby. And then take responsibility for those choices.

I sort of get it. But it comes through garbled, and feels like it needs translation. He asked this morning if what he'd said made sense, and I was honest when I told him no. It doesn't make sense to me. Nothing about the death of my son "makes sense." I've felt like people were talking Albanian around me since he died, and I just kind of look at them, hearing the sounds, the inflection, but not understanding the words.

He seems to be making some sense of it for himself, and I don't begrudge him that, and I'm not saying his perspective isn't valid. But wrapping my head around something so... huge... so all-at-once, it feels removed to me, and I think this is one of the ways the masculine and feminine differ in the way they grieve.

My grief is immediate - I had the personal experience of having William inside of me, and I knew him, on a level no one else did. My husband didn't have that. Aside from his knowledge that I was pregnant and carrying his son, and his own connection to him through me - feeling him kick from the outside, my talking about the baby's movements - M.'s experience was more removed. Fathers bond more with babies after they're born, and William never took a breath. My husband's dreams were born dead... mine died inside of me.

The difference is stark. I want my baby back - my loss is experienced on a "now" level - my breasts want to nurse the baby who was just kicking my ribs, my arms want to hold the weight of my tiny, perfect son. My husband, on the other hand, has lost the future - teaching our son how to read, how to fish, how to hit a baseball.

I think, from what I'm reading about other mother's (and father's) experiences, that women experience our child's death in the "now" forever. We might imagine what they would be like at one year, two, ten... but it isn't until those anniversaries come up that we experience the loss of our child at that age. Fathers, I think, have that loss all at once.

Don't ask me which is worse. They're both too awful to contemplate.

All I know is that I'm not really understanding him, and it makes me wonder if he's understanding me. Maybe we're both talking, but not hearing each other. At the very least, it feels like a lot is getting lost in the translation.