There is something particularly special, and difficult, about this Fall.
Special in that it marks five years that my heart has beat for my sweet little Peyton, loving her as I do even though she is not here. Difficult in that this year should have held such a magical milestone.
Grief is so strange. There are so many firsts we never had with Peyton. No first steps. No first words, or even first tantrums. No first rides on a bike, or first "I love you Mommy," moments, though her heart beating against my chest when I held her told me she did.
There were so many firsts that should have been with Peyton that at some point in my grief I almost, *almost, became numb to them. I think that's what so-called healing is, your mind and body deciding to either numb-up, or give up.
I posted this photo on Facebook today, with the following message:
In another life on the other side of the loss universe, I gave you a hug and sent you off to Kindergarten this week.
I imagine that had she been born healthy, I would have had so much trepedation and so many nerves about leaving my child in the care of someone else for the first time. The reality is that from the moment of her birth, to the moment of her death, Peyton was always in the care of someone else, down to my inability to even make decisions over when to feed or bathe her.
If Peyton were here, and healthy, this would be the moment in time for me to watch as my little girl became a big girl, and root her on as she walked off independent of me, into a new experience. Because of the cards we were dealt, that moment came in the pediatric intensive care unit as I urged her to please let go and be free of the pain of this broken world, when she took her last breath in my arms and was finally, finally, pain-free and at peace.
Even five years later, you never get over a moment like that. I imagine that in fifty years, I still won't.
I received so many beautiful messages from friends, but one response to my facebook post by a dear babyloss momma friend especially resonated with me:
Perhaps in that other life somewhere our little ones enter kindergarten together, holding hands and filling the room with joy.
So tonight I am holding tight to the beauty of that image, to the thought of all of the precious and much loved little ones from this community holding hands as they walk into their first day in kindergarten, and all the while I am hoping that wherever Peyton is, she knows how very, very loved she is by those of us left behind.
If you are looking for a positive or uplifting post, you have come to the wrong place. Four years ago today, Peyton's suffering ended and my suffering began.
I would like to say that loving and losing Peyton made me a better or stronger person. I would love to bask in gratitude for all of the lessons she taught me, or feel joy that she is with Jesus. There are a lot of beautiful ways I would love to be able to spin this in my mind, but the reality is that four years ago today my child struggled for her final breaths in my arms. I will likely never be okay with that. I am angry and hurt. I am sad and bitter. I walk a line between feeling incredibly blessed and grateful for the joys in my everyday life, joys that I know Peyton worked hard to bring me, and feeling an immense amount of sorrow over how incredibly robbed she was. Of life. Of joy. Of growing up. Of everything. Peyton never even felt the sun on her face. She never breathed fresh air.
She was born into a world where she gave only love, and knew only pain. I guess four years is not long enough to blunt my anger at that.
This month I am participating in Kathy Benson's Time Warp Tuesday. Kathy's instructions are to "Write a new blog post on which you introduce, link to, and then reflect on your journey since you wrote the older blog post..."
For this month's theme of "Fathering," I am sharing the post, (Father's) Day, that I wrote in June of 2009.
In the post I say:
You were meant to be a Father. I don't know if I ever told you this, but it was you that made me want to have a family.I have been so fortunate to receive your love, to know your kindness,and I wanted to share that- you, with a child.
There was so much pain, hopelessness, hurt and grief in my words of that post. I remember the guilt I felt every time I would see my husband, because (right or wrong) I blamed myself for being unable to bring Peyton into this world healthy. Everything after her passing felt so final. Like we were destined to live a half-life, walking this universe forever childless.
What a difference three years makes.
I took this picture the other day:
The kiddos were sick with ear infections and nasty colds, and Hubs, home not even five minutes from work, quickly threw on sneakers and brought them outside. He found a way, despite how uncomfortable, feverish, etc. they were, to make them smile.
I went back to my old post and after reading it, I just feel so grateful. Grateful for the man I married. Grateful for the father I have given all three of my children. My husband loves without judgement. He is patient, and kind, and funny and I don't honestly know how we got from there to here, because survival felt impossible so many times over during our journey, but the gratitude I feel for having this man to share my life, my heart, and my family with--is immense.
His love for Peyton is never ending. His love for our Snowflakes is ever growing. He is the father I knew he was meant to be and more. The epitome of the word: "Fathering."
Last Spring, I stumbled upon a video about infertility entitled "What IF?"
At the time when I first saw it, we were knee deep in grief over Peyton and had been trying desperately for nearly 9 months, without success, to achieve another pregnancy. The previous December, I had gotten the news that an infection from my c-section had left both of my tubes scarred beyond any usefulness, and that my only option, and not a guaranteed option at that, was IVF.
I was in shock.
For over a year after Peyton's birth I had complained to my doctor that I wasn't ovulating or menstruating. When she gave us the green light to try again last June, and I failed to conceive, I knew something was wrong. Through it all, my OB explained my infertility away as the result of me "grieving too hard." "If you don't get over this," she would tell me, "you will never get pregnant."
Lying alone and half naked on a steel table at the hospital, my unresponsive tubes glaring down at me from a monitor overhead, a sympathetic doctor delivered to me the news that I would never again be able to conceive on my own. "There is no justice in this world," she told me, taking a deep breath, and as she did, any last shred of hope that I had held onto for a family of my own, flowed out of my eyes and down my cheeks.
In that moment: grief stricken and infertile - I felt my life was over.
Discovering that I had lost my fertility after losing my only child undid several months of healing, and brought a million questions to my mind. Hard questions. Painful questions.
Was I still a woman if I couldn't conceive?
Was I still a mother if my only child was dead?
Was I still a Catholic if I was willing to pursue IVF when the church is so strongly against it?
Was I still a wife if I couldn't give my husband a family?
Were we still a couple if making love could never create a life?
For someone who just a year and a half prior had been a confident 28 year old, with a promising career, thriving social life, happy marriage, and first child on the way - the downward spiral of those 18 months took me to the darkest depths of my life. Everything I believed would be suddenly felt like a lie, and the truths that I was facing were hard to swallow:
I had lost our child.
I had lost our fertility.
I had lost our hopes.
That's not a typo. I HAD LOST these things, or at least that's how I felt. In my mind, the blame for all of our losses and failures, were mine and mine alone.
I don't know why I always viewed hubs in a different light than myself. In many ways, I saw him as a victim in all this. He had married me and I had failed to hold up my end of the bargain.
Maybe it was because our IF issues were with my body?
Maybe it was because when he proposed he told me he wanted to "grow old together and have lots and lots of children," and the realization I couldn't give him that made me pity him for staying with me?
Maybe it was because I was Peyton's mother, and our miscarried baby's mother, and mothers always blame themselves.
All I know is that when I stumbled across this video, it struck a deep chord with me. I had, for months, been asking myself many of the same questions posed in the video.
What IF I lost my sense of self to my infertility?
What IF I lost my sexiness to infertility?
What IF I lost my spouse to infertility?
What IF?
What IF?
What IF?
Today I was looking around on the internet, and once again came across this video. As I did, the tears came, but they were different somehow. Today I cried tears of gratitude. Though I had felt so sure just six months ago that infertility would beat me, today I realized that I have beaten infertility.
It took over a year of trying, months of hormone injections, the pain of twisting an ovary, Ovarian Hyper Stimulation Syndrome, 4 weeks of bed rest for the Ovarian Hyper Stimulation Syndrome, the heartbreak of learning our first cycle had failed, many, many, MANY hours of therapy to deal with the above mentioned feelings, facing a second cycle after failing the first with no explanation, a bleed that has kept me on bed rest since week 12 and in all likelihood will continue to keep me bed ridden for the next 20 or so weeks, tens of thousands of dollars, countless tears, fears and anxieties, and all the emotions that go into having a high risk pregnancy after loss, but I am here - pregnant - full of hope - and very grateful.
I guess that is why I am writing this post. To let others on their own infertility journey know that I get it. I have been there, at the bottom, the very bottom. I have questioned every aspect of myself, my worth, and my life. I have wondered if joy would ever again return to my heart. If I could ever give my husband a family. If I could ever survive this, and the answer is yes.
There is always a chance.
Sometimes we have to wrestle with these big questions to find our way, but in the end, we can all get there. For us, a couple who lost their fertility to birthing a dying child, our chance came with IVF. For others it comes with surrogacy, or IUI. Medications, or adoption.
I don't know what the future holds for us, but I do know that it is looking brighter once again, and that is something that once felt impossible.
I guess that what I am trying to say is that it is only when we open our eyes and our minds to all of the possibilities in front of us, even those that we fear or resent or are unsure of, that we can find pathways to hope.
Here is the video that had such an impact on me. I am sure for those of you haven't seen it before, or are viewing it a second time, you will feel it resonates at some level with you too. (Be sure to pause the music player in the right column of this blog to hear the video.)
Okay, so like I said in yesterday's post, each day I write my truth, and today my truth is that I don't feel like being a Miss Mopey Schmopey because I took a look outside and saw so many beautiful changes happening, changes that I sometimes lose sight of when I am being Miss Mopey Schmopey, and those changes are what I want to focus on today. Will Miss Mopey Schmopey return tomorrow? I'm not sure. But as for right now, she's taken the day off.
Spring has sprung into full swing here. The trees off my deck are starting to bloom...
And even Charlotte is really enjoying the sunlight... although her idea of enjoying the sunlight is to lay in the brightest spot of the deck, overheat, come in, drink some water, pant against the cool floor, then go back out and repeat. I don't know that it would be myidea of fun, but hey... who am I to judge?
Something that really struck me was the transformation of the area around our mailbox. Last year I had written about it being just overrun with weeds and neglected, like a beacon to all our neighbors that we had stopped living. I wrote about it in a past post called, "Another Manifestation of My Grief, AKA How I Let My Gardens Go To Pot."
Last year it had looked like this...
And after much hard work had come to look like this...
**Disregard the date...I don't know how to fix that on my camera
I didn't think about the garden much after that. The fall came, then the winter with its cold days and nights, but today I noticed, like reallynoticed, that the sporadic plantings of last fall have grown into something beautiful.
This is how that area looks today....
I guess it just goes to show that even when we feel like nothing is changing, even when we feel like each day is exactly the same as the last and that there hasn't been any forward momentum or growth, there has been. And that is something to be celebrated.
I can see it in our nieces faces,how they always light up when they see you, how you offer seemingly endless energy when you play with them.
I could see it in the way that you joked lovingly with my full belly, how you got anxious with each phonecall as we neared my due date, and spent hours getting the carseat just right in preparation for Peyton's birth.
You were meant to be a Father.
I don't know if I ever told you this, but it was you that made me want to have a family.
I have been so fortunate to receive your love, to know your kindness, and I wanted to share that- you, with a child.
I guess that's what saddens me most this Father's Day.
We live in a world full of men dodging responsibility and child support, a world where entire television shows are centered around child denial and paternity tests, and it just seems so unfair.
Unfair that you, who so wanted and loved our child, who studied through weary eyes the packets of information that they gave us, even when it didn't make sense, and searched and searched for options and ways to keep her with us, you, who were so obviously born to be a Daddy, should have to be childless on your first Father's Day.
