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Seeing Past the Windshield
Don’t get so caught up in the obstructions immediately in front of you that you fail to focus on where you are going.
The winter after our second child was born was a challenging one for our family. We had naively imagined that after my husband completed his master’s degree, our greatest difficulty would lie in choosing between job offers. Instead, we found ourselves back in our home city, where my husband cobbled together a couple of low-paying jobs into a six-day work week that provided something of a livable income. We had one car, and a workplace that was impossible to reach by transit . . . .
Two More Words
“I’m sorry” implies empathy, and empathy is powerful.
I received a wide variety of responses when I told my friends about my miscarriages. They ran the gamut from “You wouldn’t have wanted a handicapped child,” and “It’s a good thing, actually. Mother Nature takes care of the ones who can’t survive,” through “Oh well, I hope you can be as brave as someone else I know,” to a friend who hugged me and wept and just said, “I love you so much!”
Two Words For Every Situation
I have come to the conclusion that thank you is the most versatile phrase in the English language.
As a ten-year-old, I thought I didn’t know how to accept compliments. When people would praise my performance after I participated in church or played in a piano recital, I had this vague feeling that I needed to find a response that was simultaneously self-deprecating and brilliant. Quite a tall order for a 10-year-old.
Naming Loila
It was half a year, and more, before I gave “the baby” a name. Why not sooner? I can’t remember now, to what degree I just didn’t think of it, and to what degree it seemed too presumptuous. I’d never heard of anyone naming their miscarried child. It wasn’t till I suffered my second miscarriage that it became necessary to give them each a name, just to tell “the babies” apart.
To another parent grieving the loss of a miscarried or stillborn child, I would strongly urge them to name the baby. Miscarriage is grief in a vacuum - the emotional impact of losing a child with nothing concrete on which to hang that grief - no mementos, no pictures, not even memories. A name is tangible; it is an identity.
Loila
My heart remembers.
Eight days after my unexpected breakdown, on October 31st, I had some light bleeding - never a good sign when you’re pregnant. I spent the day lying on the couch. It’s torment to find yourself on the brink of catastrophe with nothing you can do to prevent or prepare. Paradoxically, the only “action” I could come up with to meet this emergency was to rest: ironically, I would soon learn that it was weeks too late for any preventative action.
Who Is My Depression?
“I think of it as a little child that needs comforting.”
One of my teen-aged children taught me a valuable lesson about mental illness. We were together in a counselling session. As we often do when discussing all sorts of illnesses, the counsellor had been using metaphors of conflict. We “fight” a cold, we “battle” cancer; and similarly, the counsellor, in an effort to motivate my teen, was asking them to “confront” and “combat” the anxiety that was severely limiting their growth and enjoyment of life.
“I don’t like to think of my anxiety as an enemy,” my teen said.
Between 2005 and 2008, I lost four tiny babies to miscarriage. In an effort to help others who may be experiencing similar losses, I want to share the story of that journey. If you click on the title above, and then follow the “Next in Miscarriage Journey” links at the bottom of each post, you can read through my story sequentially.