(living baby mentioned)

this is kind of the polar opposite of eliza's thread about good memories.

i know we all have big stuff that haunts us. but there's a little thing that bugs me, and kinda creeps me out. and it doesn't go away, so i'm kind of hoping that sharing it here will help take away its power. if anyone else has anything similar, maybe you could do the same in this thread?

so. back when i think i was about 15 weeks, i was round at a friend's house. he has a baby who was at that point about two months old. i picked up the baby, and, joking around, i put him on my not-really-there-yet bump (that was more of an 'i ate too much' than a bump, especially given what we found out two weeks later) and said to DH and our friend 'look, the baby's on the baby' or words to that effect.

so yeah. my baby had already died at that point.

and the memory really makes me shudder. that i thought everything was ok, that i was joking around. but it was already too late.

anyone else need to get anything off their chest?

With Chickadee, I wrote letters every week, on Thursday. That's when my ticker changed. I started at 6 weeks, because I'd felt so scared before then. I knew how many pregnancies ended before 6 weeks and thought - ok, now we're starting to be safer. Cool. Four letters. Including one the night before we found out there was no heartbeat and really, no baby. And development had stopped around 5 weeks. So there was really no baby by the time I wrote the first letter. I've always felt sort of horrified by that.

So I never did that with Chickie (Gabriel). I wrote one letter after the NT scan. I never did the weekly pregnancy questionnaire or things I'd seen done on other blogs. That was too risky, see?

Just like buying stuff. I still feel funny and ridiculous when I consider that we spent the two days before Gabriel's birth buying clothes for him that he would never wear. Like I tempted fate by doing it. In darker moments, I wonder if all that walking around and movement was the trigger for a further abruption or put too much pressure on the damaged cervix we didn't know about and started labor. We'll never know, and of course, my restrictions had been modified because there hadn't been any bleeding in two weeks . . . and the damaged cervix would have eventually given way without warning anyhow.

Reading him a story - I started reading to him. Winnie the Pooh. My favorite. I read him the first part of the story about Pooh pretending to be a raincloud, but I never finished it.

There are so many little things, I dont know where to begin. I think often of how I was in labor, maybe half an hour before my water broke and I was in so much pain, and I asked the midwife "we're going to have a baby this morning, right?" and there was so much hope in my voice, and so much longing behind that statement. I think somehow I knew that he would never come home. It's just horrific how many things your mind goes over and over, and an "ordinary" person who has not experienced baby loss cannot imagine how cruel that tape is that plays over and over. Being sorry that this has happened to us is not enough sometimes, it breaks me to know that we have all been so cruelly handled by this world. I wish I could make it go away.

For a long time, I was haunted by what happened at the hospital. Now I mostly don't think about it. Because when I do, I still get very angry. It's tempered by knowing what I know now, but they still should have done things differently, and I should not have been as neglected as I was.

For the most part, I block that out.

I'm haunted by the fact I didn't kiss Matilda. We held and dressed her but I never kissed her. It haunts me - I've even written her a letter telling her I'm sorry.

Oh, Maddie. My heart just contracted in pain. I felt that way about Gabriel. I wish I'd kissed him while he was alive, or held his hand or something, but I was so afraid he would get cold or be uncomfortable, that I left him wrapped up until he passed away.

I hate the fact that i ordered a lovely baby dress off the internet. I lost Eleanor on the tuesday, and the parcel was waiting for me when i returned from the hospital :-( and she was already gone.
I also freak a bit when i remember the exact moment of delivery. My husband was so angry....not at me but at the injustice of it all.

I am haunted by the fact that, while i was pregnant, I wished that my baby was a boy (I have two living daughters). Did my daughter die because I couldn't accept her unconditionally? Was that my punishment?

Steph - I wonder the same thing. At 20 weeks we were told there was a 75% chance Matilda had a different chromosomal disorder - I don't know what we would have done but interrupting the pregnancy was on the table. I still wonder if this is my punishment and that I'll never get a living baby because of it.

The fact that we had started sewing things, in fact the first spotting with the miscarriage (the never-mentioned baby) was while my mother was measuring for a maternity dress. We assessed it as minor spotting since it stopped, and were going to call the midwife on Monday. We went for fabric for the dress. I went to the bathroom, I was spotting. My mother and father went as fast as they could for the van, to get me to the hospital. My grandmother? She got in line and paid for everything before shambling out to the van. I still love her, but...there's always a "but" now although I can't tell you what it really is.

Putting the fabric away and bringing it out for the next baby. The pain that brought out, seeing those things again but without the hope it had before, my thinking that it would be some kind of death curse. Not keeping a pregnancy diary on Aeryn's pregnancy, trying to relax and just be your usual mum, worrying about trying to deliver vaginally instead of c-section and trying to change doctors. Buying things, everyone being excited because this would be a girl. Sweeney Todd - I love it, but sometimes watching it or listening to it I freak out because I was sitting in a movie theatre wearing my new black-and-white striped shirt watching it, the same shirt I'd wear when we'd find out Aeryn's hydranencephaly was fatal and not just hydrencephaly and a birth defect we could work with.

I regret how my son Oscar's was born,June 4 of last year. We went in for our 20 week ultrasound and found out he had died. We had heard his heartbeat just a few days earlier, so it was a complete surprise. What haunts me is his birth - that I asked for the strongest drugs they could give me and II never pushed. Not at all. Even when the midwife asked me to each time she inserted more of the whatever it was that induces you. (I forget the name..) Before the 4th or so insertion, she had me go to the bathroom, which is where he was born.

I know it is sort of irrelevant - he had already died, I suppose a gentle birth isn't very important. But it bothers me greatly that I didn't actually "give birth" to him, rather he just sort of came out by accident. I feel like he deserved more than that, that I didn't take good care of him. I have come to think that I didn't push because I wanted to keep him inside of me, so I feel worse that he was born like that because I was selfish. I replay it in my head over and over, wishing he was gently born in the hospital bed, into the loving hands of the midwife or my husband.

That I "wasted" two summers (16 weeks each) with the most horrific of all morning sickness for nothing. And that I got pg on the same day, therefore due the same day, in 2008 and 2009. And then they were born 360 days apart.

I hate that I only have about 50 pictures of each of them. I wish I'd taken so many more -- with family that came up to see us and with us. And I wish that I'd let everyone that wanted to come up to meet them do so.

One thing that haunts me. When I was about 8 months pregnant I took some friends to finally get a birth certificate for their baby, who was born at home. The guy was making a dumb joke about the "certificate of live birth". "What else would it be? A certificate of dead birth?" I snapped "that is not funny. Let's hope we never find out." grrrr. I wanted so badly to rub it in his face. "Here's what we got at 39 weeks 4 days dude. Certificate of fetal death. Happy now?" He probably doesn't even remeber that conversation, but it haunts me still. (We were so ignorant and naive then. I knew babies died, I just didn't know mine would.)

It did kind of help me sharing my memory on here. I hope it helps the rest of you too.

Hugs to you all. I wish I could erase the pain and give you all your babies back. It's not fair.

The night Micah died, I noticed I hadn't felt fetal movement in awhile. I knew something was really wrong (and I'm pretty sure he was already dead at that point) but instead of calling the midwives, we sat down to shabbat dinner and tried to laugh it off and have a normal meal. I lit the candles, we said the blessings, the whole deal. And I knew, the whole time. What was wrong with me? When we try to make shabbat on Fridays now, everything tastes like ashes to me.

oh, bridget. i'm so sorry.

if you didn't do anything - then maybe you were wrong and he would still be ok.

i'm not surprised you think of it every friday. that must be really hard, to have a ritual thing that reminds you of something you blame yourself for. even if it wasn't your fault.

hugs to you.

Yes, the realization that in trying to have a second baby, then hemorrhaging while miscarrying said baby, I could have died and left my little boy without a mother. Now I am more terrified of having that happen again, then actually losing another pregnancy. If that makes sense at all. I am haunted by how calm I stayed and how little awareness I had of the seriousness of what was taking place. I am haunted by the cries of the babies on the floor (it was a postpartum floor- yeah, I know) that I was put on at the hospital when I was finally stable.

No, that does make sense A. I'm so sorry that happened, it sounds horrendous. I'm so glad you didn't die.

and i'm not surprised at all that the cries of the babies haunt you. what a horrible place for them to put you after losing your baby.