On Thursday, I had my anatomy scan with Dr.F, and all looked well. She was able to better explain to us the cause of Kenley’s death. It was officially decided that she died from blood clots in her umbilical cord. We sort of knew this, but as I’ve said before, when we were first told about the cause of her death we were VERY fresh in our grief. I was better able to understand it now, at almost 11 months out.
guilt
anatomy scan.
**trigger warning**
grandparent’s day.
Jesus I can’t even write the title of the post without getting tears in my eyes! I don’t know why, but it breaks my heart.
Landon came home yesterday with a form for Grandparent’s Day happening November 22nd at his school. I knew about it through another little note sent home, but I guess just getting the form hit me hard. Kenley will never have the opportunity to go to Grandparent’s day. Ever. No matter what, it will not happen…because she died. I immediately started crying when I was reading the form yesterday– I couldn’t help it.
need help!
I’m going to put this out there, and maybe someone will stumble across it and have advice.
I’m planning on making (at minimum currently) 20 care packages of the hospital where we had Kenley. I am planning to include a bunch of things, but the one thing I’m struggling with is a candle. I would like to include a glass votive candle, or something bigger (depending on price) with a healing quote, or something about the candle being a memorial candle etc. I cannot find any that I like on the internet anywhere. I’m thinking of aromatherapy type scents. Nothing too over powering, and definitely nothing that would smell like anything child related.
Sooooo….I’m wondering if anyone makes candles, or knows of someone who makes them? Heck, or just someone who would like to be part of the donation and is willing to learn to make them? I would love to have something made by another loss mother, or someone who has been affected by the loss of a child in some way shape or form. Like I stated, I would be looking for 20 currently. If I cannot find a candle maker, I will probably buy them from somewhere, but would be interested in someone who could make a graphic sticker for the front of the candles, also.
Please let me know if you have any ideas, or know anyone who could help!
The goal is to have the 20 care packages done by Kenley’s first birthday…December 29th.
I’m open to suggestions as well for ideas to include with the care packages. What did you need after you lost your child? What did someone give you that really stuck with you? Is there something you didn’t think about needing but ended up REALLY needing?
• I needed tissues. The hospital tissues sucked ASS and my nose was bloody and raw from crying into them. My step-dad purchased a really nice box of soft tissues for us, and brought them the second day in the hospital. This is where the idea came from to buy puffs soft pack tissues (I bought about 40 full size packs) and I will be donating them to the maternity ward for baby loss mommas only.
• I needed chapstick. I didn’t bring any in my bag, when usually I do. I plan to include a nice chapstick in the carepack as many moms don’t plan to have this awful thing happen to them, and chapstick is the last thing on their mind…until their lips are so dry from constant crying and face wiping.
• I’m adding in a personal bottle of aromatherapy hand lotion. I know that the hospital gives you these things, but having a good quality lotion might make you feel more relaxed? I know that sounds like a joke, and honestly even saying it sounds awful because nothing can make you feel more relaxed after you just find out your baby died.
• I’m planning to include this book that I was given at the funeral home. It’s a very light read, and that is what I needed in the days after Kenley- not the gigantic book that I was given. This is such a good small book to start with.
I’m also planning to include this book which has been the greatest book I have read since Kenley died. It is written by a loss mother, as well, and it just tells you what you need to hear. The version I will be donating will have Kenley’s name in the back on the memorial page.
• A pack of forget me not seeds that are specifically packaged in memory of a lost loved one.
I had also tossed around the idea of including a molding kit for hand prints. I didn’t get any hand prints from Kenley and I would have loved to have them. These are things that you just don’t think of during the absolute worst moments of your life.
I had also thought of including some sort of lara bar, or something like that, but when I thought about it, it made me want to puke a little. I remember them wheeling in this huge cart of coffee, tea, drinks and snacks after she died. It sat in front of my bed about 10 feet away from me, staring at me the entire time we were there. The nurses would come in and ask if we needed our coffee refreshed and all I could think was “my daughter just died”.
Eating was not the best memory from the hospital.
Anyway, those are my ideas. I know there are a lot of you reading who have lost your children too, so please don’t keep quiet. I’m looking for input on ANYTHING you can offer me.
ten.
My Sweet Kenley,
Today you should be 10 months old. You should be here, wearing an adorable Halloween costume. I should have been carrying you in my arms when we went trick or treating Thursday. I’m so sorry you didn’t get to celebrate with us; I’m so sorry you will never be able to celebrate with us. I dressed up as a Fox this year. I needed you with me; I couldn’t do it without you. I couldn’t go walking around, seeing all kinds of babies dressed up as cute little lady bugs, or skunks without you there with me.
As the holidays get closer, my heart aches harder for you. I know that last year on the day after Halloween I turned on Christmas music. I listened to Christmas music every day. You loved it, and would dance around. I’m not sure if I will be able to listen to it anymore. I don’t want to be sad when I think about sharing the holiday season with you safely inside of me. I want to be happy, and excited to have spent any time with you at all.
But my heart hurts.
And I’m tired…so tired.
Every single fiber of my soul misses you.
I wish so badly that I could have saved you, baby girl. I wish you were here. I know that I say it over and over, but there is no other way to express it.
I would give anything to have you in our lives, for you to be here with me, to watch you grow and walk and coo and drool. I would give my life for these moments with you, my love.
Mommy misses you sweet girl. I miss you more than there are stars in the sky.
I love you.
Forever and Always-
Mommy
PGAL and feelings of guilt.
I’ve been having a hard time with the guilt I feel from being pregnant with our second Daughter. I have found a bunch of very interesting articles, and blogs that discuss the feelings of guilt related to loss and to pregnancy after loss. I just can’t find something that speaks to me like other things have- until today.
I was searching, and came across this post on Huffington Post by a woman named Heather Spohr. I started reading it and immediately burst into tears.
(Please read this letter. It is AMAZING)
The story is written as a letter to Mothers who are announcing their rainbow baby, and I fell in love with it.
I know how hard it was to announce this baby, the complicated mix of jubilation and guilt. You want to be excited about this new life, but you want to be respectful toward the life who is no longer here. This is the tightrope you’ll walk down for the rest of your life, but it will get easier.
It’s OK to be afraid. It’s OK to take it day-to-day. It’s even OK if you’re not excited. You’ve learned, in the worst possible way, that nothing in life is guaranteed.
As I’ve written in previous posts, I’m struggling with guilt surrounding this pregnancy. I cannot think of this new baby without thinking of the death of Kenley. I know that’s not a good thing, and I’m trying really hard to allow myself to think of Baby A as her own individual person. I often find myself thinking about her in the Nursery which will be her room until we move; I think about her wearing the clothes we specifically picked for Kenley. When I think about these things, I get sad; I start feeling guilty for missing Kenley, and for not celebrating A.
But then I read this:
Even the practical things are complicated. Will you be able to handle giving your new baby items from your deceased child? Even if that child never had the chance to use them? You’ll resent that you don’t get to look at these things as normal hand-me-downs instead of the few cherished possessions your child left behind — yet another reminder of how unfair life is.
YES. This woman, who has had TWO rainbow babies (after the death of her toddler, and after a miscarriage) gets it. I guess it’s just reassuring to know that what I’m feeling is totally normal. I know in my heart that I love being pregnant with this little girl, just as much as I loved being pregnant with Kenley (and Landon) – it’s just different now. I can’t help but feel the unfairness of the situation whenever I think of this beautiful little girl I’m carrying. This is not to say that I don’t feel moments (lots of them, too) of joy.
She then goes on to say this:
The day Annabel was born was one of the best days of my life. The day we brought her home was one of the hardest. My emotions, fueled by postpartum hormones, were all over the place, and I was completely unprepared. I sobbed onto the top of her tiny head a lot. My heart was swelling and breaking simultaneously, and it overwhelmed me.
I’m absolutely sure that I will be feeling more joy than I can even fathom right now when this little girl comes. I know she will be a member of our family for the rest of our lives, and I can’t wait to give her a great life…but… The overwhelming anxiety I feel about her coming into this world safely is sometimes crushing. I am a crier, so I know that I will cry a lot when she comes. Maybe not. Who knows. I have no idea how I’m going to feel when she arrives and I get to hear her screaming when they take her from my body. When Kenley was born her silence was so heavy; it was the loudest sound I have ever heard.
I guess this post is mostly for me; A mini pep talk of sorts. I have been feeling the heaviness of being PGAL with our Rainbow a lot lately.
Thinking of naming this baby (we have a name picked and we are 80ish% sure we’re using it) makes me sad and excited.Thinking about redecorating the nursery for baby A doesn’t make me excited like I want it to. I hate that, because instead it makes me feel incredibly guilty.
Shane and I decided that we need to buy something for baby A that is specifically her own. This is very hard to think about seeing as we haven’t been in a baby store/down a baby aisle/ avoid baby items like the plague for like 10 months. I’m not sure when this will happen, but it’s our new goal.
I needed to read this letter by Heather today so very very badly.
Baby A will be here in 141 days.
thinking.
I’ve had to do a lot of thinking lately. I know that sounds weird because you think everyday, but I feel like lately it’s been “extra hard” thinking. Just FYI, this post talks about my current pregnancy, so if you’re having a bad day please guard your heart. I will not be offended.
For example-
• Am I going to be ok with the giant dinosaur being moved away from Kenley’s door? I will have to look at the physical door every day now when I walk to Landon’s room. You might think it’s stupid, but trust me, it’s not.
• There has been talk about a baby shower for this baby. I didn’t have one for Kenley because I bought every.single.thing. she could have ever needed in her entire first year of life. While I, in theory, would love to throw this baby a shower…I would feel more guilt than ever imgaineable because I didn’t have one for K. How could I not have had one for her; For my perfect sweet girl. It breaks my heart.
• How am I going to deal with her nursery? I know some people say “it’s like a hand me down”, or “reuse some of the things for the new baby’s nursery”. While I appreciate their insight, it’s just not that easy. Repainting her room means I will (willingly) paint over the color I spent so many months picking out. I bought 7 samples of paint before finding her color. SEVEN. It had to be perfect, and it was absolutely perfect– but I can’t reuse the same color. Her dresser will be reused for her little sister, and needs to be repainted as well. I spent a month painting that thing, so happy and enjoying every second of it.
Now, thinking about repainting the dresser makes me want to die. It makes me feel like a traitor to my own daughter. This feeling goes along with everything in her nursery that I will be replacing (don’t say it’s not replacing, because it IS) for our new daughter. It’s a whole separate level of weird grief.
• I know that I will feel sad using the same clothes for this baby that I bought specifically for Kenley. I want to use them, but at the same time I want to get rid of everything that was specifically hers. I would feel horrible if I really did get rid of it, because they are her things. They are the things we specifically for her; for the daughter that we so badly wanted, yet just couldn’t keep for some reason.
• I can’t help but think that she was failed by modern medicine. It’s 2015/16 and she died inside of me; inside of the one place where she was supposed to be the safest. My body failed her, because someone somewhere SOMEHOW missed something very important on one of Kenley’s ultrasounds. We had so many that it blows my mind it happened. I do not believe I was given enough NSTs. I had ONE….because I asked for it. I’m sorry, but listening to my baby’s HB on a doppler, once every 2 weeks, for five seconds is NOT good enough. My poor girl, I wish I could have given her better care. I wish I would have been taken seriously when I told ALL of my doctors that I knew she needed to come at 38 weeks. She died at 38+4. Cue all the guilt in the whole wide world.
• Naming this beautiful child I’m carrying might be one of the hardest things I’ll ever have to do in my life. I knew since the age of 21 that if I ever had a daughter, her name would be Kenley. I told Shane and he agreed. We knew her name 9 years before we had her. We never wavered. And now? Now I get to say her name forever, sure, but through grief and sadness. How is any of this fair?
• How can I make myself enjoy this pregnancy? I think I’m keeping my distance, as I’m sure most people do during a subsequent pregnancy after losing their child. How am I for sure that this child will come home to us? What if I was to go through all of the preparations again, and get excited, and this baby dies too? I have an anterior placenta this pregnancy, so I’m already not going to be able to feel kicks as early as before. I can’t find her HB on my doppler yet, when I found K’s @ 10 weeks. It’s like everything is telling me to just “keep your distance” and I don’t want to, but I also feel like I hands down have to.
• We have 2 embryos on ice; they are male embryos. I love having Landon SO much. He was my first baby, and I would never change that obviously… but boys are hard. Maybe it was just Landon, but he was crazy. He didn’t sleep through the night until age 3, and that’s being SUPER generous because he still had a rough night 4/7 days a week up until Kindergarten. Thinking about having this girl, then going on to have 2 more boys freaks me out. On the other hand, those are my babies. I fought so hard and went through so much to get them that I feel terrible for even thinking about NOT having them. When we started the IVF process things were still super fresh for us.
I told Shane that no matter how many PGS normal embryos we got, that’s how many we were going to have. So we got 3. We were satisfied with that number. Now that I’m pregnant i’m worried that I won’t want to go through this again. I love being pregnant; it makes me feel so grounded and amazing. I had pretty rough pregnancies before this one. Landon made me sick, and it was my first so it was new and weird. Kenley’s pregnancy was SO nasty. I was nauseous and sick 24/7. I had intense fatigue, and my pubic bone separated and caused the worst pain I’ve ever felt. This pregnancy has been fucking CAKE compared to the previous two. I don’t know why, but I’m not sick. I’m tired, but no where near the level I felt with K. I feel like this baby knows she needs to cut me some slack because I have been through hell, and deserve to have at least one good pregnancy.
If we choose to have the additional two children, we need a new house. We are busting at the seams as it its now. I know that we could make it work here with 2 children and our grief for the one we lost, but if we added any others we just wouldn’t have the space. So there is a lot that goes into the process. What I wouldn’t give to just get pregnant naturally. I’m so thankful that I was able to experience that with Landon. He gave me that joy, that naive joy of taking a test and seeing it say “pregnant”, the sheer joy of not knowing that bad things can happen to people who want a baby so badly. I will never forget those moments with Landon. I remember the day that created him so well, I remember buying the tests. I remember calling my mom and saying “uh I think I’m pregnant” and her response being” what do you mean you THINK you’re pregnant!”. I’m so thankful I got to surprise Shane that one time. I love those memories so much.
My mind has been a busy battle ground lately. I’m so sad and so happy at all times.
I don’t know how I get through every day.
photo prompt.
As many of you know, I am doing the capture your grief challenge on my IG. Each day’s prompt gives you an outlet to speak about the real emotions related to losing your child. Today’s prompt was Beautiful Mysteries.
Um. Ouch. Mega mega ouch.
This prompt urged you to speak about the mysteries of your child. I chose to speak of where I would see Kenley now. What would she be? Who would she be? I found todays prompt extremely hard. I have a rough time with envisioning my dead baby as a real baby. I don’t know if it’s strictly because I don’t want to think about it because I know it can never happen. I don’t know if I don’t want to hurt my heart like that? When I opened my heart for this challenge today, I just found myself crying while writing it. I chose to use a photo of Kenley’s hair for todays photo. Her beautiful, auburn, strawberry hair makes my heart melt; it was the most beautiful color. The lock of hair we have from her is dark brown, though. I don’t remember it looking that way in real life, and I HATE that. I hate that I can’t clearly recall what her hair looked like. Sure, photos help, but she’s my daughter…why does my brain block it out?
Grief brain?
Is it my heart and soul protecting itself?
I’m not sure what it is, but I am sure one one thing…I would give anything to be able to see her one more time.
fall.
I know that every holiday is going to suck, probably forever. Sure, the suckage might lessen as the years drone on and on, but they will always be missing our family member. My sweet girl will always be a “what if” for me. What would I have dressed her in this year for Halloween?
You know, I can’t even answer that because my heart won’t let me think about it. It hurts way too fucking much. It stings. It’s like someone stabbing me over and over in this open wound that I call my heart now.
No matter what it’s always going to be painful.
Tonight, we went to get pumpkins. Landon chose two pumpkins for both of his sisters. He has a heart old gold, that boy. He also chose a super small decorative pumpkin and said that it was “just incase I have a brother some day”. He had such a good time and loved looking at all the fall things this place had to offer.
I, however, could not help but be sad I wasn’t pushing her in a stroller, or giving her a small sip of apple cider to see her little face pucker up.
These things, these normal everyday things, that “regular” people take for granted are so painful. I know I took them for granted with Landon, for sure. Hell yes I took them for granted- I never in a million years thought there would EVER be a reason I should feel otherwise.
But, now that it’s fall, my heart is still broken and my arms are still empty, I can’t help but realize how much I’ve taken for granted with Kenley.
I would love to be inconvenienced by anything Kenley related, besides her death. I would give up my life to hear her cry just once; to hear her take a breath of the air she will never breathe.
I just wanted to buy you a pumpkin…and be able to see you hold it.
But, instead, it will sit on the front porch with all the others- untouched by your beautiful little hands.
And seeing that? That will break my heart all over again.
clothes.
Let me start this post by saying today is 9 months since Kenley died.
Today, Shane and I went to Kohl’s to find him some dress clothes for my sister’s wedding in October. Of course, Kohl’s is always full of mom’s with double strollers. I mean like…EVERY.WHERE. I am really glad that we had to just be in the men’s section because I only saw them when we were checking out. It doesn’t make me “mad” like it used to, it just makes me feel pretty sad/blah. Kinda like takes my breath away? I dunno. I look at these women with their kids, and their newborn carrier in the stroller and I just feel sad. I feel upset that I don’t get my daughter. I feel a little jab of jealously that they (more than likely) don’t know the absolute horror that is preparing for a baby that will never come home.
They probably had a typical pregnancy, with no issues, and brought their beautiful living breathing crying baby home from he hospital. You know, but I could be totally wrong. Maybe they had a terrible pregnancy and thought they were going to lose their baby. Whatever the case is, bottom line, they have their child and I do not have mine.
I’m having a weird time with people who have their second child right now. I’m also having a hard time seeing women who had their babies near the time Kenley was born, and are getting pregnant again. Ouch. I know it sounds so fucked up, right? I’m pregnant again. I’m going to have a baby (hopefully) in March. There is a good chance that this baby will survive and we will bring her home from the hospital. It just doesn’t matter; all of those things do not matter when you’ve lost your child. It’s like this new reality that I was forced into living is the worst one possible.
I’m sure there are many people in my life who are thinking I should “be over it” by now, or that I should be feeling better/different about things. I am feeling “better” (probably just natural to feel <strike>better</strike> differently after a certain point?) but that’s not to say that I don’t wake up every morning and feel the emptiness in my heart. It’s a part of me now. I can’t just “get better”. I will never “be better”. I know it’s hard for some people to understand, but that’s just not going to happen.
I will probably always have a sharp pain in my heart when I see a baby/child/teenager who is Kenley’s age. I will always feel her absense in my life, during holiday’s, during family outings, with every single breath that I take for the rest of my life. I’m not looking forward to my birthday next week. Last year for my 30th, it was the greatest birthday I’ve ever had. I was about 6 months pregnant with Kenley, Shane and Landon bought me the most beautiful past present future ring I’ve ever seen, and we had an amazing day together… not this year.
Someday’s I am just really sick of having to hold it all together, of having to “fake it”.
Sometimes it just feels like I’ve had enough.
Somedays it feels like most people have forgotten her. I feel like I’m the only one who thinks of her and that really breaks my heart.
Once again, I’m trying. I am trying for you, Kenley. I’m trying to get through this life without you.
Our Sweet K. 