PGAL and feelings of guilt.

Posted by Randi

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.

Posted by Randi

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.

711

clothes.

Posted by Randi

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.