Goodbye to the Monster Jeep

In the fall of 2010, on October 5, we bought this Jeep.  We bought it because we were due with Baby T in February, and we didn't want to risk being up on the mountain, and me going into labor, with only a Chevy Aveo to get us to the hospital in a snowstorm.

I would lose Baby T exactly a week later.  I was already feeling sick and fighting off the infection that would eventually send me into early labor.  We got the Jeep from a guy up above Palmdale, out in the desert.  We drove up together, and I spent the hour or so while Jonathan checked it out talking to the kids of the guy who owned it.  My belly was already showing, and they asked me questions about being pregnant.

We drove home, and stopped at Charlie Brown Farms on the 138, a farm stand tourist attraction on the east side of Palmdale, halfway to Hesperia.  Jonathan got dinner - they have a giant menu with everything you could ever want, and more.  I wasn't feeling great - was tired from the long day, and also cold and shivery - and I just got a hot cocoa.

The next day, we went out to check out the Jeep, and we both climbed into the cavernous back, where we talked about how much fun it would be to go camping with our kid the following year.  A week later I was in the hospital in shock, having delivered Baby T the night before.   And as of this evening, the Jeep belongs to a nice couple from Yucaipa who are going to use it as the wife's primary car.  I hope they're prepared to spend a lot on gas.  It gets like 7mpg.  But it will go over a snow berm 3 feet high.  It did that five months after we had bought it, in March 2011, when I miscarried the Mustard Seed Baby during a snowstorm, and had to go to the hospital.  They'd plowed the road, but the berm was high, so Jonathan drove over it while I stood on the street and waited, not wanting to get jostled around.

I got an email the other week from a girl who had lost her baby in May, and found my blog.  She wanted to thank me for writing about Baby T, and tell me how it gave her comfort.  I wrote back to her and told her what she could expect from the future.  Four years later, after years of infertility, it still hurts, but you just get used to it.  It hurts every day, and not just because I miss my boy, who would be almost 4 now, but because the last time I was truly and innocently happy was that day when we sat in the backseat of the Jeep and planned our future camping trips.

Now, I'm cautiously happy.  Always on guard for the next surprise.  Because the worst part of the Baby T loss was just how sudden it was, and how much of a surprise it was.  Looking back on it, we felt so stupid for thinking that later losses couldn't happen to us.  We felt so naive and silly for just skipping along being happy when the greatest heartache of our lives was waiting for us, just around the bend.  Now I take a cocktail of anti-anxiety drugs for when things get really bad, and I get so afraid that something awful is going to happen to Hannah that I can't concentrate on anything and need to lay down and take deep breaths and bury my head under a pillow, hiding from the world (yep, my meds are professionally monitored - don't worry, I'm not self-medicating).  I miss that person I was on October 6th 2010, sitting in the back of the Jeep reading a book while Jonathan washed the windows outside.

I'm glad to be rid of the Jeep because of the memories I have associated with it.  After the loss, Jonathan drove it as his main car for a while, and neither one of us wanted to be without the other for very long, so I went along to his AA meetings, and waited in the truck reading a book.  It meant that there was an extra half hour of driving time that I wouldn't have to be alone.  I spent many hours in the Jeep that fall outside the Presbyterian church, wrapped in a blanket so I wouldn't have to run it for heat, reading ebooks on my phone, waiting for Jonathan, and being heartbroken.

So farewell Jeep.  I kind of hate you, and I kind of love you at the same time.  But either way, I'm glad to be rid of you.  Time to clear out the old.  Lots of clearing of the old going on lately.  It's emotional, but necessary.  We're getting ready for the new, and it's exciting.

fertility treatments (or how to drop $1200 on an unsuccessful IUI cycle)

J and I are going through Fertility Treatments.  I capitalize it as if it's a proper noun, a holiday, a day for turkey and apple pie.  It's more like Veterans Day.  Not a day for picnics or presents, but a somber time of reflection.  We have already done one cycle of IUI (Intra-Uterine-Insemination - or artificial insemination for those of you not in the know - which was me, two months ago) which wasn't successful, and are now going on to our second cycle now.  Which means I'm taking Clomid, progesterone, and J gets to give me an injection in my butt.  We really know how to keep the romance alive, I tell you.

It's an adjustment, this move into full on fertility work.  It makes the possibility that we may not be able to have children so much more real.  Up until now, it was always theoretical.  "If we lose another baby, we'll start the adoption process."  Or, "if I can't get pregnant by the time I'm 37 we'll start the adoption process."  I never really expected either of those things to come true, if I'm honest with myself.  It was something I hung on to, like an ace I never expected to need.  And yet, with each unsuccessful cycle, we get closer to the possibility that I might not actually ever go through a successful pregnancy ending with delivering a living baby.

It's made me sad, in a more profound way than I have been up until now.  Because I never really doubted that we would figure it out and be able to have kids.  And while I know that even if we do start adoption and stop fertility treatments I could still get pregnant later in life, the odds of that happening keep getting smaller.

IUI tends to work in 3-4 cycles if it's going to work at all.  We are just starting the second cycle.    Clomid on days 3-7 of my cycle ($20).  Day 12 ultrasound to see if my follicles are growing ($250).  Injection 36 hours before IUI ($98).  Sperm washing at the lab and Insemination on Day 14 ($600).  Blood test on Day 21 to see if I ovulated ($115).  Progesterone days 16-30 ($300).  You know I could buy a Louis Vuitton bag for what I will spend this month on fertility treatments?  And yet there's a lady in the grocery store with six kids hanging off her.  #notfair

But who said life was fair, right?  I made the decision to wait until I was older to start trying for a baby, and yes, we may have had some worse luck than others, but I'm guessing that if I had gotten married and started having kids when I was 24, things would look very different now.  Well, I'd have a teenager for one thing.  That would be weird.  I did what I did and it got me to where I am right now, and I don't really wish I was anywhere else.  Even in our sadness, J and I are still best friends, and we still laugh every morning.

I know I don't want to do IVF.  At least not now.  It's too invasive.  There are too many drugs, and too many hormones, and there are too many kids in the world who need good homes for us to spend money and energy on IVF.  So one way or another, all this uncertainty will end this fall.  We will either become pregnant, or we will start researching adoption.  Either way, it will be good to have the facts, and be able to make a plan based on them.

For now, we just embrace the uncertainty and keep our fingers crossed.

hard time of year

Wednesday a year ago we bought the big-ass jeep from a guy up in the Antelope Valley.  We wanted a jeep because I was due in February, and we were afraid of getting snowed in.  I had just hit 20 weeks.  It was all downhill from here.  On the way home J drove the jeep, and I drove my car.  I was still feeling sick.  I had been sick for four or five days.  I was a little worried because I felt weird, but I had never been pregnant before.  I didn't know what pregnant felt like.

On the way home we stopped at Charlie Brown Farms, a place we'd found when we went up to see the poppy reserves for the first time.  J had a burger or chicken sandwich.  I just had a hot chocolate because I wasn't feeling so well.  I listened to music thinking about creating a birthing playlist.  I wanted to have music close to me when I gave birth, and I was starting to organize my music into different types of playlists - the "new age zen" stuff for if I needed to relax, the "upbeat shake your booty" stuff if I needed energy.

The next day it was rainy and cloudy, but I went outside to take pictures of the jeep to send to my dad.  J took the back seats out and hung out in the giant part in back for a while - I read a book while he read the owners manual - and we talked about the camping trips we'd take with our little Baby T.

Then the next day was Friday.  We went out on a Date Night.  I was feeling good.  We went to Carrows.  I wore my maternity jeans, and a red long sleeved tshirt that said "Baby makes the Belly go Round."  I put a sweater on because I was still getting chills.  I went to old navy and bought some long sleeved tshirts and yoga pants because I was going to be headed to England the next week, and I needed some more warm clothes.

Saturday J's friend came over and helped install the ladder up to my girly nook in the attic.  I put up some Halloween decorations.

Sunday I remember because Tony Stewart won the Nascar race in Fontana.  We had tickets to go - there was a deal where, if you bought tickets to the Epicenter rock festival two weeks before, where we saw Blink-182, you got the Nascar tickets free.  We thought about going, but I was a little nervous.  I still wasn't feeling well, and I wanted to get well for my trip to England that Wednesday.  I told J he could go on his own, but he didn't want to.  Tony won.  Tony has been J's favorite driver since before I knew him.  He's never seen him win in person.  He was bummed, and I felt kind of like a killjoy for keeping him from going.  But I brushed it off.  I was pregnant.  There were more important things than Nascar races.

Oh, and J felt the baby kick for the first time that day.  He still isn't positive he felt a kick, but he did.  He says he felt "something" and I know it was a kick.

Monday I still wasn't well, but I started making up a packing list for England.  I told Sandor that I wasn't feeling great and was going to need to rest a lot while I was there.  I did my laundry and rested and drank juice and ate salad.  I remember the juice - Hansen's apple cranberry.  I must have had five gallons of it during the two weeks I was sick.  I can't drink it anymore.  Plus juice is full of sugar, anyway.

Tuesday morning I checked into my flight for the next day, but I was still feeling like crap.  At 11am I told J that I couldn't go to England feeling like this.  If anything happened, I said, I would never be able to forgive myself.

I did a google search to see how you could get out of flights you bought on Priceline, and a bunch of former Priceline workers said that the way to do it was claim you had a miscarriage.  That seemed really obscene to me, so I called them and was just honest.  They let me cancel the trip and just pay a $250 fee.  I wasn't thrilled about the fee, but it was better than simply eating the entire flight.  I told the guy who helped me how I had read on the internet that if you claim to have a miscarriage, Priceline will refund your money.  I told him I couldn't do that because I was 21 weeks pregnant, and that would be a terrible thing.  He said that he hoped karma didn't bite people in the ass who did that.

I called Sandor and Anna Louisa and told them I couldn't come because I was still so sick and was worried.  They were disappointed, but understood.

By 1pm I was feeling bad - backache, gassy, etc.  J was at an AA meeting and I asked him to pick up lunch for us on his way home.  Plus juice.  Always that damned apple cranberry juice.

At 3 I put a chicken in the oven for dinner.

By 4 I was having full on contractions, but didn't know it.  I called the doctor.  He said to come in the next day.

At 5 I realized the pain was coming in waves, like the doctor had asked me an hour before, but I hadn't known then whether it was coming in waves - I just hadn't noticed.  He said to come in right away.

I got dressed and told J we needed to go in.  I was peeing before we left, and my water broke.  Only I didn't know it at the time.  I just knew there was blood.  Lots of it.  And that wasn't good.  The doctor told us to go to the nearest ER.

By 6:30 I was in the hospital room seeing my boy on an ultrasound, still alive and kicking, but not able to live without the fluids.

At 7 J kissed my belly and we said goodbye to Baby T while he was still alive and could hear us.

By midnight it was over.

I ovulated last week.  If I'm pregnant, I'll find out next week sometime.  Even if you time everything right, there's still only a 25% chance each month that a fertilized egg will make it.  So I'm not getting my hopes up that it will take this first month of trying.  And hope isn't even the right word.  After losing two (count 'em, two) babies, I'm not so much hoping to be pregnant.  I'm hoping to have a child, to not have my only experience in the labor and delivery room be when I lost my son; and in order to do that, you need to get pregnant.  And so I will brave being pregnant, with all the fear and angst that goes along with that.

I miss you Baby T.  So much.  Even after a year, I still ache for you.

Same Sh*t Different Year

I'm moody today.  I'll tell you why.  Because I'm at the American Library Association's annual conference in New Orleans, which happens every year around this time.  Last year it was in Washington DC.  And I had found out I was pregnant about 10 days beforehand.  I was trudging to the Safeway near the convention center to get Good Food since there was a little life inside of me, and was thus avoiding Convention Center Food, which basically sucks all around.  I was still all excited.  Reading the What To Expect When You're Expecting book, highlighter in hand, post-it stickies marking every relevant page.  Thinking about how the next year, we'd all drive to ALA because we'd have a 4 month old, and I've been on enough flights with 4-month-olds that I wouldn't want to inflict that on anyone.  Stupid planning.  Stupid What to Expect book.  They don't tell you to expect that your heart is going to be literally torn apart.  They don't tell you to expect to have emotional mood swings even 8 months later.  They don't tell you that you'll burst into tears doing the most mundane stuff like picking out raspberries in the grocery store.  They don't tell you crap.  Everybody knows to expect morning sickness.  Duh.

In addition to the fact that, since last year I have lost two, count 'em, two babies, I'm also reminded of my friend Jim Buescher.  Jim Buescher was my bestest friend from the time I was about 12.  He went to a different school - Penn Manor whilst I went to Pequea Valley - but we met in drama classes at the Fulton Opera House in downtown Lancaster (a mysterious place which, to a country bumpkin like me, was brimming with sophisticated things like coffee houses called The Monks Tunic, and convenience stores you could walk to.  Imagine that.  Walking!  Like on a sidewalk!  Slurping your slusheee.  Amazing!).

My name then was Heather Buettner and he was Jim Buescher, so we were only separated by a very few letters in the alphabet.  He was worldly and knew all about Paul Simon's albums post-Garfunkel and pre-Graceland (when he wrote deeply poetic songs like "When Numbers Get Serious" and before he became a plastic surgery disaster).  After the SAT's one Saturday afternoon we were driving along a back country road and he started driving in the oncoming lane and saying, "Look!  We're in England!"  And he taught me how to say a French phrase, which, roughly translated meant: "I like to frolic with gay soldiers in New Orleans."   Only he didn't tell me what it meant, and I wandered all around the French-speaking part of Switzerland on a choir trip one summer thinking I was asking people where the bathrooms were.

Anyway, I'm in New Orleans now for the first time (which, coincidentally, got me the jetsetters badge on 4square today, thank you very much) and Jim Buescher is...wait for it...passed on.  Like my (count-'em) two babies.  He died in a car accident last summer.  I found out about it while I was at an OB appointment.  That's some dramatic foreshadowing if I've ever seen any.

So here I am in New Orleans and I want so desperately to call him up and say, "J'aime jouer avec les soldats gais à la Nouvelle-Orléans" only he's not there.  And I want so desperately to hold my baby boy, only he's not here.  In a town that's been descended upon by 25,000 librarians, you'd think somebody would effing be here.  But nope.  Nobody's here.  It's a ghost town.  


I've gotta go to bed.  Oh, and I'm sick, too.  To the couple who sat next to me on the plane from Vegas:  sorry for all the hacking, folks.  I hope you had purell handy.  I tried not to breathe on you.


I'm gonna go cry my little shrinking self to sleep now.  Cue tiny violins.

In Which I Probably Offend People From Oakland...

I'm still happy these days...despite the best efforts of Mother's Day and my 35th Birthday (note to any childless people nearly 35:  Do Not, I repeat, DO NOT Google: having children after 35.  You will not be happy with the results.  Apparently, if I even manage to conceive now - and apparently that's a big if - my future child will be born with three heads.  I'm ignoring Google)

I was really ok about the weekend until Friday afternoon when I was returning my rental car at the Oakland airport, and hopped on the little jitney bus to go to the terminal, and there, on the seat next to me, was a baby that was about 8 weeks old.  Baby T would be about 10 weeks old now.  I really wanted Oakland to have a chapel where I could go and cry.  Lots of airports do have chapels.  I see them.  I've never gone in, but I see the signs.  Oakland doesn't.  Smug prepsters who are too cool hiding behind their ipads to need to go to a chapel.  Grrrrr.  So I found a quiet spot, curled around my suitcase, covered my head with my jacket, and sobbed for 15 minutes.

And then I got a frappuccino, because really, I deserved a damn frappuccino.

(which begs a whole other entry about the idea that food could somehow make the situation better, and my thought process that would lead me to believe that since I was sad, I somehow concluded that I deserved sugar and caffeine...but in fairness to me, I did get the sugar free syrup, and only drank half...still, the thought process is what it is)

That being said, before the baby-sighting threw me into the abyss, I spent Thursday evening at the Piedmont Springs spa in Oakland.  It was part of my Project Happiness: Trying New Things.  So let me tell you about the hot tubs at the Piedmont Springs.

Actually, first I should tell you about hot tubs in general.  Public ones, that is.  When I was 19 I drove across the country for Spring Break in my 1987 Oldsmobile, by myself, on an ill-advised man-chasing trip. It was 1995: the early, heady days of CompuServe, and it turned into a bad scene pretty quickly.  Me, being stubborn and overly dramatic, thought that it would be a cool gesture to steep myself in heartbreak and visit said man's hometown.  While I was hanging out in Contra Costa County, I met up with another friend, who was also made via CompuServe, and he took me to the Albany Pools and Spas, where they have these giant wine-vats converted into hot tubs.  They're all outside, in private rooms with the roof open, fairy lights hanging everywhere, and I was smitten with this magic place where one could rent a hot tub for $15 an hour, and sit in it.

So, fast forward to me now, living in California, with an office in San Mateo, allowing me to go up to the Bay Area pretty much whenever I want, which is kickass cool (because I love San Francisco, but it's too frigging expensive).  So I've been back to the place in Albany several times, and it's just as awesome as I remembered it.  But then, people in my office recommended this place in Piedmont, which supposedly takes the awesomeness to the next level.

Last week, as part of my Trying New Things Every Week project, I rented myself a hot tub at Piedmont Springs.  So I got to spend a couple of hours here:

Pretty sweet, eh?  The only thing about it is that I don't really think I'm a fan of Piedmont in general.  I'd been there before once to visit a stationary store (yes, on my trips to different places, I like to do things like visit new stationary stores.  I'm sorry.  It's me.) and I get the distinct vibe that Piedmont thinks it's a hipster town, with hipster guys wearing man-purses filled with gadgets, riding their expensive bicycles, and smugly drinking their Peet's coffee, making lists in their heads of all the ways they are a superior man.  There are outdoor cafes, lots of independent shops, small-town atmosphere.

Frankly, I found it boring.  I'd be much more of a fan of Oakland if, instead of taking pride in these little hipster scenes, they took pride in what was authentic to them - their hip hop and blues music history, for example.

I've never been a fan of the whole Northern-California-Superiority-Complex anyway, but I live in Southern California, so I would say that.

Smug Alert
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...

In Which I get Zen with The Shit

What can I say, you guys.  It's Monday.  Justice may have been done by getting Bin Laden (and I'm not so sure about that, anyway, given that I really don't feel much safer now that we're at an elevated threat level) but The Donald still refuses to do the Right thing and get rid of Star, so I'm still waiting for Celebrity Apprentice justice.  The other night I stayed up until 4:30 to watch the Kate become a princess, not because I care so much about them (though, really, I've fallen under their spell lately) but because of all the great views of central London.

The thing I want to share, though, is this amazing artist on etsy that a friend shared with me, The Midnight Orange.  She makes beautiful clay sculptures for mama's like me.  Like this necklace.  I got mine in the mail today.

I can't look at her shop for too long, though, because I start to cry.  Cuz she has stuff like this (called, appropriately, Empty But For Love):

So it's been over six months since we lost Baby T, and I've been grieving pretty hard lately.  I think part of it is that there was so much going on in the first few months after it happened, and I never had time to just grieve.  You deal with hospital crap, and recovery, and then we started working on getting pregnant again right away, so I was temping and reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility, and then I got pregnant in three cycles, and then I was freaking out about that baby, and then I lost that baby, and then there was more hospital crap, and then we went away, and now there's just...nothing.  The hospital bills have even slowed down now.  There's just an office that should be a nursery, and two drawers of gender-neutral baby clothes that I bought in a lot on ebay when I hit 18 weeks and thought I should start preparing.  No 3am feedings.  No gurgling baby snuggling next to me.  No crying.  No diapers (we had decided on cloth diapers - we're both cheap, and green!).  Just more of the same.

Mother's Day is coming up and the support group I go to is having a Mother's Day Tea on Saturday (which also, incidentally, happens to be my 35th birthday) for mama's of babies who aren't here anymore.  I waffle between really looking forward to it, and dreading it.  I haven't gone to the support group since I lost the second baby.  There's just too much sadness.  Too much heartache.  I hate it.  I want to be around happiness.

But sometimes, when you're sitting in shit, the best thing to do is quit looking around hoping that the shit turns into purple marshmallows, and just accept that you're sitting in shit, and in order to get out of the shit, you need to stand up and actually walk through the shit.  Thus, perhaps getting splashed by even more shit in the process, but eventually getting to the other side of the shit.  It doesn't work to pretend the shit is anything other than shit, which is what I was doing before.  Oh look!  I'll get pregnant right away!  It will all be ok!  A second baby will make it all better!  Nope, darlin', you're still stuck in shit.

So I'm getting zen with the shit, accepting the shit, not trying to deny the shit, and hopefully, by not trying to fight back against the shit, I will be able to flow through the shit, to the other side.

I just typed shit like sixteen times.  Whatever, I'm swimming in it, so I'm getting used to it.

In Which I Become Heather of Arabia

A few months ago J randomly read an article on the internet about Singing Dunes - sand dunes that make noises as the wind blows them.  They're really rare - there are only two dozen or so places in the world where they exist - the conditions have to be really specific - certain humidity, conditions of the sand, size of the sand, etc.  One place where those conditions come together perfectly are the Kelso Dunes in The Middle of Nowhere, SoCal.  You drive up the 15 to Barstow, then pick up the 40, go 70 miles west, and turn off to the north, drive down a dirt road for five miles, and then hike for three miles.

When J first heard about them, it became a Thing Between Us because it was August, I was preggo, and I thought that the fact that he thought I could do something like that while preggo meant he was insensitive and not very thoughtful.  I milked it as a martyr for several weeks.  

So anyway, we're looking for new fun things to do, and decided to head out there yesterday. 

 

Oh my God, it was seriously hard core.  I did not think I was going to make it to the top.  The highest dune is 700 feet high.  That's like a 70 story building.  But the kicker is, you hike for over two miles in the sand.  You know, like, the stuff that you sink into, and then falls away as you try to climb up.  Can you imagine climbing a 70 story building, over the course of 2 and a half miles, in the desert, in the hot sun, in the sand?  Man, it was tough.  We had to take breaks every 100 to 200 steps.  Well, I did.  J could have done it easily, I'm sure.  But he patiently waited while I took a break, and even made shade for me with his shirt.  Awww, bless.

I tried walking in footsteps that were already there thinking it would make it easier.

I know it's hard to see, but there are people sliding down the main dune - they look like little ants!  Sooo steep.

But the reward for getting to the top is that you can slide down the dunes on your butt, and make them sing.  They make this pulsing vibrating noise that's kind of a cross between a jet engine and whale sounds.  It was so strange.  The whole dune-mountain vibrates with it.  Nuts!

But man, I'm SORE today.  Not just sore, but pretty much exhausted.  We spent the day cooking an Easter turkey and taking turkey-induced naps.  The weather was pretty crappy - cold, wet, rainy, foggy - so it kind of felt like Thanksgiving, only falling asleep to baseball instead of football, and eating lemon-meringue pie instead of pumpkin pie.  

This whole Doing New Things experiment is such fun.  It's almost giving me enough to think about so that I don't dwell on the card we got from the hospital sending us their thoughts on the 6-month anniversary of losing our baby boy.  Which, when I opened it in the post office the other day, made me break down and cry.  Right there at the high tables next to the giant recycling bin.  

Sigh.  Two steps forward, one step back.  Onward and upward.  

In the mood for Spring!

Wrigley explores the snow 2 weeks ago - it's all melted now!

Crazy how things can change in two weeks.  Two weeks ago we had a massive snowstorm coming, which knocked out our electricity for 40 hours, and dumped three feet of snow in our yard.  I was still pregnant then, though I had started spotting and was trying to stay chilled out about it, because I knew that lots of pregnancies had spotting.

Two weeks later, I've lost a second baby, and the weather has warmed up so that the snow has mostly melted, except for some of the big piles and berms made by the plow.  I'm looking forward to springtime, and spring cleaning, which we got a head start on today.  I'm working at home today anyway, so at lunchtime we spent an hour cleaning the last of the snow off the deck, taking up the mats and rugs that were wet so it could dry underneath, and hauling a crap-load of junk to the dump and thrift store.  Our deck is empty of old crap, the kitchen has more space, and my office doesn't have the extra big chair which we were keeping around because the cats liked to lay on it.  They might enjoy the chair, but when you live in less than 800 square feet, which we do, you can't have extra giant office chairs laying around.

I've been on another Peter Cetera kick - he's my go-to-guy when I'm sad - and this morning I told J that I was going to rock out to PC, and he wasn't allowed to make fun of it.  So half an hour later, J comes in to ask me something, purses his lips, stifles a snort, and walks out.  I ask my Rise Against-loving hubby what's going on, and he says, "I'm not allowed to comment.  I'll be back in later."  So I turned it up and sang along even more.

AND I bought two bottles of wine last night, since, you know, I'm taking a break from the whole getting-preggo-scene.  I might get drunk for the first time in almost a year!  Not tonight, though.  I'm waking up super-early tomorrow to go to the LA Flower Market.  It's the giant market district where all the professionals go to get their flowers, which they open up to the public two days a week, and it's the most magical place on earth.  If I had another life to live, I'd totally be a florist.  When we lived by Dodger Stadium, I'd go to the flower market once a month or so, and for two weeks the house would be filled to the brim with gerber daisies and lilies and tulips and all kinds of colorful things.

For our wedding, we went to the flower market early in the morning the day before the ceremony, and loaded up the car with roses of all colors, and tons of gorgeous fall flowers, and for less than $400 we made all the bouquets, centerpieces, and corsages, and had enough left over to cover the archway in ivy and autumn-colored flowers.  I'm lucky to have crafty ladies in my family circle, who know how to arrange flowers, and we had so much fun that day - buckets of flowers in the bathtub, clippings all over the floor, vases filling the refrigerator, flower wire caught in our hair...it was the best part of our wedding, I think.

So tomorrow, for my Artist's Way Artist's Date, I'm going to haul my butt out to the flower market early in the morning (to get the best selection you have to get there before 8am, and it's an hour and a half away) and drop $25 and get enough flowers to brighten up every spot in the house.  I only hope the cats don't go crazy on them.

I officially want to eat my words about an 8-week loss being a piece of cake.  The reason it seemed like that to me was because on Wednesday, when I posted, I hadn't passed everything through yet.  Thursday I go to the doctor, to my regularly-scheduled appointment, and it turns out there's big pieces of tissue that can't pass through, and I need a D&C quick-like.  So what I thought was a routine appointment - where we'd talk about what happened, and how we're going to wait to try again, and other interesting tidbits about my reproductive health, with a nice lunch at the Soup Plantation afterwards - turned into a day at the hospital with anesthesia, throwing up Jell-O, and surgery.  Not a fun time.

So I started getting into Serious Healing mode this weekend.  Here are some things I recommend doing when you're Trying To Heal.

1) Wake up first thing in the morning and rearrange the kitchen.  This may involve pushing heavy pieces of furniture around.  If you do that, be sure to put towels under the legs so that your husband doesn't yell at you for scratching up the floor.  Listen to NPR as you're doing this.  Even though it's fund-drive time, nothing's better than pushing around buffets while listening to Weekend Edition.  When your husband comes out and sees the giant mess that you've created, rubs his eyes and says he's going back to bed, let him.  He'll just get in the way anyway, what with his need to do things Right.  You can wake him when you've cleaned the mess up.

2)  Buy a New Toy.  Look, I'm not advocating pointless consumerism here.  But nothing helps you take your mind off crappy things like reading an instruction manual and playing with a new toy.  So if you can afford it, do it.  We bought the PlayStation Move attachment for the PS3.  It's a camera attachment and controller that turns your PS3 into something like a wii or kinect - it recognizes your motions.  The game that was included was a collection of sports, so we played table tennis, frisbee golf, gladiator duels, archery, and beach volleyball for a couple hours.  It was tons of fun, and I'm a huge fan.  Can't wait to see the fun developers have with this.  There's a new Elder Scrolls game coming out in November - it would be beyond awesome if it had some of this technology built in - the swords, bows, and hand-to-hand fighting could all totally utilize it.  There's a gun attachment so Black Ops could go nuts with it, too.  If that happens, J and I will need to get two tv's and PS3's, because neither one of us will want to give it up.

3)  Book a cruise.  Growing up in landlocked Pennsylvania, I always thought cruises were for people who were beyond wealthy.  Mostly, I guess, because you had to fly somewhere first before you could even get on the boat.  But LA is different.  There are boats that leave Long Beach and San Pedro every day.  And we're going to get on one of those boats in a couple of weeks.  They even offer a resident discount, which makes it about the same price as staying in a nice hotel, albeit a floating one where you get fresh sea-air every day, and lots of pools, and free food.  I'm totally stoked.

4)  Go to your Happy Place.  Mine is Target.  Even if I don't buy a thing, I'm called like a honing pigeon back to the red carts.  Target is like a spa for me.  It's quiet, it's peaceful, I can do good thinking there.  Or I can just be distracted by the pretty shiny jewelry, and the designer-knockoff bags, and I can daydream about springtime in the garden section.  Oh, Target, how I do love you.  I love that you have fresh food in most of your stores now.  I love that everything in your store is just so...hip.   I love all the good memories I have planning new apartments and new lives in your stores.

5)  Drink lots of water.  It's good for you.

I know you all think I disappeared...

...but I didn't.  I'd like to, though.  I had another miscarriage.  I was only 8 weeks, so it's not nearly as traumatic as it was with Baby Teysko - I don't mean to minimize 8 week losses for anyone reading this who has had one...it well and truly sucked - but after you had an emergency ride to the hospital with clots the size of grapefruits falling out of you, and then go through 8 hours of active labor under bright lights with IV's sticking in you, and sign death certificates and deal with mortuaries and your milk coming in...well, a loss at home sitting on the toilet involving nothing more than lots of pads and extra towels to lay on is kind of Club Med in comparison.  I didn't even go to the ER.  I talked to the labor & delivery nurse and doctor, and they both agreed that it would be safe for me to be at home.  I mean, women have been losing babies in the comfort of their own home for millions of years, right?   I'm so sick of paying ER bills for dead babies.

So, yeah.  That's what's going on.  I will write more about this later.  Right now I'm just trying to keep my mind off it, playing lots of Oblivion, hugging on to my hubby something fierce, and thinking about spending the springtime getting healthy and healing, and taking more time off before we try again.  Eight months ago I didn't even know I was pregnant the first time - I was just finding out.  In 8 months I found out I was pregnant, carried Baby T to 21 weeks, lost him, got pregnant again, carried to 8 weeks, and lost that baby.  It's freaking exhausting, and I need a break.  I need to spend the springtime walking by the lake, and reading books, and eating well, and taking a vacation, and writing...and not be obsessed with temping and charting and all the other high-maintenance trying-to-conceive stuff I was doing.

The one thing I'm taking heart from is that I got pregnant again so soon after losing Baby T.  It was only three cycles.  Which shows me that I don't have to worry about my fertility too much right now, and we do truly still have time to heal and get strong before going down this path again.

If anyone wants to send good thoughts, I'll take 'em.  If you're the praying kind, I'll take those, too.

Due Dates and Snowstorms

Snowflakes and Butterflies

Today is Baby Teysko's due date.  The week before we lost him, in early October, we bought a giant Jeep because we live in the mountains, and we'd been through three winters up here without a 4-wheel drive vehicle, and we didn't want to tempt fate by trying to make it a 4th, especially when we were due in February.  We bought the Jeep on a Wednesday.  On Friday we went out on a Date Night in it, even though it's a gas guzzler, just to try it out.  I wore a long-sleeved red t-shirt that said, "Baby makes the belly go round" and J rubbed my tummy a lot - I was starting to really pop out.  On Tuesday he was gone, my little butterfly baby who sits on my shoulder and tells me not to cry because he's still with me, and I'll get to hug him someday.

This past weekend we got a major snowstorm, and we kept talking about how great it was that we had the Jeep, considering that this is when Baby T was due.  But it's silly thinking.  It doesn't matter now because we don't have to go to a hospital to bring a baby into the world.  We just went to Redbox to get movies, and felt smug because we could return them without having to shovel the berm, and could just plow over it.

My baby boy, I love you so much, and I'm so sad that you're not here with us.

I wrote another Grief Blog post over on Open Salon and it got another Editor's Pick.  If I didn't know better, I'd think that I was suddenly becoming their Miscarriage Girl.  I guess that's an honor?  Nah, it is, and if it gets more people aware of the fact that 1 in 4 women lose a pregnancy, then it's good.

It's Saturday, and I had a long week, so the highlight of my day was a walk around the lake.  Then I started to get caught up on laundry, now that we have our super-fancy singing washer and dryer.  Nothing is hipper than washing blankets that cats puked on which have been sitting in a corner for 2 weeks because you don't want to take that hot mess to the laundromat.

Now I'm laughing at this collection of the funniest texts from parents.  My favorite: Dad: "Got new phone.  Plesa send me your text message address."  Text message address?  What is that?

'Member the old days of email when addresses were crazy long?  My first email address was 76353.2273@server.compuserve.com or something like that.  Then in college we got email addresses that included our social security numbers - I don't know which genius thought that one up.  'Member hotmail?  That was the first time you could get web mail that was short.  But everybody thought you were saying hot-male when you gave them your email address.  And that pun would get so old.

All right, it's almost 11 and I've got some laundry to change over.  I so totally know how to party these days.

New Grief Blog post

I wrote another post in my Grief Blog over on Open Salon.  You can read it here, or, you might notice I've added a bunch of tabs up at the top for your navigational convenience.  This one was made an Editor's Pick, so I feel good knowing that Baby T is touching people, and that his life is continuing to have meaning.  I hope I'm making him proud.

In other news, I work in libraries, and CA libraries are really under fire right now.  Jerry Brown wants to eliminate ALL state funding for libraries, claiming they can be funded locally (remember when he used to be a liberal?).  Except for the fact that one of the big areas he wants to cut is used for matching funds for grants.  Plus, things like delivery, interlibrary loan, etc., aren't funded locally - they need to be funded by a central statewide location.

So I spent some time today learning how to use xtranormal to make a video explaining, in laymen's terms, what the TBR fund does.  It was posted on Calix, the CA listserv for libraries, so my boss thinks I'm "viral" now.  I'm a disease.  I'm going to make some more over the next few days.

Music and Lyrics

When I was 23 I broke up with my college boyfriend and moved to LA where I lived in a tiny studio apartment at 426 S. New Hampshire Ave, two blocks north of Wilshire, and one west of Vermont.  I didn't have a car, so I got a red grandma-cart to get groceries at the Ralphs at Third and Vermont, I took the Red Line to work, and I rode the bus to Larchmont to play with pottery at Color Me Mine.  This was an enormously happy time for me, mostly because I was living on my own for the first time.

My apartment was in an old building from the 20's, and it looked out on a courtyard with palm trees.  I had wrought iron bars on the window, but the windowsill was wide enough to sit in, so I hung lots of plants from the bars, and would sit on the windowsill and write in my journal.  I hung fairy lights up everywhere.  There was a fold-in-the-wall bed, and it took me three months in my temp job to save up enough for a cheap mattress for it.  On the day the mattress arrived, I took the bus to K-Mart on Third street and bought a nice sheet set, and then I stopped for Chinese food, and I sat in my bed with my new sheets and ate dinner and watched college football on tv.  It was a Good Day.  I still have the comforter from that sheet set, which goes to show the quality of the sheet sets they sell at K-mart.

(Side note - in the summer of 2005 I went out on a blind date with a guy who, it turned out, lived in that old building.  Of all the hundreds of thousands of buildings in Los Angeles, I wind up on a date with a guy who lived in my building from when I was 23.  What are the odds?  He was a nice guy, and had a cute cat, but I just couldn't have a future with a guy who lived where I lived when I was 23.  They say you can't go home again, and it's true.  I had moved on, past 426 S. New Hampshire.)

I also listened to a lot of music that my boyfriend hadn't liked.  Tori Amos (like nails going down a chalkboard, he said), Cher (it was during the "Do You Believe in Life after Love" phase), Peter Cetera (because he's my go-to-guy) and Jewel (she's just so cute and sweet; how can you not love Jewel?).   Oh, and I splurged on the Brazil Nut body butter from the Body Shop even though it was like $10 (which was about 1% of my take home pay for the month) and smelled all nutty.

The point of saying all this is that Jewel is pregnant.  She's 36.  Gives me hope.

In other news, I remembered how much I love Tori Amos when I spent two hours listening to Little Earthquakes on Monday in the car to San Diego.  I blasted it so it nearly blew out the speakers, and I let out all my righteous feminist anger.

Tori Amos writes the best lyrics including:

So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts
What's so amazing about really deep thoughts?
Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon
How's that thought for ya...

Busted!  Take that male sexist establishment!

And in the best kind of reverse-sexism, in Ashton Kutcher's new movie No Strings Attached, there are supposedly lots of close ups on his butt.

Finally, a video that ties together butts, as well as the title of this post:  Hugh Grant channeling his inner-George Michael from Music and Lyrics, which is, I'm ashamed to say, one of my favorite movies of all time.

PoP! Goes My Heart | Music Videos | SPIKE.com

New Grief Blog post

I've taken to writing in my Grief Blog over on Open Salon on Tuesday nights - I lost Baby T on a Tuesday, and it's the night I get Girly Alone Time cuz hubster has his AA meeting, so it seems appropriate to spend part of my Girly Alone Time remembering my boy, and memorializing my grief.

This week - the fear that comes during the second stage of grief:
http://open.salon.com/blog/hteysko/2011/01/11/grief_and_fear

On another note, I read today that Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise are boycotting the Oscars because Anne Hathaway is hosting, and they didn't like the impression that she did of Katie on Saturday Night Live in November.  That is now top of the pile of People Who Take Themselves Too Seriously.  Also, just a tip, Tom and Katie, when you only make headlines for boycotting things, you might want to take a step back and do some self-examination.

And with that, my Girly Alone Time is now over, and it's time for Couple Time.

Trajectories

One of the things that is so weird about a pregnancy loss, especially (I think) if you don't have other children, is how strange it is to go back to your normal life.  I think about how there were times, before June, when I was happy.  Lots of times.  Jonathan and I did all kinds of fun stuff.  But then we were coming to live from the trajectory of not being pregnant, and not ever having been pregnant.

Then I was pregnant.

And now, I am not pregnant again, but I'm coming at it from the trajectory of having been pregnant.  So it's all completely different now.

It's still J and I, like it always has been.  But nothing is different.  And yet everything is different.  It's a complicated mind-blowing physics experiment - measuring the everything/nothingness rate of change in our lives now.  The only physical changes are a drawer full of newborn clothes I bought, the cheap heart rate monitor and Burt's Bees Mama Bee belly rub.  That's pretty much it.  Oh, and a breast pump from when my milk came in.  So four physical differences.  And yet nothing is the same at all.

I'm thinking about it because I was cleaning out my closet and came face to face with a bunch of my maternity clothes.  I'm such a dope - I bought a whole fall/winter pregnancy wardrobe.  Even if I got pregnant today, I wouldn't need pregnancy clothes until March or so, so all these heavy sweaters will go unworn.  Lesson learned.  Only buy as you need.  The books say that, but I didn't listen. I decided it would be a good deal to order a ton and combine shipping to save money.  Silly me.

I sure hope I can wear these preggo jeans again soon.  I wonder how many women are pining for maternity clothes right now?  Yearning for elastic.  Because elastic equals pregnancy.  At least in my equations.  Ahh, beautiful Motherhood pregnancy jeans that are getting slightly frayed at the ankle, I will wear you again soon, I hope.

Oh, and if you're wondering...

...where all my miscarriage grief went, don't fear, it's still hanging around.  I have started a blog over at Open Salon where I blog exclusively about my miscarriage.  I think that's appropriate.  This blog has been around, in various iterations, for almost 8 years.  I want Baby T to have his own place where I can grieve for him in a venue that's unique from the place where I used to blog about bad dates.  So check it out if you want to stew in grief for a while.  One of my posts was already made an Editor's Pick.  Go grief go!

Moments

it's kind of hard to type with a kitten sitting in between you and your laptop, happily purring away, but I am attempting to try.

So I gave Fresh and Easy the what-for today on facebook.  They have these new cinnamon-coated almonds, which looked really yummy in the bag, but nearly broke my tooth in real life.  I think dentists secretly created them to drum up business.

I've kind of taken off the last two days of writing my book.  I've been engrossed in a
Tim Dorsey book.  I even woke up two hours early this morning to find out who the FBI informant was.  I'm going to quit being lame and lazy like that tomorrow, though.

I watched Millionaire Matchmaker today.  Seriously, how much ass does that show kick?  But it's like really sweet and thick chocolate - you have to be careful not to overdo it.  I watched it for an hour today, and I think I'm done for another 34 years.

So I have been thinking about getting pregnant again - how much I hope it happens quickly, and how I'm excited for something else to look forward to besides just being miserable.  Even being afraid (which is, I'm sure, pretty much how I will spend the entirety of my next pregnancy) seems appealing these days.  I'm frustrated though, in the current state of the trying to conceive phase.  Last year at this time, when we had first started trying, I was so carefree and nonchalant about the whole thing.  I didn't know what pregnancy symptoms were, I didn't know what it was like to be pregnant, I didn't know anything.  Now I'm hyper-aware of every feeling of nausea, every time I'm tired, every time I feel hormonal... you name it, I'm watching it.

I don't know how to un-know these symptoms.  I don't know how to un-know something that I know already.  I don't know that I'll ever get that carefree innocence back.  And to be honest, I don't know if I'd even want to.  I feel naive and stupid looking back at myself last year now.  When I thought that if you got pregnant, it meant that you were having a baby for sure.  When I didn't know how many terrifying ways there are for babies to die.  When I didn't know what this kind of pain felt like.

Would I want to go back to that?  I don't think so.  I'm wiser now, which has made me more compassionate and empathetic.  You don't get wisdom without going through some shit, and I'm glad I have this wisdom now.  I'm glad I know that babies can die.  Because I think that when I'm pregnant again, I want to go into it with my eyes open.  Not so that I can be terrified and depressed, but so that I can appreciate every minute that I'm pregnant.

I vow that I will never complain about morning sickness.  I will never complain about insomnia.  I will embrace those symptoms because they will mean that I'm pregnant, and for that moment I'm pregnant, and that's all you have.  Really, that's all anybody has - this moment.  Then you get another moment.  And eventually, if you're lucky, you get 9 months worth of moments that add up to a healthy baby.  And if you're really lucky, you get 80 or 90 years worth of moments that add up to a fulfilling life. But this moment, right now, this is all that I have.  It's all you have.  It's all anybody has.

Hubby is spending this moment playing Gran Turismo, his very favorite video game.  I am spending this moment on the couch with him and two purring cats; and in this moment, I am very sad, but life is still good.

Artwalking

This girl was my favorite - Amanda Sage - google her!

Thursday night we went to the monthly Artwalk in downtown LA.  It's a fun evening where all the galleries are open late, there's lots of kickass food trucks, and best of all, tons of street life.  I really miss street life living in the driving-metro-area-of-the-world.  One of my favorite things in London and NY was just to spend the evening wandering around, looking in shop windows, grabbing coffee, and watching life around me.  I really really miss that in LA.  It's just not the same.  Driving around just isn't the same as walking around.  So I like Artwalk because there's street life, and lots of people around.  Plus, it's Christmas time now, so LA tries to do snow and festiveness.

It looks like snow and you don't have to shovel.  Wheeee!

 It was kind of bittersweet Artwalking.  The last time I went on the Artwalk was in June, and I was already about a week pregnant, but didn't know it yet.  In fact, the frappuccino that I drank that night would cause me no end of grief when, five days later, I discovered I was pregnant and that caffeine was a no-no.  It wasn't until I saw the first ultrasound that I felt ok about that Artwalk Frappuccino.

It was nice to go back and walk around with hubby.  We had a good old fashioned date night.  We walked to Little Tokyo to eat, then stopped in a Japanese grocery store so he could buy seaweed (just to gross me out) and I could play with all the foreign toiletries, and buy lots of foreign gum.  I love me some foreign facewash and gum.  Of all the weird things I could collect, I pick facewash and gum.  It's so weird.

I have been really sad again lately, really missing being pregnant.  Tomorrow it will be 2 months since the Horrible Day.  I just keep replaying scenes from the day in my head - it's like it's on a continuous loop - and I can't get rid of it.  I try really hard not to think about it, but then trying not to think about something is pretty much the same thing as thinking about something, so it hasn't been working out that well.  I did treat myself to a new pair of sunglasses the other day - my old ones were resting on my cheeks and giving me these weird creases in my face all the time - so at least I have cool sunnies to hide behind when I'm crying in public.  Sigh...  I hope I get pregnant again soon.  It will be nice to have something else to think about besides how miserable I am.

Oh, and finally, a book update.  I'm now at just over 5800 words.  NaNoWriSixWeeks is coming along smoothly :)  I like my characters, I like my story, I like spending time with them, so that's all positive.  I'm struggling with their dialog, but that will come in later drafts.  Right now it's about getting words on the screen.  I'll be so stoked if I can do this, even though it wasn't in November, and it's six weeks rather than a month.

Crap.  I just now realized that one of the cats has figured out how to slide open my closet doors.   This is not a good development.  I need to get hooks or something.

When is a loss a loss?

There's big drama going on over on my grief and loss message boards.  The grief and loss boards are for people who are dealing with pregnancy losses, and some of the stories are ridiculously traumatic.  They're also ridiculously inspirational.  One woman found out when her daughter was at 18 weeks that she had a condition that was incompatible with life.  She decided to carry to term, to give the baby a fighting chance.  The baby died in utero the day before she was due.  There are tons of stories like that - really gut-wrenching stories of people trying so desperately to have a child, and dealing with their own personal losses.  I can't deal with it that much, to be honest.  There's just too much grief, so many new hearts broken every day.  But the women there were a huge support to me, so I feel like I need to go on at least a few times a week to check in, and offer some support of my own, now that it doesn't hurt to breathe so much.

A few weeks ago a woman posted that she had just had a d&c because she found out that her baby had down syndrome, and she was sad because they had to start all over again.  Well.  This got people seriously riled up.  Down syndrome is compatible with life, you see.  So her baby could have lived, but she terminated the pregnancy because she wasn't able to deal with a special needs child.  People were seriously upset.  One person said that she technically had an abortion, and hinted that she hoped the next child didn't have any other imperfections, like, say, the wrong color eyes, or else they might get the chopping block too.  One woman was a special education teacher, and she said she was horrified.  At first I felt sorry for the original woman - she had come on the board looking for support, and people should have given her that support and not judged her.

But then I got to thinking that, while yes, we should give her the support she needs, really it's pretty stupid of her to come on a grief board and talk about the baby she willingly gave up because it was going to have special needs.  If I willingly give something up, I can't go around saying that I've "lost" it.  I haven't lost it.  I've given it up.  It's pretty insensitive of that woman to come on a board where there are thousands of women grieving their own lost babies, who would willingly have traded places with her to have a healthy baby.  I know I would have.  If Baby Teysko would have had down syndrome it would have been very sad, and we would have been very upset, but that's the baby we were given, the baby we were trying so hard to have.  I'm not going to throw that back in the face of whatever creator there is out there who deemed me worthy and strong enough to care for him.  That would be our baby, and we'd manage.  Life would look a lot different, and I pray that we never have to be in that position to make good on our words, but I can pretty confidently say that we would figure something out, and that baby would be loved, and welcomed into the world and into our arms.

Even if we didn't, and for whatever reason we wound up terminating the pregnancy, I wouldn't go on to a bloody grief and loss board and talk about how I made a conscious decision to end my pregnancy, scheduling the appointment myself, and having it all go according to my plan.  That's just not a loss.  A loss is something you don't get any say over.  It's not something you work into your schedule because the alternative doesn't suit you.

I fully believe that original woman should have support, and I have no idea how difficult and painful it was for her to make her decision.  There are probably message boards and support groups for people in her position, but I think it's pretty darned insensitive to hang out on a board of grieving women because your baby was going to have special needs.  Look, it's like an exclusive club, these grieving mama's.  And you have to go through a horrific hazing to be part of it.  That hazing can include sudden ambulance rides, expected routine ultrasounds where there is suddenly no heartbeat, huge amounts of blood, being more frightened than you've ever been in your entire life, screams, rivers of tears, and going through six hours of labor to deliver baby that was alive when you started, but will die during delivery.

That hazing does not include getting on the phone with your doctor's office, checking your calendar, and planning a convenient time to end your pregnancy.

We don't get a lot, us grieving mama's.  We don't get to celebrate mother's day, even though we're mothers.  We don't get to put the baby clothes we bought on to the baby we intended them for.  Some even don't get to return the baby furniture they bought.  We don't get pictures, we don't get memories, and we don't get locks of hair.  But we get to call ourselves grieving mama's, and I'm sorry, but unless you went through the hazing ritual, you don't get to be part of that group.  And that's all I can say about that.