The (Virtual) Pages Of My Life

Earlier this morning I was reading a friend’s livejournal, when Connor snatched the mouse from me, clicked some random buttons and brought me to my own livejournal, in particular the “just plain weird” category of my own LJ. I haven’t used LJ regularly for years, the most recent post was from November of 2006 complaining because my heavily pregnant belly was in the way of any lady garden shaving attempts.

I flicked through the posts, there was an intense hatred of Bobby Flynn (that’s still there, just typing his name makes me want to go out and stamp on bugs just to release the rage), there were silly conversations I recalled with my husband and my coworkers, there were posts written by newly married, newly pregnant 20 year old whose primary concern was the fact that someone with stupid hair and more than a passing resemblance to Eric Stolz in Mask was a favourite to win Australian Idol.

I said fuck and didn’t worry about offending my mother, I posted pitures of myself instead of hiding behind the camera – I was hot and pregnant and everyone needed to see it, I wrote posts in the ten minutes between arriving at the office and the clock ticking over to nine and receiving a glare from my boss indicating that I had to start working immediately.

At some point, and not just since Robyn, that confidence has started to dwindle, it made a steady progression downwards until taking a nosedive of Ricki-Lee proportions on the nineteenth of February when I discovered I was about to give birth to a dead baby.

Posts now sit half written in my browser for two weeks just because I couldn’t find the right image to go with them. Declan repeats something funny to me and I stop myself from posting it because it seems disrespectful to write about how funny my kids are when one of them is dead. Connor (finally!) started walking and I never even mentioned it… because Robyn never will.

Dan and I said within days of her birth that we can’t let this define who we are, it’s far easier said than done. I don’t cry about it often any more, but it’s still there, this constant nagging feeling that I should be watching my daughter roll over around now, I should be buying ridiculous amounts of size 00 clothes in purple and I definitely shouldn’t have enough free time to be working on a new business and attending markets at the weekends.

Today is a fresh start, I don’t think I’m going to ever get back to the care free 20 year old (particularly now that Aus Idol’s gone to shit!) but I would like to get back her blogging style. The one without obligation, the one where I don’t linger over posts for weeks and most importantly, one that actually represents who I am right now at this moment in my life, because although at times I’m paddling madly under the water, sometimes I’m hanging out on the sand and just enjoying my kids and the positives that I have in my life. THAT is what I need to remember when I look back at this in five years from now, not how overwhelming the sadness can be.

I think a new shiny blog layout is called for

Only Words

Last week I bit the bullet and got a referral from our GP to go and speak to a Psychologist. He gave me a referral to who I had requested (Declan’s pysch, who announces on his card that he “does big kids too!”), but not before making me do the dreaded “How Close Are You To Jumping Off A Cliff” questionnaire and suggesting that based on my responses I shouldn’t even contemplate getting pregnant for another 18  months.

Then I burst into tears and don’t remember much else of what he said.

I left with my referral, I have an appointment booked in for Friday, and I’m a little bit stumped about it.

I don’t know what there is left to talk about. I feel like I spent the entire first month just talking about it until my jaw ached, there is nothing left to say. Robyn died, I am sad, but I need to keep functioning to look after my two living children.

I cry when I see sleeping newborns. I am jealous of their parents. Because at some point those babies will open their eyes, and mine never did.

I can’t look at ultrasound screens, on telly, on my mum’s forums, I can’t even look at the old sonograms of the boys. Because all I see is the dead upside down baby, with no movement in her chest and a room full of silent people, none of them knowing what to say next.

I can’t watch telly, I don’t want to see the news, I don’t want to see stupid fluff pieces on morning shows, I don’t want to see adverts for products offering “the best protection for your baby”. I was the best protection for my baby.

I can’t sit still and let my thoughts take over, that would be instant doom.

I can’t imagine having a baby. I can visualise my next pregnancy perfectly. I can picture myself running around after the boys with huge belly once again without any hesitation at all. I can’t imagine myself with a newborn, or with three children living under our roof, I am prepared for the death of my fourth child more so than I am for its birth.

I have irrational hatred to people that I consider to be parenting badly. The mother in the cafe mixing up formula, I deserve a child more than her, because I would breastfeed. The parents standing in the same aisle as me in Target, complaining because they can’t find anyone to babysit on Friday night, I deserve a child more than them because I would never leave it, ever.

Don’t even get me started on the emotions I have towards the people that actually ARE parenting badly. Another reason why the news is a no-go area.

I don’t want to pick up her ashes, because then we will have to scatter them, and I will lose the last little bit of her forever.

I’m not ready for another pregnancy yet, but I still sob every time my period starts.

The logic in that one fails me completely.

I am sad. I have moments of uncontrollable emotions, but on a day to day basis I am competent, I am coping well, in fact I even feel far better than I did during my PPD with Declan.

I want to go and see the psychologist and just get him to tell me that this is all normal, that everything I am feeling is what I’m meant to be feeling.

I don’t want to sit down and talk for hours about all that could have been, or why what happened, happened. It doesn’t fix anything, it doesn’t make her come back, it doesn’t even make me feel better, it just forces me to dwell on every emotion.

I just want him to tell me I’m normal, that everything I’m feeling is normal.

Tick. Tock.

10 hours until Dan and I head into the hospital for my post-natal check up and to discuss the results from Robyn’s autopsy.

Dan’s gone to bed early.

Me, myself and I don’t tend to make for a very stable mental state. I hate being alone at the best of times, when I’m nervous about something then I go a little bit psycho.

And I’m super nervous about this.

Best outcome – They know exactly what caused her death, it was some 1 in 20,000,000 freak accident and will never happen again, more babies will be in our future.

Average outcome – They don’t know what caused her death, but nothing is ringing any alarm bells regarding having another child.

Worse outcome – They know what caused it, there is a high likelihood of it happening again, in fact, the boys were complete miracles. No more babies.

I keep repeating in my head how lucky I am to have Declan and Connor, how I already have far more than some people do. But the fact that in ten hours there’s a possibility that someone is going to tell me that there won’t be another pregnancy and another, living, child in my future scares the crap out of me. A few weeks ago I couldn’t even process that as a possibility, and now it’s completely consuming my thoughts. This goes far beyond wanting another child, I NEED another child, children. I feel like a chunk of me is missing, and I know it’s not going to be filled by another baby, but I know it will do a pretty good job of starting to patch it up.

I’m just petrified now that it isn’t going to be a possibility.

Time for bed.

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

For the first couple of years of Declan’s life I was convinced that it would all get easier as time went on. This whole parenting shebang couldn’t be this hard forever, right?

It didn’t.

In some ways it’s almost getting harder, as he grows I have more expectations of him and I’m more aware as each week passes how he’s moving further away from “normal”. As the months and years go by, certain problems get solved, only for new ones to pop up in their place. Just when I think he’s finally hit the ceiling and it can’t get any more difficult, he turns it up to eleven and shows me that, in fact, it can.

During my pregnancy with him this is not how I saw my future, parenting shouldn’t be patting yourself on the back because you went an entire 24 hours without looking up terms and conditions on eBay to work out whether your three year old counts as livestock, or whether you should just go the local route with a classified ad.

My niece asked about some of his behaviour and why he acts how he does. I explained that Declan just thinks a little bit differently to other kids, he has a harder time controlling himself, and doesn’t process things in the same way that they do.

“Yeah… but why?”

I wish I knew.

Good Days

When someone asks me how I’m doing I’ll normally answer something along the line of “I have good days and bad days”, even if I feel fine at that particular moment, I’m very aware that if I say I’m fine then people will start to think I’m in denial and not coping. Then if I say I’m not fine then they’ll think I’m having a breakdown and, again, not coping. I have visions of them carting me off to the nuthouse if I say the wrong thing and so I try to remain neutral in what I say to most people. It’s true that I have good days and bad, most of the time I just don’t feel like going into details about which side of the scale I fall on at that particular time.

Maybe I just over think things.

Today was one of the good days. Both of the kids are sick so the house remained fairly calm, Connor slept most of the day, and Declan was content to read and play with his cars instead of spending the day bouncing off the walls.

It felt normal, and normal is all I need right now to consider it a good day

One Month Down

Yesterday was my due date, the magical 40 week mark that I still have yet to hit with any of my pregnancies, it also marked one month since Robyns birth and death.

I guess that officially that should be death and birth, death came before birth for her, which is just an odd concept to wrap your head around.

I’d been dreading the anniversary, was preparing myself to be a wreck for the entire day, but it came and went without a tear shed. Why should one day hurt any more than the previous ones simply because it’s a full month, year or decade. Anniversaries are what we make them, so I made yesterday a celebration of Connor’s 18 month birthday, with cupcakes that spilled out of their wrappers and a bright yellow crown that was too small for his head.

The emotions are different now, the grief and pain isn’t completely overwhelming, it ebbs and flows. Sometimes it’s just a pang, like this morning seeing a pink and black newborn outfit I would have bought, sometimes a scene in a movie will set me off (FYI, when you’ve just lost a child, Kill Bill is probably not advised) it’s like I’m drowning in tears and I need Dan there rubbing my back and helping me to calm down.

I’ve come a long way in a month. For the nine days in between her birth and the funeral I wrote daily in a private journal, it helped me process things. Just reading back on those first few days shows me how far I’ve come, logic and sense have returned.

The overwhelming desire to steal someone’s baby has left and although I think about getting pregnant almost hourly, I also know that’s not going to be a good move for me, mentally or physically, right now.

I no longer feel guilt for walking away and leaving her in the hospital, instead sense has returned and I understand that there wasn’t anything else we could do.

The haze of confusion has made way for a whole new wave of ambition and determination. I was so insistent that this all had to be happening for a reason, something good must come from it, and if that something good is me being a better mother, and more enthusiasm to achieve bigger and better things in my personal goals, then I’m happy with that.

We still have more hurdles to jump over, we got a letter a couple of days ago saying that Robyn’s ashes were ready to be picked up, we need to scatter them, and then the dreaded autopsy results in just under a month. But overall I feel each week my mental state improves a little bit, the individual days, and even hours, are up and down, but if you step back and look at it on a bigger scale, I’m getting there, I don’t think the pain will ever heal, but ever so slowly it’s easing, and that’s all I can hope for right now.

In Waiting

My not so strict internet ban is working well. I’m focusing on my home, on the kids, and on a hell of a lot of sewing. I feel much better mentally not having unavoidable reminders of Robyn, babies or pregnancy, although I am missing mummy blogs, but at the same time I’ve found some wonderful craft blogs to fill their void for the time being. Surprisingly I’m not yearning for twitter as much as I thought I would.

I still don’t have the iPod set up to distract me, so sewing is one of the few times my mind wanders and I think of everything that has happened. I still feel so much guilt surrounding my pregnancy. I keep on replaying the scene in my head when I peed on that stick and two lines came up, where I swore, slammed the doors and lay in bed sobbing telling Dan that I didn’t want a baby, it was so unexpected. I was in tears on the phone to my mum several times, panicking about finances, buying a car to fit everybody, moving house so we could have enough space. It wasn’t until probably around 30 weeks that I really accepted that we were going to have an addition to our family and started to get excited.

Everything I was concerned about over those months seems so trivial now, never once did it even cross my mind to worry about my baby dying.

The autopsy results are just over a month away and I’m starting to panic about them. Dan and I have agreed that if it’s something that can be replicated, like a genetic issue, then we’re going to call our family complete. I can’t comprehend the thought of never being pregnant again, at the moment it’s the only thing I feel can heal me, but at the same time I don’t think I could cope with losing a baby again. Right now I feel like I’ve come out of this stronger, but if I had to live through it again I think it would just break me, and I don’t really want to be broken.

Then I think of how negative I was through my pregnancy, and how that will make me feel if I find out it was my last, I hate myself for not celebrating it like I should have.

I feel like I just have this ticking clock over my head, counting down until the 16th of April, to get the next step of closure and to have some test results decide the future of our family.

Waiting.

Coping Mechanisms

One of the main triggers of me going a little loopy is when there is too much inside my head. Brain dumps are my best friend, I need to hold my head over a sheet of paper and let everything that’s inside it fall out of my ear and allow itself to become more organised somewhere other than my skull. The house is always liberally scattered with sheets of paper with random scrawlings, doodles and numbers that at one point made sense to me, but now out of context, and usually with the same thought spread over different scraps of paper, they may as well be written in another language.

Inspired by this beautiful diary on Kikki.K I have resolved to empty my brain on a daily basis and give those currently wandering thoughts a home where I can make a little more sense of them. Unfortunately, I know that if I drop $30 on a book with nothing but numbers and a pretty cover I’m going to freak out about using it, the perfectionist in me will rise up and it will sit untouched forever more.

Instead I’ve gone for the McValue meal version: one $3 Derwent sketchbook and a sharpie, no new notebook=neat writing guilt, no beating myself up if I miss a day, just focusing on making my mental state a little more stable and clearing up the debris that is currently fighting for attention within my cranium.

I do hope that 2010 will be 365 days of awesome for me and for our little family. Although in comparison to the mental clusterfuck that has been 2009, even a mediocre year will look like peaches and cream. I know that nothing will magically become wonderful in three days time when the clock ticks over, but  I can’t help but feel excited about the fresh start, and hopefully this little book will be part of it.

The Daily Battle

I stutter occasionally. I will be mid sentence when my brain decides to stop communicating with my mouth and I get stuck on a sound. It tends to flare up when I get tired, stressed or just mentally unstable in someway.

It happened today, and as I stood there stuck on “Ra” for thirty seconds I thought how similar it was to my mood swings. I battle to take myself to stability in the same way that I try to claw my way to a word that makes sense, only getting more frustrated that there’s a missing connection that is getting in the way of what I want, only getting more embrassed that I can’t do a function as basic as speaking or being happy.

When I fall into a pit, or even worse – the cycle of miserable followed by the manic happiness and energy levels through the roof, leading to a bigger comedown than an entire crate of Ketamine, I don’t want to be there. My brain is saying that it doesn’t make sense to be crumpled in a heap and sobbing because I burnt the toast, I know logically that I shouldn’t explode at the kids because they spilt some drink, I know I shouldn’t despise my husband because I can hear his breathing. Yet I do.

Just like the stuttering it’s absolutely exhausting trying to drag myself out of that, but with depression it isn’t a case of focusing and trying to chane the word that I was about to say. It’s a very self aware battle to take myself from darkness into a functional life, knowing that there’s a good chance that I will be back there tomorrow and the battle will continue on.

There isn’t much point to this, there’s no happy ending or fabulous conclusion where I say how much this helps me grow as a person. I hate it. I hate not functioning as a regular person, I hate the lack of understanding from people who simply can’t understand why I don’t wake up one morning and just decide to be happy, I hate that it’s reached a point where I really believe my lack of stability is affecting my ability to raise my children.

I really would just like to find that switch that evens it all out and makes me normal, I’m not asking for perfection, just something closer resembling the average person. I want to be average.