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Miscarriagemoon

3/28/2014

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When we were only around 6 weeks pregnant, we started having this conversation about how this would be our last 9 months to travel just the two of us, so we booked the ubiquitous "Babymoon" (what travel site or women's magazine or major hotel/resort brand came up with that garbage anyway?). We couldn't necessarily afford it, but money is no object in the face of blind joy. We figured we'd thank ourselves later. I wrote a lovely letter to the Airbnb.com renter telling her all about how we would be coming to use her tropical oceanfront condo as a Babymoon escape, pushed send, the deal was made, and I promptly set to fantasizing about sunning myself under a palm tree complete with cute little baby bump sticking out of my bikini. 

Fast forward to today (when I would have been around 18 weeks…gosh that's hard to wrap my head around) with the reservation date quickly approaching. The renter lady emailed me to confirm our arrival details. She wrote : "we're happy to be welcoming you and your husband to celebrate your babymoon". I had forgotten she knew. It was like taking a bullet. A bullet I tell you. Ok, no, I've never taken a bullet per se, but I have to imagine. 

It got me thinking though. About Miscarriagemoons (is it possible i just coined the most bizarre term ever uttered?) They actually seem like kind of a brilliant idea, right? It's like a Babymoon! With booze! (that's how we'll advertise them) Chances are there is no time in your life when you have been more in the need of a vacation or in need of a chance to reconnect with your partner over something exciting. I, for one, certainly can't think of a better reason to drink guilt-free pina coladas (and I've dedicated considerable thought to the topic). I'm counting on stupidly high levels of Vitamin D to counteract the Ghosts of What May Have Been and we'll go from there. I'll report back from the other side!

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Lightning Strikes Twice (or : The Universe Doesn't Play)

3/25/2014

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What did I once say about not-knowing being worse than bad news? I was wrong. Bad news might be worse. At least with not-knowing there is always room for hope. When it’s definitive, the party is over. 

In the first days after the worst news of my life a number of things began to happen regularly. One of these things being that I would wake up each day and remember what had happened before I even opened my eyes. Actually, more accurately, I would remember something terrible was about to dawn on me. And then it would dawn. I would have that sensation where you aren’t quite sure if it is a nightmare yet, but every day I had to reconcile that this was no dream. I sobbed in a way I can’t remember doing since I was a little girl. It was the kind of crying where you can’t catch your breath and it thunders in your ears and makes you feel sweaty and shaky and like you’re going to be sick. Then I would feel totally numb. The sobbing-numbness routine is a fun little cycle if you haven’t had the chance to experience it yourself. I asked myself repeatedly when I would ever feel like myself again? It actually felt impossible to imagine myself truly happy. 

Intellectually, I knew I had to grieve, but that I also had to make some rough stabs at trying to keep on living. In this vein, I attempted to keep myself distracted. I had dinner with both sets of in-laws (my husband’s and best friend’s parents), I watched crap TV, I had friends over to watch the Super Bowl, I made onion dip (you know what's sadder than onion dip? a depressed person making onion dip). All those things certainly helped to take my mind off things and provided momentary comfort, but every time I caught myself laughing or forgetting it was met with a counteracting and crushing wallop of sadness that hurt ten times worse when I remembered.

In my life I had always been lucky enough to observe that when I worked hard and lived in the world authentically as myself, that one thing flowed to the next. Working tirelessly (read: nerdily) in school flowed into going to a university and on travels that would shape me, which flowed to growing and accepting myself as a person, which flowed to finding a masters degree that reflected my personal passions, which flowed to learning to love myself, which lead to acknowledging I had found the One to love me back and marrying that person, which lead to conceiving a baby. However now I found myself in a position from which no amount of hard work, or charisma, or passion could rescue me. For the first time in my life I actually did not know if or when I would be okay again. 

Time stretched on for an eternity during these days, but I also entered a bizarre time warp where sometimes I would glance at the clock and could hardly believe that hours and hours had flashed by while I stared out the window or into thin air. The fact that my body still felt pregnant was a cruel and constant torment. Seeing a mother walking in the street carrying her child was enough to completely knock the wind out of me. My email inbox incessantly delivered subject lines such as “Your Baby’s Development at 11 weeks” and “When Will I Start Showing?”. I would press delete with shocking speed thinking futilely that I could out-run the inevitable emotional stab. There was a stack of books about pregnancy, a pregnancy journal I excitedly started, and a prenatal workout DVD that, although hidden in my apartment, radiated a constant frequency of pain from their respective hiding spots (see Ever Forward Fail File Post #2). Somewhere in the dark mystery of Chris' computer there were also the first weeks of “belly photos” that we took--pictures of me lovingly touching the belly that would soon be swollen and full of baby. 


It seemed everyone started posting sonogram photos all at once on Facebook and although I'm usually the girl who loves seeing those, people may as well have been dangling them before my face and laughing. Photos posted of new moms glancing down at their beautiful newborns and smiling sweetly morphed into a demonic taunting sneers in my mind's eye. It was enough to drive a person completely mad. And mad is how I began to feel as I sat inside my apartment wondering when my body would begin to miscarry the heart within me that was no longer beating. One such afternoon I started to feel like I actually could not breathe and so I forced myself to bundle up and go outside and take a walk. And I got mugged. The cruel and ridiculous irony of this was not lost on me. I actually found myself almost laughing thinking, Is that all you've got, Universe?! It would have perhaps been enough to shake the belief of even the most devout disciple of Universal Justice or Karma or a Greater Power. In an odd way however, getting mugged was a gift. It was the first time I was able to look into the future and see a version of myself telling any element of my story with sardonic humor. It jolted me out of my fog and forced me to reconnect with my most natural coping mechanism--finding the (at times sick) humor in things. It was like the Universe was shaking me and saying you better start fighting back or I will walk all over you, girl!

Perhaps the take-away of learning that things actually always can get worse is that we should fiercely appreciate what we have even when things seem to be the darkest. Now, I'm not saying I was the obnoxious person who was able to recognize or grasp that in the moment, but it's certainly a universal truth thats been made abundantly clear to me as I was dragged kicking and screaming further and further into its inevitable verity. 

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Ever Forward Fail #2 : Destroy the Evidence

3/21/2014

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EF FAIL #2: Because it's not as easy as you would think to destroy the evidence 
(and a bon fire just feels so permanent)  

This stack of items was super exciting to accumulate, 
but now they have to be hidden from me at all times so I don't have a total mental breakdown :

The Belly Book : I lovingly answered questions about the day I found I was pregnant, my cravings, our plans
Prenatal work out DVD : I know! how about instead I gain like 10 lbs of hormone and depression weight?!
Pregnancy, Childbirth, & the Newborn : I feel like this book actually radiates an aura of pain from wherever I hide it
Taking Charge of Your Fertility : aaaand instead it took charge of me
Children's Books : I always superstitiously lied and said these were for other people's kids,
 but [full disclosure] they were really for mine

Alright. I took the photo. Back to their hiding places they go. For now. 

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The Saint of Lost Causes

3/18/2014

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By the time my 10-day follow up appointment rolled around I knew everything would be okay. I knew that if the baby grew from point A to point B there was no reason it wouldn’t continue on to point C. That was logical and scientific and solid. I was sickeningly nervous of course, but still hopeful. While I sat in the lobby awaiting Chris who was coming from work to meet me, a little 4 year old girl belted Phil Collins' “You’ll Be in My Heart” and I took it to mean the cosmos was smiling down on my soon-to-be good fortune. I entered the ultrasound room like the professional I had become over the last two and a half weeks. I knew the drill. I changed and hopped on the table and laid back. I watched the screen ready to see my baby who I was told at this point would be the size of a big old green olive or maybe a blueberry if the little one happened to be a couple weeks behind. Looking back, I remember that, unlike the last two times, the monitor was placed in an awkward position that I had to crane my head up and back to see over my left shoulder. Later I wondered if that was the first ever-so-slight crack in the universe before the bottom fell out.

I watched the screen and felt the entire earth give way and rock under me as it became increasingly clear that the ultrasound tech was not seeing anything. I began furiously praying to St. Jude as my mom had told me she did at my last ultrasound. Although raised half Jewish and half Episcopalian, I don't particularly identify with my Christian half or with organized religion at all for that matter, but this seemed like a moment where the Saint of Lost Causes might forgive me for that and give me just one little miracle for being a good person. The tech searched around for a bit longer and then stoically said she was going to go show the doctor the images. 

The guarded, slow motion way in which this was unfolding was scarier than any suspenseful horror film ever written. Chris stood up and put his arm around me and his lips on the top of my head, but I could not feel a thing. The doctor walked in. She must have been no older than Chris I observed offhandedly with some extra part of my brain that wasn’t preemptively screaming and sobbing. This is where the entire moment was put on pause and I had an utterly out-of-body experience. 

As a therapist in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, I had been on the other side of countless numbers of these conversations. The Out-of-Body Version of Me looked down from my perch on the ceiling and thought “Huh! That’s interesting, this is what it is to be the patient about to get bad news”. All those years of empathizing and putting myself as an ally and advocate for the bad news recipients had made me acutely aware of everything happening in the moment. First I noticed the way the ultrasound tech stood in the background and would not make eye contact with me. Later maybe she would say to her husband “Oh I had such a sad case today” or maybe she would just compartmentalize and never think of me as a human being again because medical people can be shockingly good at that. I noticed the way the doctor made a point to sit and get at eye level with me like someone had told her to do in some “patient centered care” seminar once. I watched the hitched breath she took before speaking that revealed she would rather be anywhere else than doing this right now. Then as if on command all the fractured versions of me -- the one perched on the ceiling, the dissociated one in the fetal position in the corner, the one already weeping her heart out-- rushed back into the version of me sitting on the hard examination table and I heard the doctor say there was no more heartbeat and that the pregnancy would no longer be considered viable. Chris asked if they would be doing another another ultrasound to confirm and they said no. No they would not. 

It’s strange to find yourself inside the exact moment you spent weeks not allowing yourself to look at as a possibility. I felt about a million happy possibilities and expectations for how my day, month, year was going to go evaporate into thin air. I have no memory of getting home and into pajamas and under the covers. I have one brief flash of recollection that as we passed over the Brooklyn Bridge the water looked more gray than I had ever seen it. The rest of the day was a cruel repetitious cycle of all my closest friends and family texting or calling to ask how my ultrasound went. Each time I explained it I would relive the moment so fully that it actually knocked the breath out of me. I turned off my phone and sobbed like a wounded animal while Chris cradled me in his arms and eventually I gave in to the salve of numbness. This may have been the first day of my life where a happily ever after seemed entirely out of reach.
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A Sad Little Present

3/14/2014

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This bottle of Veuve Clicquot 
has been taking up residence in my refrigerator since the day I found out I was pregnant. 
(That day happened to be right before New Year's Eve.) 

I remember thinking briefly : "Oh darn, I won't be able to have our nice champagne", 
but then laughed at what a ridiculously easy trade it was : a baby in return for bubbly. I'll take it. 

Every time I remember I can drink since the miscarriage it's like a sad little present. 
I think : "Oo! I can have a glass of wine"  and then remember instantly why that is. 

I have had plenty of conversations & laughs with friends over glasses of wine since all this happened, 
but I have not been able to bring myself to touch this bottle. 
It represents the very first moment I let myself believe I was pregnant. The start of it all.

Today, however, is my birthday. 
And I am going to pop this sucker and toast to moving Ever Forward. 
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Ten Days of Limbo

3/11/2014

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What my pregnancy process confirmed is that not-knowing is ten-times more frightening than bad news. I suppose I always knew this, but never have I felt it so acutely. 

The morning I went in for my follow up ultrasound I felt like the world had been drained of oxygen. I was frozen with fear as snow pelted down and I took a slow motion cab ride uptown to the hospital. I had prayed and prayed for the week from Hell to speed by, but as it did, and as I got closer to the day of my appointment the dread built to a fever pitch. Would my greatest fears be confirmed or would I be given back hope? Keeping positive energy flowing felt like a battle and I was never more than a deep breath away from sobbing. 

The way it all unfolded felt quite unremarkable for all the drama and build leading up to it. I felt oddly grateful that the ultrasound room was less foreign this time although the silence of it was still deafening. I stripped from the waist down and draped myself with a scratchy hospital gown. As I sat on the exam table I sent a last-ditch effort blast of positive energy toward my uterus. I steeled myself for what was to come and leaned back. When the ultrasound tech told me to hold my breath I was confused, first of all, because I was sure I hadn’t breathed in days anyway, and secondly, because they did not ask me to do this at my last appointment. I focused my eyes on the screen perched above me to see something flickering on the screen. They were asking me to hold my breath so they could count the beats. Even though intellectually I knew that flicker on the monitor was a heartbeat--the thing I had longed so desperately to see--I could not accept it. Chris squeezed my hand and lifted his eyebrows in excitement, but I returned his glance with what can only be described as deer-in-the-headlights eyes. I simply wouldn’t let myself feel excited because I was so desperately trying to protect myself. 

Another ultrasound tech entered cheerfully stating “sometimes it’s nice to have a second set of eyes”. I wasn’t buying. Something was wrong. I felt it. The doctor came in and with a tentative look said the baby was there, but measuring two weeks behind what they would expect at my calculated eight and a half weeks and that the heartbeat was a bit slow. "Slow for six weeks or for eight?" I asked trying desperately to piece things together. Then the doctor said that the “other sac” now appeared to be empty and not viable. I stared at him like he was suddenly speaking Mandarin. “The other sac?” I managed to choke out. Apparently this was a twin pregnancy that no one bothered to mention to me at the last ultrasound because they were pretty sure I was miscarrying. My mind was beyond blown. I laugh now remembering that I asked, "Is that normal!?". I guess it took my dumbfounded self a moment to recognize that two sacs meant twins. The doctor chuckled humorlessly and said, "Well we see it all the time".  A wave of foggy information washed over me about something called Vanishing Twin where one sac ends up being reabsorbed or miscarried and the other one usually goes on to develop normally. I was only half able to hear. In an instant I was forced to simultaneously process that I was pregnant with twins, but now I am not. More waiting was prescribed. We’d know better how the remaining embryo was doing in ten days I was told. Ten more days of limbo.

When we walked into the waiting room my mom leapt up and asked for the report. We told her and she looked overjoyed to hear there was a heartbeat. I wanted to be excited too, but anger came out instead and I brusquely insisted we should not get our hopes up. I told my sister and closest friends and everyone's instantly positive outlook felt like a threat to my tightly-gripped delusions of rationality and neutrality about the matter. It took days for the icy defense mechanism to melt away and before I decided to give myself permission to feel hopeful. There was nothing there before and now there was a heartbeat. That was a clearcut move in the right direction. I was even able to fairly quickly make my peace with the fact that the one twin was never meant to develop. All my energy was turned toward "The Shrimp" as we affectionately nicknamed the embryo. 

So those ten days of waiting took on a different quality. During the previous week of waiting, it hurt too much to acknowledge even in the smallest way that I was pregnant for fear that it just wasn't true.  During the ten day waiting period, however, I knew that I was pregnant and whether it was for the next eight months or the next eight minutes, no one could take that fact away from me.  There was a heart beat flickering away inside my body. I let myself lovingly rest my hand on my belly, I allowed myself to take small glances at the pregnancy apps on my phone, and I unlocked fantasies of baby names, cribs, and due dates. I let myself refer to the baby like I knew she was coming and it felt good. 



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THE EVER FORWARD FAIL FILES: #1

3/7/2014

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Ever Forward Fail #1: Get Plenty of Rest

I was told so often during this process-- take care of yourself and get plenty of rest. It seemed like a sensible enough stepping stone toward decreased anxiety and eventual healing. However, I have to imagine the most common response to people telling you "get plenty of rest" is rampant insomnia. At least that was my experience. And nowwwwww introducing for the very first in my "EVER FORWARD FAIL" Series : 

The Top 10 Things I Found Myself Doing in the middle of the night when I was not getting this supposed, elusive, healing rest:

10. Obsessing. Obsessively : Maybe my calculations were off and thats why the baby is measuring small. Maybe it was that cold medicine I took before I knew I was preggo that is causing all this. Maybe a black cat crossed my path and sprayed me with evil luck. Maybe I'm obsessing too much. Am I obsessing too much ?

9. Organizing. Badly : There was an evening that I spent the hours of 2AM- 4AM shuffling things around in my medicine cabinet and in the morning it still looked-if possible-worse. I wondered if I had dreamt it. I hadn't. I was just that dysfunctional at the moment.

8. Eating. On the Floor : Why on the floor, you ask? Reasonable question. Something about impending doom makes you do bizarre things. Like sitting cross-legged on the floor eating your way through a box of tasteless water crackers. Sure, we'll say it was because I was nauseous. 

7. Reading. Without Comprehension : I would say this experience has provided me with a stack of approximately 15-20 unfinished books. I would be up at like 3 AM staring at the pages and by around 5AM I'd have turned a handful of chapters without having the slightest clue what I just read. Then I'd lose interest.

6. Looking at Facebook. All of it : I would stare at the glow of my iPhone for hours on end in the wee hours of the morning (I know, I know, that's supposed to make it even HARDER to fall asleep). By dawn I knew what you thought of every episode of House of Cards, "What City You Should Actually Live in", where you went on vacation, your snarky take on celebrity affairs, and had seen every cat video on the Internet. 

5. Message Boards. Satan's Candy : I read thousands of pregnancy message boards and worked to stretch and contort each one to fit my situation and glean maximum comfort out of each. Please refer to #10.

4. Wallowing. Like No Other : Now, I enjoy a good wallow under normal circumstances (see : My Spotify Playlists : "All The Worlds Beautiful Sadness" and "One Stop Shop for Melancholia" … I wish I was taking creative license here, people), but this experience took it to a whole new level. I didn't indulge too much during the day, but at night… well, I did. 

3. Composing Epic Emails. Sorry Friends. : Sometimes 3 AM just feels like the right time to express your true feelings of undying love and soul connection to friends and family in a detailed novel of an email. Nope. I'm not drunk. Stone cold sober and hormonally imbalanced (which may be worse).

2. Crafting. At sub-par Levels :  Any one need a janky looking friendship bracelet made at 4 in the morning?? No? Ok. Well let me know because I have like 10 of them. 

1.  Staring Blankly at the Ceiling. This one is fairly self explanatory. 
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The Sundae of Broken Dreams

3/5/2014

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If you search the annals of history and pop culture, you would be hard pressed to find substantial evidence of a sad moment in a old fashioned soda shoppe. It’s just not documented, because there is no reason for it to exist. Drinking a milkshake served to you by a fresh-faced kid in a white cap is empirically a joyful experience. However as we three sat in the corner of the perfectly restored and playfully old-timey Brooklyn soda shoppe, its inherent joyfulness lay on our collective chest like a ten-ton weight. The only thing I can think of that would have been more sad than the three of us in that soda shoppe was if I had been alone there. That was around the day when all babies took on a decidedly smug attitude and started glaring at me. This I could almost handle because, lets face it, babies have a certain well-fed smugness to them anyway that we all engage in an unspoken social contract to ignore. It was their pity I couldn’t stand--their tiny, swaddled, milk-scented pity. I swear a baby wrapped snugly in a sling plunked himself down across from me in a cafe and just sadly shook his head “no”. 

I should back up--to the moment when I peed on not one, not two, but six pregnancy test sticks. To the moment where I stood alone in my tiny bathroom starting at these fortune-telling sticks and they all beamed back up at me a resounding YES. YES! the thing that you have wanted since you were a little girl is happening. YES! it is terrifying and wonderful. YES! your body really DOES work the way it is supposed to after all. YES! to a happy new year. YES! to things falling into place. YES YES YES!  I always thought I would scream, and cry, and jump up and down clutching Chris joyfully, but my reaction was much more internal and subdued. Instead of a triumphant outward celebration, I quietly began to allow myself to believe in steps-- I let myself acknowledge that my body felt different, I let myself realize we really could fit a crib in the room with us, I let myself fantasize about this little miracle that was cooking inside of me, I allowed myself dreams of her little cheeks and hands and her smell. And then in the darkened room of my first-ever ultrasound after being poked and probed and prodded, I was told I may have allowed myself to believe too soon. I was told that this was most likely a miscarriage. We would know definitively in a week they said. And so began the longest week of my life that was kicked off by an afternoon of “walking around like zombies” (as my best friend Jeremy later described it) that lead us to that fateful soda shoppe. 

That day was the hardest I had experienced to date. The world skipped and jumped and raced around me as I moved in slow agonizing motion with the sound muted like I was underwater. My entire world hung in the balance while people selected books in the bookstore, bought tickets to movies, gathered groceries for dinner, and drank milkshakes. Looking back, I really only remember a foggy outline of the day. I know that I walked like I was moving through honey with Chris on one side of me and Jeremy on the other. I remember that day in black and white and blurred around the edges. That day faded into a night where I woke up repeatedly thinking it was all a dream only to remember it wasn’t and to cry myself back to sleep. 

Each day from there got a bit easier as I realized that hope was not lost and I could not surrender to thinking it was. It could have been a miscalculation, it could be a mistake, it could be so many things. There was a thin line to walk between the power of positive thinking and not wanting to make myself vulnerable by ignoring the potential worst case scenario. Impossible as it seemed, I managed to get into a place where more often than not, I believed in a miracle. I had just as much reason to believe things would work out wonderfully as terribly. I renewed my faith in my body and it’s power. I did all that I could to renew my faith that the Universe would make things happen how they were meant to happen. I let myself joke and be distracted. My mom flew in to put a blanket of comfort around my entire apartment and me within it. I ate the foods I craved with no guilt for the first time in my life. I read stories of mothers who had been told all hope was lost, but lived to see otherwise. I surrounded myself with people who I am lucky to say love me to an unfathomable degree. And I waited. There were days when I walked around in a fog and days where I laughed like life was normal. It was a strange sensation to live through a week that you knew ultimately would not matter in the history of your life. I would either look back on that week as the week before something wonderful or terrible happened ...or before more of the same happened. That week was the closest thing I have ever done to putting my entire life on pause. I ate. I napped. My mother dusted my bookshelves and organized my cabinets. Dear friends drifted in and out knowing there was nothing to say. I engaged in an epic battle against the magical thinking notion that if I let myself get negative, the worst would happen. It stood to reason that if I could convince myself to be truly positive, the best would unfold.

One thing I knew is that I had no choice but to move forward. Ever forward. Whether it was against my will or not I had to wake up every day and breathe and allow myself to be open to what was next.

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    lover of life. celebrator of everything. drama therapist. wife. friend. picking up the pieces. finding creative ways to put them back together.

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    © Rebecca Elkin-Young  and theEverForward.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Rebecca Elkin-Young and TheEverForward.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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