Good Riddance May 2011

May 2011 was an emotional journey of sorts for me. I have never felt so alone and unfamiliar with myself. I don't think I was prepared for the intensity of the emotions I would feel about my miscarriage, even after the miscarriage was done. I tried to rationalize what was happening and then was surprised and taken aback by the weight of it all. I grieved. I am still grieving. But why? There was not a life lost... Others I care so deeply about have lost REAL loved ones. What right do I have to grieve for my non-baby-producing pregnancy?!?

I have always been a highly-emotional person. I have encountered many people who do not understand and therefore can not deal with my emotional-ness. Normally, I let my emotions flow forth with no remorse, despite the opinions of others that I am OVERLY-emotional.

Lately I have started to think maybe they were right and there is something wrong with me. Maybe I feel too much and make a big deal about too many things. Maybe all this emotional shit is because I overanalyze everything. Maybe I am crazy.

Joey's death was another moment when the intensity of my emotions and grief shocked me. I still haven't really dealt with it, mostly because I do not feel like I have any right to grieve in comparison to the level of loss felt by Shawn and his family. Yes, Joey was my family, too, but I only saw four years of his life, and only snippets at a time, during family functions. The rest of the family lost someone they had spent a lifetime with, a part of them.

So I have been stuck in this odd, gray and foggy place- grieving for the loss of his life, missed opportunities and a lost future. Grieving for the people I love (more than I thought I ever could) as they face this new life without one of their own. Yet at the same time, not allowing myself to grieve at all. Holding back because of a self-imposed limit of grief.

Add to the nine-month-old restricted grief a new, more inner-personal (is that even a term?) grief because of my blighted ovum/miscarriage and my emotional state has become a separate entity. I feel like I am experiencing life in the third-person. This is not happening, it's not real... I have started referring to my two-week ordeal as "when I was sick" because I don't know how else to compartmentalize it. I have stopped talking to my husband about it because I feel like I should already be moving on. I WANT to move on, but I feel so stuck. Unable to process so much more than just this. Luckily, I have a few great friends that have allowed me to talk about it without judgement and with complete sincerity... To them, I am eternal grateful. There are others that I expected to be there for me, like I have been for them, that are, surprisingly, no where to be found. This compounds the emotions because I really needed/need them and find myself frustrated with the one-way relationship.

During all this, I am watching the lives of others I care about with more clarity, but with a sense of detachment. I congratulate with the uttermost sincerity when something good happens for a friend or loved one. I truly feel my heart break when those same people lose someone else, unexpectedly and tragically, or when someone I love is very ill. Unable to do anything but watch from afar, scared to offend someone with my emotions. Afraid to feel "more than I should".

Where is the happy medium between bottling your emotions and letting them fly? Should there be a limit on emotions? Who gets to limit those emotions? Someone else than the person feeling them? I am 28 years old and feel like I am no further developed, emotionally, than I was at 18. I feel lost and overwhelmed, unhealthy, tired and scared, empty...

I miss feeling hope...

-Nic

“There is in every true woman's heart, a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.” - Washington Irving

May 2011, So Far

May 1st reminded me of the first time I went to Hawaii. I spent the day reflecting on the first time Shawn and I had to say "bye for now" (I hate the word good-bye, it sounds too final...). Here is what I wrote on May 1st but didn't publish and includes updates from May 3rd and today.

May 1, 2011
Four years ago today, I was boarding a plane back to SLC, flying away from the love of my life, after only four days with him in HI. Soon, he'd be going on his first deployment, and I would find myself dealing with the hardest thing I've ever done.

I bawled my eyes out saying bye. There was a banner hanging in the terminal that said, "May 1, 2007 is a GREAT day!", or something to that affect. (For the record, I was really pissed at that sign.) I told Shawn, and everyone else within earshot in the Honolulu airport, that I didn't know how to do "this", I flat out couldn't do it. The thought of how many more times I'd have to do this until he'd be home for good seemed insurmountable.

On the flight home all I could think about was how I was going to survive the wait. The wait for emails. The wait for phone calls. The wait for underways and deployments to be over. The wait for the days, weeks and months to pass until we could see each other again... How was I, impatient little me, going to manage to get through this?

I wish I could say I handled it with grace, but that would be a horrible lie. I cried the whole flight home, including the hour layover in San Fran. When I finally made it back to my apartment, I laid on the floor and bawled some more. Shawn and I are now able to joke about our first farewell. He teases me about being so emotionally distraught that I was bed-ridden for a week. It wasn't far from the truth...

Of course it got easier. I should say the wait for emails, phone calls, underways and deployments became less emotional. Even after our first year apart, there were still times I thought I would crumble. Ellie likes to remind me of the morning I accidentally knocked her piggy bank onto the ceramic tile, causing it and all its contents to shatter across the floor. All semblance of normalcy I had been grappling for did the same.

There were also moments when it felt like there was a higher power intervening and granting reprieves to keep me from loosing my mind- like when Shawn's boat surfaced for a swim day and his cell phone managed to work in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Or when I cried that all I needed was an email and five minutes later there it was... during a period when Shawn was supposed to be in an email "black-out". (He had written a series of emails knowing he would be in black-out and that they would sporadically be delivered to me. <3)

Eventually the breakdowns got fewer and farther between, and I think I even found a sense of independence that was greater than anything I had ever felt. I continued to survive the thing I thought was impossible as of May 1, 2007. Our relationship survived separation and stresses that I never thought I could endure before. With each heartache associated with being "married to the military", I learned the true depth of my feelings for Shawn, and his for me.

* * * * *

May 3, 2011
After all that, we finally got to celebrate Shawn's first year home. It hasn't been the easiest year. At times, our marriage has been a struggle. We had to adjust to cohabitation for the first time in our marriage. After two and a half years of successful, long-distance marriage we thought we had this in the bag. I think we both disregarded what others in our situation had said about the readjustment period. This was the time in life that I had been waiting for but it was not living up to the expectations.

So much of our "military life" seems like a distant memory. I find myself forgetting that we were apart for so long or that his homecoming wasn't everything we had hoped it would be. It may have taken us some getting used to, but we got it now.

* * * * *

May 7, 2011

Shortly after Shawn got home, we decided that when my IUD expired, we would not renew it and "see what happens". This was a huge departure from Shawn's original plan, which was to wait for until he was done with school before trying. (The second revised draft of the plan was to wait just one year after he was home before trying.)

We tried for five months before we got a positive on the HPT. We were so excited! We went to the doctor on April 6th and got our confirmation. We started making plans. We notified those closest to us. Everything was coming together...

Yesterday we went in for our ten week appointment. It was time to hear the baby's heartbeat and make sure everything was alright. We were full of hope and happiness as we waited for the doctor. I wanted to record the sound of the baby's heartbeat for Ellie to hear when we got home. My doctor was so happy with the progress my body had made in the past four weeks. Everything was developing exactly how it was supposed to. The only thing left was to hear the heartbeat.

I can't pinpoint the exact moment when I knew something was wrong. It was either when they referred to the gray matter in the sack on the screen as "debris", or when my doctor called in a third doctor to try to locate the baby on the ultrasound.

Apparently I had what is called an anembryonic pregnancy. Everything else about my pregnancy developed perfectly, except the baby.

There is no baby. There never was a baby. Just an empty sack...

Admittedly, I am having a hard time excepting all this. I read the statistics from the American Pregnancy Association that tells me that 1 in 4 medically confirmed pregnancies end in miscarriage, and half of those are caused by the same thing that happened to us. I had hoped the statistics would make me more stoic about the situation. Detach me from the "loss" of it all. I notified all those that knew of my pregnancy so I could begin the process of moving on from here. No baby? Fine. Let's get whatever the next step is over with...

I have tried looking at the bright side, telling myself that what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, everything happens for a reason- one cliche after another. Blah blah blah...

I am, however, incredibly grateful that I am not currently carrying what was once a living embryo around, that it is just an empty sack. But the intense feeling of loss of the idea of having a baby growing inside me is still there. All the hopes and dreams of the "Wee Baby Shamus" (thank you, Archer) as we had been calling it are interrupted by guilt, grief and emptiness.

Shawn has been amazing through all this. Attentive as always, but also sharing his feelings with me and being willing to talk about our loss. In our true manner of dealing with stuff like this, we have been making jokes, between the bouts of sadness, as a defense mechanism. Before we learned about what was going on, we had shortened Wee Baby Shamus to "WBS". Yesterday Shawn said, "We thought WBS stood for Wee Baby Shamus but apparently it stood for Water-filled, Baby-less Sack." (He was also quick to point out that we did not lose our WBS, he's still yet to be conceived.) This morning Ellie seemed particularly klutzy and we kept telling her to stop damaging the only human cells to survive the harsh conditions of my uterus. There was also a joke made comparing my uterus to a water balloon filled with goo.

Ellie has shown an amazing sense of understanding in all this. After much debate, we had decided to tell Ellie about the pregnancy shortly after the doctor had confirmed it. If there was something wrong and I ended up loosing the baby, Ellie would be effected by the aftermath without knowing what had transpired. We felt like it would not have been fair to cut her out of what was going on in her own family because of some silly notion that she would not understand or be able to handle the information due to her age.

With that said, she seemed to understand the issue far better than even we thought she would. She has expressed her own sadness in our family's loss, but has also stated that she understands that there was not really a baby there, so it's okay. Her matter-of- fact outlook has made it easier for us.

Now, I really just want this to be over. The doctor told me I could either wait until my body realizes there is something wrong and "expels" the matter itself, or "medically intervene". The first idea disgusts me. Mostly because I don't want to continue to feel the pregnancy symptoms for no reason. Nausea is enough of a pain in the ass without the added disappointment of it NOT being because your baby is growing. Being extremely tired is enough of an inconvenience to my life without knowing it isn't going to produce a little bundle of joy when this is all over. And if I am not pregnant, I would really like to enjoy as many DTH rolls from Tsunami as possible before we conceive again. Still, the idea of physically going through a miscarriage freaks me out...

So that is May for the O'Shea family so far...