Harper.

Today marks two years since my daughter Harper was born too soon at just 20 weeks, due to the incompetent cervix I didn't even know I had. 

Wow, so two years. How does two years feel like forever ago but just like yesterday all at the same time? So much has happened in just two years and I feel very old. I can't help but have flash backs of that day two years ago. The painful contractions as they induced me into labor with pictocin. How I lay there completely tormented and confused, sad and angry and helpless. The infection and fever I had. Not wanting to believe my daughter had died before she was even given a chance at life, before she even took a breath of air, and how I couldn't help but feel completely and totally responsible because it was my body that had failed.

It is tradition that we let go balloons on our babies birthdays. Today, the weather matches my mood perfectly. Gray, cold, rainy... I only hope it stops raining so we can let Harper's pink balloon into the sky. I wrote a message to her, hoping somewhere out there she will read it. But I have so much to say to the little one I never met. Who should be sitting on this couch with me, a year and a half old. Who should be cuddling up next to me, who I should be singing sweet lullabies to at night. But no. Instead her soul floats along somewhere out there, with Eli and the other little one we lost this year. I can only hope that she somehow feels the love I have for her, I hope she knows how much I miss her and want her here on earth. 

Tiny steps.

On Infant & Pregnancy Loss Awareness Day, I felt something inside me shift. I wouldn't say I felt "acceptance" or anything like that, but I did something I had been avoiding for awhile because it hurt too much.

When we first lost Harper, we brought her home in a pink urn. It was not the homecoming i had in mind and I felt like my heart had been ripped out of my chest. On the ride home from the funeral home, my arms ached to feel her warm, squirming body, but instead I held a box with an urn inside it. I could barely look at it. It felt so unreal to me. My baby was inside this little box, the baby I knew was inside my belly only a week ago. I was so overcome with disbelief and sadness, that we placed her in the room we designated her nursery. It took a lot of courage to even go in that room, let alone be faced with her urn. I know this sounds strange. Why wouldn't I want to talk to her each day, be in that room with her ashes? Because it was a reminder that she was not alive. She had died. And I couldn't face it. So I shut the door for a long time. A few months later, we opened the door and I even went in the room and talked to her a few times. I listened to Florence & the Machine loudly and cried my eyes out (some of her songs absolutely rip my heart out, they're so haunting and emotional.. I must have played that album for four months straight). 

When we started trying to conceive again, and we got pregnant again, I felt it were a little easier to walk by that room with the door open and not be overwhelmed with grief. Until we got pregnant and lost Eli, again at that 20 week mark. I knew it was happening all over again. We went to the same funeral home and brought our son home in a matching blue urn. I stared down at the box in my hands and felt the most helpless I had ever felt. Almost as if it were happening to somebody else. This had already happened once. It wasn't supposed to happen again. But it did. And it was. We placed his urn next to hers and I cried and felt hopeless and like it wasn't my life. It wasn't real. The nursery became a sad, avoided room in the house. Almost my own mini graveyard which I had to walk by each day.

I couldn't handle it and made my husband turn the room into a guest room. We bought a bed and night stand. We put all the baby related items and gifts that never got used in boxes in the basement. In a fit of crazy rage, I pulled all my maternity jeans and clothes off their hangers (I had kept them up after that first loss when we had hope for a successful second try) and threw them into the hallway. I told my husband to pack them up and get them out of my sight. 

But where would the urns go? If it wasn't their room anymore, where could we put them? I was still too fragile to look at them every day, it only reminded me of what we had lost. So in a random moment, we put them on a shelf in another spare room where the computer is. I never felt happy with this, but I didn't know what else to do. I hardly went into that room so it wouldn't be too hard on me. And I didn't have to walk by it each day. But I also didn't want them to feel forgotten, if that makes sense. It was such an odd feeling. What do you do?

So they stayed up there for awhile. Until this past Tuesday. My husband and I were sitting on the couch and we were going to light candles in a few hours. I said to him, "I think we should have Harper and Eli in the room we sit in most, I want them to be with us." I had been thinking about this for a little while, but never acted on it. I still hesitated. Would it upset me? Would I feel depressed at the sight of their urns? And another thought nagged in the back of my mind, how would visitors react? Family and friends? Of course, nobody talks about it but would they be caught off gaurd by the sight of our babies urns? I guess something inside me flipped a switch. I don't know when it happened but I stopped fearing their urns and the sadness that came with it, and I now wanted them with me.  

So there they sit, on our bookshelf, and I can look over and see them at any time I want. And it's okay. At first, it made me sad...and now, I feel like they're almost here with me. Sitting in this room with us. I want them to feel loved, a part of our family, even though they aren't physically here. And I know ashes can't feel that love, and I know it's just a container for their bodies... But I am holding onto their souls in my heart. Their spirits. 

October 15th

Today is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day. I will light candles at 7:00 pm for the babies I have lost. If each time zone lights their candles at 7:00 pm, it will create a continuous wave of light for 24 hours, symbolizing our babies lives...how they will live on and shine bright, even when they are not here with us on earth.

Tonight I will be lighting candles in memory of our daughter Harper, our son Eli, and our little bean whose heart stopped beating at only 8 weeks this past May. I can't help but think about all we have been through (big surprise there) and feel complete sadness over all that we have lost, and all that we should have known. I should be pregnant now, in fact. I would have been about eight months pregnant and almost ready to deliver. I could be in such a different situation right now. But no, instead I sit here thinking about all that we have lost. All that we have been through, and I can't help but feel total disbelief. When did this become my life? This life of loss, grief, sadness, madness, trauma? When did this become my new normal? How did I even get here? I know I can't turn back and I can't go back into time and put the TAC in place that very first loss, but damnit, I would if I could. But I can't. And it is utterly frustrating. 

My therapist told me last week that I am very angry. I guess she is right, I am. I am mad at the world, at its cruel circle of life, how life and death can just happen. How life can be created and then ripped right from you, for no damn good reason. There is no reason my babies had to die. I don't care what anyone says. I've heard, "God has grander plans" or "God needed more angles." Really? God decided to give me a child and then take it away? Why didn't he just keep them in the first place and spare us all this pain? I don't know. I just don't know. 

Some people don't even know I was pregnant this past March. Most people have no clue. They don't understand what each day is like for me. Dragging myself out of bed. Going to work and "being normal" when inside I just went to die. 

I miss you all so much.

Make it better.

So, last week, I saw a physical therapist for pelvic floor dysfunction. Basically, my urologist felt around and determined that my pelvic floor muscles were in a spasm and I needed therapy to fix it. Which could be the culprit of all of my discomfort and issues the past couple of months.

What a great experience! This therapist was super sweet and gentle and understanding. I am so glad I was referred to her. I wasn't really sure what to expect. I described how I had been feeling and she listened to my entire story and history and then she had me lie on the table. She moved my legs around, tested my resistance, and felt the muscles around my hips. Then she did an internal exam and said, "oh yes, you are completely in a spasm! All of your muscles are completely tightened!" And she was finding trigger points... Basically spots of muscle that are so tight and worked up that they form little nodules. And, on top of this, I have a muscle that is constantly twitching! Like an eye twitch. And now (like right now actually) when I'm sitting I can actually feel it twitching. It is the weirdest sensation, even though it's barely there. So, she gave me some simple yoga-based exercises to do twice a day and I have to see her once a week for three months. I think we may be doing some internal massage this week, so I'm kinda wondering what that will entail but I can already feel a difference, I believe. But how crazy is that... To have your entire pelvic floor constantly flexed and not even be aware of it! But it is a result if all if the trauma I have experienced in the past few years. And stress and PTSD doesn't help it either.  

So here I am, trying to be brave again. Trying to trust a doctor (well, therapist really so maybe she doesn't count?) and hoping this fixes me. I haven't given up hope on TTC entirely but I must be able to comfortably be able to have sex again for that to even be an option, right? I see my other therapist tomorrow, too. I think talking to her has helped a lot, too. I'm trying to get me in a better place, physically and emotionally. It's been hard, and Harper's 2nd birthday is coming up on the 24th. I took the day off work because I know it will be pointless for me to try to work that day. My husband and I will get a balloon and we will write a message to her and set it into the sky. I can't believe it's only been two years... It feels like ages ago, when this journey began. 

I feel so old.