Archaelogy

There is a back corner of our garage where baby things accumulate.  It's where we hid away the little red suitcase of things we'd bought or been given for Zainab when it became clear she wasn't ever going to use them, along with the pram and carseat.  Over the last six months or so of this pregnancy it is where pre-loved baby things have washed up as dear friends have pressed them upon us.  Yesterday was a clear sunny day, impossibly warm for Autumn but a good washing day, so El Prima and I started our excavations.

We worked through boxes of baby clothes - washing and sorting them by size.  Tiny jumpsuits hung from our washing line like a cloud of white fluffy bats.  And we tried to imagine Adzuki's little feet - those little heels sliding regularly across the inside of my belly and giving El Prima well-timed kicks in the back - wearing some of these clothes.  It all feels quite unreal at this stage, but now that we've gotten past the same stage as our accident last time, some of the fear has lifted.  We're doing that crazy unbelievable thing - preparing for this baby to come home with us, and getting ready all the things we'll need to care for him as a living, breathing baby.  The part of my brain which tells me that I'm tempting fate, I'm hearing but not heeding.  Who knows what will happen, but I want to enjoy this bit of anticipation while we can.  

We started with the most recently stashed away things from friends, and then gradually dug deeper into the pile, finding the pram we'd bought second-hand for Zainab and pumping up the tyres, along with all the bits and pieces for it.  And finally we took a deep breath and turned to the little red suitcase.  I had imagined this as a little time capsule of all our hopes for Zainab - that we could open it, and while it might be sad, there might also be something bittersweet about her little brother wearing her hand-me-downs - a connection between the two.  I should have known from the weight of it that something was up, but the moment I unzipped it, we could smell what had happened - somehow water had got in and everything inside was mouldy and mildewy.  At first I just took a deep breath and started separating out the irretrievable things from the ones that might come good with a good soak, but as the extent of the damage became clear, we stopped and I wept.  That time, when we had felt Z kicking, and had bought these small things in anticipation - was well and truly gone - the new clothes we had bought then are no longer new but decaying.  The little gold sequined mardi gras shoes were still wrapped in plastic, so they smelt musty, but were mostly okay - the blue and orange overalls were so badly mildewed that the fabric fell apart as I pulled them out. The irretrievable things I packed back into the little red suitcase - it will have to go in the bin soon, but for now I needed some means of disposal that reflects the love and sadness we have for these mouldy little scraps and the baby who was supposed to wear them.

The other things, I soaked and washed and pegged out on the line - hoping that sunshine will help get rid of the smell, and that Adzuki won't mind if some of his clothes look slightly the worse for wear because they come from his sister.  Wednesday will be 36 weeks, so chances are, we'll be meeting him in the next month or so.  As scary as it is, we're putting faith in that thought. 

Don't mention the bump

I'm still here, but have gone quiet for a bit.  It is so hard to capture everything going on at the moment.  I'm at that funny stage where some people will look pointedly at my middle and say, "Are you....?" and I'll have to confess, Yes, Pregnant, while others are still surprised when I tell them.  Either way, there is a lot of telling going on, because being the blathermouth that I am, I'm not likely to leave things unexplained or unelaborated.  And yet, it all feels so awkward, because so often there is a great yawning gap between their and my understandings of what all this pregnancy business means.  For me, this is not a easy topic about happy future plans and discussion of baby products, it is a hot ball of molten lava which is both an amazing, miraculous thing and a very dangerous and unpredictable substance.  I need to put on the fireman's gloves for that.  It is here, on the newsy surface of things which people feel happy talking about, whether they know me or not and yet it is chained directly to my heart, so that even just telling people I am pregnant feels like an intimate exposure. 

For people who don't know our story, this inevitably leds into variations of the question "Is this your first baby?".  I'm getting better at getting the words out.  No, our first daughter died...  car accident ... eight months pregnant.  And now that I've said it so many times, I can almost roll it out easily and move on with the conversation - out of self-preservation rather than callowness.  They usually apologise - this was not the territory they were meaning to steer us into.  So I need to sum it up so that we can move back to safe territory - "It's okay.  It just meant that getting pregnant again was a Really Big Thing.  Extra precious."  Which doesn't really even begin to sum it up, but that's the best I can do for chit chat. 

For friends and family who know the back-story, many have surprised us with the genuine intensity of their joy for us.  It feels like a gift in itself, but I can't quite meet them on that optimistic territory - I just stand there smiling nervously and saying, "Yes, fingers crossed". And I think for a second - am I actually pregnant?  Or have I just made a silly mistake?  And I have to prod my belly surrepticiously, feeling for that taut roundness of womb. 

Because, as amazing as it is to be pregnant again and to be feeling those first flutters, I have no illusions that this is a done deal.  Knowing how many things could still go wrong (and have gone wrong for other babies I know of) makes it all the more precious.  That bit is true, even if a small corny word doesn't capture the tenderness of it.  But there's still a part of me that wants to save the celebrations until this chicken is well and truly hatched.

Zainab would nearly be two by now.  Most of the babies who were belly-side with her are now speaking, playing games, running on sturdy small feet and learning to crack tantrums.  Our street is lush with roses at the moment.  I lean right in to smell them, crush the petals to my lips and talk quietly to my baby daughter.  Her star has reappeared, now in a different part of the sky.  The ritual of missing her is built into my life now - I stand at the dresser and consult her serious sleeping baby face on which brooch to wear, which earrings.  When things are hard, I sigh "Oh Khallila" for her comisserations.

So many cues are interwoven with the missing of her.  Wind in the gum tops makes me picture her as snugglepot and cuddlepie bush baby, learning to sing magpie warbles.  The startling orange-red of pomegranate flowers against grass green leaves - those are the colours I wear for her.  Poems, comic topiary, haloumi cheese, earrings - my link to her is cobbled together from so many little things.  Even the little time I hive away for writing or art - this is a part of my life she reawakened in her short path through it.  And every bit of being pregnant reminds me of her - suddenly I can recognise myself again as the mother-body who housed her.  I'm becoming familiar with this mosaic-daughter, pieced together from so many small reminders and memorial acts.  But I still hanker for her wholeness, and the thought of her dark-haired small form moving and making noise. 

Image from here.

Weary

Oh, the posts that have been floating around my head!  Sadly, I've had to direct my energy into marking two batches of 120 assignments - urk.  Meanwhile, my head is spinning with missing Z and being tentatively excited / worried for Adzuki, and alternately feeling guilty for letting doubt creep into this new pregnancy. 

Things seem to be going well.  We had another scan at 8 weeks, and there was Adzuki with a rockin' heartbeat, with the beginnings of arms and legs and measuring a few days ahead.  We've done crazy things such as book in with a midwife, and register with the hospital.  I had my ten week blood tests yesterday, and my GP had a poke around my tummy and proclaimed, "I think that's the uterus - it seems pretty big already", which was reassuring and alarming at the same time.  She's lovely though, as is our midwife, and I feel like we're in good hands whatever happens.  (*whatever happens*...  this is the kind of hesitant, tentative hope I'm holding onto at the moment.)  I'm glad I can blame my fat tummy on that old uterus, though, because I feel exceedingly lumpy already.  A student remarked on it today, and wished me luck! (Though I don't mind people wishing me well on the pregnancy so much when I actually *am* pregnant.  It was pretty awful when I wasn't.)

I've been delighting El Prima with continuing nausea.  She was very comforting but also a bit happy when I threw up my dinner the other night.  I'd forgotten the absolute desperation of pregnancy hunger, as well as the importance of eating slowly and being careful to stop eating when the nausea demands.  There is so much that feels just like my Haloumi pregnancy with Z, that it sometimes does my head in.  And yet the food I get hungry for is very different - all salty things.  So many little new bits of grief catch me by surprise - just the thought of explaining to a little child that her/his big sister died before she/he was born.  The thought that Z would in probability be talking by now, and how much that would delight my dad.  The thought of not having to explain to Z that she might soon have a little sister or brother. 

Just "gestating safely" and getting my head around the whole thing seems to take up so much energy, and yet this has been precisely when my work has stepped up and demanded more from me than I feel able to give.  I've also realised that I'm grieving the loss of my old job and workplace.  It was my choice, of course, but I miss my colleagues and a system that I knew my way around in. 

Our next scan is in two weeks at 13 weeks.  I don't want to wish that time away, because I started this pregnancy wanting to enjoy every moment of it, I know those are two important, beautiful weeks for Adzuki, but it is pretty scary too.  I'm trying to weave those two things together in my head - to know that this is the deal - this is what pregnancy after loss feels like - scary and amazing in equal measures.  I'm so grateful to be here, even if it scares the pants off me.

Adzuki Bean

Once upon a time, on that other planet I lived on before our baby died, I was an ordinary pregnant lady who had a little bit of an obsession for red bean buns.   I loved them so much that I had long conversations with El Prima about why I loved them so much, and why Haloumi demanded that I eat them on a regular basis.  I googled "red bean bun" so that I could discover their principal ingredients.  Because if I wasn't eating them, I wanted to be reading about them.  And I discovered that the red bean paste is made from beans called (by some cultures at least) "adzuki beans".  El Prima and I mused, if we ever had another haloumi cheese after this particular Haloumi Cheese was born, maybe we'd nickname him/her "Adzuki Bean" in utero. 

That thought just floated, until our accident happened, and Haloumi died and was born - and was suddenly a real particular baby girl we named Z, rather than a Haloumi mystery baby-bump.  Well, she was still a mystery baby - but one whose face we'd kissed, and who we had given a name.  One of the few things we liked to think we knew about her was that she liked red bean bun and wanted me to eat it all the time.  So the idea that she had somehow 'picked' the nickname Adzuki Bean for her sibling became very tender to us.  

All of this is a long round-a-bout way of saying - we saw a heartbeat this morning - we've seen the Adzuki Bean!  The whole 5.5mm of him or her!  A copy of the picture is posted on the page I've just set up, specifically named "Adzuki Bean".  Our usual IVF doctor was away, so it was a doctor we'd never met before who started by asking, "Is this your first?"  (Cue a deep sigh from me, and a joint internal eye-roll, before El Prima launched into the answer) But once we'd told her, she was very sympathetic, and as soon as she started the scan was immediately saying, "Everything looks fine".  At first, I couldn't see anything in the sac, and didn't really believe her, thinking we might only see empty sacs and blighted ovums.  But she insisted, and there, indeed, was a tiny little adzuki bean, a promising little blob, with its own thumping heartbeat. 

It is strange to be back in pregnancy territory, with the same symptoms as with Haloumi, but with a body and a self altered by grief and motherhood.  It is hard to believe that pregnancy could possibly work along a similar timeframe, or work in the same way as it did before.  But while we'll always live with the chasm between 'before' and 'after', we're no longer in the wild woods of griefland.  (Where are we then?  Maybe we've found that grief has its own village, not all that far from where we lived before, and that as it turns out, many of the people we love have been a resident of that village at some time or other.)  All the possibilities bundled into a pregnancy - I now know how many of those can break your heart.  But this is the thing with possibility, you can't pick and choose.  All we can do is recognise that we're at the mercy of all kinds of good and hard possibilities, and we'll experience whatever we get as open heartedly as we can.

There's such a long long way to go, but stick with us, Adzuki Bean, this could be so much fun!

Well, be careful of those home pregnancy testing kits...

Because sometimes they are WRONG!!

Blood test showed HCG 539.    And then the nurse told me two completely improbable dates - 23 September for a scan to confirm a heartbeat, and 16 May 2012 as an estimated due date.  I very nearly said, "Ha ha, as if!" but that would have been rude.  And also showing very little faith in this tenacious little embryo's persistence.  Oh, it is so so lovely to be proven wrong in my sad scared little theories that everyone but me was allowed to get pregnant. 

Who knows what path lies ahead for this pregnancy, but we haven't gotten this far since Monday 1 June 2009, when I stood with a positive test in hand, staring at the wall - Haloumi's entry point into our lives. 

16 May 2012.  The day before my little brother's birthday.  Yikes.  But right now, 10 September 2011 is enough to deal with. 

Thanks so much for all your love & encouragement.  You rock too! xxxx h

ps so glad other people could see the elephant too.

Not Molar!

There has been much punching of the air in the last 2 minutes around here - not only was yesterday day 1, but I finally got a call from someone at the Womens telling me that the genetic testing has come back, and PLB was definitively NOT a molar pregnancy. (oh PLB. I wish I was hypothesising about who you might be rather than celebrating the fact of something you weren't) If it feels windy where you are, that is probably me exhaling after five weeks worth of holding my breath. No, that isn't exactly true. Okay, it's a big fat lie.

Somewhere after my last post, after I had been holding my breath for so long (metaphorically, people)that I just wanted to vehemently push each minute past me and away from me - just throw it away - I couldn't do it any more. I did kind of break, and came closer to realio trulio mental hospitalio madness than I ever wanted to come. But in breaking, I also exhaled, and felt what it might be like to live without hope dragging me forwards into an imaginary future moment. And I breathed in all the scary things that a molar pregnancy might mean - not knowing whether I could get pregnant again for 6 months, a year or ever, chemo, having to do stupid 24 hour urine tests and carry 4L plastic containers of my own wee into the Womens every week. And I breathed out, because I wasn't there yet, and every little second standing between me and a 4L urine sample container was a precious precious thing.

Breathing in an uncomfortable spot like that can be hard, but I've had lots of practice at it by now. I take great pride in the fact that when my brother and sister in law (both dive instructors) took me for my first ever ocean scuba dive this January, I used less oxygen than either of them, despite freaking out under water about how to clear my mask. See - that's my talent - breathing. Simple but actually pretty important.

I hope this is making sense. It isn't as though my life could go to bits and I'd still be happy as la-la because I could breathe, but you take comfort where you find it - and given my luck, I can't really be too picky. The work incident also reminded me how much I value my work - and forced me to start being more assertive with work, rather than continuing to be hedgehog-like and resentful about it.

I've missed my bloggy family, but needed to put my head down for a bit, and focus on holding onto my job, and breathing. We also got news over easter that left me without words - dear friends of ours who lost their baby boy last year, greeted a beautiful baby daughter - but she was in distress at birth, and was put on life support. She held on for four days, so she could meet all four grandparents, and then died in her parents' arms. Those 49 words can't possibly convey a scrap of it. Two entire universes-worth of love. I know that this is unfixable, as much as I've come to accept that my loss of Z is unfixable, but still my mechanical brain spent days going in circles, trying to think a way out of it for them.

I'm sorry I've been quiet for so long. I feel like I've done a bit of a mental spring clean - and am hopefully coming back a little bit fresher, even if I'm a little heavier with this news for our friends.