Month: January 2019

It’s almost February and just about three months since Gabriel was born. After he was cremated, we intended to spread his ashes somewhere locally as a family. We wanted it to be intimate and special. Well, as special as spreading your baby’s ashes can be.

We visited a few different places but none of them felt right. So, we still have him with us in our home.

Barry came up with an idea that I loved: renting a boat, and spreading him in the gulf. I still love the idea of doing that, and it’s likely we will. At some point, anyways.

I don’t feel ready. I thought that I would. I don’t know why I thought I knew what it would be like to have some finality of the nightmare that, in the moment, felt like it would never end.

Part of the reason we made the decision to cremate Gabriel was because we move every couple of years, and we didn’t want to bury him somewhere we may never return to. While we like Florida, and feel that we will come back at some point, it’s always possible that we fall in love with another location and decide to settle there after Barry’s CG career is over. If we buried him here in Florida, that would be it. We could never live anywhere else.

Now, of course that isn’t true. We could always live elsewhere but I would always feel like we had abandoned him. If we weren’t there to visit him or his grave, I would have a hard time getting through the day. Just thinking about that makes me feel guilty.

I think that Barry wants the finality. He wants to lay Gabriel to rest in the sea and for us to continue to live our lives. I don’t know why I’m feeling so conflicted. It’s not like I think about it every single moment of every day. Whether his remains are sitting in a box in our bedroom, or scattered in the ocean shouldn’t matter, right? I haven’t even opened up the box that contains the box of his ashes. Hell, we haven’t even looked at the pictures we had taken before he passed away.

But this is part of the journey of child loss. It doesn’t make sense. If you spend all your time wondering “why”, it will consume you.

So I try not to. I just shrug and tell Barry that I’m not ready. And that’s that.

Every few years, my husbands job changes and we pick up our family and move. To someone who hasn’t lived this sort of life, it probably sounds terrible. I have embraced this military lifestyle and enjoy experiencing new places, new jobs, and making friends all over. It enables (read: forces) you to make friends quick. When you’re thousands of miles and a plane ride away from your family, you have no choice but to rely on other people, some of whom you may have literally just met. While most moms joke that making mom friends is like dating, us military moms take it a step further- “You seem really cool and our kids get along great! Can I use you as my emergency contact at my sons school?”

I’m not much into feeling bad for myself and am exceedingly good at saying what is on my mind (ask anyone who knows me). This weekend my threshold for bullshit was met and I found myself wondering just how much I can take. This, paired with the fact that we are preparing to move in the next few months, got me thinking about the last three years. We like Florida a lot. We love our house, we’ve made some great friends, have great neighbors and a support system I never knew I was capable of making. But y’all. This tour has been rough. From start to finish, it has been one crap thing after the next. I am pretty sure I am “that” friend now. You know, the one that you feel bad for and tell your significant other about. The one who has the shittiest luck and seems eligible to have a sitcom written about their life. Yeah, that’s me.

It was February 2016 and we just found out we’d be moving from Newport, RI to St. Petersburg, FL. Max had just turned 2. We wanted to try to have a second child and in April we found out we were pregnant. I went for a dating ultrasound in May and that’s when we found out that there was no baby. It was a “blighted ovum” and we opted to let my body do it’s own thing. I told my OBGYN we were moving in a month, and she thought that it would likely pass by then and there’d be nothing to worry about. Well, I started bleeding about a month before moving and before I knew it we were in Florida and it still hadn’t stopped. I’m pretty much the worst patient on Earth since I’m a nurse, but I figured I should probably see a doctor. Well, cool thing about Florida is that there are a bajillion people who live here and most of them are old. So, I had to wait for Tricare to change my region since we moved from up north. Then I had to wait until they assigned me a doctor. Then I had to wait until they could see me, but “lucky” for me, when I told them I was miscarrying and had been bleeding for over a month they saw me fairly quickly. They did an ultrasound and it was determined I needed to see an OBGYN “immediately”. Well, I called 8 different OBGYNs, some of whom actually laughed out loud when I said I needed an appointment soon. “Um, so you’re a new patient? We are booking new patients in August”. *SIDEBAR: During this time I also picked up freaking HEAD LICE for the first time in my life at 27 years old, presumably from one of the hotels we stayed at. Yup. So we had just closed on our beautiful house, was in the midst of unpacking, job searching, finding my way around a new town, oh, and miscarrying and trying to find a doctor who would see me, and in a head lice crisis all at the same time* I finally got in to see an OBGYN a couple days later and the day after my office appointment I had a D&C. And a month later my husband left on his first patrol which was about 7 weeks long. So that was our introduction to Florida.

In September, I found out I was pregnant again. The abbreviated version of this is that we found out Lauren was missing her corpus callosum, had a potential serious heart defect and her functional status would fall on a spectrum of “can’t even tell something is wrong” and “severely disabled”. Her pregnancy was physically a breeze (unlike Maxwell’s), but mentally and emotionally it was torture. We knew she’d go to NICU because they needed to rule out (or in) something called coarctation of the aorta which she may need surgery for. I was high risk because of this, so I followed with the MFM group. I was 38 weeks pregnant when Barry’s command decided that he was going to get deployed with them. They left St. Pete for Aruba, and it was decided that he would go with them on the boat, and immediately fly home from Aruba to be here for the birth. Ordinarily, commands don’t do this so close to the due date, but this one did and that’s all I’m going to say about that. I’m sure you can guess what happened next. He left on a Tuesday, I had my standard 38 week appointment that Friday. Max was at daycare and I had an afternoon planned to get a pedicure and lunch after my appointment. Well, that appointment would be my last one with Lauren as I was sent to L&D from there to be induced. The amniotic fluid around Lauren was dangerously low and could have caused her to pass away, so I needed to deliver ASAP. She was born around 1pm on Saturday. Barry got home at 8pm Sunday. *You know how I talked earlier about making quick friends and relying on people you hardly know. Yeah. The phone call went something like this to my friend Amy. “Hey. I have a problem. I have to go and deliver this baby today. Max is at daycare in your neighborhood, I don’t even know the address, but they have a white mustang in their driveway and they live near your main entrance. Any chance you can take him for the weekend?”* So my BFFL Ashley was my stand in partner and followed Lauren to NICU after her birth. She gave me updates, sent pictures, and relayed info to me from the nurses and doctors until I was able to go up and see her myself.

So let me recap Florida real quick: miscarriage, head lice, crappy pregnancy filled with anxiety over my unborn baby, husband missing the birth. That brings us to June 2017 when Lauren was born. Lauren had a couple inpatient hospitalizations, intense therapy, feeding tube, etc. since then and her limitations have landed her somewhere in the middle of that spectrum we talked about earlier. She is making progress, but she is much more affected than many of others with her condition. Our week is filled with doctors, therapies, special feeding accommodations, etc. Fitting it all in sounds impossible and sometimes I feel like I can’t do it anymore. But, I do.

And as you all know, we got the surprise positive pregnancy test in Feb 2018 that we’d be parents to baby #3, and all the things that followed. We thought that 2019 HAD to get better. And in some ways it has, but the shitstorm has continued and I’m writing this on January freaking 21st.

The government is shut down. My husband serves in the only branch of the military not getting paid. I’m lucky I have a job where I can make decent income to get us over the hump. Well, I did anyways. Until we found out our nanny was involved in some shady jerry springer type situation and long story short, we no longer have childcare. So here I am, the only source of income for my family currently, figuring out how (AND IF) I can piece together childcare for the next few months before we move. Lauren has special needs, I need to find someone who is willing to learn how to use a feeding tube, who is willing to bring her to therapies, who is willing to watch my kids for 14 hours a day when Barry leaves, and who doesn’t want me to pay her $100 an hour to do it. Oh, and I need to find someone like before Wednesday of this week or my only option is to call out sick to work. And while I won’t go into details about ex-nannys personal problems, it was a situation that forced us to change locks, install cameras, go to doctors, etc.

Of course, there were other little things that happened, like our house getting infested with fleas, Max aspirating on bubbles from the bubble bath, and things like that which weren’t mentioned in my pity memoir, but you get the point. I guess I’ve gotten used to the fact that we have literally the worst luck imaginable. “Murphys Law” anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, it’s a thing. And it’s even more of a thing considering our last name is actually Murphy.

So here we are on 1/21/19, looking at each other and saying “it has to go up from here”, “what else could possibly go wrong”. But, a lot more could go wrong, I know that.

Life in general is funny like that. It’s both an uphill battle and a beautiful ride. It’s both a wonderful journey and a journey through hell. You learn from it whatever it teaches you, and sometimes they are lessons you never cared to be instructed in. Like losing a child. Or having a special needs kiddo. Or learning to survive months without your spouse. I didn’t “want” any of those things to happen to me. I didn’t care to figure out what there was to learn about watching my baby die in my arms. But now that it has happened, I learned that I can move on. I can still be a good mom to Max and Lauren. And even though right now I am discouraged, sad, angry and anxious when I think about all we’ve been through and all we still have to get accomplished (and I’m just thinking short term), I hope I can get to a point where Barry and I can laugh and smile about this journey. We can talk about our journey through hell, and feel proud that we came out the other side and didn’t allow ourselves to succumb to the metaphorical devil. Because believe me, there have been moments, and even whole days where I’ve wanted to give up. Where I was SURE I had reached my max fill of allowable bullshit and moving forward was not something I could mentally or emotionally handle. Then, I remember to give myself some grace. I pour a glass of wine, take a hot bath, go to bed early and tell myself that tomorrow will be a better day. And sometimes it’s not. But sometimes it is. And when it is, I get some breathing room to prepare myself for whatever ridiculous hurdle I’ll have to carry myself and my family through next. Because really, that’s what life is. A whole bunch of hurdles of different heights you have to learn to jump over, on the fly, with no notice. At first you stumble, and fall flat on your face. Over and over and over again. Until you put in the work to figure them out you’ll continue to fail and get frustrated. And once you learn how to handle them and have the tools to do so, they’re no longer impossible hurdles, but mechanisms to help you soar.

In the past few weeks, life has picked back up where I left it after Gabriel’s passing. We spent months and months planning on the inevitability of his short life and cherished our moments we had with him. When we returned home, the first week was agonizing and I remember just wanting to lie in bed and cry (which I did plenty of, by the way). Now that I’ve returned to work, and school has resumed after the holidays, life has become busy again. But it’s not the same busy as it was when I was pregnant. Lauren still has her therapies, I still have work and Barry still has commitments at his work. But I’m not rushing to exams and specialists. I’m not making plans for the death of my baby anymore. I feel guilty that I don’t think about it all day every day. And maybe it’s because I’m so busy, and because we’re planning our move to New Jersey in a few short months. Or maybe it’s because I haven’t really dealt fully with his death. I guess I don’t really know how.

Every so often I think about him and it hits me. It hits me like a ton of bricks. Like someone punched me in the gut. My baby boy isn’t here.

Last night, I was brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed when it hit me. I don’t know why, at that moment while I looked up into the mirror that it hit me. But all of a sudden a sadness washed over me. It took my breath away. Oh my God. My baby isn’t here. I should be exhausted from nighttime feedings. I should be anxiously awaiting the first time he rolls over, his first belly laugh. He should be smiling at me and at his big brother and sister every day. He shouldn’t be sitting a tiny baby urn on my dresser.

Thinking about all the things he would be doing right now if he were here just brings me back to the brief moments we had with him. I miss him so much. I hate that I never got to see his beautiful eyes. Or his smile. I hate that he never got to see our faces and how much we adored and loved him. How much, with every fiber of our being, we wanted him. That this really shitty luck struck my family. Again. I try not to dwell on all of the what ifs but it’s so very hard when my heart hurts to hold him again and have him here with us. I know he’s not here. I know that he died. But it still really sucks.