employed

I went in today to sign some paperwork and to get the hiring process started.  After my background check is finished and I review/sign the contract I will officially be employed.  

It has been a really difficult process trying to find a job that I felt like was a good match for me.  I sent out so many resumes and went to so many interviews only to find that each place had a pretty significant issue that made me feel very doubtful that it would be a good working situation for me.  This job came along right before I was about to accept a position that I had strong reservations about.  It has nearly everything I had on my dream job wish list and the things that were on that list that it doesn't have were not ones that I was overly concerned about.  The best thing about it is that the group I will be working for is incredibly supportive of their employees and highly values the balance between work and personal life.  

Finally, after so many years of school and all the drama that ensued with my program in regards to graduation because of the the time I had to take off (a whopping two and a half weeks) after my c-section with George, I am going to be able to actually put all my hard work to some use.  

Of course, this does mean my internet time is going to be severely limited...

Oh, my lovely internet, I will miss you and all the things I learn from you.  At least I don't start for another six weeks so I have some time to adjust to life without you in it everyday.

ghost in the kitchen

I got up this morning and helped Leif get ready for work- made him breakfast and ironed his shirt.  He cleaned up the kitchen for me before I got out of bed so it was a fair trade.  After he left I showered and then promptly crawled back into bed.

It is now 1:00 in the afternoon.

I am still in bed.

I feel like there are so many things to take care of and worry about right now that I've made the unconscious decision to turn them all off.  I feel like a circuit has been shorted out.

Click.  Hum.  Silence.

I watched an episode of television while laying in bed and the last scene was of four adult siblings -all with families of their own- hanging out and laughing in the kitchen after Thanksgiving.  In the corner, unbeknownst to them, was their mother quietly observing them and obviously quite proud.   

My "what would he be like" visions used to only go so far- two or three years in the future.  A blond-headed toddler with muddy knees and ruddy cheeks.  A freckled face turned up to ask a question for the thousandth time in one day.  A smile that reminded me of his father.  Now those visions stretch far ahead and I wonder what kind of man he would have become.

Would he have been close to his siblings?
Would he have been a traveller?
What would he have done with his life?
Who would he have fallen in love with?
Would he have had children of his own?

I don't think that these questions will ever go away.  Even if I am lucky to have children in the future and they are able to grow up into adults.   I will forever be the woman observing from the corner her adult children hanging out and laughing in the kitchen, quite proud of them.  But also squinting to see the ghost of their older brother and wondering about the man he would have become.

I don't want to be that woman.  I don't want to carry this around forever.  It is very, very heavy and I am so incredibly tired of this grief.  I want someone to take it away for awhile.  I want to feel, even just for an hour, like the person I was before March 31, 2010.

walking the Grief high wire

In my last post I inadvertently touched on a very sensitive subject.  Well, actually I knew it was a sensitive subject but I thought I did a pretty good job at explaining myself about being faced with the challenges of participating in other people's lives when it comes to pregnancies and infants while also grieving the loss of a baby.  I am red-faced because I did not do such a great job of explaining it at all.  I think now, in hindsight, that the explanation and the feelings behind that deserved their own post entirely.

If grief was an object, it would be a high wire (if it was a person it would be David Bowie).  You start out from one end, marked by the death of your child, with no one giving you any real direction on how to traverse the Grief high wire.  You are not given a balancing pole or special shoes or even a net, although occasionally you get to a point where you can rest for a moment before you have to be on your way again.  Despite this you go forward because otherwise it means being stuck or worse yet, falling to your death below.

As the walk lengthens and time passes you become aware of what exists on each side of the Grief high wire.  On one side, should you fall, you would fall into the deepest despair and depression imaginable.  On the other side, should you fall, you would fall into pretending that everything is perfectly alright even though your baby is dead.  Either way you are lost.  Either way you are no longer you.  You are either a black shadow of your former self or a dollar store replica of yourself- plastic and cheap.  Either way you are lonely from fake relationships or no relationships at all.

It is difficult to find the balance as you walk.  Not just for yourself but for everyone else who is living their lives in the midst of your high wire act.  People are watching you as they go along their own lives.  Some of them make tremendous efforts to help.  They watch with baited breath and are scared that you may fall off.  So they try to help in whatever way they can.  You have the cheerleaders rooting for you, the engineers trying to steady the wire, the philosophers trying to keep you focused, and the clergy praying for you.  It helps.  All of it.  But ultimately you are still on a Grief high wire and you are still there alone.

Some of these people have what you lost when you started this Grief high wire act.  Although you are still on that wire, slowly placing one foot in front of the other.  You know that they are on their own kind of path, not a Grief high wire, but something else.  Most of the time you give them your best and most genuine smile, even though it is still painful up there, because it is real smile.  Sometimes you can't and you need to turn away from them to focus on the placement of your feet.  All of the time, even through the pain, you are their cheerleader, their engineer, their philosopher, their clergyman.  

You share in their joy the way they share in your grief.
They share in your grief and you feel steadied  enough by their compassion to share in their joy.

There are other people too.  The ones that maybe you knew of in passing (or maybe you knew really well, who knows) before you stepped off that platform.  The ones that you still see from time to time from your vantage point, also living their lives in the midst of your hire wire act.  They are the ones who look blankly at you as if they can't quite remember where it is or what it is you are doing all the way up there.  You look at them and realize that once upon a time they knew but now that you have been walking up there for so long they have forgotten or have chosen to forget.  Sometimes it makes you mad.  Usually it doesn't.  Mostly it just makes you grateful for all the cheerleaders, engineers, philosophers, and clergy you know.

Some of these people have what you lost when you started this Grief high wire act.  They want to show those things to you.  To the whole world.  More times than not, even though you are still walking up there all by yourself and you risk falling off the wire down to the dollar store plastic version of yourself, you want to do for them what they have been unable to do for you.  You want to bear witness.  But sometimes you just don't have the energy to keep your self perched precariously to that side of the wire.

Then, of course, there are the others.  The ones that when you look around you, you see them tottering around on their own Grief high wires.  From above, you talk with them.  You give them the best support you can and they give you the best support they can.

You trade secrets with them- If you crouch down when things get really bad it lowers your center of gravity and makes it easier to stay balanced.
You talk about experiences with them- I've been doing this for two years already.  Trust me, it will always suck but you do get better at keeping your balance.
You commiserate with them-  You ever get overwhelmed by the inescapability of all the pregnancy and baby-related content there is in the world and the silence we feel responsible to keep about how it affects us?


It is good.  All of it.  We need it to survive.  At least I do.

But sometimes I forget that all of us on our Grief high wires are not really and totally alone up here even when it feels like we are.  The other people in our lives are still there with us, most of them doing their best to understand -even though hopefully they never will because there is only one way to understand life on the Grief high wire- and they are still watching us intently.  Watching us intently because they want to be there in case we need a cheerleader, or an engineer, or a philosopher, or a clergyman.

I have forgotten what life was like before being up here.  Sometimes I also forget that there are others who aren't on this Grief high wire that are doing the best they can to still be present.

I talk shop.  I trade secrets.  I commiserate.  I forget.  I inadvertently touch on a sensitive subject.

I am so fortunate to have so many people in my life who fall squarely into the category of "people who try to help me while I walk this wire" and "people who are walking their own wires."  I don't have many people around me who fit in the "people who wan't nothing to do with my grief but want me to participate in their joy" category.

I want to acknowledge that.  I want to give it the attention it deserves and say,

Thanks for helping me to keep my footing.

a facebook confession

I am about to offend 200 million people.  Luckily for me only 0.0001% of those people may actually see this so I think I am relatively safe.

I Do Not Understand Why People Love Facebook.

Let me explain.

Leif has a Facebook account, which he rarely even looks at.  I do not have one and I highly doubt that I ever will.  But, and I am confessing this dirty little secret...I used to check his account everyday but not so much recently.  He knows this, by the way, and is totally fine with it.  I am not some crazed and jealous wife who sits at home smoking Marlboro Reds, while guzzling warm PBR and checking her husband's Facebook account during my soap opera's commercial breaks.  It was his idea in the first place to give me his password so I could get an idea of what this phenomenon was all about.

BTW, Google, it is so obvious that you are totally jelz of Facebook when your auto spell check on Blogger does not recognize "Facebook" as a legitimate word.

Initially I got on and looked at a bunch of photographs of people I knew from high school via one of my good friend's profile (Hello Good Friend, please don't take my social network site hating personal-like).  It was hypnotizing.  Like watching a cuttlefish change colors right before it eats its stunned prey.

I am not above mocking the people I never really liked in school in the privacy of my own home (the only thing worse than a teenage bully is an adult one so I tend to keep my mocking private).  In fact I am very much below that.  I think, upon the first time perusing the Facebook accounts of some people I used to know and not like so much, I actually guffawed*.  I guffawed!

But the novelty wore off pretty quickly.

I was hesitant to get an account even before I started looking at Leif's but now I am sure that it is not for me.  "Friend" requests (and I use the term "friend" very loosely here), "So and so" is now friends with "so and so" plastered all over the place, photoshop retouched profile photographs, "So and so" likes stuff, poking people, trends for ridiculous things...  

I found that the only updates that I was interested in were from people I am already in contact with anyway, which kind of defeats the purpose I think.  At least it does for me.

Plus, being on this side of infant death (stillbirth or neonatal) Facebook is not really a friendly place to be.  I am sure all the other women on this side of the divide who read this blog would agree with me.  I've heard a lot from this community of women who do have accounts how they have to "ignore" a good amount of people because of the incessant beaming and cooing and bragging that they are bombarded with.  A great use for that feature, I think.  Also a necessary one when you are being constantly reminded of what your child never had the chance to experience**.

Ignore.  Ignore.  Ignore.

Yet I still get on and check it every other day or so.  A morbid fascination.  A little bit of masochism.  It is like my very own Frienemy.  The other day Leif asked me if I ever get bored looking at his account full of people I don't know.   Yes.  But I don't think it would bore me any less to have one of my own.

So, to the 0.0001% (or less, I'm not going to overestimate my appeal here) of Facebook users who actually read this blog, I'm genuinely interested to know what it is that I am missing.  I'm in such a distinct minority (200 million people have accounts!!!) that I am convinced that I am overlooking something on this subject.  It is a "Its me, not you," kind of thing.

*ROFLOL in Facebook


**I considered deleting this part because I was afraid of offending people who read this blog, who have babies or are expecting babies, who have never experienced a loss, and who use Facebook.  I didn't want to cause the pendulum to swing the other way, so to speak, and make people question too much what it is that they are sharing.  But then I decided to leave it as it is with this explanation so as to hopefully ease some of those tensions that it may create.  
Sometimes, but not all the time, it is painful to see updates about things Leif and I never got to experience or that George never got to experience.  I absolutely do not want people to censor themselves (other than beyond basic courtesy) but I am weary of pretending that at times it is not painful.  Being in the minority (and thank God or whoever/whatever that most babies make it into this world just fine) makes things pretty lonely and when faced with daily examples of just how unlucky my son was...well, it sucks.  
But that isn't a phenomenon solely attributed to Facebook.  That is part of life for us.  A part of life that I know many women like me feel badly for talking about.  It is why we feel a responsibility to hide our grief and envy away from other women (currently pregnant and/or with infants).  It is why we use the term "medusas" to describe ourselves.  
So there it is.  
I'm leaving that entire part in.  For me and for all the other women I know who are too embarrassed (like me) or ashamed (like me) to say that sometimes seeing other people wrapped up in blissful naivety burns.  

riding a bike on a frozen lake

On a whim Leif and I have decided to move*.  Not anywhere far but to a new part of the city and somewhere we've never explored before.  In the hills with a beautiful view and terraced patios.  I'm excited.  New rooms to decorate.  More furniture to buy at flea markets and refurbish.

A new house to make into a home.

But...

And isn't there always a "but?"

Part of me feels like I am leaving behind a piece of George here in this apartment.  It was here that housed all of the hopes we had for him while he was still alive and healthy.  Grief has all but choked out that hope but I can still catch glimpses of them from time to time.  Sometimes I can still remember what it was like to think of him with only joy and not the longing with which I think of him now.  He was alive here.  At one point he was in the present here.  In our new place he will always be in the past.

On so many levels and because of so many things going on in our lives right now I feel like I am closing a door on him.   I know, I know, I know people -including my therapist- will say that it isn't true.  But isn't it true just a little?  When tragedy strikes isn't there a point when we make a conscience decision to start living our lives again?  When we decide to keep moving forward and to start folding dreams of the future back into daily living?

I think Leif has been at that point for awhile now, patiently waiting for me to turn my gaze back to the road ahead instead of the chaos behind.

....

*I wrote this long explanation about how our landlord reacted very poorly to this news last night.  But then I deleted it all.  Let me just say that she was very, very unhappy that we were giving our thirty days notice even though we are within our rights to do so.  The conversation was not pretty and at one point getting an attorney was mentioned on her part.  Later that night she called and conceded to the fact that we were legally within our rights to give our thirty day notice at any point during the month but it doesn't negate how terribly we were treated earlier.  Seriously, folks, it was unreal.  I've never been spoken to like that before and I've dealt with some really tough patients before.  The interaction just made me feel more ready to get the fuck out of here.  Hopefully our new landlord is a reasonable human being who treats other people in her life with respect.  

Please keep your fingers crossed that our landlord does not try to make our remainder here any more uncomfortable than it already is going to be.  I can't wait until these are the views we will be seeing every day.

no thanks christmas, i'd really rather not

For the last few years that Leif and I have lived together we have gone to get our Christmas Tree the first weekend of December.  We started out with a miniature tree to match our miniature apartment in Santa Monica but when we moved to this side of town we upgraded to a small tree that matched our small apartment.  The last three years since we've been here we have gotten the tree at a place a couple of miles from our house and have had to rig it to the top of Leif's old Honda Civic with twine and wishful thinking. No, that isn't quite right.  Last year we had just purchased our new Toyota, in early preparation for my expanding pregnant girth, and we tied the tree to the top of that car.

Neither Leif or I are Christian, as I am sure most of you reading either know already or have surmised from my writing.  I used to be, a long time ago.  Before Leif and I ever met, well over six years now.  As for Leif, he grew up as a Baha'i.  What is that you ask?  Yeah, I asked the same question when we first started dating.  Up until I met Leif my only knowledge of Baha'i was that members of the faith sponsored a section of highway clean-up near my childhood home.  Admittedly I still don't know all that much about it and what I do know about it has mostly been garnered from Wikipedia articles and discussions with Leif or his parents.  Although the rest of Leif's immediate family is Baha'i he hasn't been since he was in high school.  But unlike me, he still has some strong ideas about spirituality and the after life.

Despite the fact the neither one of us are Christian we do celebrate the holiday and getting the tree always signified the beginning of one of our favorite times of year.  Leif loves the egg nog and cold weather and I love the garlands and twinkling lights on the tree.  Last year as we decorated our tree we talked about how this year would be amazing and how much we were looking forward to meeting our future child.  We were so excited it was, looking back, ridiculous of us to assume that everything was going to go exactly as we had planned.  Fools.  Neither of us will ever be those people again.

This year I am not sure that we are even going to get a Christmas Tree.  I don't feel particularly festive right now.  My affection for this holiday has always had to do with celebrating family and friends and seeing as our family is incredibly incomplete I just feel totally apathetic about the whole thing.  Being the amazing and supportive husband that he is, Leif is following my lead on this issue.  So the decision has been left up to me and right now I am leaning towards trying to just power through this holiday with as little tears as possible.  Which will probably entail foregoing the Christmas Tree (I always feel badly about using a live tree anyway) and continuing to lick my wounds in the safety of my, decidedly Christmas Cheer-Free, home.

I think I will venture out into the Christmas season for only the most important activities.  Three events.  Two parties and Christmas morning.  Three days.  The other 28 days can just evaporate for all I care, Christmas Eve included.

In spite of all this I am in a much better place right now than I ever would have imagined that I would be six months ago.   Most days I am actually doing pretty good.  I'm just not ready to fully participate in everyone else's holiday joy.  That part of me that used to participate is too occupied with thoughts of what should be but aren't.

I'm on a wait list to order an ornament for George.  It is a ceramic rain cloud.  I don't think it will get here in time for Christmas anyway, even if we did get a tree.  I'm also participating in an ornament swap and will be getting something for George made by another mother who is missing her daughter this holiday.  I'm making one for her too.  It feels right, even though I am neither Christian or celebrating the holiday this year.

They all deserve to be remembered.

(almost) working

The last two days have been filled with four interviews, a dozen handshakes, a permanent not-totally-genuine smile plastered on my face, and the same questions about my strengths and weaknesses.  How does that saying go?  Feast or Famine?  When it rains it pours?  Whichever, I have been spending a lot of time in my car, driving around town in my suit.  I have two more interviews scheduled for later this week.

Why is it so difficult to find a flattering suit?  Every time I put on my "interviewing" slacks and jacket I feel like if it were silver I would make a pretty convincing tin man -or woman, in this case- for Halloween.  

Anyway, I guess this means that I will probably start working soon.  I figure at least one of these places might want to hire me.  Take a chance on a new graduate?  Perhaps.  Fingers crossed.  Not having to work these last months has been great but at the same time being at home and alone for most of the day has not been particularly healthy for me.  Physically or mentally or emotionally.  Especially emotionally. Netflix, the internet, the refrigerator and I have become too close.

I need some responsibility.  As things are I have very little of that going on in my life, which for a long time after George died was what I needed.  But now the most I do during my days is clean the house and make dinner.  Last night was sunchoke and leek soup with tarragon and roasted garlic.  I get bored and so Leif ends up eating pretty well.

I used to be terrified at the kind of responsibility I was going to have practicing medicine but now I almost find it welcoming.  I am growing weary of living inside of myself.  I want to take care of other people again.

Well, as it turns out Leif is sick today.  Poor guy woke up with a sore throat and stuffy head but he had to go in to work anyway.  He was going to only go in for a half day but is probably going to be there until he normally gets off work because someone else called in sick today.  I think that is called, responsibility.

For dinner tonight I'm making something that will be easy on his throat.  I'm going to take care of him.

I may not have a lot of responsibility in my life right now but I do have a lot of love.