creative

At this very moment outside of our living room windows most of the world on the hill below us is asleep.  There are not too many windows alighted with the glow of vigilance and it is so quiet that I can hear the distant sounds of cars on the freeway.  Most nights Leif and I are tucked away in our dreams long before the majority of everyone else is around here but as I am typing this the clock icon on my computer is telling me it is Fri 1:52 AM. It is peaceful, probably one of the few times in Los Angeles it is like this.

I've been feeling listless as of late, so I'm not sure if tonight's bought of insomnia is anxiety or boredom.  Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon, it was my first day on maternity leave, sitting on the couch wondering what to do with myself.  There were plenty of things I could have done but very few of those things actually were accomplished.  I could use the fact that I am pregnant as an excuse but the truth is I've never been much of a self-motivator, unless we are talking about academics.  My inner nerd has never been satisfied with academic mediocrity.  Hence the too many degrees, the large amount of academic debt from attending a big-name university, and ultimately a profession that I just don't like that much. But hey, at least I have job security and for a pragmatist such as myself that does count for something.

Anyway, once upon a time I used to be a creative person.  Now I am most decidedly not a creative person.  I have plenty of things tucked away in drawers to use to be creative; paints, canvases, inks, pencils, glue, pencils...You name the art supply and I have probably collected it over the years.  They were all available to me yesterday but they went unused and continued to gather dust as they have been for the last four or five years. The last thing I brought out my acrylics for was to paint George's "picture."

I simply do not often have ideas in my head that I find worthy of transforming from vapor into something tangible.  Even writing here, which has been the closest thing to a creative outlet that I have, I find that I am mostly only motivated (or inspired) when the sadness of missing George is too overwhelming to keep to myself anymore.  The best things I've written, and when I say best I use the term loosely, have all come from a place of intense loneliness and longing.  When those feelings wane so does my ability to write anything that I find all that interesting.  I write for myself but much of the time I don't write what I wish I had the ability to, speaking of both the ability talent-wise and freedom-wise.  Which is one of the reasons I've contemplated closing up shop here on numerous occasions.

The icon on my computer is now telling me it is Fri 3:05 AM and it has taken me an hour to write four paragraphs.

Forget it.
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Sat 5:14 AM

I've come to a conclusion of sorts. Until this baby comes, which could be as soon as tonight or as far away as August 16th, I am going to do my best to do something creative everyday.  I can write, I can paint, I can take photographs...whatever, but I've got to do something everyday that is not normal routine for me.

We will see how this goes but for now here is a time lapse video Leif made of the view from our living room window at night.

Time Lapse View from .daily.amos. on Vimeo.

no celebration

A little bit of advice to those who are closer to their loss than I am at this point...

There will be long stretches of time when you feel pretty good.  In fact there will be long stretches of time when you feel almost like your old self again.  You will be happy again but it won't be the happy you were before.  But also know that bad days will come and they will come with the force of a train.  You will be surprised not only by the strength of how badly your heart still aches but also by what triggers these days.

Tomorrow is my birthday.  This is my second birthday since he's been gone and I have a lifetime of them left, always without him.

I will never see him again or hold him again.  I will never know the sound of his laughter.  I will never have any more time with him than what I've already had.  I miss him so much that it physically hurts.

I have much to be grateful for in my life.  Family, friends, a daughter who is on her way to meet us, and most importantly, my amazing husband.  I know I should be celebrating, but instead I spent yesterday evening and most of today sobbing and missing my boy.  I am another year older and George is still dead...I can't find much to celebrate in that.

large

Apparently I am growing a large baby.  Current approximation at thirty-six weeks is SEVEN and a HALF pounds.  

I should have guessed this would be the case.  After all, Leif and I are not exactly petite.

I know these estimates can be off by about a pound in either direction but still I'm getting a wee bit nervous.  The bigger baby is the less likely it is that I will be able to successfully have a VBAC.  Luckily, my OB is awesome and is still supportive of us giving it a try.  If we change our minds and decide to go ahead with a c-section, she is supportive of that as well.

The radiologist who did the ultrasound this afternoon made a prediction that we would not make it to August 16th.  She said that the fluid levels were perfect and baby looked very healthy, practicing her breathing. Basically she's looking like a full-term baby already.

Still...I hope she sticks around for at least a couple of more weeks. I don't think she is ready yet.  Or maybe we are the ones who aren't ready yet.


 

the creep

Sleep is an allusive beast these days.  

Yes, it is partly because at nearly thirty-six weeks pregnant I am experiencing multiple awakenings to use the bathroom, sore shoulders, and a stiff neck.  But those are small items; nothing to complain about.  

I've been waking up, usually for good, around four each morning.  I try to force myself back to sleep.  I imagine bargaining with a little pipe-smoking man who lives inside the control deck of my brain.  Flip that switch, the blue one by your right hand, back to sleep mode and I promise I will go for a walk and let you operate the exercise panel after I get home from work tonight.  But after nearly 32 years he, unfortunately, knows me better than to accept my bargains, especially when it involves exercise. So I am left to stare at the spinning ceiling fan until my blood sugar drops low enough that it forces me to accept defeat and get out of bed.

I know it is because of The Creep.  That familiar fog of anxiety that starts rolling in over the hills.  It is slow and insidious but I've come to recognize it in its earliest moments.  It settles over everything, even though I know it has origins from a distinct place.  

This morning The Creep woke me up again at four.  I laid there thinking about an article I read yesterday about something particularly sad and random (which I won't go into specifics about because of just how sad and random it actually was) that happened about, I don't know, ten miles from our house.  It was something so completely unexpected that there wasn't anything really for the people it affected to have done in order to prevent it from happening.  A perfect storm of events.  A series of dominoes, that led them to be in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time.

Life is full of bear traps.

I am scared for this little girl I am carrying.  I thought it was a dangerous existence inside of my womb but the world outside is so much more treacherous.  The sheer randomness of shit that happens makes even the mundane seem to hold so much peril.  Nothing seems safe to me anymore.  How do you protect someone from something no one could have foreseen coming in the first place?

Maybe all this anxiety about not being able to protect my daughter stems from what happened with George. No matter what we did for him we couldn't protect him.  We couldn't save him.  We never even saw coming the trap that swallowed him up.  Life went completely out of our control and that completely fucks with your mind.

Or maybe all this anxiety is just about being a parent, regardless of whether it is in the context of suffering a traumatic loss or not.  I think about my own childhood and the anxiety my father had about my safety and that of my sister.  He worried about us with a consistency of an olympic athlete in training.  I think he still does.

Maybe I'm not the only soon-to-be parent or seasoned parent staring at the spinning blades of the ceiling fan at four in the morning wondering what possible dangers to their children are lurking out in the world.

Maybe The Creep is universal. 

(un)fair

We went to the second and last birth class this morning.  The class concluded with a video of a c-section, complete with a screaming newborn baby at the end.  It was pathetic how much our experience having a c-section was the antithesis of what we saw on the screen.  While it looked almost exactly the same, at the end of our version we were not handed a crying baby but rather a silent, barely moving one, whose sweet little face was swollen because of his heart failure.  After watching the video I held it together long enough to get outside of the building before having to stop on the sidewalk to sob.

We did not go on the tour.

It never really stops, the trauma of living after the death of your baby. It just goes quiet for stretches of time.

Have I ever mentioned that when we were initially in the hospital with George a few rooms down from us a certain B list actor, who has been arrested for drugs and for abusing his (many) wives on multiple different occasions, was there with his girlfriend (25 years his junior) who had just delivered their healthy son?  Leif walked back into my room after getting me more ice chips, since at the time I was pretty much vomiting everything but ice chips up, and told me about seeing this guy obviously pretty excited while talking on the phone out in the hall.  I think I said something along the lines of how completely unfair it was that some fuckhead who drives drunk, has been in and out of rehab, who has been married quite a few times to women much younger than he, and who just generally seems to be a douchebag, gets a healthy baby while we get a dying one.

It wasn't fair.

Driving home from the class I kept thinking about that particular actor, his now 15 month old son, and the unfairness of George's short life and -eternal- death.  I came to the following conclusion. 

It isn't fair.  But life isn't fair.  It never has been.  I had just been lucky up until that point to have escaped rather unscathed from the unfairness of the world.  People worse than that particular actor have healthy babies all the time.  Murderers get away with murder all the time. Thieves call themselves business men, robbing from the poor while stuffing their own off-shore accounts, all the time.  Good people don't have enough to eat all the time.  

It isn't fair.

But neither is it fair that I have a wonderful relationship with my husband while some women are in abusive ones.  It is not fair that I have a good job while there are others who have worked equally as hard as I have, if not harder, who are jobless.  It is not fair that I live in a country where I am, as a woman, completely free to wear what I want and to go where I want, why others live under the thumb of oppressive religious patriarchies.  

It isn't fair that George died.  But it would not have been somehow more fair if my son had lived and the son of that stupid shit actor had died. Neither child deserved life more than the other.  George just happened to get the short end of the stick.

What is fair and what is not fair have no bearing in this world.  Fairness is the exception while unfairness is the rule.  We are surrounded by what is unfair and it is miraculous that there is any fair at all.  This is a concept that I have just now, just today, really begun to understand.  

George died and it isn't fair.  George died and while I can never accept it is as OK that he died, I can accept it is as OK that it isn't fair that he died. I don't feel like I need to rail against that concept anymore and believe it or not, that kind of helps.

we're actually getting stuff done

The Nursery Edition.

When we found out I was pregnant with a boy the first time around one of the first things I did was figure out how I wanted his nursery to look like.  It was all part of the expectation that our future was going to be exactly as I planned it would be.  This time around it has been a struggle for me to believe that we would even need a room for our baby because it was hard to believe we would even have a baby to bring home.  I still have my doubts but as we creep closer to her due date I've made the effort to start investing in her future as much as I did with her brother.

This time I went with something that, sans the crib, could be adequate for a guest as well.

We bought a Jenny Lind style crib through Overstock, payed 3 dollars in shipping, and it literally came two days later.  Unfortunately Leif was in New York all last week (sad face) so we, and by "we" I mean "he," assembled her crib on Sunday.

Leif decided to dress for the occasion.   Notice the watermelon sitting on the counter.  That is watermelon number two for this week.  We realized that one a week was not cutting it so this time we bought two.  Number one is 3/4 gone already and it is Tuesday.  At least it is mostly water, right?

The cabinet and the mirror we thrifted and fixed up (I'm kind of a thrift store junkie) but the mirror isn't staying because I think it needs something smaller.  The clothes in the cabinet are the full extent of the clothes that we have for her at this point.  The top shelf is still occupied by George's memory box and some other item's of his that are special to us.  Not sure where they are going to go at this point... 

The curtains were about as girly as I could go in this room, it does have pink in it though!  I'm just not a super girly person.  As a kid I was more interested in catching lizards than playing dress up.

The rocking-chair and the brass lamp were thrifted as well.  Initially both of these items were going to live in the living room but I think they look better in the baby's room.   Plus I recently thrifted an ottoman that I recovered with Leif's help and it now lives in the living room in place of the rocker.

I cut up some fabric that coordinates with the curtains and used embroidery hoops as frames, that is what is sitting on the chair in this photograph. They are super light-weight and so I think they will go up behind the crib so that if there ever is an earthquake (and living in Los Angeles that is a real concern) and they fall they won't hurt the baby.  

Crib, all assembled along with the fabric I used for the hoops.  Still need a mattress and about a dozen other things but we're plodding along. Besides, what does a baby really need other than a carseat, a place to sleep, diapers, and clothes?

Best part of the room; Husband, content with a job well done.

return

For the better part of a year I could not even drive by the hospital where George was born without my eyes welling up with tears.  When errands would take me to that side of town I would take circuitous routes to avoid the large buildings but occasionally I would have to pass by and thus I would find myself unable to look away from the glass windows, attempting to remember which one was ours.  In my mind the hospital had become a huge green and glass monster; hundreds of eyes peering at me and tempting me to remember everything.

At first, when I thought about having another baby, I was repulsed by the idea of going back to that hospital.  Every hallway, every door, every piece of equipment, every person seemed like a trapdoor to some unpleasant memory.  But another baby seemed so far away and it seemed so unlikely that we would even be in Los Angeles, since for a good while after George's birth we were still planning on moving to Portland.  Then things changed. I could not muster up the courage to leave the city in the wake of the trauma of losing George.  I was still learning how to live in a life that was never supposed to be my own and so the thought of trying to do that in another city and state was terrifying to me.

So we stayed.  Then eight months later I was pregnant again and now here we are, six weeks away from being back in that same hospital for the birth of our daughter.

I mentioned before in an earlier post how we had decided to take a birthing class at the hospital with the intention of a) educating ourselves about labor and delivery and b) dealing with any trauma going back there might expose us to before we have to go there for the real deal.

Our first class was this past weekend and walking into the hospital both Leif and I were expecting things to have changed in some way in the time since we were last there.  Instead we got coffee at the same Starbucks, walked the same hallway to the lobby and sat on the same couch and I cried, where I did the same thing numerous times before.  I think we had both wanted to see that something had changed here but instead it was just reinforcement that life (and death) had continued as usual.

There were eleven other couples and, of course, everyone went around and introduced themselves.  As it turned out we were second to the last and we listened as every single one of those couples said something along the lines of this baby being their first.  When it was our turn I just said our names, that were were expecting a girl and what her due date was.  I took the easy way out, I admit, but I couldn't bring myself to say that this was my first child or that I had a son who had died.

The class itself was fine, nothing too exciting or inspiring.  We talked about the stages of labor and the signs of labor and we practiced some breathing techniques.  At the end we watched a video of actual labor and delivery.  I was relieved we were in the dark because I was crying again at this point, watching and listening as everyone talked about how amazing it was and how much having their babies changed everything.  Words were used like, "perfect," and "beautiful," and "life-changing."  Tiny crying babies, filling up my vision on the screen.

As I sat there watching twenty-two other people watching the same video all I could think about was something I had read over at GITW during the early days after George's birth, which was this; "Birth Matters.  Until it doesn't."  An epidural matters.  Until it doesn't.  Birth position matters. Until it doesn't.  A birth plan matters.  Until it doesn't.  None of those things mean very much to me anymore while it seems like they mean so much to so many.  Perspective changes everything and while I don't fault anyone for placing emphasis on these things, I just don't feel the same way.  I'm not going into this experience with any expectations for what I want other than a healthy baby and a healthy me.  It does not matter to me if she comes out the usual way or the way her brother did- through an incision in my abdomen.

Three hours of class and I only cried twice.  Not too bad.  But next week includes a tour of the labor and delivery floor, which I am having some significant anxiety about.

When we left, we did so through the exit I had left two times previously. The first time, in a wheelchair, vomiting because of the digoxin, but pregnant and with a small hope that things might still turn out positively.  The second time we left, I was again in a wheelchair but sobbing because George was dead and we were leaving for good without him. This time I left walking on my own two feet and that felt pretty good.