a change of scenery

Well, the grass is always greener and the blog is always . . . bloggier?

Anyway, I've moved. Please come snark along with me at http://eggdance.wordpress.com/

(and if you are one of the cool people who has my blog listed in your sidebar, please update the address).

I'll see you there!

whatnots and etceteras

Just a few things floating around in my head lately . . .

• I have been getting so many great comments lately and I really love it. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has taken a moment to leave me a comment. Reading them really makes my day. My deep and increasing love of comments will hopefully translate into me being a better commenter (I'm giving it the old college try).


• While it is perfectly acceptable to ask someone who has recently had a cold if they are "feeling better yet," it is NOT acceptable to ask this of someone who has recently had a miscarriage. The answer, whether she tells you or not, is probably "hell no." While the answer may also be "sometimes," please keep in mind that asking her this question will inevitably make her realize that what would make her feel better is punching you right in your upbeat little face.


• Today I had to go in for a beta (to make sure my hormones are crashing downward appropriately). The nurse who took my blood said, as she finished putting the band-aid on me, "you're almost done with this now." Almost done with what? Giving blood? Getting betas? Having a miscarriage? The enigma is so delicious. Morning blood-taking nurse, you are handy with a needle and mysterious. Thanks for keeping me guessing at 7:40 this morning.


• As you know, I am having a renewed love affair with Tori Amos (because she had miscarriages and wrote cool songs about them and she has my ideal hair and she just kicks ass). This renewed spark made me dig out my Little Earthquakes cd and listen to it all the way to work. I remembered just how much I love that whole album. I used to say that it would be my pick if I were stranded somewhere with only one cd. This may still be true.

• Potter (fat little love pug #2) has to have surgery to remove a cyst! While this is not all that dramatic, I have been having a lot of conversations with him about how he should not be afraid and giving him even more attention than usual (which is a lot).

• I think I may be the worst professor in the history of the Western world. I have come to this conclusion because I NEVER have papers graded on time and I am always tempted to let my class out early. This may or may not be apparent to my students. Also, I tend to have a very hard time resisting stepping up onto my soap box. Just two days ago I had to pull myself away from a long-winded and impassioned speech about the power of individual dissent (citing several major civil rights movements) so my students could get out on time (so I am also guilty of keeping them late. See: Worst Professor Ever (above)). I do not think they were stirred to action by said speech. They simply looked annoyed.
• Oh, and while I'm thinking of it, if you have a blog and someone writes you an email (through the email address you provide on your own blog page) to express their heartfelt thanks for all the writing you did about your own miscarriage and expressses how helpful it has been to read your writing as she struggles through her own miscarriage, WRITE HER BACK. You don't have to write a lot, since apparently you are very, very popular, but at least acknowledge that someone took the time to thank you for your work and for sharing yourself. If you don't do this, this person will start to hate you just a little bit and will think snarky things every time she reads your blog. So there!

a new language

This morning on my way to work I got a call from one of the women I work with (not a colleague, but a (for lack of a better word) client). She told me (somehow without actually saying the word 'pregnant') that she was pregnant and was trying to work out the logistics of getting an abortion. It turns out she can get one this week in Worcester (where I live) although not in Boston (where she lives) so she was calling me to find out if I knew where the Planned Parenthood was (I don't). I gave her what information I could and asked if she had anyone to go with her. She said she was going by herself (from what I can gather, they will be giving her the RU-486 and then making her stay there for 4 hours). She is one of the few women (clients) I work with who knows about my miscarriage, and she did talk a bit about the fact that she did not want to upset me and that it seemed sickly ironic, me losing a baby I want so desperately her desperate to not have a baby. I said what I should have said; I said things that The Wise Woman (that archetype I am always trying, and failing, to emulate) would have said. I told her that every situation and every grief was its own; I told her that both situations were difficult and that I thought she was brave for making a choice that would be best for her and for her son, but inside I just felt bitter and tired and that the whole world was just so fundamentally unfair. I hung up the phone with her.

And then I thought, 'I CANNOT go with this woman while she has her abortion.' And then I thought of having mine, and how scared I was. I thought of Renee, sitting in that uncomfortable chair and the two of us trying to make each other laugh so we wouldn't listen too closely to the women on either side of us who were there for their retrievals and their transfers-- the women who were there to make babies instead of lose them. And then I thought, 'I CANNOT let this woman do this alone. I can't be a person who just turns away.' So on Friday I am going to Planned Parenthood to offer what I can to this woman, to try to hold my anger and pain and sadness inside long enough to hopefully be of some help to her.
Shit.

What feels so tiring to me is that we are faced, in this life, with not only surviving our tragedies, both small and epic, but with reconstituting ourselves after them as well. I felt this after my divorce-- the undertow pull to just close myself off, not believe in love, never send a card or listen to a song and imagine myself in its lyrics. And it was and still is so hard sometimes to not just give in to that, to not just pull up my feet and let the water carry me to some darker, safer, sadder place. Now I am there again. I have lost my innocence again. I am so sad, but I don't want to become someone who can't be excited for other people's pregnancies, someone who looks away from children in stores. At least, I don't want to be that person for good, because I am definitely doing these things now. Two of my co-workers are pregnant and throughout the course of our 4 hour meeting today, it felt as though an almost constant undercurrent of comments about their babies swirled around me. I found myself gritting my teeth and just thinking of my co-workers (most of who know about my very recent miscarriage), 'Can't you see me?!' I mean, how the fuck, as a woman who knows about another woman's loss, can you just sit there and make comment after comment about something that (with any minimal amount of thought or consideration or empathy) you would recognize as intensely painful for her? And worse yet, how many times in the past have I been that thoughtless woman, making comment after inane comment without recognizing how deeply I was cutting someone?

But I guess these are the rules of this new world I have entered into and not the rules of the one I no longer inhabit. It's time to learn a new language.

and finally . . .

I have finally managed to take pictures of the sign I stole from the church. This is good because having the sign in my house was beginning to bother me. As an added bonus, the sign has not been replaced!

Angry woman: 1; Judgment and Blame Masked as Religion: 0.

ask me about my miscarriage

Although we were relatively careful about not telling too many people about the pregnancy, I have found that I am often very quick to tell people about the miscarriage. I think it probably has something to do with wanting some acknowledgement for this loss; some of it probably also comes out of a sense of anger that there still seems to be so much silence around this particular issue. A co-worker who is both closeted AND homophobic (quite the winning combo) mentioned that she had not seen me around the office much lately. She had the bad sense to ask if I had been on vacation. I must admit that I took more than a bit of pleasure in replying, "actually, I had a miscarriage." The look on her face was, I think, probably a mixture of shock, embarrassment, and perhaps even a smidge of confusion ('but I thought you were a lesbian? how? what?')-- notably, she did not say that she was sorry. She eventually stammered something about "not even knowing" that I was pregnant (as if the fact that she did not know that I was pregnant meant that I could not have possibly had a miscarriage). Another woman in my program fell victim to Hurricane Sara when she asked whether I "had a bun in the oven yet?" I think it's safe to say that that is probably the last time said woman will ask me that question.

I want people to look at me and see this wound, this loss. We don't have a coffin and there was no service-- many people who know us did not even know that I was pregnant, but I find myself demanding acknowledgement for what we have lost and for what we are surviving. If we have to live through this, then everyone else, at the very least, should have to look at this gaping, jagged hole-- if only for a moment.

As you all know, my miscarriage theme song is Tori Amos' Playboy Mommy (both because it is a great song and because it manages to capture several of the most prevalent feelings I have in a way that is fierce and sad and not a bit watered down or overly sentimental). I knew from reading bits and pieces about her in the past that she had had one miscarriage-- when I was googling last night I found out that she actually had three before having her daughter. I also stumbled upon a pretty great clip of her talking about her miscarriages. The line that hit the closest to the bone for me was when she said of going into the doctor's office and finding out about her miscarriage, "you walk in thinking that you're an ecosystem and you walk out completely barren and empty."

In an effort to be "proactive" (a word that I hate since it is one that, for some reason, my mother has overused my whole life) I have signed up for a 10 week mind-body program at the Domar Center (which is affiliated with our clinic, Boston IVF). I received the 14 page intake form in the mail yesterday and I was a bit stymied when I faced the request to "please describe yourself." Luckily, I had a whole line on which to do this. With many apologies to Tori Amos, I just couldn't resist writing, "she's convinced she could hold back a glacier/but she couldn't keep baby alive." I think that about sums it up these days.

and all i got was this stupid miscarriage

Although I spent some time last night trying to remember whether I had ever had a worse Valentine's Day than yesterday, I think the answer, finally, has to be no. This was really no one's fault but my own and maybe also the underachieving embryo's. Renee tried her best-- she got me flowers and a card and even cooked me dinner-- but there was just nothing she could do to pull me out of my horrible, no-good, very bad mood. I yelled, I cried, I refused to eat the food that Renee made for me. In short, I was a complete and heinous bitch. And I knew I was being horrible, but I just could not pull myself out of it. So then I felt sad and angry AND guilty for further ruining Valentine's Day (because, to be fair, this whole not-having-a-baby thing had kind of already made yesterday nearly unsalvageable). But I finally pulled it together a bit and we got to talk and drink some wine and I even got a massage. The good news is that unless one of us is bitten by a cobra or abducted by a roving band of Republicans, there's a good chance that next Valentine's Day will be better. The bar is pretty low.

In other news, I think perhaps it's time to step it up a bit in terms of really making my despair public. I want something that will let people know just where I'm at in case the paleness and the bad skin and the puffy, red eyes and the inability to concentrate on anything other than my own foul mood are escaping people's notice. I think what I really need is a shirt. Maybe even several shirts. Here are just a few that I could wear to spice up my wardrobe and help everyone I work with understand just how little I care about their problems right now:

• Ask Me About My Miscarriage


• Nope. Still Not Pregnant.


• Bleeding. Angry. Bitter. Enough Said.


• I Spent $3,000 Trying to Get Pregnant and All I Got Was This Stupid Miscarriage


• I'm With Miscarriage Haver (with arrow pointing to me). For Renee, of course.

Feel free to chime in with ideas of your own.

mizuko jizo

As I've mentioned, I've been trying to think of some way to mark/memorialize the miscarriage. I've been surfing the net and reading other people's stories and googling, but nothing seemed quite right. It seemed as though the choices were either to do nothing or to do something so schmaltzy and trite and overly sentimental that there is no way I could possibly take it seriously, let alone think of it as any sort of tribute. I've been reading through the archives of other bloggers who have had miscarriages, trying to find myself in their words, I guess-- trying to locate the path of breadcrumbs that got them out of the dark forest of their grief-- and I came across the mizuko jizo in Unwellness. For the first time, it seemed like I may have found a possibility.

Peggy Orenstein writes, "I had never previously considered that there is no word in English for a miscarried or aborted fetus. In Japanese it is mizuko, which is typically translated as "water child." Historically, Japanese Buddhists believed that existence flowed into a being slowly, like liquid. Children solidified only gradually over time and weren't considered to be fully in our world until they reached the age of 7." So the 'mizuko jizo' is the "bodhisattva, or enlightened being, who (among other tasks) watches over miscarried and aborted fetuses." The idea is "that Jizo would eventually help the mizuko find another pathway into being" and that we can, through ritual and acknowledgement, "send the mizuko off, wishing it well in the life that it will have to come . . . [b]ecause there's always a sense that it will live at another time."

My mother had a miscarriage (in her 40's) before she had my youngest sister. I was in high school at the time and I remember thinking a lot about what had happened, trying to fit it into my world view somehow. I somehow decided that whoever it was who had been trying to be born would be eventually. I decided that everyone who needed to get here did get here somehow. When my mother got pregnant again and had my sister, I remember thinking as I looked at her, 'you tried to come once before.' I even remember asking my mother if she thought that the new baby was the same one that hadn't made it through the first time. I don't think she ever answered me. This seems like the type of discussion that my overly pragmatic mother would have had very little patience for. But I have believed this cobbled-together theory of mine all these years and I think I do still. So, after a fair amount of searching, I found a mizuko jizo statue that I really liked and I ordered it. One of the things that I like so much about this particular version is that it is both holding a baby (which I assume to be the one who has died and is being watched over) and has a child peeking out from under its robes (which I think of as a child yet to come).

I feel as though I owe it something, this child that thought better of being mine, but I just don't know what. I find myself thinking in dialogue with it sometimes, but even then I don't know what to say, exactly, except "we wanted you," except "I'm sorry." But even then I don't know what I am apologizing for. I guess I'm apologizing for bad luck and for bad cells and for all my imperfections. I guess I'm apologizing for my selfishness and my love of gossip and how much I swear and for not working out more and for the drugs I took in college and for all the other millions of things that may make me far less than the best mother one could have. Sometimes I say, "I tried," which was one of the first things I said to Renee as we stood in the parking lot of the doctor's office, holding each other while everything slipped away.

See the article:http://www.peggyorenstein.com/articles/2002_mourning_miscarriage.html