I feel like a broken mess. Sadness, love, fear, anxiety, stress, joy, guilt, anticipation, anger, hope and a whole mess of other things that I could never describe are things that I feel a little of every single day. It is so exhausting! This is such a roller coaster of emotions. Everyday I have sweeping highs and deep dark lows. Sometimes I get a very brief moment, maybe ten minutes where I feel like I can do anything. For some reason this usually happens on my drive home from work. I usually plan out all the things I am going to do for the day. It is usually like 20 things that I know take longer than just one day but I feel happy and energized. Then I get home and that feeling is just gone and it makes no difference if I sit down and try to relax or I keep going and run errands or try to clean. There are usually a few happy, distracted hours that I get to spend with Marc before he goes to work but once he leaves it sets in again and slowly takes hold of me throughout the rest of the day until I am totally depressed and crying hoping that Marc walks in the door soon. I wish I could write about my steady climb to happiness. I wish I could report that I am stronger every day but I lately I just feel weak.
I have so much fear and anxiety mixed in with grief of not having Marc. I am worried about the same type of loss, a cord accident. Even though I know that only 1%-2% of pregnancies result in a late pregnancy loss no matter what the cause. I have general anxiety and stress about everything! The bad part about that is that I need to stay busy and plan trips and projects to try and ward off the deep depression but I stress myself out trying to do that. Most days I end up being so exhausted from the stress and anxiety that I just don't do anything and then the depression sets in. I thought I was doing better! I really cannot understand this process. How could I go from doing better to being so depressed, its like one step forward and then five steps back.
I do have good days though. I have times when I am laughing for real, usually when I am around people, specifically Marc or Amber. I feel like over the past 8 months I have depleted my internal source of positive energy and now it is so hard to pick myself up when I need to. For example, I started making a baby blanket for this baby. I got about twenty minutes into crocheting when I started thinking about making baby Marc his blanket, the blanket that is still hanging over the glider in the nursery that we rarely step foot into. I remember spending the hours crocheting that blanket and dreaming of the day I would wrap my little Marc up in it and rock him to sleep. I thought why am I making this blanket for this baby when he might not even get to use it. Then I felt bad because this baby deserves to have the same things that baby Marc had. This baby deserves a special blanket that mommy made while she was waiting for his arrival. Even if he doesn't make it here he still should have the same type of things prepared for him. Then I just got so angry that I could not have that dreamy wonderful feeling that I had when I was pregnant with baby Marc. I immediately started sobbing uncontrollably, I was actually hyperventilating and had to text my mom to call me so that she could calm me down since Marc was at work. I finished the blanket in three days but I didn't dare dream of this baby being wrapped in it. I have to catch myself when I realize that I say things like "if this baby is here at Christmas..." or "maybe we will get to do this with the baby..."
I thought reading to this baby might help me bond with him, something I can tell is harder than it was with baby Marc. Of course I love and want this baby but I can tell that things are different this time. When I was pregnant with baby Marc there was not one moment that I forgot I was pregnant, now I forget that I am pregnant quite a bit. I know I do it as a coping mechanism. I can't think about being pregnant all of the time because when I do I have all those mixed feelings and it's overwhelming. I assume that forgetting I am pregnant will get harder to do once I can feel him moving, at least I hope.
The sad thing is that before I could start reading to this baby I had to go to half price books to buy some new children's books to read. Although the trip to the bookstore was not due to a lack of great children's books already in the nursery. I just could not bring myself to read the books I had read to baby Marc or imagined myself reading to him. That makes me feel awful too! I need to be able to read those books to this baby. I need to be able to do all the things I imagined with baby Marc with this baby!
A study done in 1989 found that, regardless of the timing of the subsequent pregnancy following a loss, mothers in their descriptive study talked freely about having feelings of replacement. I know I will never be able to replace Marc and that this baby is his/her own unique person but I have instinctively done a few things that have made me feel guilty. First, we were on our way to get a sonogram and I told Marc that I was excited and I couldn't wait to see baby Marc. Second, my friend Amber and I were at half price books and I picked up a book that had a Andrew written on the inside cover. I put it back and told her that I did not want to buy a book that had some other little boys name in it but that I wanted Marc to be able to put his name in the book. I am glad there were not any kids in the children's section that day because I must have looked insane as a sat on the floor crying. Maybe I would have done those things even if Marc were here, like my mom who can't seem to call any of us by our name when all five of her children are in the same room. Maybe it was just one of those kinds of mix ups and if baby Marc were here we would laugh about it and it would mean nothing but he is not and since I don't understand all these feelings it made me feel guilty and hurt.
So like I said....this blog post is a mess. I tired to produce coherent thoughts but still feel like its all jumbled and I am too tired to figure out a better way to word and organize things. No real conclusion here. Just a jumbled mess of raw thoughts that I happened to be able to get together and off my shoulders.
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