If I Had an Anonymous Blog

Today's blog dare prompt is this, what would post about if your blog was anonymous? Would it be the same as your current blog? Could you let loose and and write more about what it on your mind?

Well since my blog is anonymous this is an easy one for me to answer. I blog anonymously specifically so that I can be as honest as I want to be. In real life I'm the kind of person who loves to share the positive things and tends to keep the negative things to myself. I've never been a complainer, I've never been the kind of person who needs other people to lean on in times of trouble. I deal with most of the negative things in private, with my husband. I keep my happy public face on at all times. I hate to cry in front of other people (except my husband of course) and I don't usually reach out and ask others for help.

But losing my son is simply too much for me to bear. I can't just do it myself. I can't deal with it alone. It bursts out of me when I least expect it. I cry in public now, I cry in front of friends and strangers. But I hate it. For some reason, I still feel the need to put on a good public face. It's exhausting most of the time but I just can't turn into someone I'm not. I'm not brave enough to share my real grief with the people I know and love. I know that sounds crazy, but I just need them to think I'm strong. I can't allow myself to let them see how sad and vulnerable I really am. I don't know why I'm like this, but I am and I've come to accept it.

So I blog without telling my name. Here I can let it all out without worrying that people in my real life will think I'm losing my mind. Here I can talk about the people in my life who have let me down. Here I can express my grief in a way that I just can't do anywhere else. I know it's the Internet and I'm releasing my innermost feelings in a very public way, but somehow it feels safe.

Safer than trying to express these feelings with my friends. It's not that they won't listen or care, but sometimes it's just too hard to see the looks of horror on their faces. Watching them absorb my story, the story that is probably their greatest fear, the fear of losing a child. Watching that look reminds me that my new normal is still completely alien to them. They don't live in the world of dead babies. The world where you pick up ashes and have blessings at a church. The world where you have to deal with an empty room that should have been a nursery. The world where nothing is safe anymore.

But here, I have found many people who walk this path alongside me. It's an awful path, but it's ours and we're doing our best to try and navigate through it.

So that's why I blog anonymously. I get to have a safe place where I can work through my loss, and I still get to have some semblance of my old normal life. I really think I need both to stay sane.

Phew, that felt a lot like a therapy session. : )

Dear Tears

Photo courtesy of photo8.com

Dear Tears,

Can you please go away? I am trying to get on with my life and you are making things very difficult for me. Walking around with red puffy eyes is not a good look. Plus, you are standing in the place where happiness should be. I would really like happiness to come and visit me. So if you could just leave for a while I would really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Me

Thanks!

Thank you so much Ava's Mummy from Beautiful Songbird for this blog award.

Confession time...It's noon on a Sunday and I'm still in my PJ's nursing a killer hangover, so I'm feeling especially stylish today (snicker).

But wow, I can't believe I've been given an award for this blog. A blog that I wasn't sure anyone would want to read. After all, who wants to read about a grieving mother and a dead baby? But as it turns out, there are many of you who, just like me, are struggling down this road. We have reached out into cyberspace and found each other. None of us would choose to be here, but sometimes it's nice to know I'm not alone. So thank you again Ava's Mummy.

Here's how this award works.

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you the award.
2. Share 7 things about yourself.
3. Award 15 recently discovered great bloggers.
4. Make sure you contact these bloggers to let them know about the award. 

Seven Things About Me

1. I swam with dolphins a few years ago in Puerto Vallarta and it was an amazing experience.
2. I am an avid wine enthusiast. I drag my husband wine tasting in every country we visit that makes wine.
3. I love to travel. I've got a list of places to see that keeps growing and growing with Morocco, Sardinia, Tokyo, and Cape Town topping the list at the moment.
4. No matter how long I live outside the US, I will always be a California girl at heart.
5. I have just started exercising again, hopefully this time I will stick to it.
6. I was in a Sorority in college and still keep in touch with many of my sorority sisters.
7. None of my friends or family (except for my husband) know about this blog. I'm not brave enough to tell any of them about it or to let them read it. So I blog in secret, well except for you lovely readers. So thank you for being here to read my words and offer encouragement. It helps more than you will ever know. 

And the Awards Go To
I'm fairly new to blogging but I've already found some amazing blogs. So I went through my list and picked these 15. I tried to pick blogs who have not already received this award in order to share the love. Please stop by and check them out, I think you will enjoy reading them as much as I do.

1. Leslie at Cullen's Blessings
2. Sarah at Hope, Interrupted
3. Missy at Mommy's Sunshine
4. Tess at My Space
5. Jessica at Four Plus an Angel
6. AKD at Little Footprints
7. Louise's Mom at Now What?
8. KAM at Our New Normal
9. Teresa at Our Sweet Angel
10. Paula at wyatt's ways
11. Jessica at Two Pieces of My Heart
12. Patty at Journey of Loss, Hope, and Faith
13. Jenn at jenn's den
14. Lindsay at It Just Takes One
15. Megan at MJ's Memories

Dreams

To all of you who have lost children. Do you ever see them in your dreams?

Today is the 13th of January. It's been exactly 5 months since my beautiful, perfect son was born still. He was perfect in every way, a victim of his placenta which failed to do it's job. Five months since we said good bye to our hopes and dreams. Five months since we had the dream of the perfect family.

Not once in those five months have I had any dreams of my beloved son.

I am an avid dreamer. I remember them all. I have many recurring dreams, being naked in public, being chased, being on an elevator that is out of control. I dream about all sorts of things. But for the life of me, I am unable to dream about our son.

Somewhere in between my 34 week doctor appointment where I last heard my baby's heartbeat and the 36 week scan where there was no heartbeat, my husband had a dream about our son. I remember it so well. He woke up with a big smile on his face. "I saw our son last night in my dream." he said. "He had these beautiful big blue eyes and he was smiling at me." The joy on my husband's face was something I will never forget. "He is beautiful," he told me. "I can't wait to meet him."

I remember sharing this story with a few of my friends. How lovely, I thought. How lovely that my husband is dreaming about our son. What a fantastic father he will be. Little did I know that our son had most likely already grown his angel wings by then.

Is it possible that what my husband was dreaming about was actually our son saying good bye? Do you believe in things like that? I'm not sure if I do or not, but it's an awfully strange coincidence that the only dream he had about our baby boy was during the time that he left his body and went to live in heaven. Either way, I would like to believe that it was our son's way of letting us know that he was leaving us and that he is OK.

I just wish that I could see him in my dreams as well. I miss him so much.

Crying in Public Places

Since losing my son, I have lost control over my emotions. They swing back and forth, from happy highs to crashing lows on a whim. Their whim, not mine.

As someone who has always been fairly level headed and logical this is a huge adjustment for me. Especially when I'm out in public. I never used to cry in public places. Not for any reason, not ever. I used to be a very private crier. But not anymore it seems.

It seems that my "new normal" is crying whenever and wherever the mood strikes me. I am not thrilled about this of course, but it seems I have no control over it. My emotions have taken over and logic is out the window.

I usually carry sunglasses around just for these moments. I know I must look silly walking around London on a rainy day with my huge glasses on but I don't care.

But then there's those moments when I'm caught without them. Like this morning when I was out walking. Exercise has been my salvation. It's been a huge mood lifter and made me feel better about myself. It's a way to release my tension and sadness. And you guessed it, it brings out the tears.

So there I am, walking as fast as I can through a lovely park near my house. Ipod blasting, arms pumping, and the tears rush out. Sobbing while I walk, not just little cute tears but a full blown sob. Nice right? Not embarrassing at all right? I was horrified and quite far from home.

No sunglasses with me so I'm totally exposed. I have no choice but to just let it all out. I'm sure I looked like a crazy person. But luckily I live in England, and the English are very polite. So if anyone noticed, they all pretended not to. But I know what they must have been thinking.

The Room

Our son's room. The room where he was going to sleep and play. The room where I was going to change him and feed him and rock him to sleep. The room where he was going to grow up. The room that had a future. The room that was going to be filled with joy and hope. What do we do with this room now? Now that there is no baby, no crib, and no rocking chair? This room is still empty and so is my heart.

Well sort of empty. The mattress from the old guest bed is still there leaning up against the wall. The paintings and mirror that once hung on the walls are on the floor. There is a blow up bed from when my Mom came to visit us after my c-section back in August. You see, this room was still in transition when we got the horrible news that our son had passed away. It was being converted from a guest room into a nursery.

So it sits there very much as it had been on that day. Frozen in time, a time where there was still going to be a baby and the old stuff needed to go. Unfinished, like my dreams of a successful pregnancy and happy family. A chaotic mess, the way I feel about myself a lot of the time.

But you can't freeze time, it goes on even when you don't want it to.

So what to do with the room? Do we buy a new guest bed? Do we empty it out? Do we leave it the crazy mess it is now? We did a lot of thinking and have decided to turn it into an exercise room. A fresh start for the room and a fresh start for us as well. One of the things we decided after our tragedy is that if it's just going to be the two of us then we need to get healthy for each other. If it's just going to be the two of us then we owe it to each other to live for a long time. So we're buying a treadmill and installing a TV in there. We'll keep the blow up bed for when guests come over from the US of course.

It's heartbreaking. This isn't what I had planned. I wasn't supposed to have to re-do this room until he was old enough to decide that the sports theme I chose was "too babyish." When he was too big for his crib and we were getting ready to move him into his "big boy" bed. I wanted my baby boy, not a treadmill. I wanted to be playing with him on the floor in that room, not doing sit ups on a yoga ball. I wanted a lot of things that I'm never going to have, but at least we're doing something healthy and positive.

Hopefully, some day I can write another post about how I'm having to convert our exercise room into a nursery.

Hopefully.

Hopefully

Please??

So I'm All Better Now,,,, Right?? No?? Well At Least My Hair Looks Good.

Today was our last appointment with our therapist and I'm left wondering,,, am I all better now?

My husband's company has a pretty great benefits scheme which includes grief counseling. They found and paid for a certain number of sessions with a psychologist who lives very close to us. It's not a benefit either of us knew about, but the fabulous folks at the HR department set it all up for us. All we had to do was show up.

Now I have my Bachelors degree in Psychology but up until now I've never actually done any kind of therapy. So even though I have knowledge of what psychologists do, I was still pretty unsure of what to expect during our sessions. I know my husband didn't know what to expect because after the first session he said he didn't think our therapist was any good because she didn't tell what to do, all she did was sit and listen to us talk. I got a pretty big giggle out of that one. You gotta appreciate how men just want to cut to the chase and get the answers fast. So I explained that therapy is a process where we work through our feelings with the guidance of the psychologist and then he got it.

I think that our sessions have really helped us. They allowed us a safe place to talk about our son and how much it hurts that he is not with us. Therapy has also facilitated a lot of talks at home. We have done a pretty good job of sharing our feelings with each other, both in and out of our sessions. I think we both have a better understanding of how each other is coping with our loss and what we can do to support each other. We have a long road ahead of us and we're taking each step together. And we're both open to future sessions if we think we need them at any point going forward.

After the appointment I went to the hair salon for much needed color and highlights. I'm not normally one who lets these kinds of things go as I've got a bit of a vain streak running through me. Roots and straggly ends are not my friends. But the holidays really took it out of me this year and for the first time in memory, I let myself slide on the grooming front. I'm still a bikini wax and a pedicure away from my usual self, but the hair was a great start to my transformation. I love the feeling of walking out of the salon with shiny bouncy hair. It's like being a kid on the first day of school with your new school shoes on. As I walked home I felt like a new woman. A happy one.

So am I all better now? Not even close. But at least my hair looks good!

Why Did I Start This Blog?

So what first prompted me to start this blog?? That's an easy one, I decided to start blogging when I lost my son. But it wasn't as simple as that really.

I was a total stranger to the blogging world. I knew about celebrity blogs like PerezHilton.com because I am a sucker for any kinds of celebrity news. I knew a couple of friends who had blogs, but mostly they were designed so that friends and family who lived far away could see what they were up to. I also had a friend who was setting up a blog to help promote a new business idea she had. But it never occurred that the blogging world was one for me.

One day I was having lunch with a new friend who as it turns out is in the publishing business. She was telling me about her job and the writers she works with. I was sharing my grief  with her. It was at that moment that she asked me this question.

"Do you write?" she asked. My answer, "Well I update my status on Facebook." She said, "You should start a blog about what you are going through, it would be really good for you to get your feelings out."

I was very hesitant at first. I've never been a diary kind of gal and the idea of writing about my innermost feelings and then releasing them for the internet to see is a pretty scary one. I had flashbacks to the 12 year old me when my little sister showed my diary to our babysitter who was two years older than me. In it I had written about a boy that I liked and this babysitter knew him. Total humiliation. So I told her no, I didn't want to write a blog because I was a very private person.

But the idea stuck. Maybe I should start a blog? Maybe getting my feelings out on paper (so to speak) would be good for me? Maybe it would help me heal? Maybe it would help me feel "normal" again.

The idea brewed in my head for about a week. It was the week before we we were flying home to see the family for the first time since losing our son. It should have been a happy trip, one where we were introducing our infant son to our family. Instead it was a trip home with his ashes. A trip to have his ashes blessed instead of having him baptized. It was going to be one of the hardest trips of my life.

And that's when I knew that I needed to write. Not for anyone else to read necessarily, but for me. I needed a release, I needed an outlet. I needed a blog. So I wrote this post about how hard it was to pack for this trip, the one that should have been for 3 people but was now just for 2.

And I haven't looked back since.

Where is That Crystal Ball When You Need It?

Photo courtesy of photos8.com

Don't you ever wish you could see into the future so you would know what to do next? Well that's how I'm feeling these days.

It's a new year, a fresh start, and time to start making some decisions about what's coming next. Since we lost our son in August we've been in survival mode. Walking through life in a grief filled stupor. It feels a bit like when you're walking in dense fog and can only see a few inches in front of you. So you walk slowly and with great care, constantly looking around you to make sure you don't walk into anything or fall off a curb. I think we're both at the point where the fog is beginning to clear and we can start to see our future in front of us, although right now it's still pretty fuzzy.

We both agree that we want to try for another baby. But it's not that simple for us. It took us seven years to conceive our son with the help of fertility doctors and it's been my only pregnancy. So we really don't know if I will get pregnant again. Also, we are both carriers for cystic fibrosis so any child we conceive will have a 1 in 4 chance of having the disease. We got very lucky with our son when genetic tests showed he would not have it and I'm not sure we'll be that lucky again. And of course there's my age. We started trying to get pregnant when I was 33 and I was 2 weeks away from my 40th birthday when we finally got our positive pregnancy test. So you do the math. Yes, that makes me 41 (well not until this weekend) which is not exactly the ideal age for pregnancy.

Which is why I am wanting that crystal ball. To tell me if I will be able to have a successful pregnancy if I try again. To save me the agony of trying and failing, or trying and having another tragedy like this time. To tell me if I should just accept the fact that I will never have a child. To tell me I should start thinking about adoption. I want a crystal ball to tell me which decision will be the right one. I want it to tell me which way things are going to go. I want it to save me from being hurt like this again.

That's not too much to ask,,, is it???

2010- The Things I am Thankful For

I've been doing some thinking since I posted this item  yesterday. Even though 2010 ended up being the worst year of my life, it wasn't all bad. So for the sake of balance, I want to add this entry.

I am so thankful for my husband. I always knew I picked a good one and living our experience has made me realize just how lucky I am to have him. Tragic events can either drive a couple apart or bond them forever. In our case, it's cemented the bond we already knew we had. He is my life, and even if we never have a living child,  my life will be complete because he's a part of it.

I am thankful that I finally got to be pregnant and carry a baby to term. I loved feeling my dear son wriggling and kicking inside me. I loved the way he kicked me every time I tried to sleep on my left side as if to say, "Roll over Mom, you're making me uncomfortable." I am thankful for the joy and love our baby boy brought into our lives. The joy and love we felt when he was growing inside me is like none I've ever experienced. I am thankful that we got to experience that, even though in the end we did not have a happy ending.

I wouldn't change being pregnant with my beloved son for anything,,, I'd just change the ending.

So there you go, even in a totally crappy year there are still some things to be thankful for.