When my daughter died, my heart was torn and it felt like half of it went with her. The outpouring of support we received helped us keep going, and we are so thankful for the love of our friends, family, and even total strangers. I wrote a blog nearly every day after Hannah died. The words wouldn’t stop, and my mind felt like it would explode until I could get them out through my fingers. No words can really describe how I’ve been feeling lately. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even had time to process it myself, but subconsciously I’ve probably been keeping busy to avoid having to process the emotions, which are so much deeper now than they were in the beginning.
Recently, several of my friends who were “probably done” or “definitely done” having kids after two have made pregnancy announcements that they’re having a third child. On the one hand, I’m happy that they don’t have to deal with the pregnancy drama that I had. Whether they planned these babies or not, they love them and will make great parents to them. I can’t quite articulate how I feel, except to say I feel left behind.
I feel like I should be part of the Three Kids club. I AM part of the Three Kids club, but no one acknowledges my membership, or if they do, it’s with a sad face, eyes gazing down and a tone of apology. Really I’m part of the Five Kids club, but I’m part of the Three Full-term Kids club, the Three Kids Who Lived Outside My Womb Club. No one nudges me and winks as they tease me about forgetting to take pictures of my baby each month. No one jokes that I might forget the third kid someplace, or that I need a vat of coffee every day to survive the chaos. No one teases me that we need to learn how babies are made so we can stop at 3. All the little things that drive parents of 3 (and more) kids crazy, I’m sure, are the things that should be driving me crazy, too, except no one treats me like a mother of 3. No one treats me like a normal mother, because I’m a bereaved mother.
It’s not that I don’t want my friends to have any more kids, it’s that I wanted to have 3 living babies and I don’t. It’s not that I’m not happy for what they have, but that their happiness reminds me of my own sadness and the babies who are missing from our family. I want each of my children to have two siblings they can grow up with, not one and a picture book of memories. If I were younger and healthier, I would convince my husband to have another kid, but we are both scared and traumatized, both by the difficulty of my pregnancies and by the track record of results we’ve had, and we kind of want to end our “having babies journey” on a “win.”
I’m preparing to attend a retreat in July in New York for bereaved mothers of children with congenital heart defects. The person who started the retreat also started a foundation in memory of her son called Hayden’s Heart. If you want to help defray the travel costs for the retreat, please message me. I think it’s going to cost about $600-$700 to fly out there (between the flight itself, baggage fees, shuttle to and from the airport, and work that I’ll be missing that week), though thankfully I received a full scholarship for the retreat itself.
I’ve heard of many people who have started a foundation in memory of their children, to help other parents traveling on this journey of CHD and child loss, and to raise awareness and research funding for others with their children’s diagnoses. We received a wonderful gift basket from Little Light in Kansas City while we were at Children’s Mercy, and those things are still part of our box of Hannah’s treasured things. Most of these foundations were begun within a year of the child’s death. I’ve been feeling like a failure as Hannah’s mother because I didn’t start a foundation, don’t do public speaking events about her (though I would like to, just no opportunities and I don’t exactly know how to “market” that), and I don’t even write about her very often anymore. The only thing I can do for my baby now that I can’t hold her in my arms is keep her memory alive, and I’m not doing a very good job of that.
I attended a grief retreat recently where the speaker, Dr. Alan Wolfelt, said that the brain fog of grief is very normal, though it can tend to make people feel crazy. I would like to know how anyone can have high enough executive functioning in the acute grief phase to be able to start a foundation. I barely have enough executive function now to write a blog once a month and keep all of life’s other details straight. Maybe this is my new normal – being so scatterbrained that I do nothing well and constantly feel stressed because I feel like I’m forgetting something. Maybe this heightened level of anxiety is just how life will be now, but I really don’t like it.
To end this blog post, and because several of you have been asking me what exactly is stressing me out, I’ll list all the stressors in my life. 🙂 Being a good wife and mother, living with my mother while we list our house (not stressful because of her, but because none of our stuff has a place and I’m constantly misplacing things/spending time looking for things/looking at the mess I’ve created in her house but feeling too overwhelmed to do anything about it), potty training a puppy (anyone want to take a foster puppy for a couple of months?!), getting help for our youngest daughter’s potential developmental delay, marketing music therapy to local nursing homes, music therapy sessions/billing, starting to pack our house, lowering the price on our house and figuring out what to do with it/why it’s not selling, keeping up with Norwex consulting/team leading and trying to share Juice Plus with others (both of which have been taking the “back seat” on the Stress Bus lately), Bible study (back seat), moms group (now done for the summer), documentation for music therapy recertification that’s due this year, taxes (now done, obviously), taking care of my sick daughters and husband while trying not to get sick myself, keeping an eye on my crawling baby in a non-babyproofed house, keeping an eye on my 5yo daughter who likes to give the baby small items to choke on, taking care of my 5yo’s wound from falling out of bed last week, keeping my 5yo from punching a screwdriver into her stuffed animals, extreme lack of sleep, trying to lose weight but not succeeding due to stress eating, trying to list things on social media that we’re selling to prepare for the move, debt/finances, church choir and solo performances, extensively researching an issue that’s on my mind a lot lately…I’m sure there are many other stressors but those are the ones that come to mind right now.
I don’t want anyone to read this and pity me or think they shouldn’t bother me with anything, because amid all of this activity, I haven’t made time for friendships or even my marriage, and I obviously haven’t made time to take care of myself. I would love it if my husband and I could go on a real date. I would love it if a friend would come and kidnap me to get a massage or my hair done, or take me to get coffee and do some coloring time. I would melt if a friend offered to take my kids for an entire day so I could spend some time writing (or catching up on the bajillion things on my plate). Nathan and I haven’t had a real date for at least 2 months, and I haven’t had much time with girlfriends lately. I’m sharing all of this so that you can understand why I’ve been a crappy friend/wife/daughter/mother/Norwex consultant and leader/correspondent/Juice Plus rep/church soloist, etc. (and to remind myself what all I need to be doing LOL). What am I forgetting? The constant feeling that I’m forgetting something is going to make me collapse. I don’t think anyone else can relate to this level of scatterbrainedness and task-to-brain-and-time ratio overload. If you can, text me. I probably won’t respond to any other communication methods because I’ll forget. 🙂
PS: This blog brought to you courtesy of me choosing to sit down to write while dinner baked, ignoring the total mess around me, sticking my 5yo on a movie, skipping watching the news, praying the baby kept sleeping, sticking the dogs in their kennels, and snapping at my husband when he got home from work and questioned why I was sitting on the couch at 6:30 when the dogs haven’t been fed, dinner isn’t ready, and I have to leave for church choir in 15 minutes…but at least I wrote it! 😉 This is exactly what I mean – if I take time for self-care, then everything else suffers for it. If I take time for music therapy marketing, then other things get neglected. How do people do everything well? I certainly haven’t figured it out yet.
Transparent Graces 