A friend of mine just told me about a friend of hers who gave birth to a little boy this year, born sleeping. I've been thinking about our little boy we had four and a half years ago a lot lately, and I have been missing him so much more recently. Hearing about this sweet family was the push I needed to go ahead and write some more about our precious Julian.
The truth is, what originally got me thinking so much more about him was hearing horror stories of babies coming into the ER with unspeakable injuries due to some incredibly perverse people who I am sure have carved out a special place in hell for themselves. Pardon my extreme feelings, or don't. Looking at my sweet baby boys, it just sickens me to think a person would look at a beautiful new life, completely helpless, completely dependent, and view their little bodies as sexual objects. I shutter and cry just thinking about it, and makes me hold on to my little ones that much tighter. Hearing about a death of one of these babies due to their injuries, caused me to really remember holding our little Julian - wanting to hold these poor little babies whose lives were taken so needlessly. Hearing about these despicable acts and thinking about my babies, especially Julian, sounds kind of strange now that I write about it. But it is what it is.
My brother once suggested I write a book about our experience with having a stillborn, and I've often thought about it since all the books I read afterward didn't really help. I don't know why they didn't help. I think all the anecdotal stories were written by people who didn't experience pain the way I do, and their stories were always so sickeningly positive by the end. I'm sure it is to give the reader a sense of hope and assurance that everything will eventually be ok, which it will be, but at the time I didn't care if it was going to be ok - I was hurt, mad, in unspeakable amounts of emotional pain that even hurt physically at times, felt cheated, and no one got it; even the parents who went through the same thing and wrote such inspiring sweet stories for these books. Not that I enjoy angry writing, just wanted to know other people weren't so positive and put together, but also not totally broken either.
My past posts about our experience can be read here in 2009 and here in 2010.
Here are a few of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately.
The female body. The only time I was happy after it was verified we had lost our Julian was when we were holding him. We were peaceful, excited, proud, and happy to see and love-on our perfect baby boy. As soon as we said our final goodbyes is when the feelings of loss really began to hit. I remember hearing a healthy baby cry somewhere outside our door in the hospital, and felt the strange experience of let-down - where the milk in the breasts moves downward in anticipation of feeding the new little baby your body has put so many months into building, growing, nourishing. It was physically painful and I began leaking. For days I endured swelling, engorgement, carrying two huge leaky, painful bowling balls on my chest that I was mad at. Mad at the pain, mad at my body for the constant bleeding and leaking of milk - the constant reminder that there wasn't a baby to feed, and the constant reminder that I had just given birth to a baby who we didn't get to take home. One evening in the shower while watching blood go down the drain and Nich helping me express some of the milk out under the warm shower water, me trying to not cry, it suddenly occurred to me...why am I trying to hold back tears? My body sure isn't trying to hold back. Suddenly all the leaking and engorgement were equated to my emotional pain and tears. I felt like my body was grieving the loss as much as my heart was, and it was so much easier to accept what my body was doing.
The baby room. That was one of the toughest things for me to deal with. We had all the baby furniture delivered to a storage unit, and the only thing we had set up in there was the painted walls, Julian's cute initials, JPB, some stuffed animals and books, and a baby swing we built. Nich and my mom would go in there and talk about how peaceful and calming and happy it was. I couldn't go in there for about 8 months - just the thought of looking in there made the feelings so raw again. They asked if it was because of the thought of "What could have been." My feelings were, NO, it is the thought of "What SHOULD have been." And why was everyone talking about Julian in the past tense all of the sudden? Yes, he died, but he was still there, still with me. Very much an "is" and not a "was." He IS my baby, he never will be "was my baby." "We had a stillborn" sounds so awful. "We have a little boy in heaven." They are just words, but words are powerful. Setting up the room as a guest room was easier than setting it up as a nursery again. I waited until I was 37 weeks along to set up the furniture. No one called me crazy, and my husband supported me through the whole ordeal - he made the calls to have it redelivered to our house and built, and he respected my wishes to not getting a bunch of baby stuff, and wash all the clothes we'd originally bought for Julian in anticipation or our second little boy.
Sleep was my enemy. When that depressed, I don't sleep, I don't eat, I just exist. After staying awake 26 hours, my body kept trying to fall asleep, but I wouldn't let it. If I slept, that meant another day passed since I last held my son. If I stayed awake, I could still say I held him today. If I caught 4 hours, I could say it was just yesterday. I think I slept an average of 2-4 hours a night for the first week (that I remember. I likely drifted off and have no idea). Nich, on the other hand, sleeps while depressed. He spent most hours of the days and nights sleeping, and was only awake to eat or because I told him I needed him up with me. Years and children later, it is such a disconnect because now I treasure sleep and count the hours down to when I'll be able to put my head to my pillow. Toddlers and infants tend to do that ;)
Having more children. I wrote about having another baby after Julian here. Because Julian was our firstborn, my biggest fear was whether my body could carry a baby to term. I found the best high-risk OB/MFM (Maternal/Fetal Medicine) EVER. If you know me, you know who is he is and that I LOVE him ;) If you want to know who he is, let me know. We have had 2 little boys since, a three year old and a nine month old, and the experience of each is so much more different than what I would have expected. Not the happy, calm, excited pregnancies, but rather filled with fear, anxiety, and still excitement. Ian was a lot easier, and I didn't live with the same fear as with Oliver's pregnancy. Nothing will ever take the pain of losing a child, and if I let myself think about it long enough and allow myself to re-live holding Julian, smelling him, kissing him, cuddling him, the pain can come back just as raw as after we had to let him go. I could only choose for that to stop happening about 18 months after I had him, but I will say not a day has gone by for nearly five years now, where either my husband and I don't think of him. We tell our children about him in small doses, and for people who know our rainbow story, whenever there is a rainbow in the sky, Oliver always says "that's Julian's rainbow." I can't see a rainbow without tearing up and whispering a little hello to my firstborn.
Things I found helpful. Three things made life bearable during and after the initial grieving process. The first was realizing how common it was and still is. Women two generations ago would sew birth clothes and burial clothes in anticipation of their new babies - they never knew if the baby would survive the birth or the first two years of life. Knowing I wasn't alone and women all over the world since the beginning of time have experienced this pain and have lived through it. Wondering if I would ever be excited or happy about anything else again, wondering if I would ever laugh again - and when I did laugh, wonder if I could do so without feeling guilty - was rough, but I read about women in Uganda where only 1 of 4 babies survives pregnancy and birth.* My heart aches for those women and their families but it is somehow oddly comforting that this is a human experience. Heck it's an animal experience...I've watched a mother cat whose large premature litter died after two days, and how she grieved and meowed and searched for a good week for her babies. The second thing was talking to people who had experienced the same thing, and hearing their stories - the good the bad and the ugly. I'm not personally a big sharer of personal information when it is something so private to me until I have had quite a bit of distance from it (years in this case), but I found it validated some of my fears and feelings. The third thing was to write about it. Write everything personal. I wrote detailed descriptions of what Julian looks like, smellt like, how we felt with him, things Nich and I shared. Everything. It helped in the moment, and years later, while it is tough to read through them, I sometimes curl up with my letters to him and all of the things that touched him and just breathe in my first perfect boy.
I don't know that this will help anyone, but it's somewhat cathartic to me to talk a little bit about some of the things I hadn't shared yet. I'm sure I'll write again about it, it may be another 2 1/2 years, but every so often I get to a place where it gets a little easier and I can let some of it out in the universe again.
*I read that doctors who work there through Doctors Without Borders have a hard time dealing with the custom of showing no emotion, happy or sad. All people keep a straight face whether giddy with joy or in the depths of depression. To do so in that culture is a sign of weakness. Women who have just lost a child don't discuss it and don't show outward emotion. I can't imagine how steel-willed they are, and what kind of inner turmoil they must be in to bottle everything up.
