We’re OK

It truly has turned into a day by day recovery.  Tuesday, I actually felt fine.  In fact, I felt so fine, I felt guilty.  How can I be “fine” when I have just lost my baby?  But I was fine on Tuesday.  Well, I was fine Tuesday morning.  By the time I picked up Conor from daycare and Dave came home, I was not doing so fine. 

Wednesday sucked.  The whole day pretty much sucked.  Yesterday was somewhere in the middle.  Today, I feel anxious again with a pit in my stomach.  Then again, I’m going back to work this morning for a few hours.  I’ve been working all week (except Monday) at home.  But today, I will see people and I think that is sort of freaking me out. 

There are a couple of weird things I’m dealing with in this whole process.  First, there is the guilt for feeling fine.  Usually, when I feel fine, I consider that to be a good thing.  Now when I feel fine, I feel like somehow I am not a good mother.  That’s weird.

Second, and I can only speak for myself here and to further qualify this is probably not how other women feel, but second, this miscarriage is very, very sad.  But it’s not devastating.  I did not lose Dave or Conor.  I did not lose my baby two days before it was due, like my neighbor.  This is not my first pregnancy and I’m not additionally racked with worry that I will never be able to get pregnant. 

I feel incredibly guilty for each one of those sentences I just wrote.  I feel like I’m supposed to be devastated and rolling around on the floor wailing in grief.  But I’m not.

I’m sad; I’m really sad.  (And I still cry just reading those sentences) But we are going to be OK and we’re going to try again, and I have hope that we’re going to have a successful pregnancy again and have a happy, healthy child again.  And in reality, we may not.  But at this point, I have no real knowledge about whether we will or we won’t, but I’m going to be positive about it now. 

And poor Dave.  He’s worried about me and wants to be so supportive and he has been.  And when I make statements like “Look how flat my belly is now” and he goes “That’s GREAT!” which is, of course, what he knows used to be the correct answer, he doesn’t understand why he gets the angry-wife-you-said-the-wrong-thing glare. 

Yes, my belly is flat(ish) again, and that makes me sad.  Yes, we can go to the SHRM conference in June now because I won’t be giving birth the next week.  Yes, I have to buy some winter clothes because the maternity clothes I just got out aren’t necessary any more, and that makes me sad.  Now I need to get a couple of conference proposals ready in the next month because in August, when the conference occurs, I won’t have a one month old.  

That continues to be the weird part.  All those plans that changed or were adapted because we thought we’d be dealing with a pregnancy and a newborn.  That still shocks me and makes me sad. 

But we’re OK.  We’re really honestly and truly OK.  I don’t know about how other women in my shoes are doing.  But we’re going to be OK.  We’re still very sad, but it’s all going to be OK. 

I hope out there in blogland, you don’t judge me for being OK.  But if there is a mother out there who stumbles upon this site when she’s trying to deal with her miscarriage, I hope it helps her to know, You’ll be OK.  It hurts.  But you will be OK. 

8:41:44 AM