Category: Spawn

Frog Chops 1, 2, and 3, bathing

Today, my babies should have been turning one. We didn’t celebrate, didn’t visit the cemetery, and I didn’t collapse into an alcoholic stupor.

Because, I’m pregnant.

I want to write “it looks like I am pregnant”, or, “I might be pregnant”. But the pee on the stick doesn’t lie. It doesn’t guarantee anything. But for the past three days (since the day my period was due), there have been two little pink lines of the stick. Very faint on the first day, but getting stronger day by day.

And there are a shedload of things that can, and probably will go wrong. At this point I am approximately 4 weeks and one day along. Something like 50% of pregnancies miscarry withing the first trimester – before 12 weeks. Conventional wisdom says that you shouldn’t announce a pregnancy until after this “danger period” has passed.

But hey, I was well out of my first trimester when things went pear shaped during my pregnancy with the twins. Aubrey was 19 weeks when he died. Archimedes was well past “viability” when he was born.

Crazy, terrible, devastating things happen during pregnancy, and there is no magic “safe” time. Your baby can die during labour, or you can have her for three years and have her die in her sleep. I have lost the comfort of believing that these things don’t happen, or that they happen to “other people”.

I am now the living embodiment of that horrible warning. The woman with the dead babies. The one that you don’t quite know what to say to. And that is ok – “I don’t know what to say” is a perfectly acceptable thing to say.

So the announcement is coming now for two reasons.

1. I am not your gorgeous glowing pregnant woman. I get really tired, really nauseous, and I find it really hard to stay cheerful and hide my symptoms in public. And this time there is one other symptom that I will be unable to hide. The all consuming terror. The countdown to early September (if we make it) will be glacial. Every hour, every twinge, every cramp, every visit to the toilet will be, in my mind, a harbinger of doom. It’s hard to live a normal life when you feel like that.

2. If this goes pear shaped, I will need people to know. Miscarriage is such a private thing, rarely discussed, usually hidden and secret. Baby loss used to be the same way, whispered about, but never discussed openly.

And that just isn’t my style.

We went to the post office to pick up some shopping – a new t-shirt that says Awesome in groovy 70s lettering. So of course he had to wear it today 🙂

Mum took Squish & Alex to the wildlife park on the central coast last weekend. During the snake talk, the keeper asked for volunteers to handle the snake.

Guess who had his hand up first?

Thanks to the Anti Bogan for the image.

Last Christmas, I was full of codeine, and the pain, though intense, was somewhat numbed by the drugs. This year, there are no drugs, and front and center in my brain is the fact that my babies should be celebrating their first Christmas with us. Ripping paper, and getting more excited by the wrapping paper than the presents, and conking out halfway through the day like a pair of aged hooligans.

Yesterday, a friends dad died. It wasn’t unexpected, but this Christmas is going to be sad for lots of families. A day of expectations, that many people find it hard to meet. I find it hard to meet any, and finding the festive “joy to all” spirit is proving a challenge.

So this year, I am sending a special thought out to everyone who can’t be with their loved ones this year, and those who don’t have anyone to love. The homeless, the dispossessed, and the refugees. And especially the bereaved.

Our Christmas charity this year will be SIDS & Kids, without whom this year would have been so much harder. Everyone knows that they do research on SIDS, and that they provide safe sleeping information for families, but it isn’t well known that they also provide counseling for bereaved parents, and their families and friends. Although counseling hasn’t made the horror go away, it does help a lot to know that the crazy is normal. Archie and Aubrey’s brief lives and then their deaths have changed me irrevocably. Eventually, I’d like to be able to say that I am a better person from having known the loss, and if I get there, SIDS & Kids will have been a bog part of that.

I’ll leave you with a little video from yesterday, Santa leaving the Pearl Beach Progress Hall after the chaos of meeting the local kids.