3 Year Anniversary, Not Doing Well

[mytai]

@TimeToHeal, I think my T wants it mainly used for communicating about appointment times now, like needing to change times or to cancel. There is a crisis mobile team I could call out to me if I needed, or just talk on the phone with someone in the mean time.

 

[Echo]

@mytai - it is agony to lose a child, particularly in the circumstances that you did. Mine were also not ideal, though by no means as bad as yours. I can still cry about it and feel very sad 18 years later (it stuns me to think that it was so long ago). For a while I remembered dates and I planted a small indoor rose for my first lost baby. On the first anniversary, around the beginning of April, that little rose sent out a flower far too early in the year - it felt like a miracle.

Now in hindsight I am very glad I am not connected to the baby's father - and I know I would have done anything to ensure it had a relationship with its father - even stayed involved with an abusive man who was all about wrecking my friendships and career. That would not have been good for the baby or me.

I was wondering whether it would help you to find some way of marking the existence of your baby. Some way of having a place or symbol to go to or use as a point of reference for mourning. You will need to fully mourn your little one, and it may well be that, due to the circumstances of its conception, you have never been able to do that properly. As I say, I grew a rose (I wanted to call the child Rose if it had lived and been a girl); later on I sponsored a little boy in Rwanda and helped him to have an education. In between times, I got a kitten that needed a great deal of time and energy in the mothering vein (I always get the difficult, sickly ones that I turn into shiny, healthy monsters). That helped me, too. I found I grieved again when my rose died and when the little boy was too old to continue with the sponsorship, but having excuses to grieve again are ultimately good.

You are allowed to grieve. It wasn't your fault and it wasn't your baby's fault that the time and circumstances were wrong. Maybe you can allow yourself to channel your feelings in some kind of positive way - you don't even need to share it with anyone else. I hope you find something that works for you.

 

[mytai]

@Echo, a few months after I lost the baby I planted a flowering tree to remember her by. Unfortunately it is at the church I used to attend in the city I moved away from because of abuse. I buried her ultrasound pictures under the tree. I thought I had grieved, I thought I gave myself the time I needed, but maybe I didn't. I had a few people suggest the same thing you did, about planting/growing something in memory of her.

I hadn't decided whether I was going to keep her or not, I was looking into the potential of putting her up for adoption because abortion wasn't an option for me (I just couldn't go through with it). I struggle a lot with guilt, guilt over my feelings I felt towards the baby when I first found out I was pregnant, guilt for miscarrying - I feel like it was my fault.

Like you I have used animals as a way to fill that hole a bit. I raised my cat from a 4 week old kitten who was anemic from being infested with fleas, I took on my current dog because she needed a home to help her lose weight and live the rest of her life out in.

 

[TimeToHeal]

Ah, I see... I'm really sorry you feel unable to reach out to her right now. What about calling to see if it would be possible to move your appointment up this week? I know my therapist often has openings come up - cancelations or what have you - and is sometimes able to get me in sooner if I need it.

At any rate, I hope you are taking care of yourself the best you can. And I'm glad you are frequenting the forum. :)

 

[Echo]

@mytai - unfortunately, I think many people who miscarry think it is their fault. I absolutely hated that feeling when I felt the baby going. It felt like I had failed to protect him/her - somehow the most basic instinct of being a good mother. I imagine your bad feelings about the circumstances have got intertwined with the normal feelings of guilt. I also went through a phase (a normal part of the grieving process I think) when I felt angry towards the babies for leaving me. Like I wasn't good enough. That made me feel horribly guilty, too.

No-one believed me when I got pregnant again. I knew immediately that it had happened - I could always 'see' the baby inside me. I found it so isolating that no-one took it seriously. Then one day someone insisted that I go and see a medium. I had no idea what to expect. The first thing she said to me, without me saying a thing, was, "you lost two babies, didn't you? Well, I'm here to tell you that they are fine and happy and love you very much." At the time, it helped enormously. In the end, it doesn't matter what helps.

It does help to have something that you can tend and watch growing to maturity under your care. The mothering instinct is SO strong; and miscarriage does leave such a powerful sense of things unfinished.

I do hope for you that you are able to go on one day to have other children. You may not feel that is possible at the moment with all you are dealing with, and nothing will replace this lost little one, but you might find it does complete a circle, hormonally or emotionally or physically.

Would it be possible to fetch a cutting from the tree you planted and grow an offshoot - so a baby tree from your mother tree, if you like? Would it be safe for you to go back there or would someone do it for you? If that is at all possible, it might keep the link for you.

 

[mytai]

@TimeToHeal, I do have that option to see if she can get me in earlier. I normally just try to book appointments with her on my days off because I don't like to have to go to work after, in case something happens where I can't focus and perform properly. My only other day off is Thursday, but she told me she isn't working this Thursday. So to answer your question, yes I can call and ask to take a cancellation appointment as long as it ends before I go into work, I just don't know if it is the best decision for me because it may effect my quality of work. I feel like I have a lot to prove after being off for over a week from my suicide attempt.

@Echo, I do absolutely believe it is my fault, for several reasons. Right after I was sold for sex to this person, I drowned the feelings I had by smoking pot and drinking heavily for days and weeks after. I didn't find out I was pregnant until 3 or 4 weeks later. I feel like I could have caused so much harm to this baby that it never had a fighting chance. Also after I found out I was pregnant I desperately wanted an abortion, I hated the fact that I had a baby growing inside me. I felt so much hatred towards this small thing inside me. I truly believe that babies growing inside their mums can feel their mum's energy. I was not sending good energy to that baby. Not only did I put poison that could have harmed that baby inside my body (alcohol and pot) before I knew she was there, but I also sent this baby a message that I hated her... at least for the first little while. After I adjusted to the idea of being pregnant I came around and began to feel love for her, but in the beginning all I felt was hate.

I created a hostile growing environment for this baby. I feel 100% at fault for the miscarriage. If I hadn't smoked pot and drank so much at first, and if I hadn't felt so much hate towards her, I would have actually carried her to term and had her. Whether or not I would have raised her, I don't know, I was undecided at that point.

I wish I could get a cutting from the tree, I just don't have anywhere to plant it if I did get it. Plus I have a black thumb, I'm a plant killer. I don't keep plants because I can't keep them alive.

 

[Echo]

@mytai - you must NOT blame yourself for miscarrying. You didn't know you were pregnant. So you can't blame yourself in all fairness for drinking and smoking. There must be millions of women who have done that to their unborn children, many of whom will have gone on to be born. It is extremely difficult to come to terms with becoming pregnant as a result of rape. The way you reacted was entirely normal. You had something inside you that also belonged to your rapist. But then your hormones kicked in and, of course, the most natural thing in the world happened, you fell in love with your little baby. Everything that happened was totally normal; you have nothing to blame yourself for.

In my case, I drank a very strong coffee that someone gave me. I tortured myself for ages afterwards because I knew I shouldn't have drunk it. I knew my body treats coffee like that as an enema, but I did it out of politeness. And then instead of lying still, I whizzed all over the country being rattled around in various forms of transport, when I now know had I lain still I would have kept that baby. By the time I got to hospital they told me it was only a potential miscarriage and that I was only spotting. With the second pregnancy, my crap excuse for an abusive boyfriend, who knew I was pregnant, refused to help me lift furniture during my move, so of course the result was inevitable. I should have asked for help.

In the end, it was just not meant to be. I always now feel like miscarriages come to teach us something. And sometimes that something is that it was not yet time, but sometimes it is that, yes, you do want to be a mother, when the time is right. Only you can know what that message might have been. Remember though that you also bombed that baby with love hormones. Many mums will be shocked or upset to start with, but then the love kicks in and wipes all that negativity away. And I believe that love, like any love, never dies.

Do you know anyone with green fingers, some little old guy on an allotment or some green-fingered granny, who could give your cutting a good start in life?! Maybe somewhere you go walking with Chelsea?

 

[mytai]

@Echo, I tend to keep to myself, so I don't know anyone near me who could do that... except my T maybe, she has tons of plants it seems.

I'm not sure on the lesson it taught me. Right now though, I have no desire to have kids. I don't want to be pregnant again, get married, have sex... none of it.

 

[Echo]

@mytai - you will find your own way through it. And make sense of it in your own way. I hope you will find you can talk about it with your therapist. It is too much to deal with on your own. Just please don't keep blaming yourself. Please realise that is part of what was done to you by these awful men. And don't worry about the future; what will come in that way, will come. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. It is your life to do what you want to do with it, when you want to. Anything you decide for the future is right for you.

 

[TimeToHeal]

Oh @mytai, @Echo is right, you mustn't blame yourself! You don't know that if you hadn't drank or smoked pot, you would have carried to term and delivered a healthy baby. There is just no way to know that.

It is amazing how much abuse a woman can put her body through and still deliver a healthy baby - IF it really is otherwise healthy, genetically whole, etc, etc, AND - it was meant to be. The truth is, the majority of miscarriages occur because something just wasn't put together right - and through no fault of mom. So please try not to beat yourself about miscarrying - it was really beyond your control. I know, easier said than done. :O_o:

 

[Echo]

I was told when I had my first miscarriage that many, many first pregnancies end in miscarriage, because the womb is still immature. The cruel thing is that we know far earlier now than was ever the case that we have been pregnant. In the past, the loss of the child would just have been dismissed as a heavy period. No-one would have been any the wiser. The hard thing is, in part, how little society talks about it all; if this were not the case, people would see how normal it is to miscarry the first pregnancy. There may not have been anything wrong with your baby at all; your womb may just not have been ready, which is just normal.

 

[mytai]

@Echo, I struggle with the whole "my womb might not have been ready" thing. To me I see that also as, my body being so hostile because I was putting out such negative energy about this baby. I really, really struggle with seeing it any other way - guess that's one of the many reasons I need therapy... to help change my thinking patterns.

@TimeToHeal, I know to an extent what people have put their bodies through during pregnancy, and you're right it is a considerable amount. Maybe I'm faulty, maybe that's a good thing.