Cooper's Memorial

How do you pay tribute to someone who died before you had a chance to meet them? How do  you sum up a life that was only 8 weeks in the making when it ended? How do you do all of this while you're still up to your eyeballs in grief? Luckily for me I didn't have to, because I had a sister to do the hard work for me.

For any of you who are new to this website, You'll probably want to read this post before going any further with today's story, as that gives you the back story you need to understand today.

It's been six months since my miscarriage, and because I haven't mentioned it in so long, it would be so easy to say I've done my grieving, I've moved on and everything is hunky dory, but that's not exactly the truth. The hardest thing I'm dealing with right now is the fact that Miss K still doesn't really understand what happened. She knows that Cooper isn't going to come to live with us anymore, but she thinks it's because he lives at the hospital. But whenever she brings him up I let her talk about him, I never want this to feel like a subject she can't talk about, or that it's something to avoid. She needs to be able to deal with it too.

There is still a small part of me that holds on to Cooper, especially with my original due date just over a month away. So I decided it was time to finally get his memorial framed and hung.

Appreciate the fact that my bed is made. This is not my room in its natural state.

The print is the one we originally bought for Cooper's nursery before I realised I'd had the miscarriage. The writing next to it is a poem Kimberley wrote for me the day we found out.

I still love that picture, and hot air balloons still hold a special meaning for me, so much so I'm actually considering getting a tattoo of one, when I eventually get around to getting Miss K's tattoo finished.

I couldn't get a decent picture of the poem so if you would like to read it, you can find it at the bottom of this post. Kimberley sent it to me the day of my first ultrasound, and despite the fact that she is the member of our family who can always be relied upon to say the most insane, inappropriate things at the worst possible times, she really managed to capture everything I wanted to say at the time, but was too numb to do. 

For our baby in the hot air balloon xxoo

A thousand stars appear in the sky

every night as time goes by

we'll make a wish and i'll think of you

and we will be comforted through and through

because we believe that you are there

and we'll feel your presence as we stop and stare

at the beauty that is in this world

including the beautiful boy or girl

that will be watching us all the time

and you'll know a love so pure and alive

because you were here and you were real

and there was a love that we could all feel

for you and the thought that we would meet

and we'd hold your hand and tickle your feet

but god acts in mysterious ways

and we will be confused for a million days

wishing that we could see your face

and time would stop and our hearts would race

but things have changed and we feel numb

and we will be lost in time to come

but there will be one day that we will meet

at the pearly gates in the cloudy street

and we will know that it is you

and our whole family will form a cue

to hold you tight and give you love

and share the prayers we sent to god above

to keep you safe and keep you warm

and protect you from every scary storm

your heart still beats within us all

and our love for you still grows big and tall

your mum is brave and your sister is strong

and we will comfort them all year long

our hearts feel heavy and we feel blue

but you are our family and we will always love you.

After the miscarriage - one month on

I'm back again people, I thought I'd discuss where I've been since my miscarriage, it's not something I've spoken about much since my original post which you can find here if you want to know what the hell I'm talking about.  I can't promise I'm not going to swear today. In real life I swear enough to make a wharfie blush. I try my hardest to keep my language PG around here just because I'm really not sure who is reading this stuff, but I'm giving myself permission today to break my own rules, so if you're easily offended by bad language, now is a good time to click away from here.

The thing that has surprised me the most about the past month is just how bloody long it is taking for me to get over everything. I honestly thought I'd be moving on by now, and that all of this would be a distant memory, but it still hasn't happened yet and I'm starting to really get pissed off at exactly how human I am right now. That anger and frustration is starting to spill out of me now, and I find myself exploding over things that never used to upset me. Little quirks I had before I lost the baby are starting to get bigger too. I've always hated crowds, but these days anything more than three people in a room is a crowd. It makes it hard to have people visit, because while I love all of my family (they really are the only ones who visit me anyway) twenty minutes into coffee and chatting I'm ready to hide in my bedroom until they disappear. I've contemplated playing dead a few times until it becomes so awkward they just leave, but I really don't need to give people more reasons to want to lock me in the loony bin right about now.

My way of coping with my feelings has been to pile item after item onto my to do list, until I am now drowning in stuff that has to get done. I've taken on a business partnership to go with the diploma of management I'm studying, and I've also determined that now is the perfect time to learn how to do calligraphy, how to market a business, how to draw, and how to train a dog. I've scheduled all kinds of work for this blog as well, but I'm now at the point where I'm so overwhelmed nothing gets done. I sit here staring at my computer screen and worrying that I will never get through everything I've put on myself that it has almost become a self prophecy of failure. My family keep telling me to take some time off and just relax but it feels almost physically impossible for me to do that right now. I think I'm terrified if I have nothing to think about I'll start thinking about the baby and I just can't keep dwelling on that right now. I'm sick and tired of being sad, but there are days where it seems that's all I know how to be.

I think the thing that is making it hardest right now is that my body is now totally back to normal. (That's code for I got my period for anyone who can't understand subtext) and while I knew this day was coming, it still came as a shock to the system when it actually arrived. The doctors words came flooding back to me where he told me my cycle would start up again and then I could theoretically try to have another baby straight away if that was what I desired. I sat there hating my body for being so eager to get back to normal when my brain still can't wrap itself around what's going on right now. To be perfectly honest I do not desire to try again right now, and I'd love it if my ovaries and uterus could be sympathetic to this fact and give me a little extra time before getting back into the swing of things. I'm still not entirely convinced sewing my legs shut is a bad idea right now, and I'm half way through a bet with the baby's father who believed I'd be ready to "get back on the horse" two months after the miscarriage. I very kindly told him I'd put money on the fact that we will never ride that horse together again, and in fact I may never ride another horse at all. (I need to work on my metaphors I think, this one is getting creepy.) I then took great relish in deleting him from my life (my phone) and I now feel safe in the knowledge that he can never contact me ever again to discuss horses or anything else for that matter. Removing him was a huge step for me, and something I've not been able to do in the past, so that was a cathartic step to say the least.

I'm still not entirely ready to even discuss the fact that I've had a miscarriage with people who don't already know, although I did try to force this by discussing it with a substitute teacher at Miss K's kindergarten (she asked how many kids I have, I didn't just walk up to her and say hey, my baby died, just FYI), but her response was disappointing to say the least. She trotted out the old "well at least you still have your oldest daughter, you must be grateful for her even if you never have another child" line, as if Miss K was a consolation prize. I could have gotten angry at her poor choice of words at the time, but for all I know that could have been her mantra once upon a time, so I chose to let it slide and walk away quietly. And that's the thing. You never know what anyone is going to say if you tell them. I know a woman who was told she deserved to lose her baby, which is a huge fear of mine, so it's easier just keeping silent and not letting anyone know this is why I have permanent resting bitch face right now.

I can feel myself slipping, and yesterday was the first day I was able to admit out loud that I am not coping right now. This is about the point where I would normally go straight to the doctors office and get them to put me back on drugs, but I don't want to do that this time. I want to get through this on my own, without relying on chemicals to prop me up. I know exactly what I need to do, but theory and practise are always two completely different things. First I need to stop beating myself up for being slow on the uptake. I have forgotten the effort it takes to complete simple tasks when you're battling grief and depression, so instead of celebrating the fact that I was able to do the dishes for the first time in two months last week instead I berated myself for being too exhausted to do any other housework for the rest of the day. Instead of feeling proud of myself for hand writing an ad for the business I criticised my work and then hated myself for being inept at using photo editing software. That's the weird thing about grieving. Instead of saying I'm sad and angry because my baby died, I say I'm sad and angry because I suck at life and I can't do anything right. It's easier to focus on the tiny little details I mess up instead of looking at the huge and very sad bigger picture.

The next thing I need to do is take some time off for myself. So yesterday Miss K and I went to Maccas and ate junk food instead of going shopping for healthy food, and by the time this post goes live, we will be skipping school and kindergarten and on our way to the Melbourne Museum to look at the dinosaurs. Then we're going to eat pancakes at one of my favourite restaurants in the city just because it's been years since I've been there. It's also been years since I've wagged from school or work just for the hell of it, so I'm hoping this wild rule breaking spree is enough to lift me up even just a little bit right now.

I'm also closing my contact me page here on the blog for a little while, and giving myself permission to only post what I want for a few weeks. It may mean that there are longer breaks where I'm not here at all, but I promise I'll still be here at least once a month for the Fly on the Wall, so you'll still get to see all the crazy stuff we get up to when I'm not here. I'm hoping that by loosening the reins on my own life a little I might actually be able to start enjoying it again. I still desperately want to find the joy in every single day, but it's harder to do that when I'm tied to a to do list that never ends.

Well that's it from my little part of the world, coincidentally if you see any news articles about a dinosaur exhibit being totally destroyed at the museum this week, please know that I had absolutely nothing to do with it, it was all the five year old's fault.

My Little Hot Air Balloon Baby

Hello again guys, I interrupt my normal schedule to share some sad news with you guys.

This is the hardest thing I have ever had to write, and that's including when I've had to get creative with job applications. I keep starting and stopping this one, and sometimes scrapping it altogether. This is about the fifth attempt I've made, so hopefully this one makes it to your screen because I'm still not sure whether or not any of these posts are going to see the light of day.

So up until two weeks ago I was pregnant. This fact alone will surprise most of you since none of you knew I was even dating, but I was. Long story short we were friends for years, we dated for a few months, we were talking about moving in together and having kids, I discovered I was already pregnant and he freaked out and admitted not only was he not ready to be a dad again, he'd been seeing someone else for three weeks. So I walked away and started planning to be a single mum again. I wasn't scared, not like I was when Miss K was coming, simply because I've now been doing this for five years and lets face it, I kick ass as a single mum.

I was looking forward to being a mum again, I knew it was going to be tough having two kids to run around after, but kids are always a beautiful blessing, so I had more to look forward to than dread. Really the only thing I was dreading was having another ex I was tied to for the rest of my life. I was really hoping I'd made better choices this time, I really thought he was decent and it took giving him something he'd previously said he wanted to find out his true colours. But I didn't have time to dwell on it this time because I had more important things to take care of right now.

In the last weekend of April I went to Inverloch with all of my sisters and my niece Eliza. We spent two nights at an amazing holiday house ten minutes from the beach and had a fabulous time. My time was made more fabulous by the fact that for the first time in two months I wasn't plagued with morning sickness and constant back pain. I didn't think too hard about how I was feeling, I decided it was just a sign I was meant to enjoy myself this weekend and so that's exactly what I did. It wasn't until I got home and went for a scheduled ultrasound on the Monday that I realised what was really going on. The poor technician spent a full ten minutes looking for a heartbeat for me with no success. He was very apologetic, as if it was all somehow his fault and I walked out of his office in a daze. The first thing I did was call mum and start crying.

The next two weeks were a blur of doctors appointments and tears. I had mum and my big sister Sam tell everyone what was going on simply because I didn't have the strength to keep saying the same thing over and over again. The only family members I had to tell were mum and Miss K. Miss K was confused of course, and has asked lots of questions, the worst of which was whether or not she was still a big sister. My heart ached for her at this point, because it showed that for her, the most important part of my pregnancy the whole time was the fact that she finally had the chance to be a big sister. For my sake as much as hers I told her she was still the best big sister in the world and I meant it.

I've clung to Miss K like a life raft these past few weeks, as if my life depends on her existence, and in a way it does. Right now she is my whole reason for waking up, she is the one who keeps me busy and sane and without her I feel lost. Every morning that I wake up and see her little head lying next to mine I know I'm going to be OK and I'm able to get out of bed and get on with life. Every night when she goes to bed again I feel the same helplessness creep over me and I sit and wonder what the hell I'm meant to do with myself until tomorrow morning.

At least now that the physical part is over I finally have my identity back. From the time the technician told me he couldn't find the heartbeat until the moment the last doctor told me everything was over and I was nearly healed all I could see myself as was a walking miscarriage. I felt like I had it tattooed on my forehead and I couldn't understand why no one else seemed to notice it. I received no weird stares from people in the streets, none of the other parents at kindergarten even realised anything was different, which of course they wouldn't, because I hadn't even gotten to the point where I was telling people I was pregnant, so there was nothing to notice, but to me it was the biggest part of me, and I couldn't understand how it could be so invisible to everyone else.

The only thing I'd bought for the baby before we got the news was a beautiful original print. It is a water colour of a zebra in a hot air balloon, and it was going to be hung on his wall near his cot. Instead I now get to turn it into a memorial picture, complete with a beautiful poem my baby sister Kim wrote for me.

Right now I'm trying to stay hopeful, and remember my blessings. I still have a wonderful family surrounding me, all of whom have been an amazing support for me right from the beginning of this saga, and all of whom have managed to forget all their own problems and lives to prop me up and keep me propelling forward. I'm on the phone all the time these days answering messages checking to make sure I'm ok, and looking at sloth and lama pictures with thanks to Nat who knows how to make me smile.

It makes me feel better knowing that for the short time that my little boy was alive he was loved totally by all who knew of him. He knew nothing of pain, heartbreak, rejection or sadness, all he ever knew was peace, and love, and that thought brings me peace.

But there is still grief to go through, and I know it isn't going to be a quick process. There are times I can get through a whole day without any tears, and then there are the days where I can't even make it through my first coffee of the day, and that's ok. I'm trying my hardest to seek out happiness, and remind myself that there is still joy in the world despite what I feel right now, and it does seem to be helping. I have a close friend who is pregnant with a rainbow baby, having gone through her own miscarriage late last year, and knowing she needs support right now keeps me from wallowing too much. I also have a whole soccer team worth of family members who managed to forget their own worries for me, so I do my best to return the favour for them whenever the need arises, which also helps me to keep my own grief in perspective.

There are times I can still feel happy, there are times I feel peaceful, there are times I feel frustrated and there are times I feel broken. I've had days where I feel like I can climb a mountain, and I've had days where all I can do is lie on the couch and stare out the window, but I know this is all just part of the process and I'm trying to be gentle with myself. About the biggest thing I've accomplished in the past two weeks is reading over 3,000 pages of customer service horror stories, but an accomplishment is still an accomplishment when your life has been ripped apart. Day by day I repair a little bit more, and one day I will hopefully feel whole again, but until then I'll just keep plodding along. Helping my family, making people laugh, being the best mum in the world. That's all any of us can do.

To my little hot air balloon baby Cooper Dean, RIP. I leave you in God's hands for now, but I will love you forever.