Real Woman.

"You're not a real woman till you've pushed a dead baby out of your vagina."

I have no idea, and the Mr can't recall, if I actually managed to say that out loud post-birth.  But I tried to gurgle it out, slipping into a laughing/crying wail as I thought it, like a silent hilarious delirious scream.

I was sucking on gas as my torn vagina was being stitched up, while looking at my dead baby being held by his father, skin to skin.  I could see my baby's skin torn around his neck and cheek, where his umbilical cord had choked the life from him.  My baby's mouth was open in a silent wail, pushed up against his fathers chest, as his father wailed out loud for him.  They were both smeared with my blood.

With that sight in front of me, after 12 hours of labour during which I knew the whole time my baby had died, and now with a crowd of Dr's and nurses between my stirrupped legs dealing with a post-partum hemorrhage and a torn perineum, what was I thinking of?
A woman that pissed me off years ago.  A woman who turned to me once and said "You're not a real woman till you've given birth to a baby".

Forget feminism and women getting out of the kitchen and into the boardroom or wherever they damn well pleased, yada yada.  Forget that she said this to me when I was in my 30's with no children, just a horrible miscarriage up my sleeve.  Forget that she said it to be mean because she knew I didn't like her current boyfriend. 
Forget that I drove home bawling my eyes out thinking of how I almost died when I miscarried just the year before, but apparently, I was still not a woman.  Not a real woman anyway.  None of the achievements of my life counted.  I was faking womanhood.

I just think it was a highly dumb ass (ok, and hurtful) thing for her to say.
Pushing babies out of your vagina, (or having a c-section for that matter), makes you a mother.  Not a woman.
Most women I know became women before they became mothers. 

But oh, that internal scream, possibly gargled out loud statement; please, let me scream it here-
"YOU'RE NOT A REAL WOMAN TILL YOU'VE PUSHED A DEAD BABY OUT OF YOUR VAGINA".  Those words, words that my macabre and sarcastic humour found inappropriately hilarious, words that I channelled rage into, became a tiny thread of sanity for me. Or at least a distraction, something else to think about during that nightmarish reality distorting half hour of stitching and hemorrhaging and seeing my dead baby in my true love's arms.

So thanks..uh..woman, for giving me something to rage about in that moment.  It helped get me through.  I've never seen you since I birthed my son.  Maybe if I do one day, I'll take great delight in telling you all about it.  I probably won't bother though, because really, who can bother saying these things out loud.  But thanks.

Normal Abnormal

Normal Abnormal.  That's how my physiotherapist described me today.  Well, my bio-mechanic issues anyway.  As I lay on the massage table, face squished into that little hole, staring at the carpet, while she pressed down into my tender and wretched sacral illiac joint and tried to bounce it loose.  While I grunted and tried not to drool and tried to hack the pain.  "Hunh wah?" was all I managed to say.  It's real hard to carry on an intelligent conversation in that position, yet she's always rabbitting on with profound informative tidbits that I want to latch onto and ask more about.  And I always say "Hunhwahooh?"  You know, between the trying not to drool, the pain of my skeleton being manipulated, the protesting bruised muscles, the maintenance of dignity;  I think I make that 'hunwooshoo' sound pretty damn intelligent and engaged.  Well read even.  Did I mention that my butt is usually exposed too?  Yet I persist.  I want to know more about this embryology business that she's relating to my dermatitis and irritable bowel syndrome.  But mostly; what's this Normal Abnormal category she's labelled me with?  Luckily, over the year of regular visits my wonderful physio has learnt that 'whahugah' means 'tell me more' and 'yes, I read about that in a research abstract.'

Normal Abnormal, my physio tells me, is how she describes a case like mine where what is going on with my pelvis and, well, most of my bits, is abnormal for the normal human structure, but has become normal for me.  Or something.  I've grown abnormally, so that it is now normal.  I had an osteopath tell me something similar years ago when treating me for whiplash from a car accident.  He believed I had a pre-existing neck injury from early childhood that had caused me to grow twisted.  Oh, how I chuckled.  Me, grown twisted?  Ha, yes, of course.  Just like I chuckled/drooled/grunted/hunwahseesed today when the physio said I was a Normal Abnormal.

Post-dead-baby, I think a lot of things become Normal, when for everyone outside, out there in the non-dead-baby world, it's straight up Abnormal.

I see a sleeping baby and think 'dead baby, looks like a dead baby'.  All sleeping babies now look like dead babies to me.  Sleeping babies..freak..me..out.  I want to wake them up and make them cry.. Normal?  Abnormal?

My bloke walks into the bathroom of the resort we went to post-funeral, and I had left a tiny puddle of water on the floor from climbing out of the pool.  I race back to the room, heart leaping out of my chest, absolutely convinced that he has slipped over on that puddle and is now laying dead on the cold marble floor, head split open, pool of blood.  All this takes place in my mind in a millisecond in extreme gory detail.  I am convinced.  He's fine of course, but I can't let him out of my sight.  I need to know where he is in the house at all times.  He could die at any moment.  This carries on for weeks. It still happens 18 months later.  It becomes normal.

Waking up and wondering why I am still alive, wishing I wasn't, wondering how the hell I will survive another day, wondering why I should get up- there is no baby, no other living children to get up and feed.  Every day.  Hell at first.  Now it's just how I wake up.  The pre-conscious thoughts that drift me into consciousness.  Then I make tea.  It's a normal start of the day for me.

It's normal to have abnormal reactions to an abnormal, or traumatic event.   It would be abnormal to be carrying on normally.  Sometimes I try to be normal.  To carry on normally, to visit friends with babies and go to social events and not talk about my dead baby; to not say to the inevitable question of  'do you have children'-  'yes I have children, one dead son'; just to say 'no', just to pretend for a moment that I'm normal and not make the person's skin crawl with uncomfortableness.   But those expeditions into normalcy, normally end with an abnormally large crying fit.  Which I guess is pretty normal for a grieving mother.

It's just been bouncing around my head all day.  Normal Abnormal.  Like I've found a term for me as I am now.  My new Normal.  It's abnormal, but it's me, and it's what I have to live with.   Perhaps, just as my physio has been teaching me core stabilising and strengthening exercises to help keep my pelvis in place, I need to find a practise that can keep my Core, my sense of self in place, in this new abnormal world I inhabit. 

Already Dead

22 September 2010.  Spring Equinox eve, Full Moon. 40 weeks, due date.  5:20 pm. Contractions 8 minutes apart.

 Right here, this moment:

You are already dead.

I do not remember your last kick.

I did not sense your distress.

In just over an hour the midwife would not find your heartbeat..

But right now, contractions 8 minutes apart;

I was picking spring flowers.
Your father was taking photo's- we hadn't taken any belly pictures for a month- this was as big as I was going to get.        
We wanted to capture this moment.

Walking and moaning and laughing through the fruit orchard.

A picture of fecundity.

With you, already dead.
And me, unknowing.

I thought of you seeing the sun like a red orb through my skin.

I thought I was preparing you for the light of this world.

You were already dead.

I did not know. 

I was excited and nervous, empowered and afraid, feeling the pain and focusing on joy.
I expected you to be crying in the world, cradled in my arms, by dawn.

I found these photo's on the eve of your funeral.

My insides erupt.  I am turned inside out.  It claws at my breast and blisters my heart.

I have to live with the acidic and eternal Mother Shame.

My baby was dead and I did not know.

Rage, Rebellion, Trying.

I couldn't write after my baby died.  Actually, I couldn't write when I was pregnant either, nor paint. I guess all my creative juices were busy growing another humans brain and fingernails.  Then after, the grief thief stole my words.

I read a few stillbirth blogs in the first months.  I thought, aha, this here is what I'll do.  I'll enter the blogosphere, join all the other grieving mothers and fathers writing to stay alive, to make sense of it all, so that I don't become isolated with the grief.  Then I didn't.  I had no words.  I stopped reading too.

It's been 18 months since Jackson died inside of me.  We were getting ready to start trying to conceive.  I had all my blood tests, my vaccinations, dental work, counselling, lost 17kg and grew abdominal muscles.  March loomed, the month we'd planned on.

Then a baby in the family was born, February 29th, and they named him Jackson- my son's name.   All my grief erupted.  I started this blog and in one snot filled, tears dripping on the keyboard night, wrote the Taking of a Name.   It was a case of trigger, trigger pop bang go.
I have to write now.  It's all I can do.  I can't move with this grief sitting on my chest.  It fills my mind, consumes every moment, inescapable.  I want to scream, to flail my arms about me, to pull out my hair and carve out the unspeakable language of grief upon my skin.

  That wail from the early days comes rising up out of me.  I cry for days, as I did back then.  Fine one minute, sobbing the next.  I am immobilised.  I can not run from it and I all I want is to run, screaming from it.  I want to lash out and smash.  The anger of grief.  Rage that we have no control over death.  Rage that I cannot change things. Rage at the cruelness of it all, this cruel world.  Rage that I have to live through this.  But also; just rage.  No reason, no meaning, un-nameable.  Just a tightening in my sternum, heart beating hard against my bone, constricting my lungs.

My back and pelvis and hip disabled from, well, genetic predisposition and an action packed youth. 
 A fucked-upness, sub clinical,  just waiting for the trigger of pregnancy and labour to bring it all undone. Throw in an unresolving dose of symphysis pubis dysfunction that all the Dr's blew off as the usual pains of pregnancy.
I am old and weary and in pain. Every. Single. Day.  I am older than my mother.  Left unable to physically throw myself into dance, or stick fighting and fire dancing, or even in just a really fast and furious stomping walk, not even a cruisy bike ride.  I can't even do a damned yoga class without it exacerbating my shitness.  All the ways that I would try to deal with my feelings in the past, now make all the pain worse.  I am under Dr's orders.  It's been a year of  (expensive) physiotherapy, of being a 'good' dedicated client, doing all my prescribed exercises, hydrotherapy, mindfulness of posture, Bowen therapy, chiro, hot packs and acupuncture, and a few painkillers (but never as many as I really want to take) thrown down the gurgler for good measure. 

  Yet still today, my hip locked up after being OK for the last month. Now again, I cannot stand or walk without the pain, without feeling the bones grinding, without feeling the pulling apart of the front of my pelvis as it cuts down into my vagina like blunt scissors.  The back of my pelvis feeling like it's about to pop out through my skin.  My bones move in the wrong direction.  I can't roll over in bed properly.  So I lay here, on my right side, not my left because that causes pains down my leg, and I cry.   I want to give up.  I don't want to die, but I want to give up.  I can't bare my own bitching, can't bare my own pain.

I am tired of trying.  I think if one more person calls me brave and amazing (or the worst, 'You're so brave, I don't know what I'd do if my baby died'.  Um, darling, none of us dead-baby-mummys know how to deal with it either, we certainly didn't plan it.  Also are you implying that because I haven't thrown myself off a cliff that I somehow feel less for my baby than you do for yours?)
-- I'll not just stand there wordless and dead inside; I'll scream at them; I'll say fuck that, it's not brave to have a dead baby; I didn't choose to go into a burning building and rescue some old lady.  My baby died and now I just breathe, it's an involuntary muscle response thing y'know.  You just want me to be brave so you don't have to see all the horror of it, so you don't have to worry, so you don't have to feel burdened or feel guilty that you hardly call; you want me to be brave so you don't have to be. 

 So I'm gonna go out and get drunk and start a fight, I'll be loud and foul-mouthed, untamed and unforgiving.  I'll wear steel capped cow-girl boots and stomp on sleazebags that get in the way of my dance.   Be the loud angry 18 year old, headbanging and chewing my tongue with the taste of amphetamines in the back of my throat in smokey death metal caverns, daring anyone to fuck with me.  I'll find a dodgy Dr and get oodles of opiates and wash them down with whiskey and I won't get out of bed and I'll order take out every day and I won't clean the house, I won't try and smile and look sane for my partner when he gets home from work.
 I'll score an ounce and smoke it in a week and chain smoke rollies, leaving overflowing ashtrays around the house instead of artful arrangements of Buddhas and stones.  I'll swear at the nosey post office lady, tell her to mind her own fucking business and tell the people that compare the loss of their grandmother to the loss of my baby to go fuck themselves.  I won't care, I won't try, I won't bite my tongue in the face of others tactlessness.
I'll throw grace out the window and move in with tragic. 

I think I'll never try to have another baby.  It's impossible.  This back pain is never going to end. I'll be immobilised the whole pregnancy.  This grief is never going to end, I'll break the baby with my anxiety.  Besides; I'm going to be drunk and stoned and speeding off my dial, remember.  Can't possibly have a baby.

Then tonight, the bloke that sits next to me on the couch asks; "So are we going to try get pregnant this month, next week, when you'll be ovulating?"  He keeps track of my chart.  He's ready.  In one moment adrenaline surges through me; I see silky soft chubby baby thighs and I want.  I want.

I should eat some leafy greens tomorrow.  Some fresh fish.  I'll remember to take my pre-conception vitamins that I've been taking for months, but not for the last week.  That's been the extent of my real life rebellion; no multi-vitamins this week and no exercises.  I even went so far as to cancel my physio session and my counselling session.  It felt like I was wagging school.  I took off to the beach where I saw teenagers wagging school.  I wanted to bum ciggies off them.  I didn't.
I'll try and do some of my physio exercises.  I'll have lunch with a cousin, I'll appear sane.  Tired, but sane, and more, like someone who is coping.  I'll reschedule my appointments.  I'll water the garden, and call my mother and tell her I'm OK.
I'll try to sleep in the bed instead of falling asleep on the couch at 4 am watching t.v.

I'll see how I feel next week.






  

Unbelieving.

I wore mud for shoes.

The branches and leaves joined above my head to form the only roof, the only shelter I needed.  I would feel the waves of wind approaching through the forest canopy, and when the wave reached where I stood, I would know whatever it was I needed to know.

 I listened to the wind, and sometimes in the more extreme moments of self-important-hippiness, I believed the wind listened to me.  That wind, it carried my messages to friends on the other side of the forest, the other side of the country.  It was before facebook and mobile phones and we didn't even have radios and I utterly completely truly believed in the ability for us all to communicate through the bare soles of our feet that grew like tree roots to meet in the core of the earth; transmitting not just gooshy hippy love vibes, but a message that the main village camp needed someone to turn up with a car.   Breath carried on the wind as radio waves.  Tweeting without # in front of your name.

I believed in my dreams, so much so that others did too. 

I saw significance in where spider webs crossed  paths through the forest, and knew that a certain crack in the pavement at the end of the High street mall was where I would inevitably bump into the friends I needed to bump into.  

I believed in The Other Side.  I believed one could speak with the dead and feel their presence.

I believed I would always find a way.  I believed in My Way.  That there would always be enough.  I was penniless but never poor.
I believed in Signs.  

Then my baby died.
 I stopped believing in anything.   My only certainty: there was and is and will always be grief.
Only his blood left behind on the blanket that held him.  The stretch marks on my belly.  The separation of my symphysis pubis joint and the locking up of my sacral illiac joint.  The disappointed sag of my unused mama breasts.

Now, I do not dream.

Except for the dreams that I'm breastfeeding.  Then I see that my baby is dead and cold and still. Quiet and bruised.  Skin torn and blood dripping from his nose and eyes sunken into his skull.  Meconium stained eyebrows.
 The milk either wont come, or it will but he can't drink it and I am a wasted spring  feeding not life, but death.

I feed death.  I gave birth to death.  I carried death in the womb created for life.
 I am Kali now.

Even though I stopped believing in Goddesses and blessings and painting my brow with my moonblood.
 I am Kali.  Not the Kali that I once held in reverence as..mystical..awesome and beautiful in her fierceness.. the transformer.

No, I am just the fear, just the horror.  I am Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, sitting in the dark cave, whispering "The Horror The Horror".

Grief negates.  It wipes clean everything that I was, that I thought I was. 

There is freedom in the negation.  I can believe in anything I want.  Or nothing.

Maybe one day I'll hear something in the wind again.  For now, I cringe from the wind.  Its breath tears my skin.

I clean my feet meticulously, no traces of mud left.  I wear shoes everywhere I go.  My feet are soft.  I like them like that.

I believe in clean feet.

These are not my bare feet.  But they do look clean and I quite like them.

The Taking of a Name.

When your child dies, especially at birth, their name takes on a special meaning. Their name becomes the part of them that gets to live on in the world.   You speak it to each other at night when the grief comes, you write it everywhere, you turn it into art, you get it tattooed onto your skin, your friends write it everywhere and send you photos of it.  It becomes imbued with the sacred.
                                                      Jack  JACKSON   J

Memorial Art.  Beach pebbles.

 To see it, to hear it: it gladdens, it saddens.  It always triggers strong emotions- sometimes post traumatic stress symptoms. If you have lost a child you know what I mean, if you haven't, then you possibly can't, or can't possibly..and I'd never want anyone to have to know what it means.

I'm telling the world: I'm not OK with family naming their child Jackson.
Too soon, too insensitive- especially since I was told with a post birth phone call consisting of ;
                      "Hey we've named him Jackson, hope that's OK with you.."
Um.. no it's not OK, but it's a bit late for that really isn't it?
 I was polite; I said sure; I said I'm so happy for you.  After all, I am really happy that their baby was born safely.  I wanted to celebrate with them, not rain on one of the happiest days of their lives.

Still, this naming; It's not OK- it's just insensitive.

I wish I could not feel the hurt that I do, I wish that I could just be fine with this.  But I'm not; I'm hurt and I feel like something has been taken from my little boy. On a more tangible or rational level, our feelings have been completely disregarded and we feel deeply disrespected.  (We did manage after the initial phone call to communicate, very politely, that we were uncomfortable with the naming).

 I've been thrown into the rawness of the initial grief, like I've lost him all over again.

Their name takes on a significance, wherever you see it.

They weren't naming their child 'in honour' of mine.  They just liked the name.  Well I'm sure they had other names they liked, that wouldn't cause the hurt using our dead son's name does.  Choose one of them.
Did they have this name picked out for years?  I don't know, does it matter?  My son was born first, so too bad, that name gets struck off the list.  I've struck a few off my 'baby names list' as they were snatched up by other family.

Really it's just very poor etiquette.  Isn't there a rule somewhere?  "Thou shall not name your baby after a still-born family member from the same generation, especially without seeking their parent's blessings first".  I've read that it's bad etiquette to take the name of a deceased family member if it will hurt their closest living family.  Hey, that would be me, and yes my partner and I are seriously HURT.

As the grandmother of my baby said  "How am I supposed to greet and hold this baby and call him Jackson?!".  It is a trigger for many.  Surely, when other family members hear that name they think of my darling little boy?  Will that wear off eventually so that the Jackson in the family becomes THEIR Jackson instead of MY Jackson??   My Jackson won't be around to charm people with his first words or his sweet curly hair, his stumbly first steps; all the achievements of  life that their Jackson gets to experience and be remembered for.  All my boy has to be remembered by is his name.

 Following the appropriate etiquette, unwritten though it is (because surely it's just plain common sense) would have saved a lot of pain now and in the future.

Indigenous cultures do not speak the name of the dead.  Let's go with that shall we?  If you can't speak the name of the dead, you certainly can't go using the same name as one of their dead cousins, born only 18 months earlier, when the grief is still quite raw for the parents and other immediate family members.  And hell, if you ARE going to be OK with being that insensitive, then you should be OK with copping a bit of backlash.
 

Written by a friend in Broome.

 I know I have every right to my own feelings.  I know that I can't ask them to change their name choice.  (although the activist in me wants to start a campaign to change things, unreasonableness be damned).
 I do wish it had been handled differently.  Approaching me before hand to guage my feelings on their choice may have either softened the blow for me, or -best case scenario- they would have realised the hurt and ongoing trigger their choice would create, and taking this into account choose differently.  Or was it a case for them of  'If you don't ask they can't say no..'?

 Whatever their reasons, explaining earlier would have helped not only myself and my partner understand, but would have saved the uncomfortable feelings and sense of shock now rippling through the entire extended family.
Our feelings of hurt are not what has created conflict, my partner and I have not created this situation.
What I've been left to deal with is not what life has thrown at me- what life threw at me, and what I've dealt with quite gracefully, is the death of my son.   This thing that I have to cope with now, is just what two people have decided to do, regardless of the hurt that they knew it would cause.

This is Jackson.  He's my first and only born.  I know that by others taking his name, that it can't take away from the 9 months that I grew him and knew him, it can't take away the 30 hours I had with him in my arms.        
But it still hurts. I still feel a sense of loss, of a taking away of the specialness, the singularity, the sacredness and the respect for my son, Jackson.

Jackson

                                                 Jackson's  Name in the sand by CarlyMarie