Progress, Eureka!

It seems like my world has changed so much since Nile has become a toddler. The changes have been huge and I have been finding myself quite often feeling very overwhelmed.

My baby is loud. He is expressive and creative and wonderful and fun and smart and did I mention, loud? I personally really adore his exuberance and enthusiasm for life. But it has gotten us into a spot of trouble on several occasions. While we were in Mexico we were literally attacked by an uptight (obese & toothless) American man in a restaurant who responded to Nile's happy shrieking by requesting that we "Shut him up or get the hell out". (We had the misfortune of running into the same man again on the beach the following day where he proceeded to lecture me on how I was raising a monster). It was pretty traumatic.
And back at home in Canada we have been harshly scolded by restaurant staff on more than one occasion for Nile's inability to do anything quietly. He's just a loud, excitable little guy.

I've been really conflicted lately as to how to handle this situation. On one hand I want him to behave "appropriately" when we are out in public. But on the other hand I want to honor the fact that he is two and not squash his joyful expression. Either way, I have been feeling really stressed out and judged lately and find myself always looking over my shoulder expecting someone to attack me for my parenting.

I hit rock bottom last weekend when I took Nile to a child-friendly Earth Day dance performance / celebration. I made sure to sit in an aisle seat so he could move freely and dance if the mood struck him. As soon as the lights dimmed and the dancing began Nile began to chatter loudly about what he was seeing, "Mamma! ladies dancing!!". He was loving it, but I was immediately stressed and concerned that he must be bothering someone. Before long he was dancing in the aisles, body-slamming himself into neighboring seats and climbing the stairs to the stage. I was completely and utterly paranoid that it was only a matter of time before someone decided to confront me for his wild behavior. Try as I might I could not get him to comply with my requests to sit down and watch the show quietly. (I should mention that although it was a child-friendly event and there were many kids of all ages there, Nile was the only one dancing wildly and talking loudly. Most of the other kids were on their parents laps happily watching the performance).

I had so many manic thoughts running through my mind: Why can't I control my child?...Why can't he just enjoy this like a "normal" kid? Why is he the only one behaving this way? What is wrong with him? What is wrong with me? (*note to anyone who might think I'm being over-dramatic: I wasn't always like this, but our run-ins with irate people have really put me on edge*).

Nile's wild antics resulted in me not being able to enjoy any of the performances because I was too busy trying to control his behavior and worrying what everyone was thinking of us. It was a really stressful evening. I got home and broke down into tears from the frustration and the worry. I felt awful and I realized then & there that I needed a parenting strategy, pronto. My days of freestyle parenting were over.

For the past several months I have subscribed to a daily parenting email called 'The Daily Groove" by a wonderful man named Scott Noelle. I have always loved his outlook and advice. It's based in NVC (non-violent communication), which is something that our family has been really getting into over the past year. We love it and really believe in it. In addition to the "Daily Groove" Emails, Noelle also has a great website and he also offers very reasonably priced telephone coaching for parents who are in a rut or experiencing a crisis - like me! So, at the urging of my dear friend, Sabrina, who has used his coaching service in the past and strongly recommended it, I called Scott and set up an appointment.

This is already getting to be a pretty long post, so I won't go into all the details & particulars of our session. But I will say that is was very helpful and I would really suggest him to anyone who is in need of a little parental inspiration. He was able to really shift my perspective on my situation and diffuse a great deal of the fear and frustration I was experiencing. It's been a few days since the consultation and I am feeling really inspired and hopeful.

Noelle advocates creating a "child-honoring" space for our kids as opposed to constantly forcing them to conform to the rules of our grown-up world. One of the biggest gems that I took from our conversation was his suggestion to approach each incident of "difficult" behavior by asking, "What is wonderful about this?". I know that this sounds really touchy-feely, but I am really beginning to believe in it.

Here's a real-life example, the other day Nile found a full watering can in the bathroom and proceeded to "water" the bathroom floor. I asked him to stop, but he ignored me and headed out towards the rest of the house to continue his mission. At that moment I began to feel really frustrated and aggravated with the mess, the disobedience, the entire situation. My instinct was to snatch the watering can away & clean up the mess. But I stopped to ask myself, what is wonderful about this? The answer: Water is wonderful and Nile is discovering that right now. He is curious and playful and having fun experiencing what will happen when you wander around the house with a watering can. Looking at it from this perspective (his perspective) I was immediately able to shift my energy from being annoyed and snappy to being a co-creator in his experience. I scooped him and the watering can up and transferred them both to the garden where he could continue to explore and have fun with the water.

This may seem like a no-brainer to a more highly-evolved mamma, but prior to my conversation with Scott I was finding myself constantly getting stuck between satisfying my own needs (ie: a clean, dry house) and my son's need to be a curious, fun-seeking toddler. It truly felt like an impossible conundrum.

I feel so much lighter and more optimistic knowing that there is a middle ground and I'm slowly learning how to walk it.

"A place to share sad secrets"

I’m pregnant. But at the same time, I’m not.

My body is currently housing an approximately seven-week-old embryo. But that embryo’s heart has stopped beating, probably just a few days ago, or so the ultrasound technician tells me. So right now, I’m in limbo till an appointment with my doctor in a few days, where we’ll talk about next steps. By “next steps” I mean “how we will get this dead embryo out of me.”

I don’t know why that last paragraph came out sounding so clinical. I don’t feel clinical. But I keep mentally approaching this subject from different angles, and it’s hard to find words to talk about it. I feel disappointed. I feel very, very sad. But I feel like there’s some aspect of this that I’m not feeling. Or else I’m feeling it, but because I don’t have words for it, I don’t know what I’m feeling.

I thought I’d be better at this – that I’d be more self-aware, or more capable and efficient at managing my grief -- this time around. Because this isn’t the first miscarriage I’ve experienced. I was pregnant once before Sam, and that pregnancy failed at around five weeks, something I didn’t find out till a couple of weeks later. Both miscarriages are alike in that I never experienced any of the warning signs: cramping, spotting, or bleeding. Both times I thought I was pregnant right up till the moment an ultrasound tech told me otherwise.

I hate ultrasounds, by the way. Though I feel huge sympathy for the people who perform them. What a shitty job.

Both of these miscarriages are similar in another way. Both times, I felt an acute, unaccountable, unshakeable sense that something was wrong. I didn’t feel this way when I was pregnant with Sam. That’s kind of weird, don't you think?

When I miscarried three years ago, it was at a time when I wasn’t doing any personal writing. I didn’t write about the experience, and by extension, I didn’t talk about it. I was really messed up for a long time, and I think that my silence was the reason why. So I’ve decided to be more forthcoming this time around.

When I think about why I was so quiet, a few reasons come to mind:

• Being a private person by nature (which sounds weird coming from someone who writes about their life on the internet, but some of you other bloggers will know what I’m talking about)
• Feeling ashamed and embarrassed
• Thinking that by talking about it, I was “dwelling on it” and therefore “not getting over it” – and I desperately wanted to get over it
• Not wanting to be a downer for other people
  

In retrospect, most of these reasons seem stupid or, to be a bit kinder to myself, ill-conceived (no pun intended). I don’t know what I was ashamed or embarrassed about. And it became patently obvious that not talking about it wasn’t making me feel better, so I should’ve ditched that strategy early on. And I don’t know why I worried so much about whether other people – especially my closest friends – would consider me a pill for being a tad depressed over the greatest loss I’d ever experienced.

This last point still sticks with me. It seems like I was doing my friends a huge disservice in assuming they would get tired of me and my sadness. I wonder why I wasn’t able to give people the greater benefit of the doubt. Especially since, both then and now, my friends have been universally wonderful – thoughtful, concerned, helpful, touchingly sympathetic, and offering their willing ears any time I want to talk or cry.

It also seems like, in being so quiet, I was doing other women a disservice. There’s so much silence around this subject, so few personal stories, that the statistic that one out of every five (or four, or three, depending on which source you cite) pregnancies ends in miscarriage feels like just that: a statistic. And while, yeah, I usually tend to find a certain amount of comfort in statistics, this one feels a bit hollow. (Actually, I feel completely detached from this particular statistic. When the miscarriage stat for the general population is 20 percent, and your own personal stat is 66.6 percent, you can see where the disconnect happens.)

So now, belatedly, I’m going to make my first miscarriage story part of the public record. I’ll totally understand if you want to stop reading at this point. And don’t feel guilty if you need to stop reading! I want my story to help the people who need it. If it can’t do anything positive for you, please, please don’t feel obligated to trudge through it. Also, this story gets somewhat graphic, so it’s not for the squeamish.

My husband and I decided to start trying to have a baby at the very beginning of 2004, and we were shocked and excited when we got lucky on the very first cycle of trying. In mid-February, when I was only about four or five weeks pregnant, I started to experience sharp pains in my lower abdomen. My pregnancy with Sam later taught me that these were just run-of-the-mill pregnancy pains from my uterus and ligaments stretching, but at the time I was paranoid about ectopic pregnancy, so I had an ultrasound that showed a yolk sac but no embryo, which was to be expected at the time.

At about the same time, my doctor, slightly concerned by my “weak” pregnancy test and minimal symptoms, scheduled a series of blood tests to measure my HCG (pregnancy hormone) levels. I had blood drawn every two days for a week, and at first things didn’t look so great, but then they seemed to pick up and we were all cautiously optimistic. My doctor scheduled another ultrasound at seven weeks. And this was when we found out that the fertilized egg hadn’t progressed past the fifth week. This is called a “blighted ovum” in some circles, though my doctor made a point of telling me this isn’t a medically recognized term. I’m still not sure why she was adamant about this.

At that point, I was told that I had three options:

• I could wait for my body to miscarry naturally.
• I could have a D&C.
• Or I could opt to try an at-home procedure using a vaginal suppository called misoprostol, which would induce miscarriage.

I opted for Plan A, which seemed the most “natural” to me at the time. Also, in Vancouver, you can’t just schedule a D&C. You have to show up at the hospital without an appointment and put yourself on a waiting list, and then wait in the emergency room, possibly for hours, until they can squeeze you in for the procedure. I didn’t seriously consider misoprostol at the time, because I didn’t know anything about it and because I’d been warned that inducing a miscarriage could be much more painful than having one naturally, in much the same way that induced labour can be more painful than non-induced.

So I waited to miscarry naturally. And I waited. And waited. I’ve never realized how long a mere couple of weeks can feel. During this time, I couldn’t think about anything but this misstarted life, this failure of my body not just to create a healthy new life but to reject an unhealthy one, and my growing need to just get this phase of things over with so that I could start over.

After two weeks of my body stubbornly holding onto this poor little failed egg with no sign of letting go, I was done waiting and, not wanting to endure a hospital visit, ready to skip Plan B and move right to Plan C, the misoprostol. I received a prescription from my doctor and picked it up at my neighbourhood pharmacy, trying not to wonder if the pharmacist was looking at me pityingly or not.

But in my fuzzy-headed haste to finally get things going, I misread the instructions. Believing that it would take hours for the misoprostol to work, I inserted it just before bedtime, assuming it would start working at some time the next morning. And of course I started feeling the first cramps about an hour later. At the time, I remember thinking, ‘How bad can cramps get?’ The answer is, pretty bad. Pretty horrific, actually. In fact, in comparing them to labour contractions, with labour being a ten out of ten on the pain scale (note: I’m not saying that labour is an absolute ten on the entire spectrum of pain; I’m just creating a basis for comparison), these were about an eight-and-a-half. Maybe a nine. And of course, since this whole experience seems to be a testament to Murphy’s Law, it was by now well after midnight and the strongest painkiller we had in the house was extra-strength ibuprofen. For some reason, too, I had this stupid idea that I shouldn’t wake up my husband, who had a big day at work the next day. (He’s still incredulous at this bit of reasoning, and again I’m left to wonder what purpose I saw in trying to be stoic and keep my pain away from other people.) So from about midnight until 7am, I paced the house, moaning quietly and making frequent pit stops to the bathroom, where I’d rock back and forth on the toilet, still moaning. Finally, when it was getting light out and I was completely exhausted, the worst of it seemed to be over. I went to bed and slept most of the day.

From this point, all I wanted was to have a normal period, after which my doctor told me I’d be ready to try to conceive again. So I waited. And waited some more. Weeks passed. A month. Another month. Nothing happened. During this time, I became horribly depressed, something I didn’t realize until after it was over. I didn’t want to see people. I would go to work, then come home and stay in until it was time to go to work again. I only ate what I needed to for sustenance. I slept a lot. At one point, I booked a last-minute trip for my husband and I to Cuba, thinking it would be therapeutic. We were there for two weeks, and I hardly remember anything about it. Now, when we look at the pictures from that trip, which we generally feel strangely disinclined to do, we realize how sad and lost we look.

I became obsessed with the fact that I needed to become pregnant again, that it was the only thing that would pull me out of this terrible, empty place I was in. And once again I felt that my body had failed me in refusing to let me do even this.

In late May, which marked ten weeks of waiting for my long-lost menstrual cycle, we were invited to stay with friends at their family chalet in Whistler. Thinking that it would be good to get out of the house, we agreed and made what we hope was a valiant effort to be charming houseguests. And of course, invoking Murphy’s Law yet again, THIS was the weekend my period decided to return. With a vengeance. If by “vengeance” you mean “a horrible gush of blood and tissue that soaked my pants all the way down to my shoes.” In front of everyone. Thank god these were some of my closest friends, is all I can say. I ran to the washroom, where I stayed for the next eight hours, pretty much repeating the misoprostol-induced experience of two and a half months ago. When I later described this incident to my doctor, she said that it sounds like I’d only had a partial miscarriage earlier, and that my body had decided to wait a while for the sequel.

My body is kind of a dick.

It’s taken me longer than I’d expected to tell all this, so I’ll try to wrap things up quickly and on a positive note. My normal period returned. After just a couple of cycles of (admittedly tense and rather joyless) reproductive sex, we conceived again, this time with the healthy little bundle of fun we later came to know as Sam. And believe it or not, I managed not to be a basket case. (Well, I was kind of a basket case until that first ultrasound; see above re: hating ultrasounds.) In fact, at around the twelve-week mark I developed this semi-unflappable Zen calm about the entire pregnancy. I take no responsibility for this, and am perfectly willing to assign full credit to shiny-happy pregnancy hormones. Which, let me tell you, after suffering from what, in retrospect, was probably a full-on case of clinical depression for five months, was like winning a trip to Club Med with my own personal cabana boy.

The only residual effect (I thought at the time) of this experience on my pregnancy is that, when I did go into labour, I had a very negative emotional reaction to the pain of contractions. I wonder if this had anything to do with the fact that they were so similar to the pain of miscarrying. At any rate, I was very happy with the noble efforts of my friend, Mr. Anesthesiologist, and my labour experience was actually pretty first-rate, as such things go.

I'm now realizing there are other residual effects, and I'm still trying to sort them out, which is why I'm writing this.

There are as many different miscarriage stories as there are birth stories. This one is mine. In a few seconds, I'm about to hit the "Publish" button, and I'm more nervous and anxious about it than I expected to be. If you’ve read this far, you have my undying gratitude. If I’ve caused you any sadness, I’m sorry. If I’ve helped you, I’m glad. If you've been grossed out, well, that's your problem, dude.

If you want to read a more cogent discussion of miscarriage, there's an excellent epistolary piece from Slate's archives, called "Motherhood Lost", that my wonderful friend Libby found for me. Reading it has helped me. At the conclusion of the series of letters, one of the writers thanks the other for creating a "place to share sad secrets" online. I liked that idea, and that expression, so I used it in this post title.

*As an interesting footnote to this post, and on the subject of silence, when I was typing this entry in Word, it was interesting to note how Word’s dictionary didn’t recognize many of the negative words surrounding pregnancy: words like “ectopic” and “misoprostol”. (You could argue that the last is a drug and can be excused for being omitted, but try typing “penicillin” or “Viagra” or “lithium” into Word and see what happens.) Funny.

Is your toddler...?

Is your toddler... obsessed with the story Jack and the Beanstalk (but secretly you don't mind, because now you can always get him to eat beans by telling him they're magical)?

Does your toddler... refuse to call his or her father "Daddy", "Papa" or even the more distinguished "Pater", instead choosing to refer to him as "White Guy" (or "Blue Guy" or "Red Guy" or "Black Guy", depending on the colour of his shirt)?

Does your toddler... hold treats temptingly close to the dog's face and then say loudly, "No Dobbs, that's Sam's cracker!"

Is your toddler... impervious to your frequent slips into full-on swearing, except for that one time you said "Oh my!" which has now become his or her favourite exclamation?

Does your toddler... make the fakest laugh imaginable every time you point out that something is funny?

Does your toddler... know they can sucker you into letting them use markers if they ask you if they can "Use mawkahs make cawd foy Mummy?" (Translation: Use markers to make a card for Mummy?)

Speaking of which... does your toddler call you "Mummy"? Because suddenly you're either British or you've been locked up in a sarcophagus for three thousand years?

Is your toddler... cracking you up daily with new tricks? Share!