Progress

As I mentioned, my success at the drawstring pouch Tuesday night made me want to do more. Lucky for me, the Step Two class was last night, where I made this handy tote bag. And unlike the first night, when the studio had about five fabrics to choose from, I actually shopped for the fabric in a real fabric store (with a dizzying array of choices) for this one.  It’s lined and everything. 

This is fun, y’all. And there are just not a lot of things I can say that about right now. Next week, I’m starting a four-week course on reading patterns and learning to make clothes. Next stop: playsuits for the boy?

I sure wish I had stumbled upon this when Hudson was alive—what fun that would have been.

Creative Juices

I made this.

No, really, I just made this pouch tonight in a 2-hour introductory sewing class. Inspired by some of my crafty friends, I thought I might try sewing again. I have a pretty decent sewing machine that my mom left to me and I took a beginning class years ago. But that project was much more ambitious than this one—I think it was a top (with sleeves!) and pants made out of stretchy knit fabric. Not so easy for a beginner and no quick, finished product to feel a sense of accomplishment that makes you want to keep going (oof, I sound like I’m channeling Amy Chua- yikes). So I didn’t keep it up. But my cute little lined drawstring pouch (in Hudson’s colors, in case you didn’t notice) has got me thirsting for more. Another class or two and lots of practice and maybe I can solve my own problem about boys’ clothes being ridiculously drab and pedestrian (Melissa T., I’m looking at you for guidance here).

It’s been a weird several days. Probably the least I’ve written on the blog (when not on vacation) since I started it. And that’s hard. I look at January and think, “I only wrote 16 posts?” In the past, I’ve almost felt bad about these periods where I don’t write as often, as if I’m somehow not doing right by my sweet girl. But I’ve started to recover from that kind of silly thinking. As if on the days I’m not writing here, I’m not thinking about her almost constantly, not thinking about all the sad days behind and ahead of us and all the happy days behind and ahead of us, not thinking about the immense challenge that lies in ahead as we continue to learn to live without Hudson and parent her siblings in her absence and in our grief. Of course I am.

I have struggled so much in the past several months with what it means to have these more peaceful days, these days where the words don’t just pour out of me by sheer force of necessity. But I am trying hard (still) to come to terms with that. I am working hard to find outlets for the little bits of focused (and sometimes creative) energy that hit me here and there, partly because it helps me and partly because it is another way to honor Hudson, another way to cherish what is. 

The other weekend, we had some friends over for brunch. I love brunch and I have this great new cookbook full of brunch recipes that I wanted to try. I made a yummy strata from a recipe and then improvised on some blueberry baked apples, which also turned out great. It felt so good both to do something I had forgotten that I loved and to provide some nourishment to others, after having been on the receiving end of so much nourishment, physical and otherwise, for such a long time. But I also nourished myself, something else I’d pretty much forgotten how to do. Sometimes it’s almost too easy to give in to the grief and the sadness and just wallow. Obviously, I need room and space for that (and I’ve taken it, quite liberally, whenever I’ve needed it), but as we inch closer and closer to the birth of another child, I feel the need to begin exercising muscles that have almost atrophied for lack of use, especially my creative muscles. Being a mom is so often about being creative, being willing and able to try something new when all your tried and true tricks fail. So I guess by trying to fire up my creative juices, I am not only continuing to heal myself, but I am also preparing for the hard work of mothering an infant (and later a toddler) again.

I feel not unlike those times I begin exercising after a long hiatus (yet another thing I need to be doing more of): sore, a bit bewildered, but also a little exhilarated and ready for more.

It feels good.

In Between

I’m still here. Thank you if you are still here, too.

I am living in these bizarre in-between worlds right now.

There is the in-between world of having so much to say but no way to express it. It is times like these when I wish I had far greater command of metaphor, because literal expression has been failing me lately. I think of this verse from Sarah MacLachlan’s I Will Remember You (see? I have to use someone else’s words just to be able to adequately describe how I don’t have the right words):

I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep
Standing on the edge of something much too deep
It’s funny how we feel so much but we cannot say a word
We are screaming inside but we can’t be heard


There is the in-between world of being a mother but having no child in my arms. I will always be Hudson’s mother and she will always be my child, but all I have left to care for and nurture is her memory and her spirit (a huge and important task, to be sure, but so very different from changing diapers and giving baths and reading stories and snuzzling). I am already Jackson’s mother, but as long as he is in my belly, my mother-role is in an odd state of limbo. I am caring for him and nurturing him and yet he is still so remote and unreal, in some ways still just a possibility, not a definite.

There is the in-between world of living every day with my sorrow and grief and yet trying desperately to begin preparing for a time, very soon, where that sorrow and grief will join hands with new hope and joy. I still have no sense of what such a life looks like. All I can do is hope that when it is upon me, I will know how to live it.

And more than anything, there is the in-between world of complete disbelief and slowly dawning acceptance. Every day, sometimes several times during a day, I fluctuate between these two states of being. On Tuesday, I turned 35. Hudson will never even turn 2. I still can’t comprehend how that can be. That day, I wrote the following in an email to Jessica:

I’ve been having a renewed wave of utter disbelief that this happened and that Hudson is really gone—again, I look at her pictures and remember our life with her and it just seems totally impossible that it is all over, never to return again. How can she just have vanished off the face of the earth? . . . It’s so hard for me to imagine that we have really lived without her for eight and a half months already. It really still seems like it was yesterday that we were busting into her room first thing in the morning with Bess, and she’d lift her head up off the mattress, see us and grin, and we’d start our day together. I picture her in so many different places around the house and in the car and it’s still just so hard to fathom that she will never be in those places again.

I try to imagine our lives in 30 years, sitting around with our grown children, having a glass of wine. I try to imagine how Hudson fits into that picture, that life. I try to imagine my adult children thinking about their older sister who will never be older than a toddler. And I just can’t believe that this is my life now, this is my family’s life. Living forever with one missing.

And yet, on Wednesday, that feeling of disbelief had subsided some. I found myself thinking (as I do occasionally), “OK. This is real. She is gone. And I just have to move forward.” Whenever this happens, I am reminded of a passage from C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed:

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met H. I’ve plenty of what are called “resources.” People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this “commonsense” vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace. . .

And then I’m right back to the disbelief.


I’m still here. Just living in between.

Scare

We had what turned out to be a very minor scare yesterday, although it didn’t feel minor when it was happening. Around 2PM, I went to the bathroom and had just the tiniest bit of spotting. As you can imagine, I totally freaked out. I paged the doctor and when I didn’t get a call back within an hour, I called labor and delivery at the hospital directly and spoke to the resident. She asked me a bunch of questions, including whether this was my first baby, at which point, I immediately started crying, saying that it was my second, but that my older child had died from meningitis last year, so I was panicky about every little thing. She was so kind and told me just to come on in and get checked out.

By the time we got to the hospital, I was pretty sure that there was nothing to worry about. I’d had no further bleeding, no pain, no contractions, no increased pressure, and Jackson had been squirming around pretty regularly since it happened. And yet as soon as we set foot on the L&D hallway, I started to cry. Not because I was afraid, really, but because it was the first time we’d been back to L&D since Hudson was born there 2 years ago. Despite the agonizing pain of my drug-free labor, I have nothing but fond memories and nostalgia for the place and thinking about going back again in May to have this baby without my sweet little girl there to hug and kiss her baby brother just about did me in.

When the OB on call at the hospital (who is the person who should have returned my page) finally saw me, she apologized for not calling me back, and said if I ever don’t get a return call within 15 minutes, that I should call back right away. But the L&D nurse was totally awesome and told me that on nights and weekends, I can just call L&D directly—no need to page the doctor first. She also said that her rule of thumb is that if I am ever worried about something, it makes a lot more sense to come in and get it checked out rather than sitting at home worrying about it. She said whenever women tell her, “Well, I felt so stupid coming in when it’s probably nothing,” she always tells them, “But you’ll feel a lot better when you go back home and that’s what matters.” I can’t tell you how much I appreciated hearing her say that. She said she totally understood why I was so afraid, that she’d been a “hot mess” during pregnancy, and that if she’d been through what I had, she would probably not have even set foot out of the house yet. Everyone was so kind and we were in and out in under two hours.

It turned out that everything was totally fine—no contractions, no visible bleeding at all, cervix is still totally long and closed, baby’s heartbeat is fine, he was moving around, and the placenta is in the right place (no concern about placenta previa, which can cause bleeding at this stage). So there’s no apparent cause for the tiny bit of bleeding—the doctor’s best guess is just a very engorged cervix, which is pretty common at this point, and sometimes even the slightest irritation can trigger a little bit of bleeding. How nice for me. Still, the doctor was very clear that I should always come in for any bleeding, no matter how slight, which made me feel even better about my decision to come in to begin with. 

When I got my discharge papers, under the section about my history, it said, “previous normal spontaneous vaginal delivery at 38 weeks but neonatal death postpartum due to meningitis.” I hadn’t told them that she was 17 months old and they just assumed that she’d been a tiny infant. All I could think was, “SHE WAS NOT A NEONATE! SHE WAS 17 MONTHS OLD! TODDLERS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO DIE FROM MENINGITIS!” Not that it mattered to them clinically, but to me, this description seemed to omit with the punch of a few buttons the very full life she had, short though it was.

I can only hope we don’t have to go through that again anytime in the next 17 weeks. Really. Please? Pretty please? I hope that the next time we go back to L&D, it will be to meet a beautiful, healthy boy who will help us begin to put some of the shattered pieces of ourselves back into their proper places. Seventeen weeks seems like such a very long time, especially without my sweet Hudson to keep me laughing all the way. She is just so very missing and so very missed.

Not a Dream

I had another dream about Hudson last night. In this one, we were on an open-air train of some sort. It seemed like a Tweetsie Railroad touristy kind of train, but it was on a very long track alongside a river with a highway up above it. I was sitting on the floor of the train, next to a bench that I could have been sitting on, nursing my sweet girl. Another mom was sitting on the bench trying to help me figure out how to pump on the other side while I nursed (why we would be doing this on a scenic train ride, I have no idea). The sun was shining on us.

Then, in the next “scene,” she was gone. I was still sitting on the floor of the train, but Hudson wasn’t. I stood up and screamed, “STOP THE TRAIN! MY BABY IS GONE!” And the train screeched to a halt. I had no idea what could have happened to her. Did she bounce out? Did someone swipe her? I climbed over the edge of the train car and jumped onto the ground and started running in the opposite direction of the train. About a hundred yards back, a man standing beside some kind of shack down by the river (maybe he was selling something?) yelled to me, “Here she is!” I ran down and found her sitting happily in a galvanized tin bucket full of magazines, waiting for me as if nothing had happened. I think she was wearing the pink bodysuit and denim jumper dress that she wore last Easter. I swept her into my arms and hugged her so tight, relishing how good it felt to hold her. I felt awful because this was the second time in the dream that I had lost her (I don’t remember the details of the first part—only that I couldn’t find her then, either). I worried what people would think about a mother who could lose her child twice in a row. I wondered why I couldn’t seem to keep her with me. And I hugged her tighter.

And then I woke up. My first reaction was relief that I had been dreaming and that I hadn’t really lost her.

And then I had the awful realization, yet again, that it wasn’t really a dream. That I did lose her. Except the real version doesn’t have the happy ending. So I squeezed my eyes tight and just tried to remember her face in the dream and be grateful to have seen her.  Instead of the tight hug, that image is all I get.

The Question With No Answer

When I first heard that Gabrielle Giffords had survived a close-range gunshot wound through her brain, I was absolutely stunned, but as the doctors kept saying, I knew there was a frightening vigil ahead for her family as they waited to see whether the swelling in her brain would stop. Then I read that they had removed pieces of her skull to relieve some of the pressure. Then she opened an eye and moved her limbs. Then the doctors removed her ventilator. And then today, I heard that she was able to stand and read get-well cards. Tomorrow, she’s going to be moved to a rehabilitation hospital.
With each new piece of encouraging news about the congresswoman’s “miraculous” recovery, I grew more and more envious. I’m not proud of that reaction—in fact, I’m very ashamed of it. The envy does live alongside great relief for her family and hope for her complete recovery, but the fact that it lives at all feels awful. I’ve thought about this every single day since the shooting but have been afraid to put my thoughts into words.

Why can modern medicine save a 40-year-old woman with a bullet through her brain but can’t save a 17-month-old little girl, whose brain is supposedly more resilient than an adult’s, from an infection? WHY? Why didn’t the neurosurgeons remove parts of Hudson’s skull, or at least drill a hole in it, to help relieve the pressure? Why do so many other families get near-misses and miracles with their loved ones, but we didn’t?

I’ve written before that until the wee hours of Tuesday morning, about 8 hours after Hudson was diagnosed and admitted to the PICU, I had complete faith that she was going to be OK. I was still terrified, but I simply could not fathom that the doctors could not treat and cure an INFECTION (again, I had been advised to avoid Google—advice I took—so I had no idea what we were really dealing with in terms of fatality rates and so on). In the middle of the night, though, she started having seizure-like episodes, which seemed to me like a bad sign that things were not going well in her brain, and then, horribly, one of her pupils did not respond to the hourly checks with flashlights that the PICU nurses were doing. I knew then that it was very, very bad—I had been with Jessica’s family in the hospital when her mom was stricken with Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and the news that her pupils had stopped responding to light was the beginning of the end. The CT scan they did on Hudson’s brain immediately thereafter showed significant swelling, so they pulled out all the stops to try to relieve the pressure—gave her a massive dose of Mannitol (a diuretic that is supposed to help reduce intracranial pressure) , sedated her and put her on a ventilator to control the amount of carbon dioxide to her brain, and kept her elevated in the bed. They may have been doing other things, but those are the things I remember. At rounds a few hours later, I asked the attending physician what we were hoping to see if Hudson was going to recover. He said we were looking for some signs of voluntary movements, like trying to pull out the vent tube, as the sedation wore off to show that her brain was still working. Not long after that, I looked up and saw Hudson, eyes still closed and still heavily sedated, lift her left arm and reach for that tube. My heart leapt. Surely this was a sign that they’d been successful in reducing the pressure enough to allow her brain to start recovering. The neurologists came in and did their series of neuroreflex tests—she passed them all. Her pupils were responding evenly again, her toes were curling in response to stimuli on the arch of her foot. No one could explain it, but it seemed to bode well. There was hope. Maybe we were going to get our miracle.

A few hours later, in the middle of the day Tuesday, still not even 18 hours after she’d been admitted, Hudson’s pupils stopped responding to light at all. Another CT scan (which took so long that we were not even sure she had survived it) showed massive swelling all over her brain, a catastrophic injury from which she was unlikely to recover—she would likely either suffer significant brain damage that would impair her in every way for life or she would die. The doctor said that he hoped he would be proven wrong, but those were the likeliest scenarios.

I can’t count how many times, in the hours before and after that CT scan and in the many days since, I pictured Hudson recovering in a general ward at Children’s, sitting up in her bed in a hospital gown covered with bears, IV full of antibiotics still taped securely to her hand with a wooden board, eagerly downing her first Jello with a grin, playing with all the toys people had brought her as she recuperated, laughing at the hospital clowns as they made the rounds each day, singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star with them. How many times I pictured us trying to keep her entertained and satisfied for the three to six weeks kids usually had to stay in the hospital for treatment for bacterial meningitis. Even after we knew the coma was probably permanent, I tied an Elmo balloon that one of our friends had brought for her to the foot of the bed, where it would be the first thing she would see if she happened to open her eyes. The first time our pediatrician stopped by, after the first CT scan but before the second, she told us that she firmly believed in the power of positive thinking, so I tried so hard to think positively. We tried not to cry openly or audibly in the room. We continued to talk to Hudson and read books to her and surround her with the stuffed animals she loved.

But it was not to be. The next time the pediatrician stopped by, she cried with us. The infectious disease doctor cried with us. The nurses cried with us. The hospital clowns came to Hudson’s room and softly sang Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star while we lay in the bed with her and cried. She never opened her eyes or moved her limbs or took a breath on her own again. She never got to see her Elmo balloon or eat hospital Jello. They never removed her vent until she had been declared brain-dead. And then we held our little girl in our arms as her body died, too.

And so today, for the millionth time, I ask the unanswerable question. Why? Why her? Why us? Why did our sweet, amazing, precious child who brought so much joy to the world, why did she not get her fucking miracle?

Distracted

This is probably one of the best words to describe me over the past eight months. Very, very distracted. Often for reasons beyond my control, but often by choice. People who know me may not believe this, but even before Hudson died, I had a short attention span and a generally lazy attitude about getting things done. With the right motivation (law school, a deadline, a party with guests that requires a clean house and decent food), I can usually focus long enough to finish something and come out with a good product, but self-motivation has always been hard for me. And never more so than since Hudson died. All the procrastinating habits, all the self-distracting habits (surfing the web, being tied to my Blackberry, watching television) that I had before Hudson died have multiplied themselves tenfold. A hundredfold. I have become a person who leaves the television on for company, even when I am doing other things, like surfing the web, writing thank you notes, folding clothes. Often when I am writing and my brain comes to a pause, rather than just sitting quietly and comfortably through it, I flip over to internet to see what is new on Facebook or in my email. I find it difficult to do just one thing at time anymore, so desperate am I to fill the painful spaces in my head, spaces that, if left open and unblocked for too long, take me to places I don’t want to go.

Case in point. This morning, we had a 2-hour delay at work because of last night’s ice storm. I had already gotten up and gotten ready, so I had two hours to fill at home. I spent most of it on the computer and then with about thirty minutes left, I got to work doing a few chores that needed to be done, including folding some laundry in the basement. Usually, I dump all the clothes in a basket and take them upstairs to fold in front of the TV, but I didn’t have much time for that this morning, so I just folded them there in the basement. The very quiet basement. After I was finished, I went to the washer and started to put the wet clothes into the dryer and then I just stopped. I looked down into the washtub and then looked around me, suddenly totally awash in memories of days past when I was there with Hudson’s blue mesh laundry basket, washing her little tops and pants and bodysuits as she climbed in and out of the bouncy seat that was far too small for her anymore. My hands and arms could almost feel exactly how it felt to fold those little girl clothes, shirts folded in half longways, sleeves tucked over, and then folded in half again, pant legs folded over each other and then in half, so that everything would tuck neatly next to each other and be easy to grab from the dresser under the changing table. And there, with only 20 minutes before I needed to be at work, I broke down. And cried hard. I went upstairs to Hudson’s room and sat down in the rocking chair and sobbed. As I sat, I pulled open the top drawer of the dresser and ran my fingers over her clothes, clothes that I haven’t looked at in so long, including several outfits that I bought at a consignment sale only a few weeks before she died that she’d barely gotten to wear. I pulled out her green turtle shirt, the one we captured so many beautiful photos of her in, and held it to my face, wetting it with my tears. I cried and cried, telling Hudson how much I miss her and love her and how unfair it all seems sometimes. I hadn’t cried that hard in a long time. It was rough. This went on until I looked at my watch and knew that I had to get myself together and get to work. I put the shirt back in the drawer, closed it, dried my face on a tissue and went to find the eye drops I keep in my purse for just these moments when I have to be presentable somewhere fast.

I’m really struggling with this. When I think about moments like this morning, I get why I feel the need for some kind of white noise in the background during the times when I am not prepared (whatever that means) to spend time with the grief. But I also feel wretched, as if this (the TV-watching, the web-surfing, the doing anything that does not require real concentration) is really no more than a continuation of my former habits but one in which I now feel justified because I have a pretty goddamned good excuse.

But this past Sunday, during a long holiday weekend that I had been both looking forward to and dreading (looking forward to four days off from a job I don’t really love but dreading four days at home with very few plans and no Hudson), I got a short burst of focused energy. For weeks and weeks, clutter had been piling up on our kitchen table and buffet (the dining room essentially became our makeshift office when we turned the actual office into Hudson’s playroom) and I spent a few hours finally putting things where they belonged, throwing things away, acting on some things that had been sitting for a while. The result: a clean buffet and a slightly less cluttered kitchen table. And most importantly, a feeling of satisfaction. Not so much from the finished product itself, but because I had made myself DO something. Later that day, I finally started reading a new cookbook I picked up at Costco several weeks ago (another hat tip to my dear friend Megan for turning me on to America’s Test Kitchen—their Family Cookbook is so great) and started reading it, marking recipes I wanted to try. That night, I watched a Carolina game (an activity which up until then I’d had a hard time getting into) without my laptop in my lap and actually enjoyed watching it (despite the team’s terrible performance).

I felt so good at the end of the day that I made a commitment to stop trying to distract myself so much, to try to do things one at a time, in hopes that I can improve not only my focus but also my enjoyment of things that I used to love. Granted, I woke up Monday morning feeling pretty sad and wanting to do nothing more than watch some TV to send my mind elsewhere. So I did. But I didn’t do anything ELSE while I was watching TV, so that seems like at least a little progress.

Just trying to celebrate a small victory, like I committed to doing yesterday.