International Women's Day

Yesterday was International Women's Day.  Some of my favorite blogs marked the day with commentary.  I marked it by changing my Face Book profile picture to one of a painting of a beautiful strong woman nursing her baby.  I have been reading lots of blog commentary on the baby feeding wars.  It makes me sad.  I'll write about that more later.  For now I'll just share some images that I find beautiful.

Pablo Picasso

Artist unknown to me.  It is my current FB profile image.  If you know the artist, please let me know.

Fiery Breastfeeding, Artist Unknown, alisaterry.blogspot.com

Mother and Child, Renoir

Yashoda Breastfeeding, Mysore Traditional Art Krishna

Madonna and Child, Leonardo da Vinci

The Divine Mother (closeup), Michelle Levy

 Tender Hands, Diana Moses Botkin

Young Mother Feeding Her Baby, Lepicier

 Mother Jeanne Nursing Her Baby, Mary Cassatt

Joninah Louise, Seven Months

Long winded

In the last three weeks my beloved has spent nearly $500 and at least 4 precious work days trying to get a snowmobile going so he can get around in the woods to finish the acres necessary to meet his deadline.......and the snow will be gone by the end of the week. So it will cost a few more hundred, and more worth-their-weight-in-gold work days (ok not really gold - they are just really really precious), to get the three wheeler going - which will almost certainly leave him stranded in the woods anyway........ :*0(


I tried to post this as my status on FaceBook this morning. It was error-ed out - too many characters. That is why I have this blog that no one reads - because I just can't say things in a quick blurb of a few words. My FB posts are often like this - too long. And too grumpy.

In my FB world - everybody is happy. Unless someone has died, and then condolences are quickly offered, and everyone goes back to happy. Even if they are unhappy, and they dare to post about it, they try very hard to make light of their unhappiness. I did. Notice the "emoticon" at the end? Silly little thing, right? Well actually I am on the verge of tears.

Less than $1000 spent on necessary business equipment doesn't seem like much, but for us, it is. And I can not even begin to explain the cost of missing all these days of work. It is unseemly to talk about money and angst in public - but man I think I am reaching the end of my rope.

Ok, not really. All things in my life are now sifted through the filter of babyloss. So I get angry sometimes, and frustrated, and I often feel overwhelmed. But for me, burying Noah was the end of my rope. Anxiously wondering if the money to keep our heads above water - the money sitting there waiting to be earned - will find its way into our checking account...... well that is definitely middle of the rope stuff. It's all relative.

Human Mother

My son died and I have been transformed by the experience. I am better and worse for having carried our son, to have been the source of his life, to have given birth to death. I love my children more. It is difficult to imagine the mother-love that is intensified by death - but it is. Ordinary mother-love is more than enough to nurture a child. Baby-lost mother-love is the ordinary variety on crack. I'm not saying that's all good, and certainly not worth the cost to find. And yet I know now that I didn't really know the depth of my love for my children before Noah died.

And as I mentioned before, I feel shell-shocked. I don't feel like life is as safe as I did before. I feel less capable of protecting my children. I don't feel that our hard work and the force of our convictions can always keep us afloat or safe. I feel the pull of forces completely out of my control, conspiring with my own exhaustion to drag me under. Perpetually treading water, waiting for the sharks...... Of course Noah’s death was only one of the bombs that found our family.

So I am different, but I am still a human mother. I love my children beyond reason. My mind sees in technicolor what intuition only hinted at before - that I would give my life in a second for all three of my living children. I would do it gladly if asked.  But I am still a human mother and my kids bug me sometimes. They dump toys and refuse to pick them up. They fight with each other. They scream and have tantrums sometimes. They tell fibs and help themselves to quarters out of my wallet that I've told them 20 times to leave alone. Potty training has taken well over a year.  And I'm tired. So sometimes I feel frustrated. Sometimes - perhaps even most of the time - I feel overwhelmed.  And sometimes I raise my voice. And sometimes I complain about the beloved children I would die for.

Losing a child has trasformed me - but not into a saint. I am still a human mother.

Happy Anniversary!

Today I've been married to my dear sweet loving husband for five years. If I am generous I would say we have known each other for five years, six months, but honesty forces me to admit it has been a bit less than that. Yet I can't imagine finding a better mate if I spent ten years getting to know him. Not perfect on all counts - but the perfect compliment for my own too numerous imperfections. We were meant for each other I believe - meant to be together.


We've managed to pack a lot into our five years together. Seven pregnancies, a thriving business lost, four addresses in three different towns, three schools, foreclosure, a glimpse at homelessness...... yes there is more. We have been stripped clean in many senses - extras left behind to make room for the good stuff - better stuff. We've clung ferociously, even obstinately to our values, scarifying much in their name. I often wonder if we are right.

Lots of good things have happened to us in five years, but I would be Polly Anna's perkier baby-sister if I denied the bad stuff. Or if I lied and said I am better for having experienced it all. Parts of me are better - but it's not "all good" my any means. I feel shell shocked sometimes. A true survivor of war would certainly balk at my cooptation of the term “shell shock”, just as I balk when people compare the deaths of their cats the deaths of my babies. But I don't begrudge them lest I be begrudged.

Someone who should have known better than to be so unkind recently asked me why I “let” some of the particularly difficult things we have struggled through happen to our family. What a luxury to have never tripped on pebble that catapults you into a shit hole. We are an intelligent, educated, and hard-working pair, and it happened to us. I dare say it could happen to anyone. That is why I want to tell our story - it is as American as any Horatio Alger tale - and it happened to us.

Noah is calling

Noah has been asking for my attention  rather insistantly the last few days.  Things I haven't thought of in many weeks pop into my mind - randomly.  His birth.  Waiting for the contractions.  My doctor.  No heartbeat.  My cluelessness.  Being alone.  Wailing in me sweet gentle husband's arms.  The seering grief.  And the guilt.

There are so many things I want to say about our life as a family while I carried Noah.  It isn't a pretty story.  It ends in such a vicious irony that my mind still reels at the thought of it.  How could this have happened in real life?  Even the schmaltziest melodramatist would have dared pitch this script - and he likely would have been laughed out of the meeting.  But it did happen to us - to me - to Noah.

We got a camera fo Christmas!

Baby Dreams

(I haven't posted about my dreams during Noah's and Joni's pregnancies. I wrote this in response to a discussion topic in a support group I belong to.)

When I was pregnant with Noah, I had a dream he had died just a couple of weeks before it was so. I couldn't remember the details but I told my husband about it and asked him if we could try again if something happened to Noah. (Noah had been very unplanned and we had been in desperate financial straights - so we really had no business having another baby). He said "of course but nothing is going to happen to him."

Around the same time I was at a rummage sale and struck up a conversation with another very pregnant mom and we discussed due dates. I said "we're having a boy and he's due September 13th - but he's not going to make it." I checked myself immediately. What I meant was he wasn't going to make it to his due date because he was so big and I was having so many contractions - unlike anything I had experienced with my other two full term pregnancies. In the end both my slip and my feeling that he was a big baby and would come early were both true. He arrived at 37 weeks, big, healthy, but still.

On the day of his funeral we had family over to our apartment, an apartment we moved into only 4 weeks before Noah died. When they left, I walked into the kitchen and looked at the remains of the gathering on the counter - a half empty ginger ale bottle, a bakery box filled with bars from the funeral lunch, paper plates, plastic cups - and I deja vued back to the dream. I hadn't thought of it in the week since Noah's death, but the scene in my tiny kitchen had been part of that dream. I knew at some level the Noah was going to die.

In the last days of November, just three months after burying our son, I was pregnant again. Like many newly pregnant women I had lots of crazy dream. It was not new for me - I experienced crazy dreams with all my pregnancies. But as a babylost mom, the dreams seemed more macabre - which of course, given the dream in Noah's pregnancy, scared the crap out of me. The dreams escalated in intensity until one morning I had the loveliest/scariest dream about the baby I was carrying. She was a big happy healthy chubby dark-haired little girl who looked exactly like me. In the hospital I carried her on my back wrapped in a big native looking cloth - she was so big and strong. And then she smiled right at me with all her teeth - a big wide gap-toothed smile. I was so incredibly proud of her.

And then in the dream she started to wither away. I was showing her proudly to everyone, but I could tell she was slipping away and I knew it was because I wasn't feeding her. I tried to get her to nurse, but she refused. I tried to get the nurses to help me, but they were too busy. And so, in my dream, my big girl withered in my arms.

Interestingly I woke from that dream overjoyed that I was having a girl. I talked to my therapist (a rather wise hippie counselor) about it and asked if she thought I could be excited about it even though it ended badly. She said she thought the sad part was more about Noah than my new baby. And so I was happy about my baby girl (yes the baby is in reality a girl), but my worries about her "withering away" lingered.

As the days went by I had more and more dreams. One had me in the hospital again - asking for help and getting none - wanting to see my baby. They finally brought me my baby - one I was expecting to be dead - and then she opened her eyes and looked at me. I was confused and looked at the nurses and said - you brought me the wrong baby - this baby is alive but my baby is dead - he died yesterday.

The dreams continued like that until finally I had what could only be described as a nightmare. It was clearly about Noah this time. I was trying to bring him back to life - but he was dismembered and I couldn't do it - so I tried to bury him again - but I couldn't do that either - so he just laid there in pieces on the dirt.

I woke up in tears - sobs really - and stayed that way the entire day. I couldn't shake the dream. I decided I needed to go to the doctor to have my baby checked. Because so many of my dreams had been about seeking help from my primary doctor and not getting it, I decided to call an OB I had seen in the past instead. I explained my anxiety - just short of describing the dream - and was fit in with an NP who was very kind and reassuring. She did a quick ultrasound and the baby was still alive. I was happy, but not quite relieved. I asked her if they could run a progesterone test. She said there was really no need since the baby measured right on track and had a beating heart. But then she looked at me and I think she could tell I needed something more to be reassured and said - "well if it will help."

I was about eight weeks pregnant at this point. I had seen my regular doctor a week before because of a tiny bit of spotting. My progesterone was 21 which was low for me compared to my other viable pregnancies, but my doctor declared it "great". Now at eight weeks my progesterone came back at 9. I spiraled into panic. I was put on prometreum - 200mg per day. A few days later I had more spotting and cramping so the prometreum was doubled.
After that everything with my body - if not my mind - was calm. No more spotting or cramping. And although I remained a basket case during my waking hours for most of the pregnancy, the dreams never returned.

The pregnancy was not easy. There was much to give me pause even beyond the anxiety that seems to be part and parcel of a subsequent pregnancy after loss. Even after she was born things were not perfect. I've thought of the dream often - of my big healthy girl withering away - and wondered with each dip in the road "is this what it meant - am i going to lose her now?" In writing it all out though, I think it was about the progesterone - I think my body needed that little extra boost to keep her safe - and Noah was warning me.

Another funny thing about that dream: when Joninah was born, except for being a girl, she looked nothing like the baby of my dream - she was SKINNY! Now, at seven weeks she is that girl. Far from wasting with lack of breastmilk, she is an avid, sometimes ravenous, nurser with chubby cheeks, chubby legs, chubby everything! She is dark featured, and a quick look at her toothless gums seems to point toward a gap between her two front teeth - just like mommy, big sister, grandma, and great-grandma. Poor thing!