At the end of the world.

I write this from the end of the world.  D is sitting across from me in the living room of our b&b, chatting merrily in Spanish with the proprietors' little boy.  We got into Puerto Natales, Chile last night, at the southern tip of Patagonia.  It is roughly 1,000 miles from the Antarctic Circle.  The ozone is thin here.  I have been using a lot of sunscreen.

The night before we arrived here, we found ourselves standing in the middle of a sandy plain in the pitch darkness, just outside of the town of San Pedro de Atacama.  We were with some people we had met during the course of our trip, and some we met on the street after our dinner as they loitered on a corner in town, drinking beers out of paper bags and looking for a party: some Poles, some Norwegians, a Chilean, and a friendly stray dog who had attached herself to our group.  The stars glittered thickly, infinitely above.  The Milky Way stretched across the sky, and alongside it we could see the Southern Cross rising, and the two Magellanic galaxies glimmering dimly, like a pair of clouds.  We all turned our faces to the sky, looking for shooting stars; and when they didn't immediately appear, willing the shooting stars.  Someone said into the quiet, "You can't force it."

Tomorrow, the day after Mila's first birthday, we go into Torres del Paine to hike and camp the roughly 50-mile W.  It is summer here, but the forecast calls for cold, wind, and rain.  I have come to think of it as a spirit walk, a literal walk to embody the symbolic one of the last twelve months.  I rail, still, against the shape our life has taken, trying to form it into complete circles, all 360 degrees intact.  It doesn't look the way I wanted it to.  But I am slowly, painfully learning that you can't force it.  So we will walk very far through the woods, and come out -- I don't know, wherever the trail takes us.

There comes the morning when I can feel that there's nothing left to be concealed

Moving on

A scene surreal

I know my heart will never be far from here

Sure as I'm breathing, sure as I'm sad

I'll keep this wisdom in my flesh

I leave here believing more than I had

And there's a reason I'll be back

As I walk the hemisphere

I got my wish to up and disappear

I've been wounded, I've been healed

Now for landing I've been cleared

Sure as I'm breathing, sure as I'm sad

I'll keep this wisdom in my flesh

I leave here believing more than I had

This love has got no ceiling

Related posts:
First birthday.
Atacama and Patagonia, Part 1: The Atacama Desert.
Atacama and Patagonia, part 2: Torres del Paine.
Atacama and Patagonia, part 3: Argentina.
Atacama and Patagonia, part 4: Our trip in lists.

First birthday.

Happy birthday, our little love.

Related posts:
At the end of the world.
Atacama and Patagonia, Part 1: The Atacama Desert.
Atacama and Patagonia, part 2: Torres del Paine.
Atacama and Patagonia, part 3: Argentina.
Atacama and Patagonia, part 4: Our trip in lists.

Two wolves.

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.

"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

(source)

Whatever.

It's my birthday this Sunday. I'm going to be 31.

I don't want to sound ungrateful, but this year has been a pile of shit.

Heads down.

I've been quiet on the blog because lately, it feels better not to think too much about the situation we are in. I always do on some level, but better just to fill my conscious mind with fun thoughts. Like visiting little sis in Seattle soon, or wondering what D has up his sleeve for my birthday, or finally getting into Orange is the New Black.

So if I'm kinda quiet right now, I'm just doing it for my own health. Just heads down trying to get through the rest of this year from hell in one piece.

This month will be nine months.

More than on all of my fingers and toes.

Unsolvable.

The thing that's frustrating about the primary stressors in my life right now (trying to get pregnant, and worrying about my parents) is that there is nothing more I can do.  All the things that I could do something to solve, I solved -- so now the ones that are left are unsolvable, at least by me.

Is it even worth going to my therapist anymore?  Sometimes I wonder if I am a very boring case for her; it's not like I'm someone unwittingly standing in the way of my own happiness.  She doesn't need to administer tough love and ask incisive questions to get me to see that, oh! -- I've been shooting myself in the foot all along through my own boneheaded lack of self-awareness.  I'm doing all the right things; there's no behavior change needed.  All she can do is listen, which is all anyone can do.

Living a little.

I've been dieting and trying to eat healthy the last few weeks in an renewed effort to lose the last pounds.  D is fine with it because he's also been eating blandly -- clean fuel for running -- but I know it's kind of boring.  Some days he'll gchat me at work at 4pm after his run and ask, ravenously, What do you want to do for dinner? and I, with my stomach shrunken from three days of eating homemade chicken and kale salad, will shrug at my desk and type back boringly, Whatever, I'm not that hungry.

We've both been a little bit clinical about our bodies lately.  D must eat carbs -- no ethnic, no fat -- and be in bed early on Friday nights in preparation for Saturday long runs, and sometimes races.  I spent the better part of last month monitoring myself looking for signs and patterns like a prescientific human plumbing the night sky for meaning that's not there.

Saturday, D was overcome with an urge for Spanish food and to go out, so we went to a tapas place on Pier 5 -- super early, right at opening, so that we could snag a walk-in.  We sat at the bar as the tables around us were set and started to fill up.  The room was tall and airy, all outfitted in dark wood and copper and black metal.  We watched the kitchen staff at their work, and thought about how fun it would be to cook in a kitchen like that.  White cloud-filtered light shone in diffusely from a tall window, where a stout young dark-haired woman stood cubing red and yellow watermelons for pintxos next to an industrial stand mixer.  At the counter across from us, another woman torched caramel-colored little pucks on sticks until they glistened, while another put a pastry with a dense golden crust into a toaster oven and then pulled a metal tub out of the freezer and placed it on the counter before us, where it sat giving off cold vapors.  Behind them, storage shelves reached up to the dark raftered ceiling, with something delicious stored on every level -- bottles of gin, bitters, and wine; mismatched glass canisters upon canisters filled with dried red chiles; and all the way up at the top, wire baskets filled with ropes of hard wrinkled sausage folded over themselves into loops and vacuum-sealed in plastic.

Someone brought D a glass with a cucumber and some mysterious spirits in it and presented us with an assortment of tasty, expensive things on toothpicks.  This seemed familiar... a date night like we would have, not so long ago, when our enjoyment of things was uncomplicated.  And as we looked over our menus, things didn't feel quite as complicated.  It felt like a long time since we had been out to eat bad, bad foods just for fun, so we got everything: Spanish ham, chorizo coated with egg yolk and piled with crispy potato matchsticks, garlicky shrimp, three kinds of sausage, churros, and an apple pastry with a little football-shaped scoop of blue cheese ice cream perched on top.  My taste buds woke up.  The coffee tasted like chocolate, and the chocolate tasted like fruit.

The check came in a repurposed old aluminum saffron tin about the size of a brick.  We wondered how much the original tin of saffron must have cost, and guessed at it for fun.  I meant to look up the wholesale per-ounce cost of saffron, but I forgot.

Afterwards, we took a walk down the Embarcadero.  It was gray and windy but the wind smelled clean.  We looked at a new art installation that twisted out of the ground into the shape of two giant metal neurons firing.  We peered into other restaurants where we might go.  There was a seal in the bay, lazing around, disappearing and reappearing in the water, that we watched for a while.  We sat on a bench until it started getting dark, and then we called an Uber home.

It felt a little like taking a breath after holding it for a long, long time.

A work story, part 2.

(This is part 2 of A work story.  You can read part 1 here.)

As the end of the year and my due date approached, I started tying up loose ends.  My team arranged for a contractor to fill in for me while I was out from January to May.  I started daydreaming about maternity leave and having packages of baby items -- everything from swaddling blankets to a stroller -- shipped to me at work.  The last Friday before Christmas, I practically skipped out of the office, looking forward to the holiday break and a quiet first half of January before Mila came, and leaving behind (at least temporarily) the spin and pointless battles that were happening more and more often at work.

Then, of course, everything changed.

The following Thursday, two days after I came home from the hospital empty-handed and still in disbelief, I sent an email to my coworkers letting them know about the bad news.  I quickly received several sad and shocked responses.  In my haze, I didn't notice until much later that there were some important people who chose to stay silent in those first days.  My interim manager.  The new senior account lead with whom I'd been seeing not quite eye-to-eye.  The managing director of the office.

I took seven weeks off of work -- six weeks billed to disability, and a week "billed to" bereavement.  I dreaded going back to work, knowing that not only was I not quite myself, but that all the problems I'd watched develop over the last several months would most assuredly still be there.  But I didn't really feel up to launching, gung-ho, into a new job search; and what else was I going to do, hide out at home forever?  So I went back at the end of February, at three days a week, planning to gradually work back up to full time and bide my time until I felt whole enough to find a better place for myself.

The prospect of going back was terrifying.  I felt like I was about to re-enter a lion's den, but I'd lost the will to fight.  I had nightmares about it for the better part of a week.

The day I came back, my closest teammates welcomed me warmly, but beyond that, it was a lot of awkward welcome-backs and strained smiles.  There were probably some unspoken thoughts -- but who knows what they were?  I only heard the pauses, the silence of people who had no idea what to say, so said nothing and acted as if nothing was different.

I didn't hear from my manager right away, so the first couple of days were quiet.  I used the time to try to just get used to physically being back in the office.  At one point I got a call from an old colleague.  "I have been thinking about you a lot."  She wanted to know how I was doing, how I was holding up.  She said, "It is good to work."  I knew she meant well but I grimaced silently into the phone and felt a little hopeless.  If this work was supposed to be a salve, then my life was fucked.  I felt like someone had ripped my baby out of my arms and replaced her with a pile of Powerpoint decks that had been doctored to tell a palatable, client-facing "story."  This was going to be my life now, carrying around this pile of meaningless paper.  What a cruel joke.

After three days, I heard from my manager.  I'd known him since my Boston days.  He talks about his own four kids often.  Everyone in my group knows their names, what they're doing for the summer, what they're doing in school.  He often tells clients funny stories about them to break the ice.  On that third day, he called me from Boston and said "Heygladyou'rebackifyouwanttotalkjustletmeknowbutnopressureyoudon'thaveto--"  I opened my mouth to express my appreciation and say, no, I didn't feel pressured at all, and in fact I felt grateful that he was even opening the door -- but before I could get a sound out, he immediately jumped into telling me about my new assignment.  I realized suddenly that the door had never really been opened.  I closed my mouth.

I was given a small, languishing account to try to resuscitate.  It was in bad shape, having changed hands, been neglected, and left to wither slowly over the last several months.  Word on the street was that our managing director had a chilly relationship with the clients, having quit part of their business a few years back for not being worth the trouble.  It was so bad that I felt I had to ask if we were even trying to keep the business, and couldn't get a straight answer.

Maybe I went back to work too soon, because I actually felt grateful that there wasn't much for me to do.  I waited for each day to end so I could retreat to the safety of my house.  When deliverables came up, I tried to get them off my plate as quickly as possible.  Working on a deliverable felt like an exercise in self-defense -- how fast can I get this done and get this person to leave me alone?

Things kept deteriorating throughout the office, too.  Even as our managing director made noises about how "highly valued" our group was as the brains of the company, he closed the open position for head of the department.  The people in my group felt more and more marginalized and demoralized, and started to leave.  Account execs called emergency meetings to discuss client requests where people talked in circles for hours, before realizing no one actually understood what the ask was.  One large account was lost, and there were whispers that some big pitches fell through because pitch teams got too caught up in showing off and, in doing so, failed to follow the directions.  People were shuffled around as the business shrank.  In other offices, people started asking what the hell was going on in SF.

Even though I knew I wouldn't be staying for long, it was hard not to let these things affect my state of mind.  I started to feel really, really fucked over -- first by the universe, then by my office, which just piled on as it flailed and tried to cover its own ass.  The worst moment for me personally was an internal workshare a few weeks after I returned, for which I was tasked with presenting the work being done on my new account -- in the sad, shitty state in which I'd received it -- while others presented shiny new projects that I had gotten off the ground before my leave.  At a few points during others' presentations, our senior leadership asked, "This is great -- how on earth did you sell that in?" or "How did you get that set up?"  The presenters said, "P did it," and all eyes turned to me.  I felt suddenly self-conscious.  I tried to smile but I think it came out as a grimace.  I should have felt vindicated but I just felt embarrassed.

I told D, "It feels like they're just waiting for me to quit, for an opportunity to lay me off, or for me to get so demoralized that they can fire me without severance and say it was a performance problem."

After a couple of months, I'd finally had enough.  When I didn't feel beyond caring, I felt angry -- about the general mismanagement of the business, about the marginalization of my group, and about how personally marginalized I had started to feel.  I also just couldn't forget about the lack of response when Mila died.  I know this shit is hard to talk about, but I didn't want to work with leaders, who are presumably adults and seasoned professionals, who can't muster up some kind of human connection when this kind of crisis happens to their people.  Other bereaved moms' stories about returning to work -- where their VPs pulled them into offices to hug them and cry together, or had food sent to their houses for months -- made my company's response seem even lamer in comparison.

I started looking around in earnest at the beginning of April.  I'd spend my Mondays and Fridays off sitting at Peets or Cumaica, working LinkedIn and polishing cover letters.  In my early twenties I felt too insecure to deviate much from a standard cover letter structure, but now with several years of experience under my belt, I felt I'd earned the right to inject some casual personality into them.  It felt good to do something positive and productive that wasn't directly related to processing what had happened to Mila.  I started hearing back from companies right away, even from cold opens.

At D's suggestion, I started keeping notes for my exit interview, in a Google doc I only half-jokingly titled, "Ways In Which [Company] Has Fucked Me."

I started rationing my time and emotional energy.  If I had a spare minute, should I spend it putting in some extra effort on my latest deliverable?  Or should I spend it on my job hunt or something that would make me feel more relaxed or more happy?  I started choosing myself consistently.  Since it was becoming clear my employer wasn't going to look out for me, I chose to look out for myself.

I finally got the call I was waiting for on a Friday evening in late May.  I sealed the deal within a week.

My manager sounded, over the phone, surprisingly blindsided.

The managing director looked and sounded a bit depleted, my news having come at the end of a string of other recent departures from my group.  But I suspect a part of him was secretly relieved that by leaving, I'd made his overstaffing problem a little easier to deal with.

A peer from another department who'd been there with me since the start of the SF office, and herself recently a new mother, nodded and said, "I thought this was coming.  I didn't feel like you've been as hungry as you used to be."

My closest teammates just smiled.  They'd quietly observed everything that had been happening in the office, and to them, this was no surprise.  Old teammates who had left before me winked knowingly, slapped me on the back, and welcomed me to the other side.

My last day there was June 5th.

I feel optimistic about my new job.  I also have different expectations now, ones which I fear are not very fashionable.  I don't expect my employer (without the influence of the government) to take care of me when the chips are down -- that's what family and friends are for.  But on the flip side, I don't think it's fair for employers to expect employees to devote the entirety of their lives, time, and care to their jobs as a matter of course.  To choose, at every juncture, the professional over the personal lest they be branded as not "dedicated," not "a team player."  After all the shit I've seen and experienced (at all the companies where I've ever worked), I feel like a bit of a mercenary.  This is an exchange of services, and I'm okay with that.  If that sounds jaded, well, I guess it is.

A work story, part 1.

Since I'm bored of my own feelings, and I don't have much insightful to say about grief that I haven't already said here, maybe I'll try something new and tell some other stories.  I'd hoped by this point I'd have some stories to tell about subsequent pregnancy, but since apparently life doesn't always give us what we want, I'll tell a little bit about work.  Here's the story of my work life and how it collided, in spectacular fashion, with the rest of my life.

I was at my last company for six years -- an eternity in millennial professional time.  I was 24 years old when I started out in the Boston headquarters, and 30 when I left, almost two months ago, from the still-a-baby San Francisco office.  Long enough to have been promoted multiple times.  Long enough to have worked on several accounts, with clients and coworkers located in Chicago, New York, Dallas, Charlotte, San Jose, LA, and beyond.  Long enough to have gone from plugging data into spreadsheets to working on pet projects with my group's national lead and our CMO.  When I started there, I was living in my Comm Ave bachelorette pad, had just gotten unceremoniously laid off from my first job after college, and D and I had only been dating a few months.  By the time I left, we had cohabited, remodeled a condo together, gotten engaged, gotten married, moved cross-country together, lived in four different apartments together, gotten pregnant, and lost Mila.  So I kind of grew up there.

I had a lot of success in the Boston office, though I had to work really, really, hard before I was finally recognized.  I did good work and took pride in doing it, but was not particularly self-promoting.  Really, I'm an introvert, as it's classically defined.  Hate small talk, like deep conversation, need to be alone to recharge.  I'm not a showperson.  I don't like talking about what I don't know.  I need time and space to think.  For better or for worse, that's my nature.  I know that kind of personality is not popular or even particularly useful in getting to the top of the professional heap as fast as possible, but it's what I got.  I was lucky enough to wind up reporting into S, who was a mother hen and took me under her wing.  She hustled for me, real hard, but her word wasn't enough to get me my first promotion.  I wound up working on special projects for and impressing the hell out of her boss, and then her boss' boss, before I was finally promoted to Manager.  I didn't mind (too much) that it sometimes demanded late nights and working weekends; I liked the feeling of doing my job well, and I liked the recognition.  From there, I kept advancing, getting more responsibility, and getting my own teams.

In early 2012, after nearly four years in the Boston office, a company-wide email landed in my inbox.

I am happy to share the news that we are about to open our newest office, in San Francisco. We will be moving into a cool space right on the Embarcadero and we'll be servicing some new and existing clients in this office. Eventually we see it as a full-service office with its own clients, in the near term we will be moving folks into the office to help service existing clients. If this is something you want to consider, please alert your staffing manager, noted below.

D and I had been talking idly about a move -- maybe Austin, maybe Seattle, maybe San Francisco.  It was a sign!  I raised my hand immediately and it just so happened that someone at my level from my department was needed.  I'd be among the first twenty people there, and only the second in my department, after the SVP who would be my direct manager.  Things moved quickly.  I got that email in March, and by July, D and I had rented out our Beacon Street condo to some returning expats and were rolling across the country in an underpowered Prius packed to the roof, headed for a new home at the top of Telegraph Hill overlooking the Bay Bridge.  Adventure!

I could get to work in about 15 minutes on foot.  It was a beautiful, if sweaty, walk.  I'd take the winding, precarious Greenwich steps down through overflowing flower gardens and secret houses clinging to the hillside.  The steps would pop me out at a Starbucks on Sansome Street, where I'd stop if I had time, and then I'd walk up the Embarcadero in the sunshine, following the water and car traffic.

The SF office had a great view of the bay -- all water, flags flying, bobbing sailboats, booming cruise ships, and Oakland way off in the distance -- but terrible local lunch options.  The first year was a blur.  We were constantly hiring, constantly dousing work fires, constantly in meetings, constantly making up new processes.  There was no time and weren't enough people for formal, or even much informal, training.  My boss joked that with my arrival, I had doubled the size of our department.  We brought in another transplant from the Boston office, and then added a local hire.  Whoever was available whenever something urgent needed to get done, did it.  We all did analyst-level work, VP-level work, and everything in between.  We were flying by the seat of our pants for a while.  It wasn't that great, professionally speaking, but I figured it was part of opening up a new office, and I was assured that I was on track for a next promotion.

In the second year, things started to come apart - slowly, and then faster and faster.  I started to see the writing on the wall as it appeared, gradually, letter by letter.  Here are some of the things that I watched unfold over the course of several months:

1. A new managing director was brought in to supplant the exec who had opened the SF office.  She smiled and put on a brave face as she welcomed him, but left shortly thereafter, recognizing she'd been effectively forced out.
2. The head of my department, my boss, left the company abruptly.  An SVP who I'd worked with back in Boston was designated as my interim supervisor.  I liked him personally, but knew from past experience that he was an absentee manager.
3. People from other offices, drawn by the allure of the West Coast, started transferring in, sometimes showing up virtually unannounced -- even as the amount of client work in the SF office stayed about the same.
4. Even as the open position for head of my department languished, empty, for weeks and then months, other departments started hiring in their senior leads.  Unrealistic things started getting promised to clients on our behalf, forcing us to scramble to make good on bad promises.  We started getting requests to pull forecasts out of thin air, as long as we could make the numbers tell the right "story."  Even as we got good client feedback on our most innovative projects, internally I found myself being asked to explain their value again and again to the same people.  I started to realize that the new leadership didn't actually understand what my group did, nor did they care to understand.  I had the uncomfortable feeling that, as a result, they were sniping about us further up the chain.

While this was happening, I was also starting to have some serious doubts about what it would mean for me to be promoted to the next level in this industry, in this company.  I felt skeptical about what I saw in the highest levels... buzzwords, hot air, confusion, constant travel and a million competing demands across multiple clients.  I was also realizing that I'm not, at the end of the day, motivated by power and prestige.  I wanted to be available for my family and loved ones.  I wondered, did I really want to keep advancing there?  At what price?  For what purpose?

By this time it was late summer of 2013 and I was about halfway through my pregnancy and starting to really show.  I resolved to stick it out through my maternity leave and then look for new opportunities.

(To be continued...)

You can read part 2 of A work story here.

Scraped up.

D and I went to Turtle Tower for dinner tonight.  I like the one in the Richmond because it's easy to get a table, there's an ice cream shop two blocks down for after dinner, and it's the cleanest one in the city.  (D thinks it also tastes the best, but all the locations taste the same to me.)  It was perfect because I was feeling kind of down, so not in any kind of mood to fight crowds or yell in a crowded restaurant; and also D was starving, and the food always comes fast at pho places.

We were quiet as we ate our noodles, but afterwards he told me a funny story from his run this afternoon.  He was running near the warming hut on Crissy Field, which sits by the water just east of the foot of the Golden Gate (which means it's almost always fogged in at this time of year), where he spotted a kid about eight or nine years old on a bike ahead of him.  As he watched, the kid wiped out and landed on the ground.

"I went over and helped him up - oh, he was fine, he just had a scraped-up knee.  So I asked where his mom was" -- here, I imagined the kid looking back down the road into the fog and realizing he was alone with his bloody knee -- "she was somewhere way back - and then he started crying.  I mean, it was pretty scraped up but I was like, ahh" -- D made a pffft face -- "I've done that to myself like, ten times.  You can show that to your friends later and tell them they're wusses.  Yeah, he was fine but it was the kind of thing you can show off.  So he stopped crying and I walked him back to his mom."

I'd like to see D as a dad (again), someday.

Loud and boring.

When Mila died, everything went quiet.  My mind felt filled with a dense silence.  I didn't think much about my feelings; I just felt them.  I couldn't plan for the future, so I lived in the present.  I didn't want to be anywhere but where D was, so I stayed by him and focused on him.  The thoughts that came, came one by one.  Each one was painful, but new.

At almost seven months out (is that even possible?), I find I'm bored with my own grief.  When it doesn't hurt too much, it's just really boring.  All the thoughts I have, I've had a million times before.  All the bad ones, and all the good ones with which I automatically try to counter them - they yell back and forth at each other in my head, the same thoughts, one after the other, over and over again.

A majority of couples are pregnant within three months of trying.
You really haven't been trying for very long!!

Mila's not coming back.
You're so lucky to have what you have!!

Maybe something's wrong with you.
You're healthy and normal!!

Maybe you'll never be a mom again.
Don't be dumb, just relax and keep trying!!

You're still kinda fat.
What are you talking about, you technically can zip your old pants!!

No one cares anymore.
Uh, probably true; pass.

I wish things would quiet down in there.

This is bullshit.

I'm sick of trying and failing and not being able to stop thinking about it.  I'm sick of remembering that even having other kids won't take away the fact that Mila's gone, and that fact will always be there, an immovable wall that I'll be banging my head against for the rest of my days.  I'm sick of being angry when people complain about trivial hardships because they don't really believe that life can dish out the fucking worst, and I'm sick of then feeling ungenerous because really, am I really going to play the dead baby card?  I'm sick of trying to be a better, more enlightened person because I had this experience.  I'm sick of feeling ungrateful when I remember that even though losing a child this way is the worst thing that can happen, it's actually not; that in a lot of ways, my life is no different than it was two years ago, and things could be a lot worse.  I'm sick of reminding myself to feel grateful that at least I have this, at least I have that, at least the only truly terrible thing that has ever happened to me is that my baby died.  Seriously?  I'm supposed to take this and just keep smiling?  Fuck you, universe.  This is bullshit and I'm angry about it.

Stuck.

This six-month funk is lasting longer and feeling worse than I had anticipated.

Everything is the SAME.  No matter how much I blog, or change jobs, or talk it out, or cry it out, or enjoy little things, it is still the SAME.

Meanwhile, is everyone I know popping out babies?  Sure seems like it.

Goddammit.

To: Mila.

Nuggsy,

When I think about you, I like to remember your sense of humor and the things I think you were laughing at, in the womb.  Somehow I could tell the difference between your kicking when you were disgruntled and when you were delighted.  You're a funny little girl.

Love you,

Mommy

Play.

When I say I am doing all right, it is not a lie.  I am no longer in the featureless, unnavigable fog of early grief.  I get on.  I feel a certain happiness layered over the continuous dull ache.  The acute hurts are little pinpricks of pain in skin that is gradually growing thicker.  They are mostly small or otherwise manageable.

But in my weaker moments, each holds the potential to go straight to the heart.  Songs, places, or moments that take me back to last year.  Pregnant women and pregnancy announcements.  Talk of childrearing or birth stories with happier endings than mine.  Young women complaining prattily, brattily, about their kids or their husbands, totally unaware of how lucky they are.  Oblivious older women rustling out of the office early to pick up their school-aged children, saying to me with an eyeroll, "When you have kids..."  They say it to me knowingly, patronizingly, like elder stateswomen to a young naïf; I smile in response but I think, bitterly, You know nothing.  A part of me is now very, very old.

While other adults sometimes unknowingly cause hurt, I'm surprised to realize that babies and kids often don't.  When babies smile at me, I feel wistful, but I like their open faces and bright eyes.  In Boston this past weekend, I was playing with our friends' four-year-old daughter; during a pause in our play, I leaned in to hear her better, and my pendant swung forward towards her and hung from my neck, swinging.  Her eyes focused on it, her words trailed off, and she unselfconsciously reached out (my heart jumped into my throat) and cupped the little m in her little palm.  And I liked it.  She admired it for a beat, and then asked if I wanted to see her necklace collection - which, of course, I did.  She marched me to her room to tell me about each of her necklaces in turn before leaving them in a shiny tangle on the floor, because next it was time to play going-to-school or bubble fight.  I liked that, too.  Play is good.

Appearances.

I posted a selfie of myself in a US soccer jersey the other day to cheer on the USMNT in the World Cup.  As I was looking at it later, I thought to myself,

Hey, I look pretty cute!

My hair happened to fall neatly, my skin was clear, my eyes smiled (I smized), the camera angle was flattering, and my teeth were looking particularly white.  It occurred to me that a stranger looking at that picture might think I hadn't a care in the world.  Someone might wish, enviously, to have as lighthearted a life as I.

Obviously, all is not what it appears on the surface.  For everyone.  But it's hard to remember that when we watch people appearing to swan through their lives (Gym! Vacation! Party! Family reunion! Promotion! Hilarious joke! Food! Wedding! New job! Getting crunk! House! Baby!!!!).  I suppose that's one of the reasons I write this blog, and intersperse it among the gym, vacation, party, etc. posts that also populate my Facebook timeline.  My life has both good parts and hard parts.

I read this account recently by the founder of the failed startup 99dresses.  She writes about how close she came to making it work; all the setbacks she faced; and how powerless, ashamed, and isolated she felt when it finally failed after four years.  She writes:

I was hard pressed to find anything that talked about the emotional side of failure — how it actually feels to invest many years of your life and your blood, sweat and tears, only for your startup to fall head first off a cliff.  Maybe it’s because most founders are men, and men generally don’t like talking about their feelings.  Maybe it’s because failure is embarrassing.

I'm not an entrepreneur, but that spoke to me.  I relate to the feeling of being isolated and ashamed because something didn't work out for me, despite all my best efforts; and wondering why other people aren't open about it even though I can't possibly be the only person that has happened to.  People just are bad about talking about hard things in general: death, yes, but also failure, shame, self-doubt, unhappiness, regret, anger, loneliness - even though these things are universal.  So I appreciate that she wrote about it.


...


P.S.  But if there are people who really are just swanning through their lives without a thought to other people's difficulties, congratulating themselves on how "blessed" they are:

Fuck you. :)

One percent.

Mila's stillbirth has destroyed the illusion of safety for not just me, but evidently for my friends too.  L's boss' wife is nearing her due date, and L can't help but worry.  We spent a few minutes gchatting about it during work today.

Suddenly instead of empathy and concern, I just felt angry.  Why worry?  If everybody expects babies to be born alive, it's for a good reason - they practically always are!  Overwhelming odds are that that baby will be just fine, and in 3 or 4 weeks, the new parents will be up to their elbows in shitty diapers and complaining about lack of sleep or maybe a hospital staff that didn't comply 100% with their Very Important Birth Plan, tra la la la, while the people around them roll their eyes and get bored of baby talk and L's team grumbles about picking up the slack for the bleary-eyed new father.  Because that's what happens for everybody else!

I gchatted her back,

honestly,

the baby will probably be fine

i'm just fucking unlucky.

And then I just felt so lonely I wanted to cry.  Even though I've met (too many) others now who are in this saddest club in the world, I still feel like D and I are the odd ones out most of the time. 

Birth plans.

There is so much mystery and mystique around labor, especially when you've never done it before.  There's this feeling that it is supposed to be a transformative, beautiful, choreographed experience, and if you aren't writing out your detailed, drug-free, all-natural, water birth plan then you are doing it wrong.

I was never a big birth plan person.  But I did take all the classes.  D and I learned the various labor positions, relaxation techniques, how to move the baby, the stages of labor, all the different pain relief options, etc. etc.  I was given entire books and illustrated diagrams about it.  I agonized over whether I should hire a doula to trade shifts with D and handhold me through labor and tell me what to do and rub my back.  UCSF was proud to inform me that their delivery suites were equipped with jet tubs, and that I was allowed to bring my own music, electric candles, and entourage of people, if desired.  By the time I was 36 weeks, I was thoroughly convinced that labor was a very complicated process during which I would need much coaching and that I must be doing something wrong because my birth plan was basically "See how I feel, keep the anesthesiologist on standby, and above all, get the baby out safely."  Of course, even by my simple standards, a picture-perfect birth experience was not what I got.  Not by a long shot.

But you know what?  Turns out labor itself was fucking easy!  I could almost laugh - what the hell did I think I needed a doula for?

It's pregnancy that's hard.  Nine long months of pregnancy, and taking care of a newborn, and raising a kid, or grieving a kid - that's what's hard.   As far as I'm concerned, if you make it out of labor with a healthy baby and no major tearing, you should thank your lucky stars, and to hell with the perfectly choreographed birth plan.

My next birth plan is simple:

1. Go to the hospital. 
2. Have a healthy baby. 
3. Bring home the baby. 

The secret to happiness.

We have started walking into uncharted territory.  The days keep going by and now, many of the first big milestones that I had imagined having with Mila have passed.  It feels like we're only now getting into the real After.

I don't know how this part goes.

D says things have gone back to "normal", and so what?  And now what?  We're past the delirious first phase of grief, the awkward encounters with people who don't know have dwindled, the conversations have turned to other things, we're frankly pretty functional again... but HEY IT STILL FEELS SHITTY WTF IS IT JUST LIKE THIS FOREVER AND EVER??  I think the short answer, the answer that we just kind of have to live with now, is YES.  As good as everything else in our lives gets, the fact that Mila didn't make it will always be a horrible, unfair, tragic, shitty, and permanent thing and there's just no rationalizing or getting around that.

On the flight back from Hawaii a couple weekends ago, I listened to a few TED talks about happiness by psychologists, researchers, even a Benedictine monk.  Some of the (paraphrased) insights that stuck with me:

• Sorry, there is no secret to happiness.  Invest more time in your social relationships.  Worry less about accumulating things and more about accumulating experiences.  It's like asking for the secret to dieting - there isn't one.
• Less stuff leads to more time leads to more happiness.
• People are universally happier when they are fully engaged - in the present moment, not mind-wandering - with whatever they're doing, even if that task is not particularly pleasant (e.g., commuting).
• Individual life events, whether good (new job, new house, winning the lottery, getting married) or bad (getting fired, getting divorced, getting injured), do not have nearly as large an impact in terms of duration and intensity on long-term happiness as people expect them to have.  Research shows most life traumas, with a few exceptions, have zero impact on people's baseline happiness after three months.  (Blogger's note: I think I can authoritatively say that having a stillborn baby is one of the exceptions.  But point noted, TED talk.)  Humans are resilient.
• It is not happiness that makes us grateful; it's gratefulness that makes us happy.  To be happy, we must become aware that every moment is a given moment, not one that we have earned or bought or was assured to us; and therefore it is a gift.

Luckily, I think my brain chemistry naturally skews happy.  When bad thoughts start to visit on me, that's probably one of the biggest things that keeps me from sliding (or deliberately throwing myself) into a black hole of despair, and I find myself doing some of these things out of instinct.  Not always right away, but eventually I get there.

Here are some things I do or have done to make myself happier (no particular order).

1. Remind myself that I am alive!  And healthy.  And so is D.  And so are many people who are important to us.
2. Observe the sunshine.
3. Quit a job that had become unhealthy for me.
4. Ogle D.
5. Made new friends, and kept some old ones.
6. Ignored other people's problems that I can't fix.
7. Gossiped about other people's problems that I can't fix.
8. Crafted.
9. Gave people presents for no reason.
10. Bought a slow cooker and made chicken soup.
11. Marvel at the landscape around SF.
12. Cooked for D when he was sick.
13. Hiked Mount Tam with L.
14. Stayed up late to watch the Game of Thrones finale.
15. Watch standup comedy, Colbert, or John Oliver.
16. Shop for clothes and books.
17. Threw out a lot of old papers and filed/organized the rest.
18. Wrote down and put away toxic thoughts, rather than carry them in my head.
19. Unfollowed or unfriended people on Facebook if their posts bothered me or I couldn't remember who they were.
20. Ordered a drink that came in a coconut.
21. Listened to music I liked in high school/college.
22. Felt happy for other people.

Re: #21, sometimes the music is hard because even songs I've been listening to for years can suddenly sound like they mean something different now.

A long December and there's reason to believe 
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember the last thing that you said as you were leaving
Now the days go by so fast. 

And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass.

Or, even more to the point,

So can you understand
Why I want a daughter while I'm still young?
I wanna hold her hand
And show her some beauty
Before this damage is done

But if it's too much to ask, if it's too much to ask
Then send me a son.

When that happens, all I can do is skip to the next track or do something else on the list.  Shit goes on, I guess.  We've evolved to get back to the baseline.

Wrong.

Today is six months, and I don't like it.  It's six months, half a year, and even though my baseline levels of happiness are better than you might think, and I feel generally okay, it still feels wrong.  I feel okay but I know things are wrong.  Everything, good and bad, feels a little like the result of a wrong turn, an alternate path I took, and there is no getting back to the main road.  D and I went to Hawaii and had a great time; it was good, and also wrong.  I got a new job and successfully completed my first week; it is good, and also wrong.  I spend unencumbered evenings out with friends; it is good, and also wrong.  It is June; that is good, and also wrong.

It is six months, Mila is still only the sum of our memories and mementoes, and my hair is still falling out. 

Daughterhood, motherhood, womanhood.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a few strangers notice my wedding ring and tell me that I look too young to be married -- and, as I add silently in my head as a likely corollary, too young to have had a child, and lost her.

I am 30.  I realize in retrospect that through my twenties and even into my pregnancy, I generally self-identified as a girl.  And I guess I don’t look much older -- I haven’t sprouted many new grays, or carved any new wrinkles.  But since Mila’s death and birth, I feel much older, and I self-identify, without question, as a woman.  To hear anyone tell me I look too young for anything feels strangely belittling.

I feel that identity, Woman, and all the baggage that comes with it, much more keenly that I ever did before.  Although I always believed in gender equality, so-called “women’s” issues always felt a bit distant from my own experience, and only marginally relevant to me personally.  But last weekend, I listened to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s commencement address at my sister’s graduation -- an event that D and I had long envisioned attending with Mila in tow, as a smiley four- or five-month old -- and it felt so viscerally relevant that I teared up.

The experience of carrying her, losing her, and birthing her is doing more than any other single thing has ever done to force me to grow up.  Although I would never wish this experience on myself or anyone else, I do think it’s sparked some positive changes in me.  I know myself a little better, what I can weather and what is and isn’t important to me; I try to be more empathetic with other people; I feel less afraid to tell difficult truths; I respect my own body more; I love my loved ones more.

But positively or not, I am changed, and I don’t feel apologetic about it.  While that seems to have deepened some of my relationships, it seems to have made others more difficult -- especially, I sense, with my parents.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and really struggling with it.

Part of it is our transition from being parent and child, to being parent and adult child.  I’ve passed through many milestones of adulthood in the last ten years: college graduation, becoming financially independent, moving out of the house, moving in with a boyfriend (prior to engagement or marriage - that was some drama), getting married, and having my own child.  And of course, D and I have lost our baby, a nightmare scenario that even our most well-adjusted peers struggle to fathom.  For my parents, this means there is now something hard and dark in life that I have seen more of than they have.  The older I get, both physically and emotionally, the more I feel my parents' confusion (trepidation?) about how to relate to me in this stage of life.

I think a lot of it is cultural, too.  As isolating and marginalizing grief in general and stillbirth in particular are in American culture, it is even more so in immigrant Asian-American culture.  My parents both grew up in Thailand, lived with their parents until they were married at 29, had me at 30, and moved to the United States on a whim of my grandmother’s when they were 31.

They were taught to value the family unit, education, and respect for authority.  They were also taught that showing or acknowledging emotion (especially negative) is embarrassing, to save face, that children should heed their parents unquestioningly, and that providing care to others means meeting their physical needs above all, not so much their emotional needs.

Meanwhile, my sister and I are largely products of American culture.  We’ve been encouraged to question, to be individuals, to be independent, and to express ourselves -- loudly.  And in the aftermath of Mila’s death, as evidenced by this blog, I’ve embraced that even more.

While my parents have been shaped by their 30 years in the States, they are of course still products of Thai-Chinese culture.  Shortly after Mila died, my mom advised me -- in the style of a good Asian parent -- not to think about it too much, to forget it, to “let her go”.  She likened it to how she herself had had to let me go when I moved out of the house.  (There are a lot of disturbing ways I could unpack that analogy, but I tried to take it in the most positive light that I could.)

She is not alone in approaching it that way.  My friend S, who also grew up in a Chinese-American household, told me she had planned to wish me a happy Mother’s Day this month, until her own mom emphatically warned her against it, and advised her never to speak of the matter to me again.  (It wasn’t until later that S reconsidered, and decided to wish me a belated happy Mother’s Day after all.)

My dad has still not acknowledged what happened, and my mom has stopped acknowledging it.  Although I knew enough not to expect to hear anything about it from my mom on Mother’s Day, it was still hard.  That day, it just felt like I was left with neither daughter nor mother to celebrate it.  A blank, blank day.

Now that my sister has graduated college and is headed to Seattle to start her own adult life, it seems likely that my parents will want to return to Thailand for their retirement, and I have mixed feelings about it.  On one hand, I suspect they will be much happier there than they have been in the States.  My aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and cousins are there, and given that my parents don't have a network here, being near them will probably be more important for their well-being than sticking around here for me or my sister or their still-theoretical grandchildren.

On the other hand, I’m sad about it.  It’s hard to maintain a real connection with someone on the other side of the world, with several time zones, a partial language barrier, and failing hearing in the way.  And there is something unsettling about the thought that my entire life to date is some weird, unconsidered, temporary detour abroad in my parents’ lives before their return back to their original lives, leaving my sister and me metaphorically orphaned by culture, distance, and national borders.  I wonder, when they picked up and left home at 31, if they ever thought of the long term ramifications of moving to a new country, raising two kids to adulthood there who would inevitably be a product of that society, and then leaving?

So.  The passage of time on top of culture on top of tragedy all combine to create this very confusing dynamic.  Sometimes I think my own mother doesn’t know what to do with me.  Does she look at me and wonder how she produced this stranger?  Does she see a smiling baby of her own body who sprouted up into a fully-formed, incomprehensible monster who tells her how to do things and doesn’t need her anymore?  Is it inevitable that I too will someday feel the same way about my own kids?

And the ironic thing is, whether she understands this or not, I still do need her.  Especially after Mila.  I need her in a different way than I did when I was a kid or a teenager, but I still do.  Don’t we all need or want our parents, just in evolving ways, all our lives?

Five months.

It just sounds like a long time.  It's more than half a pregnancy.  Had Mila been born alive on her due date, January 12, I'd just be returning back to work now.

I've been quiet on the blog this month, but not for lack of reflection... about growing up, my own daughterhood, grief in an immigrant family, and work.  I'm not sure I'm ready to share all of those thoughts on the blog yet, but maybe over this long weekend I'll share some.

Mother's Day.

On Mother's Day last year, I was five weeks pregnant.

This year, well, you know.

I didn't dread this Mother's Day.  I was probably in denial, but I didn't actually feel much of anything about it in the run-up.  So it was a little bit of a surprise how sad I felt all day, and how vividly I dreamed about Mila last night, for only the second time.

As D said this week, "being a mom or dad is primal, unquestioned, factual" - so even though this isn't the first Mother's Day I'd had in mind, it's still my first one, and I felt like I was allowed to "celebrate" it.  The flowers and sweet notes I got from friends and family made me smile.

I don't have much to say today, other than that I miss my baby girl and wish she were here; and I'm thinking about the other moms who are missing their kids today, and the kids who are missing their moms.

Alternate reality.

Some days I feel like I popped out of some wormhole into an alternate universe.  This alternate universe is almost the same as the one I lived in for most of my adult life.  I do the same kinds of things and have the same kind of life.  I liked that old universe.  But something is off in this one.

I'm tired of being here.

Taking stock.

It has been four months and two days.

My body.

I have lost 25 pounds, with 9 to go.

I have had three cycles.

I started shedding a lot of hair last week.

My mind.

I have attended three support group meetings, had many more sessions with my therapist, and had many, many more heart-to-hearts with friends.

I have written 22 blog posts.  The blog has received 1,467 visits and 5,166 pageviews.  Mila's birth story has been read 364 times, and her life story 214 times.  Each time the blog gets a new visitor, I feel happy that one more person knows her.

I cry much more easily than I ever did before.  A song, a news story, an article will brush up against the wrong place and I'll well up.  I never used to cry.  D can tell you.

But I also feel more "normal" than I would have expected.  Not the same as before - I don't think I will ever feel quite the same - but I can navigate the world in a way that I couldn't three, eight, even twelve weeks out.

I feel vulnerable, but I don't mind.  Let the world see the scar, and let them feel something.  Let me be a changed person.  I lost my daughter, how could that not change me?  This is who I am.

My heart.

There are a few physical objects that we have to remember Mila.

There is her memory box from the hospital, which contains a lock of her hair tied up in pink ribbon, her hand- and footprints, her hospital hat and knit blanket, and the clothes she wore.  I like that her clothes look worn, in a way that the never-used clothes in her dresser don't.  They are rumpled and bear a few smears of dried newborn goo.  Inside the folds of the hood, a few of her stray clipped hairs cling to the terry cloth.  The smell has faded, but is still there.  No one else will be allowed to wear them.

There is a soft little otter lovie from Monterey Bay Aquarium, the first thing I ever bought her - before I was showing, before we knew she was a girl, before anyone besides D and me knew she even existed.  That's her otter, and hers alone.

There are her ultrasound pictures from 30 weeks, with which I made a small framed collage that we keep in our room.  She will always be our first baby and a part of our family, so I wanted her picture to be among our family pictures.

There is her urn.  I hate urns that look like urns.  But hers is sweet, made in the shape of a sleeping silver crescent moon.  If I were to pick it up and rotate it gently, you could hear her tiny bone fragments clanking softly against the metal.  But I don’t do that, because it seems rude.

There is the little rose gold m I wear around my neck, which D gave me a few days after she was born and that I have worn ever since.

But mostly, she lives in a safe place in my and D's hearts.

Four months.

Happy four month birthday, Nuggsy.  We love you.

Keep running.

I'm having a bad day, guys.

A year ago this April my hometown of Boston was attacked.  D and I had been living in SF for eight months and I was sad to be missing the marathon for the first time in a long time.  We used to live on the course at mile 23, and hosted a viewing party every year.  I was at work when I got a text from my sister.  Miss your marathon parties. :(  I texted back, Me too :(

Almost an hour later, she texted again.  Explosions at the finish line.  Is everyone you know who ran it ok??

I spent the rest of the day Googling and following the news.  The confusion quickly gave way to horror.  We waited anxiously to hear from D’s brother and our friends who were there.  At home, I switched on the TV and familiar places lit up the screen.  I watched that downtown stretch of Boylston Street, a scene of celebration and personal victory, a scene I knew so well, explode into chaos.  People screaming.  Blood all over the sidewalk.  Body parts littering the street.  I watched it over and over and over.  I could not stop crying.

Three nights later, news of a shooting at MIT flickered across the screen.  Then a carjacking in Allston.  A car chase into the suburbs.  The MIT police officer pronounced dead.  A firefight in the middle of Watertown.  The entire city of Boston and surrounding towns going into lockdown.  I remember wondering if the world were about to end.  Somewhere in all this, it became clear that these were the activities of the marathon bombers.  We spent hours glued to the TV and the internet, getting annoyed as CNN mispronounced the names of familiar towns and streets.  The lockdown stretched into the next day, a Friday.  I spent the workday following the events, unable to think of anything else.  Shortly after 5:30PM Pacific time, the suspect was apprehended and taken into custody.

After four harrowing days, I exhaled.  The city of Boston exhaled.  And then there was celebration.  Crowds came pouring out of their homes in the middle of the night and gathered at the finish line and in Boston Common to pay tribute to the people who had been injured and killed, the heroes who came to their aid, the medical professionals who cared for them, and the police who captured the bombers.  D and I and some friends visiting from Boston had a big drink and celebrated along with them from SF.

That was the weekend Mila was conceived.  A week later, I went home and visited the finish line myself, as her cells divided secretly inside me.  I chose to think of her conception as a sign of hope.  A light in the darkness.  Good triumphing over evil.

Now it's a year later, an April later.  Boston is gearing up for the marathon again.  Mila should be 3 months old.  But Mila is gone, and it is so, so dark.

This morning I made the mistake of looking through old pictures on my phone.  I saw months and months of belly pictures scroll by, and I actually smiled.  After the very last belly picture, which showed me standing in our kitchen and smiling on December 22nd, the belly pictures suddenly gave way to a screenshot of a list of funeral homes.  I’d forgotten that was there.

I wanted to throw my phone across the room.  These last few weeks, I thought I was doing okay.  I’ve been downright cheerful.  But watching her life end like that on the tiny screen of my phone made me realize I still, still cannot believe she is dead.  She is supposed to be here.  This wasn't supposed to happen.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I want our lives to look like in a year, and have been thinking about ways to make my work schedule more accommodating of a family in the near future.  It’s scary, thinking about making choices that are not career-maximizing.  I’ve never made those choices before.  Today that started to get to me.  What am I doing, looking for working mom hours, when I don’t even have a baby to look after?  It’s hard not to feel very, very bad about myself.  Lame.  Unambitious.  Stupid.  Can't hack it, can’t do anything right.

This afternoon I was sitting in my parked car and came across this photography/film project to honor the one-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15.  The photographer, Robert Fogarty, photographed and filmed the survivors coming back to the finish line.  I read some of the interview quotes; they were beautiful.

My message is “Still Standing.” I wrote still standing because the bombers hurt me—they took my legs—but I can still stand on them. 

I’m still standing. 

This is the first time that I was back at the finish line. I had never been back, and this was about reclaiming it. That finish line has been a negative space since the marathon. This was about reclaiming that space in a positive way. I chose to be there. I took back control. I chose to do this and the heck with everybody else.  Celeste Corcoran

*****

I think that the experience of losing my leg has made me become more compassionate, so I may have less of a leg now, but I think my heart is bigger because of it.  Heather Abbott

*****

We have deformities to our bodies, but I think it makes us stronger to be so open with it. I think it’s part of our therapy to get through what happened to us.  Roseann Sdoia

*****

I read a quote, and it said “Never be ashamed of a scar. That it only means you are stronger than what tried to hurt you.” And it really resonated with me. I am strong, and this is just a little token.  Lee Ann Yanni

*****

“Love this life” has been my motto since the bombing. I spent a lot of time prior to the bombing always seeking out the next thing in my career and putting the majority of my focus on finding the right career for myself and on school. I didn’t always take time to focus on those around me —my family and friends, the ones who I’d want to spend my last days with. Since the bombing, I’ve decided to spend each day as if it were my last. This to me means focusing on and acting more graciously to all of those around me. It also means spending as much time with friends and family as possible and viewing those I love as the center of my universe.  Brittany Loring

I started the video, and as I watched it, I sat in the car and cried.

Keep running.  Boston Strong.

Dear World, a love letter from Boston marathon bombing survivors. from Dear World on Vimeo.

The real shit.

I hate that we’re so emotionally constipated as a society when it comes to loss and grief.  As if as long as we don’t acknowledge loss, it will never visit us.  As if as long as we don’t look directly at grief, it doesn't exist.

Because there's no place for sadness in public life, it's a dead weight dropped into a conversation.  Something private, not to be discussed in polite company.  As honest as I try to be in this blog, I find myself feeling apologetic when I have to look someone new in the face and explain what happened to Mila.  Their faces fall, they stutter, they run away.  Sorry for making you feel awkward for a minute of your life.

I hate that I feel that way.  It's stupid.  Why is the burden on me and D to do this?  What is there to feel squeamish about?  I don’t think I have anything to be ashamed of.  I’m certainly not ashamed of my daughter.  I don't think she's taboo.  What do I have to apologize for?  What do I have to hide?

There’s a funny-sad Louis CK bit that I saw again recently, where he explains to Conan O'Brien why he won't let his kids have smartphones.  I've always loved it, but even more so now.  He says that smartphones are toxic because they allow us to distract ourselves from how sad life can be, from the Forever Empty that is there underneath everything - but that distraction ultimately prevents us from feeling anything at all.

Most of the time we can ignore that uneasiness, but sadness and grief in other people reminds us of it.  And as a society we’re so poorly equipped to deal with it, that the reminder is so profoundly uncomfortable that we stigmatize the people experiencing it.  Certainly I tried not to think about it too much, but when we lost Mila for no reason at all, the abyss that surfaced was too huge to be ignored.

I think we would be better humans if we could learn to acknowledge it; if we could look straight into the abyss, and just let ourselves feel the sadness; if we took it out from hiding, from others and from ourselves; if we treated the open expression of it as something normal and natural.  Because if we don't, we can't connect with other people about something real.  Because if we don't, we can't appreciate what we have.  Because if we don’t, “you never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die.”  Because on the other side of the sadness is some kind of joy; because right now, we have each other, and we’re alive.

Here’s the bit.

On balance.

Things continue go up and down.  I laugh, I cry, I sit quietly.  I think about Mila, but I also think about what to make for dinner, my friends’ love lives, work, and what shoes to buy.  Sometimes I talk about Mila at length and am completely composed; other times I talk and I realize, too late, that my own words are bringing on tears.  The balance of happy and sad fluctuates; but for the first time there are moments when I am, on balance, cheerful.

Mila is always, always on my mind, but this week the sadness only bubbled up to the surface with very specific triggers.  Coming across D’s race shirt from last December while folding the laundry.  Seeing Mila’s tiny, unworn Converses in the back of the closet.  Talking about her with someone new.  Reading through Dr. R’s angry letter to my insurance company (as validating as that also felt).

But other times, I see beauty in the world, I think of her, and rather than feeling broken, I smile.  Wednesday, it rained briefly in San Francisco.  After the rain stopped, the sun lit up the thinning cloud cover and bathed the city in a post-rain glow.  The air smelled clean.  I thought of her, and I smiled.  Friday, I sat on patios drinking wine with friends in the sunshine, flowers spilled out onto the sidewalks, and dogwalkers and their packs of dogs roamed the trails.  I thought of her, and I smiled.  Today, I stood in the sun at the very end of the city, at the end of the world.  The wind blew and I watched the sailboats in the bay beneath the Golden Gate.  I thought of her, and I smiled.

Enough.

I’m trying to find ways to be more authentic.  For my whole life, I’ve had the sense that it isn’t good enough to be myself - or at least, not just myself.  I have to be more.  More interesting, more brilliant, more witty, more pretty, more outgoing, more ambitious, more articulate, more confident, more ruthless.  Less interested in silly things like flowers and stationery and Pinterest and baby clothes and more interested in things like The Future of Digital and Leaning In and How Women Can Get Ahead At Work.

I kept myself awake one night a few weeks before Mila was born, worrying about waiting lists and lead times for full-time infant daycare.  I thought about my sweet little girl, sleeping innocently in my belly - and about how within a few short months she’d be unceremoniously expelled from her safe haven and deposited at some daycare with a 1:3 caretaker ratio, never to see me except on weekends and for a few hours on weekdays, while I went off to Lean In.  And I fucking lost my shit.

Losing Mila broke something in me.  I don’t think I can keep living like that, trying to project something that’s not quite me.  It’s hard enough being someone who carries around the memory of her baby daughter; who is trying to take care of and grow her family; who really just likes flowers, stationery, Pinterest, and baby clothes.  That is enough.  I’m not sure who I was trying to prove something to in the first place, but I feel less and less like I have to prove it.  I know that there are things that I have to do, as a person who lives in the world and pays rent and feeds herself.  But I’m making an effort to recognize that they are secondary, and I am trying to limit my emotional and temporal investment accordingly.  I have to save up for the important things.

Loose ends, small victories.

There are many small indignities that have come with life after Mila died.  One of them was receiving, after several weeks of trying to piece my heart and mind and life back together, a $3,000 bill in the mail from the hospital.  For the stillbirth of my daughter.

I’ve never been charged so much, for something I wanted so little.

I get that even in a stillbirth, doctors and nurses and hospital resources need to be paid for.  As bitter as this is, I can live with it and it makes sense to me.  The medical staff at my hospital took great care of me, and it’s not their fault that Mila died.  However, folded into that $3,000 balance I found a line item that was a slap in the face: a $500 penalty from my insurance company for not notifying them of my hospital admission within the required two-day window.

Two days?  Two days?  I spent the forty-eight hours after my admission to the hospital laboring, giving birth to my daughter, saying hello to her, saying goodbye to her forever, calling our family members and friends with the news and crying anew every time, and picking out her fucking funeral home.  Forty-eight hours after my admission, my milk hadn’t even come in yet.  Can somebody tell me when in that two-day span of time I was supposed to review my insurance policy’s fee schedule?

Earlier this week I asked my OB to write a letter supporting my case that I could enclose in an appeal to my insurance company.  I just received a copy of it, and boy did she deliver.  Four paragraphs of obscure medical terms, righteous anger, and professorial disapproval.  I kind of love her right now.  When it sometimes still feels like the universe is against us, or has forgotten us, it’s nice to have an ally in this fight.

Trying again.

People tell me they can’t imagine what it would be like to lose their babies.  “I’m so sorry, I just can’t imagine.”

Well, before, I couldn’t imagine it either.  And I didn’t think I needed to.  In my prenatal reading, I briefly came across a single article about stillbirth, the story of a woman who discovered her baby was dead in the womb and was then faced with the unimaginable task of birthing her dead child.  I glossed over the article.  A horrible story, but filed squarely under Not Applicable.

That was in the Before.

From where I stand now, I actually have trouble imagining having a living child.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, I have trouble believing that pregnancies don’t all end in disaster.  I am surprised when other people have perfectly healthy babies, so easily, like it’s nothing.  I see pictures of pregnant friends and acquaintances nearing their due dates and I think, oh god, it’s going to be so horrible when the baby dies.  But then a few weeks pass and their belly photos promptly, magically, turn into photos of beautiful, healthy babies.  How do they do it?

It’s hard to have faith in the statistics once you’ve been the 1 in 160.  Once you’ve been the 1 in 160, the statistics all become meaningless.  1% might as well be 100% for all the good it does you.

But, but.  Some part of us must still believe, because we aren't giving up.  There are two types of newly bereaved mothers.  Those who can't even think of getting pregnant again anytime soon, and those who can't get pregnant again soon enough.  I fall into the second category.  I wanted to be pregnant again as soon as I got home from the hospital.  I knew even then that it was just a way of missing Mila - for nine months, even when I was alone, I wasn't really alone; and I couldn’t stand the sudden, total emptiness.  I know the next child will not be her.  We will not get her back.  But we still want a family, so at least we can work towards that.

The next pregnancy will be hard.  We will be so happy, but also so terrified, for nine long months.  And I can’t help but feel frustrated that we are in this place.  We’re not even back at square one - we are at a place worse than square one.  A year ago, my body was in its best shape ever and our hearts were untouched.  Now I worry that I am, maybe, a little depleted.  I worry that I still haven’t lost the last twelve pounds.  And I worry about how I am possibly going to love another baby as much as Mila.  She occupies so much room in my heart; it scares me to think that I might not have enough for the next baby.

But I think back on my pregnancy with Mila, and I realize that even as she made my belly and butt bigger, she did the same for my heart.  As she grew, my heart grew to accommodate her.  To pump more blood, more nutrients; to give more love.  So I trust that that will happen again.

So, fuck it.  This is clearly kind of a crapshoot.  And I choose to believe that things will work out.

Before Mila.

Sometimes the time Before Mila feels like a dream.  In the shitstorm of things both terrible and banal that have happened since she was born, I occasionally wonder - was that really me who was so pregnant and happy all those months, and not just some woman who looked like me?  I had a baby?  You must be kidding.  Was she real?  Did she exist?  Am I really a mom?  Has it really been only, and already, twelve weeks?  What day is it, and where the fuck am I?

Do I deserve to feel as fucked up as I do?

There are only a handful of things that remind me that I didn’t make her up.  The few things of hers that I can hold in my hand - the clothes she wore, the lock of her hair, her ultrasound pictures.  The people who also remember her, and say her name to me.  And this blog.  I write and re-read this blog in part to remind myself that this all really happened, and that I’m not crazy.

Why doesn't anyone talk about this?

Like other bereaved moms, I have been doing a lot of Googling.  I want to share this NPR interview that I found, with reporter Alan Goldenbach and author Sherokee Ilse.  It’s a few years old now, but not at all dated regarding the silence around stillbirth that still persists today, both culturally and medically.

Although the majority of stillbirths occur in developing countries, 1% of pregnancies in the US end in stillbirth - that’s roughly 26,000 every year.  It’s way more common than SIDS (4,000 deaths per year), which is well-known as a public health issue.  Yet people rarely talk about it, not even obstetricians and midwives, and about how it can sometimes happen even in seemingly normal, healthy pregnancies.  I personally received attentive prenatal care from a practice specializing in high-risk pregnancy (even though I myself was not considered high-risk), and I was still completely blindsided.  It was never mentioned as a possibility.

The most common known causes are problems with the placenta or umbilical cord, genetic issues, infections, or maternal health problems; but in at least 40% of cases, including ours, the causes are unknown or indeterminate - even with a full genetic workup and autopsy, and sometimes even with extensive antenatal testing.  In these cases, there is very limited research on risk factors and prevention.

While the silence is pervasive medically, it is positively crushing culturally.  The topic is so unheard of that, when it does happen, no one knows how to acknowledge it, talk about it, or provide support.  The silence and sometimes misguided comments are very painful for bereaved parents after the loss of our children, and often continue to be painful even if/after we are able to have healthy subsequent children.  There are a handful of good articles about how friends and families can best provide support to parents after a stillbirth or neonatal death, but I particularly like and want to share this one and this one.

Why doesn’t anyone talk about this?

Mila, moving.

The first time I felt her move was during a summer night in SF around week 15 or 16.   Just a couple of twitches on the lower left side of my belly, one after the other in the exact same spot.  They could have just been muscle twitches, but I don’t think they were.  She’d made first contact, and she was real.

One night shortly after that, in our old Telegraph Hill place, I flopped belly-down on the bed and felt what seemed like a tiny kick of protest, flat-footed straight down into the mattress.  Hey!  I got the hint and I quickly rolled over.

I started feeling soft, mysterious little swishes, especially after I ate.  Whenever I wore a seatbelt or slightly too-tight pants, I felt her probing and straining against the resistance, more and more aggressively as the weeks ticked by.  For several weeks I felt her swim about like this - still undetectable from the outside, like a secret conversation she was having with me.  Mama, hi!  I’m here.

September.  D and I were on the big island in Hawaii for our babymoon, and we’d just discovered her gender.  We floated in the pool and talked about names, college funds, and life insurance.  It was in Hawaii that I insisted that he put his hand on my belly and just have a little patience.  Did you feel that?  No.  There, how about that?  Yes.

On October 10 I had an all-day meeting with clients at work.  Throughout the day she bounced so vigorously that I could see my belly twitching wildly in all directions under my shirt.  This is boring.  Let’s play.

One night around 30 weeks, I looked down and saw that my belly was hilariously misshapen and asymmetrical.  I put my hand over the lump sticking out of my right side, which felt very much like a little round head.  I believe that was the night she turned head-down, nestled into position to meet us.

In the last weeks of my pregnancy, I’d lie in bed and feel her slithering about like a bag of snakes; it tickled.  She’d kick her dad repeatedly in the back while we lay half-asleep.  She’d worm her way up into my rib cage, and I’d push what I was pretty sure was her butt back down so that I could fill my lungs.  At antenatal testing, she'd punch indignantly at the sensors strapped across my belly, sending them up and down and passing her tests with flying colors.  I’d rub my hand over my belly absently and feel something distinctly foot-shaped shifting position.

When she was born, I thought I might have some feeling of recognition.  I remember looking at her little face and wondering if she looked like me or D or some combination.  The likenesses didn't strike me immediately.  But the shape and the weight of her in my arms, and her little feet and knees and elbows, felt so familiar.  I didn't recognize her by sight, but I did recognize her by feel.

Eleven weeks, two days.

I count the weeks like a mirror image of the counting that I did while I was pregnant, except this time there's no BabyCenter email newsletter to tell me what to expect from life each week.  How big is the hole she left supposed to be by now?  The size of an eggplant?  A watermelon?  A planet?