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?

An evolution.

In the beginning, I felt everything.  All of the feelings, I felt them.  Disbelief, emptiness, anger, guilt, confusion, self-doubt, fear, what-ifs, and incredible, incredible sadness.  The sadness of losing her, and of feeling like I had somehow failed her when she needed me.  Sitting in the dead silence of our apartment with all of those feelings was too much to bear.  It was a relief when 6PM rolled around every day so that I could focus on making dinner and just going to sleep.

We did a lot to try to distract ourselves in those first few weeks.  Three weeks after Mila was born, we ran away to Japan.  Japan, in all its unfamiliarity, was frankly less foreign and terrifying than the new Mila-less San Francisco that we found ourselves in, which is full of parks where I planned to take her, shops where I had bought her 12-month clothes in anticipation of a lifetime together, and other parents pushing the same model of baby jogger we had gotten her.

We wanted to be lost in translation, to disappear for a while.  Japan felt like a friendly refuge.  The lights were bright and the food tasted good.  There was good running for D, who has been channeling his negative energy into long, long runs.  People smiled at us, and the sound of Japanese chatter was a cheerful background buzzing that didn’t intrude into my thoughts.  I liked the Shinto shrines, especially Fushimi Inari-taisha with its thousands of red torii gates winding up Mount Inari, which were contemplative and integrated into their natural surroundings.

I couldn't escape completely, even there.  I saw kawaii stuffed animals I wished I could take home for Mila.  At a drugstore in Kyoto I saw a basal thermometer, of all things.  At the bullet train station, a dark-haired, pink-cheeked baby girl, bundled up against the cold, giggled and smiled at me intently.  I smiled back at her for a minute before I had to turn away.

But it helped, even though we knew it wouldn’t actually help us “work through” our grief, whatever that means.

Getting the autopsy report and all of Mila’s genetic test results after we returned from Japan helped, too.  D warned me against reading the autopsy report, but there was never any question in my mind that I would.  I’m her mom; in good or in bad, I cannot turn away from her.  In a strange way, I almost liked reading it - ten solid pages all about her, written by someone who had taken the time to observe every detail of her.  And it confirmed that she was normal, and whatever happened was probably sudden and unpreventable.  That went a long way towards putting our guilt and what-ifs to rest.  We tired ourselves out on all our medical questions, and we’ve turned to our philosophical ones.

Six or seven weeks out, my mom told me she’d had a dream about Mila as a little crawling, laughing baby.  She told me that this was about the time that souls came to visit their loved ones before going on to be reborn.  I don’t and didn’t believe this, at least not in any literal sense - but nevertheless, I felt a little miffed that I hadn’t had any dreams about Mila.  That night, I went to bed and I did dream about her.  In it I was trying, unsuccessfully, to help her pass gas.  After a moment she cooed as if to say that she actually felt fine, so I turned her over and rubbed her back.  And she smiled.

These days the grief still feels heavy, but it also feels less complicated.  Now it’s mostly just the sadness, of missing her and wishing she were here.  In the first weeks, I couldn’t take any pleasure in the sushi that I had been looking forward to eating again, having free time felt wrong, and the first beer tasted like a transgression.  I didn’t want to be able to do all those things.  Nowadays, I eat sushi and undercooked eggs, I snowboard at Tahoe, I drink Hendrick's & tonics at Lion Pub with D and my friends and we laugh - and while it’s not what we thought we’d be doing, and I miss her intensely, I don’t feel like running away anymore.

Perspective.

It is strange to think that, even in a world without Mila, there is something to be grateful for; but I am.  I am grateful that we were able to get pregnant quickly and naturally.  That she was with us long enough that we have some very happy memories and funny stories.  That she, the sweet baby that she is, gave me a fast and uncomplicated labor.  That she was otherwise beautiful, healthy, and normal.  That there was no agonizing anticipation of problems in the months before she was born, nor any drawn out aftermath in the NICU and hospice before we could start grieving.  That my physical recovery has been fast.  That I have D, who is full of love and fiercely protective of our family.  That we have our parents, our families, our friends, and our health.  I know enough now that I cannot take any of these things for granted, but right now, I have them.

Making sense of it.

When you lose a baby, you get a lot of comments that are meant to be comforting.  And I take them the way they were intended, and I appreciate that people are trying to make things feel better.  Really, I do.  But the truth is, if I really think about what they mean, it’s hard to find any comfort in some of them.

“This was meant to be.”  Was it?  Then what was the point?  Why didn’t we conceive someone else, who was meant to be?  Why did we conceive her, and gestate her, and love her and anticipate her for nine whole months if the entire time, it was predetermined that she would not live to make it into the world outside my womb?

No.  No.  That makes no sense.  I cannot accept that.

I find more comfort in the belief that this event was just random, shit, meaningless bad luck.  I cannot assign some kind of bigger meaning to her death.  She didn’t do anything wrong; she wasn’t “weak”; we did everything right given the information and technology that we had.  It could have easily turned out differently, but it didn’t, and that’s what we have to live with.

“Move on; you can still have more kids.”  Actually, it does help to know I can have more kids, because I still do want a family.  But wanting a family and wanting Mila are two related, but different, things.

The fact that she died as a baby does not diminish her personhood.  There is no replacement for Mila.  Just as there is no replacement for D, for my parents, for his parents, for each and every one of our friends and relatives, for any children I might have in the future.  We are all individual and irreplaceable.  And so it is for Mila.

I’ve met, read about, and heard about bereaved mothers who are 5 years out, 20 years out, 60 years out from the loss of their babies; and while they continued on to have full lives and families, they are still forever changed.  They remember their lost children; and every once in a while, they will see something, hear something, or smell something that will bring back the sadness of that loss in full force, even if just for a minute.

You cannot erase this shit.  I will miss her forever.  And I am justified in missing her forever.

Mila's life.

Two weeks after we lost Mila, after we had broken the terrible news to our extended families and most of our friends, we composed a mass email about her and hit send.

Her death leaves us with an awful sadness, and it’s not just one kind of sadness.  This is a sadness that has all kinds of terrible facets.  I turn it over in my mind, and I see that there are so many things to be sad about.  Of all of them, one of the worst ones for me is the knowledge that, for the rest of my life, whenever I talk about her, the most salient thing that people will know about her is that she is dead.  This bright, happy little baby, full of joy and life and potential, whom I felt I knew - all that, reduced to “Oh, she was your baby that died.”

The death of a baby is not like any other kind of death, where the person who died leaves behind many friends and relatives who knew him well, remember who he was, and have happy memories they can treasure and smile over.  The death of a baby leaves behind nothing.

I felt I had to do something to fight that darkness.  Her death will always be a tragedy, but her life was light; and I can only ever feel gratitude that she lived.  So we wrote that email, and so I reproduce it here - not about the manner of her death, but about her life.  So that someone could know her, other than just me and D.  So that we could tell all the funny pregnancy stories about her that, otherwise, no one will ask to hear.

Here it is.

Since she didn't get a chance to meet the other important people in our lives, we'd like to tell you a little bit about her and how we hope she will be remembered. Over the 37 weeks that we carried her, she developed a distinctive personality that we came to know and love very much.

Her nickname is Nuggs, short for Nugget (or Nuggette, when we found out in late August that she was a girl). She got her nickname when she was about the size of a chicken mcnugget, and it stuck. 

Like everyone in her family, she liked to eat. In her parents' long running debate on the deliciousness of mint chocolate chip ice cream, she sided with her dad and made her preferences known by turning her mom into a mint chocolate chip ice cream lover. She also helped her mom judge the first annual family Thanksgiving/Hanukkah bacon-off - and naturally, she thought her dad's entry was best in class. 

She was happy and liked fun, and had a naughty sense of humor. She always kicked up a storm when watching her favorite HBO comedy, Ja'mie Private School Girl. To our mild concern, her favorite scene seemed to be the one in episode three where Ja'mie hosts a giant house party. She bounced around a lot and liked to show off her moves at the doctor's office and during her mom's important work meetings. The sounds she knew best besides her parents' voices were Pitch Perfect, the Homeland theme song, and Howard Stern. She was never shy about showing off her ladybits during ultrasounds. We think this had something to do with her Vegas beginnings. (More on that below.) 

She was a very sweet baby and gave her mom an easy pregnancy. But she also stood up for herself - she did not like the fake baby from parenting class, and made it known by trying to push it off of her mom's lap. She knew that thing was a fake.  

She was well traveled. One of her very first trips was to Vegas - in fact, her parents found out they were pregnant the day after returning from that trip. She was a San Francisco native, but she has also visited her grandparents in Boston and Fort Lauderdale, and her cousins in Phoenix. She paid her respects at the Boston Marathon bombing site two weeks after the attack. She kayaked off of Malibu and in Kealakekua Bay, where she encountered wild bottlenose dolphins. She camped and road tripped down to LA, and went sea otter- and elephant seal-spotting along the way. Most recently, she cheered her dad on to a Boston qualifying time at the California International Marathon in Sacramento. 

She was born on December 23, 2013 at 10:13 PM at UCSF, weighing 6 pounds and 14 ounces, and measuring 19 inches long. She had her mom's dark hair, long fingers, and eyes. She had her dad's ears, long eyelashes, and long skinny feet. She had a button nose, red little lips, and soft cheeks. She was the prettiest baby girl we have ever seen. 

Her first name, Mila, is a Russian name meaning love and grace. Her middle name, Nalin, is a Thai name meaning lotus flower, a Buddhist symbol for purity of spirit. 

We will always love and remember her for these things.

Biology.

A woman’s body is amazing.

For a long time when I was first pregnant with Mila, you could not really tell.  I looked in the mirror each morning, hoping to see the first signs of a legit baby bump, but just saw a weird-looking, high-seated fat roll.  For a long time, every time I saw my friend M she would wail in disappointment that I wasn’t showing yet.  We want a baby bump now!

When things finally got going, maybe shortly before week 20, they really got going.  Each week, I didn’t think I could get any bigger; but I did get bigger, every week until she was born.  I was all belly.  I felt like a capital-W Woman.  I kind of loved it.

The day after I had Mila, I remember looking down and realizing my belly looked really, really strange.  I had been lucky not to get any stretch marks, but my belly looked stretched out.  Pouchy.  I prodded it and it felt loose to the touch.  Empty.  It was sad.

Two days after that, my boobs suddenly blew up two or three cup sizes.  They hurt.  They leaked freely.  They looked like bad fake boobs, tacked up too high on my chest wall.  They were a sad reminder of who we had lost.  I didn’t recognize them as belonging to my body.

A few days after that, the boobs were gone as quickly as they had come.  I think that was when my body decided it was time to start cleaning up shop.  My stomach started to tighten up.  The swelling in my fingers subsided.  My joints felt more stable.  I started exercising again.  Now, two and a half months out, except for a little extra padding over my belly, you’d almost never know what my body has done.  I am back to running on the treadmill, lifting weights, doing planks.  The baby weight is not melting off.  I am having to starve and exercise it off.  But it is coming off.

Even while I hated the extra weight, weird sags, and misshapen boobs, part of me grieved the loss of these changes, the last physical signs that I had once wholly carried Mila.  But my body is not letting me dwell, and is charging inexorably back towards its original state.  In the span of less than a year, I have produced and expelled many strange and foreign fluids, an extra organ, and a lovely little human; and subsequently, have very nearly reverted to normal.  Biology is wild.

We are animals.  It is gross.  It is beautiful.

Promises.

We wrote our vows kind of at the last minute, sitting at opposite ends of our hotel room at 11PM the night before our wedding, each quietly tapping at our laptops, while our friends were out getting smashed on piña coladas at Bahia Cabana across the street.

When I wrote my vows that night, I of course meant them deeply; but I did not expect that we would be faced with so much sadness so soon, less than two years after getting married.  It is such an unnatural tragedy, too - the death of a child, our first child.  It is deep and lasting.  It goes against the natural order of things.  It is so wrong.  I didn’t ever even consider that it might happen to us.

But here we are, and we are laughing and smiling and crying and feeling a little bit broken and loving each other through what I think is one of the hardest things that a couple can weather, together.  I am so lucky.

I, P, take you, D, to be my husband.
I promise that I will stand by you, care for you, and defend you.
I will be your rock and your friend.
I will travel with you and discover with you,
laugh with you and cry with you,
hold my heart open to you and love you,
through whatever joy and whatever sadness may come,
today and for all days. 

I, D, take you, P, as my wife.
I promise to be your biggest fan and your toughest critic.
Your strongest ally and your best friend.
I promise to make sure we laugh and smile together every day, even in the hardest of times.
To never let the little things distract us from what's important.
I will always share with you, love you, and take care of you now until the day I die.

Facebook, part 2.

So I posted.  And I got a pretty overwhelming response.

Here is what I said:

Today, like every day, I am thinking about my baby daughter Mila Nalin. She was stillborn on December 23rd at 37 weeks, completely normal except that she wasn't alive. She would have been 2 months old by now. 

This article struck a chord for me. People rarely talk about how they deal with grief, and almost never talk about the kind of grief that follows stillbirth or similar losses. It's hard to talk about. It makes other people uncomfortable. But one of the things I've realized since Mila died and was born, in that order, is that many more of us have struggled through these experiences than I ever imagined, and feel like they have to do it in silence and alone. 

So I am talking about it, and about her. During her short life, she made us laugh a lot, accompanied us on many adventures, and already seemed like a little bit of a troublemaker. I'm sad she won't get to experience all the beautiful things in this world, but I take some comfort in knowing she was held and loved her whole life. There are good moments, but still a lot of bad moments. It sucks not having her here. But we're getting by, somehow.

I got a lot of supportive comments, but also a lot of private messages and emails from other women who have experienced loss, or people who know someone who has.  I spent the rest of the day reading and re-reading them, and feeling a bit more like I was part of a universal network of mothers and parents and families and friends.  I posted this follow-up:

Thanks for all the kind messages, comments, texts, and emails. I've heard from old friends, new friends, long-lost friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and many, many other moms and moms-to-be. I have also heard from expecting moms who have experienced loss before, and having also lost their naïveté, are very anxiously awaiting the safe arrival of their babies. These are the kinds of stories that make me feel less alone. 

It really means a lot.  

It's still hard to talk about it, but harder not to talk about it.

I still do find it hard to talk about.  Not only is it painful, I am also usually private.  I am introverted. There are things I am still scared to say to other people, on Facebook, on this blog.  I am scared of some of the things I have already posted on this blog.  But I’m getting too old to worry too much about what other people think, so I am trying.  One of the many things that Mila taught me, and still is teaching me, is that life’s too short.

Facebook, part 1.

I was very nervous before I “came out” about Mila's stillbirth on Facebook.  On one hand, I just wanted to take the gag off and put it out there.  On the other, I was worried about how people would react.  Was this appropriate?  Would people judge me?  Would they think it was gauche?  And then I read this excellent article.  And then I saw this pop up in my feed:

Research demonstrates what I have intuitively suspected all along: couples without children have happier marriages! (link)

Kids result in less time for oneself and less time/focus from one's significant other. I spent a long time becoming an adult, and now that I am, I don't have any interest in doing or orienting my life around "kid things". Childrens TV shows, games, toys, movies, songs - you name it - I find irritating beyond belief.

Normally I wouldn’t care about this, but given the state I’m in, I found it really annoying.  I won’t even go into how unscientific this surveymonkey “research” is - that’s beside the point.  I personally think that if you want kids, having kids will make you happy; if you don’t want kids, not having kids will make you happy.  Is that really so complicated?  And I think not having kids is a perfectly valid choice, if that’s what you want.  What I don’t think is valid, is for some fuckface on Facebook to make a blanket statement about what will make me happy.  You know what would make me happy?  Getting Mila back.

Between this, stupid political views, the unending stream of happy baby pictures, and fake health news (EATING WHOLE LEMONS PREVENTS CANCER; VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM), I have had enough.

If this Facebookfuckface can feel within his rights to post this shit then I sure as fuck can post about my daughter.  If it makes people uncomfortable, that’s what the unfollow button is for.  I have been using it liberally lately; here, let me show you how.

Mila's birth story.

I would like to start with her birth story.  That was the trauma that sent me down this path in the first place.

(I'm new to this.  Am I supposed to issue a trigger warning?  This is a story about stillbirth.  Here is a big, fat trigger warning.)

On a Sunday night, I was lying on the couch watching TV and felt her make a huge, huge movement.  I went to bed.  D and I woke up the next morning for a routine antenatal testing appointment on a Monday at 7:45AM.  Perhaps I’ll tell the story of that appointment in detail later, but for now it’s enough to know that after countless normal ultrasounds, so many that they almost became boring - that morning there was no longer a wriggling baby on screen, annoyed by all the commotion, with all her hair floating about in her bubble and her little fat rolls shifting as she moved and her clear, strong heartbeat.  With no warning, no sign, no whisper of what was coming, there was no heartbeat.  I was immediately walked across the street to L&D, the diagnosis (intrauterine fetal demise) was confirmed, and this is where her birth story begins.

I was induced.  We called our families.  I cried.  D cried.  We alternated crying and comforting each other.  We waited.  We watched sports to pass the time, because it would be emotionally neutral.  We got bored.  We missed her.  The hospital bed inflated and deflated on its own in inexplicable ways. The nurses wanted to know if she had a name, and I was too overcome to say it aloud.  Two hours later, my water broke.

Actually, this is where her birth story begins.  The contractions started small, and quickly became distracting.  I lay on my side and tried to concentrate.  I asked for drugs.  They didn’t help; I felt everything.  I asked for more, different drugs.  Those helped, a lot.  I went to sleep.  D left to walk our first-responder relatives to the garage, expecting that I would be a while.  By the time he returned ten minutes later, there was a doctor in my room telling him I was fully dilated.  Then I birthed our Mila.

I birthed her in under 10 hours from the time I was induced.  I birthed her without Pitocin.  I birthed her in a handful of efficient pushes.  I birthed her without yelling.  I birthed her without tearing.  I birthed her with the unstoppable knowledge that she would be dead.  I birthed her with my eyes wide open, and looked unflinchingly on her still face and limp body.  I birthed her and wanted, unreservedly, to look at her and hold her to my chest for the entire long, dark night.  I didn’t ever ask for or want this distinction, but I birthed her like this, like a fucking hero.

Is this not the worst thing that can happen to a woman?

I reached out for her body, and our nurse placed her in my arms.  Was this my baby?  I was so happy to finally see her.  I was so sad that she couldn’t see me.  D and I both cried over her for a long time.

After the first wave of shock and sadness, I wanted to see all her bits.  I wanted to drink her up with my eyes.  I wanted to see and know everything about her physical form, which had been a matter of so much happy mystery to me for the last 37 weeks, with the limited time I had with her.  With a corner of her blanket, I wiped some of the goo and a few of my own tears off her face.  Her hospital hat didn’t fit quite right, so I tried to fix it.  I unfurled her, since she could not do it herself - unfolding her bottom lip, unrolling her bunched-up earlobe, untangling her limbs.

She did not look like a live sleeping baby.  There was no pink flush to her skin.  Her fingernails were a bruised blue and her lips were a very, very dark red.  Inside her mouth, her tongue was the same color, and her lips made a soft popping sound as they parted and closed again.

Is this not the worst thing that a woman can see?

But she was still beautiful to me.  I’m not sure if she looked like me, but her dad tells me that she did.  Her closed eyes like mine, her ears like D’s, her button nose of uncertain provenance.  A head of soft dark hair, the finest hairs I’d ever seen.  A roll of chub for a neck.  A sucking blister on her right hand, a little hand that was shaped like mine.  The shape and heft of her blanketed butt fit in my hand exactly the same way it had when it was just a mysterious lump bulging asymmetrically from my belly.  Remembering the shadow of a big, skinny foot we’d seen in her 30-week ultrasound, I fished it out and held it up for me, D, and all to see.  It was the first time I laughed that day.  It was a perfect miniature of D’s foot, huge on her little body and so cute.

Our nurse took her for a bath.  I asked her to dress Mila in some of her own clothes, which I'd had brought from our house: a pink hoodie with a little heart embroidered over the left chest, and a cream-colored footed one-piece printed with pink florals.  Her hoodie was too big, but looked very sweet. The rest of the night, I laid her belly-down on my chest with her little head nestled under the left side of my chin.  Her body grew cold against my cheek, so I nonsensically tucked her little pink hood closer around her face.  I worried that her face was smushed into my chest, so I nonsensically turned her head and checked that her nose and mouth were clear to breathe.  I fished her little hand out from the swaddling blankets and held it in mine with all five of her fingers wrapped around my thumb while we slept.  I smelled her head, which smelled a bit of iron and blood, and traced the overlapping edges of her skull plates with my finger.  We stroked her soft cheeks and whispered to her that we both loved her, would always love her, and would always be her mom and dad.

I stopped short of opening her eyes - I wanted to just let her sleep.  My guess is that they were the same color as mine, but I don’t know.

Please be advised.

My baby daughter, Mila Nalin, was born on December 23rd in San Francisco at 37 weeks after a happy and uneventful pregnancy. She was completely healthy and normal, except that she wasn't alive. She would have been 2 months old by now.  This blog is the story of her life, her death, her birth, and of what comes after.  I hope it will eventually become the story of how her dad and I come to terms with losing her, and the story of her younger sisters and/or brothers.  I believe it will have a happy ending.

Why am I blogging about this now?

In the beginning, I didn’t want to write.  It was hard enough just to feel everything.  To wring words out of the feelings would have been too much to ask, and I was already so tired.

Now, suddenly, I have the words.  Many, many words, and I want to say all of them.  I’m not sure what changed.  I think it has something to do with where I am in my grief - at over two months out, I’m now closer to the point where I’m expected to be “normal” again than I am to Mila’s birth and death.  But I don’t feel normal, still, so the gradually increasing expectation that I act normal is stifling.  I go to work; people say “How are you?”; I say, absurdly, “Good!”; we go about our daily lives.  People don’t ask about her because they don’t want me to be sad (or maybe some just don’t care), and I don’t talk about her because I don’t want them to feel awkward.  So nobody talks about her at all.

The silence is oppressive.

The feeling of oppression grew so great this week that, after a two-month blackout silence on Facebook, and a lot of fear about whether Facebook was an “appropriate” venue, I finally posted about what had happened to her publicly.  It was driving me crazy to say nothing, and to know that there were still people in the world who knew me, but didn’t know about her.  I just wanted every single person to know that I had a baby daughter, her name was Mila Nalin, she was perfect, and she died - and now, that is indelibly a part of me.  That is my baseline.  For the rest of my life, that is the framework in which I am operating.  Please be advised.