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.