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.
For me, part of it is knowing that even though, statistically, most babies are born healthy and alive, when you've been on the wrong side of statistics, they become meaningless. Less than a .01 percent chance of problem? That doesn't make me breath easier, because there's still a chance and we've been struck by lightning before. For a while, I felt bad that others became nervous because of our experience of losing Cayden. Like I was the reminder that things didnt' always work out. And then I was like, fuck it. If nervous is all that they have to feel, they can carry that load because it's a lot lighter than the load we have to forever carry.
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