family and gratitude (and shmaltz)

today i am feeling very grateful.

i know, i always get all emotional as soon as i hit the 2ww, but today i'm feeling especially emo. it's tempting when you're dealing with loss and infertility to focus on everything that gets taken from you, to get this laser hypersensitivity on everything that has gone terribly wrong. but today i can't help but feel like things are on an upswing.

for a long time i kept our fertility struggles private. no one knew we were trying and we liked it that way. slowly but surely as we started to crumble under all this pressure we started reaching out more and more. after my second chemical pregnancy i couldn't stop crying. i felt so defeated and i had no idea what was going on. my mom knew i was depressed but couldn't figure out why. one afternoon she asked me if i needed to go to Whole Foods (we're both organics and vitamin junkies so going to whole foods is a pretty expensive event for us). i was covered in stress hives for weeks after that loss. i finally had to take steroids to get them to clear up. i remember exactly how i told her about the losses. we were looking at vitamins and i reached for some of that money-suck "natural" progesterone cream and she asked me why i was interested in that, it was for menopause not hives. and i just said it, "i keep having these weird pregnancies that go away." she was quiet for a minute and then said, "it's pricey, let me get it for you."

i still cry when i think about it.

that's just how my mom is. we're not very emotion sharing people. we rely very heavily on nuance and intuition. after i told me mom i managed to tell my sister. then i managed to talk to my friends. then i managed to see a doctor and tell him what was going on. it was a trickle down affect.

it's tempting for me to say, "no one understands" because really, no one in my circle of friends really does understand. they have no frame of reference for this. but they try. my huge irish-catholic-constant-baby-having family tries very hard to understand all of this. my older sister even said to me after my last miscarriage "i feel very stupid talking to you about this because i have five children and i have no idea what all these hormones are" (i'd been explaining progesterone deficiency and failure to implant and lagging hCG levels). it meant a lot to me that she admitted that.

i found out a few days ago that my little sister told all of our aquaintances about our loss and told them not to bring it up unless we did. without us asking her, without any provocation. she just went into the toystore we love and the cafe i get coffee from and when they asked how i was and how they hadn't seen me much in my pregnancy she told them. i'd been avoiding these places since november because i couldn't bear the thought of facing them.

whenever people in the Miscarriage Support group i frequent on babycenter ask about how they can possibly face "untelling" everyone i always give the same advice: lean on your family and friends. let them do the dirty work. they are mourning too and trying very hard to figure out how to help you (often in misguided ways), so give them this job. send them to all your local hangouts and places where people recognize you. tell them to spread the word. lean on them.

yesterday my inlaws sent us a picture of the garden they're working on for our baby. they'd mentioned after the miscarriage that they planted a holly tree for us and in my fog i'd kind of discounted it. there was so much drama going on and i was so depressed and angry. i knew they were grieving too, but i couldn't see anything outside of myself. and when my mother-in-law called me crying i was enraged that she felt she could intrude on my grief. i'm not proud of it. so yesterday they sent us a picture of the garden. it's spring and things are starting to come up and grow. a bad storm downed a couple of trees around there and they hired a carpenter to make them into chairs.

i feel so overwhelmed knowing there's a place for our babies. and the tree they planted is a holly which means it stays green year round. it was important to them that there be something that would bloom and grow even in winter. in the midst of all the snow and starkness our tree would stand like a constant reminder that even as things were desolete, something was growing and alive and blooming. and even as a mighty oak tree was knocked down, we can still make something beautiful out of it- something comforting, a place to rest. they live in another state, so we don't see it very often, but the thought that it's there and growing is very comforting.