Back From Vacation

I’m just back from two weeks vacation; I had to get away from all the sympathetic looks. I’m too much of a loner to be able to appreciate all this attention – if it had been attention given to a healthy baby I had just given birth to, I could tolerate it because I would be joining in on it, but the distance from my friends and the sympathetic looks from neighbors are grating on me. I pretend to read the cards sent to me, and throw them away as soon as the person is gone. The flowers go right in the trash – they’re dead to begin with anyway.

So during vacation I did a lot of shower crying. The mentality behind that being that I don’t have to control my sobs for another person’s sake. I can just cry myself out and go on with my day. When I stop crying too early, all the uncried tears build up into this unbearably heavy thing that gets carried around with me for the rest of the day, provoking tears when I least want them.

Some of my sporatic writings during vacation:

It’s the fact that I feel inadequate as a woman that pisses me off the most. I’m a rational person, but there’s still that part of me that thinks I suck as a woman. Don’t even take into account the fact that I totally respect women who never have children, as much as stay-at-home moms and working mothers. In my crazy brain, I’m not a real woman because my body rejected a baby. I guess anger is a legitimate emotion, but it just adds to the bi-polar-esque past few weeks. I’d just really like to even out right now.

There’s the guilt, too. Before I knew there was a problem with the baby, I kept getting comments on what a tiny pregnant belly I had. People commented that I looked four months pregnant, not six. Most people said it in a complimentary way, and I wavered back and forth between admiring my little pregnant belly and wishing for a huge belly. I feel so stupid. If I ever get pregnant again, I hope I gain 50 pounds, my belly sticks out so far it becomes one giant stretch mark, if it means I have a big fat healthy baby at 40 weeks.

Before I married Scott, I didn’t even want children. I was never good with kids, babies scared the crap out of me, couldn’t even imagine dealing with a bratty teenager without resorting to violence. Scott told me he would stay with me either way, but I knew how much he wanted to be a dad, so I told him we could be parents. When we were first trying to get pregnant (which took all of 12 seconds), I remember feeling completely indifferent to whether or not I got knocked up. Then I get the positive pregnancy test. After that came the hormones, the mom fantasies, the sudden and surprising love for the baby growing inside me. Wasn’t exoecting that at all. Now I feel like a total shit for not caring enough in the beginning, as if the baby could somehow sense my indifference and decided not to be born to a mother didn’t used to want kids. That’s so crazy to type, to read back, but so are a lot of emotions so fuck it.

And now, after all that indifference, then ambivalence, now I have this visceral desire to have a baby. Like, right now. I want a baby right now, but not just any baby. I want my baby, the baby that shouldn’t have died, the baby that kicked me, the baby whose ultrasound picture is still in my purse. That one was MY baby girl, my daughter. I should still be fucking pregnant, painting the nursery and nesting in general. August is going to be so hard, passing my due date with a flat belly.

I buy sleeping pills for the first time in years. I don’t know if I’m going to take them or not, I’m afraid if I do I won’t be able to wake up from the nightmares. The lure is that maybe I won’t dream at all, or I won’t remember my dreams. I resist buying them as long as I can, but Scott notices how little sleep I’ve been getting, so finally I give in. It’s the nightmares; falling asleep is the easy part. Then an hour later I wake up crying, or sweating, or – this is the worst – thinking I’m still pregnant and rubbing my stomach, and then realizing all over again that I’m not.