Teeter totter

I had a D&C last week as the pregnancy did not miscarry naturally. I was strange being in hospital again. Not pleasant but not as unbearable as I thought it might have been.

It was actually quite an interesting experience being admitted to the EPAU. It was a fine line as to whether they would admit me at all or not as the usual criteria involves 'recurrent' miscarriages. My GP views my pregnancy with the twins as a miscarriage as it ended so early. However, the EPAU considers my pregnancy with Jessica and Georgina a 'successful' one. And it was. I suppose I've become so used to thinking of that pregnancy as a 'failure', that my body let my girls down, that I'd almost forgotten that it was the pregnancy (my one and only) that resulted in my two daughters. How could I possibly consider that experience a failure when it resulted in Jessica who is still with me today and my darling Georgina who I got to hold and meet? It was actually good to see my previous pregnancy recast in a different light.

This brief pregnancy was very different. No living child, no body to hold, no baby to be seen, no scan pictures. Things never progressed that far. Nothing. Not as crushing yet somehow more crushing at the same time.

I always seemed to be in two minds about this pregnancy. On the one hand, I felt as though I was 'owed' a normal pregnancy. That if I managed to fall pregnant, I was almost guaranteed a full-term, healthy baby. Despite the fact that I know that the world does not work this way and, given my line of work, I should have some appreciation of independent events.

But on the other hand, I was (and still am) worried that there might be some underlying reason why I cannot carry a pregnancy to term. My memories of my pregnancy with the twins are so blurred. I felt as though I was going to throw up every single waking moment and I was so tired, it all seems so impossible now. I never really felt the girls move because they were so small still, I also had two anterior placentas that might have made perceiving their movements even more difficult. It all seems so very unlikely, that I was ever pregnant. Pregnant? With Jessica? That she actually had anything to do with my body and wasn't created in a hospital by doctors? Really?

Perhaps I am trying and trying to do something that is simply not a possibility for me and, in the process, I will wreck everything I hold dear. The conclusion at the hospital was 'bad luck' but still . . .

Whilst I am sad that this pregnancy did not progress beyond a few weeks, it made me appreciate what I have, how lucky I am to have a child.

So strange, this terminology that is used to describe pregnancy. When the EPAU contacted me they told me that the pregnancy was 'failing', they then double checked that I understood this to mean I was miscarrying. How strange. That one little word, failure, cut me right to the quick. Nobody likes to fail and it seems bizarre that something that is so far beyond our control should be termed as a failure. Failure seems to imply neglect or carelessness.

I know that, when Georgina died, I thought it was my fault. I felt that way for a very long time. I still blame myself to some extent. I raked over everything I had done or neglected to do over the course of my brief pregnancy. I wondered about make-up and bath oil and depilatory cream and deodorant and the caffeinated coca cola I drank once by mistake and whether I had been too fond of alcohol or chocolate or work prior to falling pregnant. Whether I was too fat or too thin or too young or too old. Too smug. Too happy. Too lucky. Too unlucky. Whether I was an awful person, a person who would be a terrible mother. Whether it was a punishment. I'm still not entirely sure it wasn't. Just a feeling that I can't quite shake off.

It took me a long time to stop hating myself for killing Georgina. I felt as though I had killed her twice over, once by birthing her and once in the NICU when I stood by and watched her die. I still hate myself from time to time, I suspect I always will. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night.

I feel a touch of that old self recrimination about the failure of this latest pregnancy. But not as sharply. Just bitter, bitter disappointment for the main part. And regret. Regret that I told my husband and my sister and my parents. And then had to tell them all over again. Not to expect the child or the grandchild or the niece or nephew. To take the gold star off the calendar that my mom had stuck on with so much glee.

But still. I am so pleased and proud of Jessica that I can't stop this bubble of excitement building up in my stomach and pushing my hopes higher and higher.

I hesitate to post too much about Jessica on this blog. Mainly for fear of jinxing myself. Which is silly but it is hard not to be superstitious about life when you are in the midst of it as it were?

But she is doing better than anyone ever suspected that she would. Apart from her ICU consultant who always told me that she would be 'a normal little girl'. How he knew this, I just don't know. None of the other consultants seemed to agree at the time.

She is doing things that I feared she never would. She is standing, she is starting to walk, she is communicating, she is smiling, she is eating like a champ, she is breathing on her own, she knows who I am, she knows who her daddy is, she wants to join in with everything, she loves other children. I can't help but feel my heart sing when I watch her.

Sometimes I get a little glimmer that she is different. She isn't a big child, or a developmentally advanced child, for her age. But she is amazing. When I look at her arms and legs and think of the twigs they once were. When I look at her breathing, on her own, and think of the machinery it used to take. I can hardly believe it and I was there. I saw her change in front of me.

The other day, when we were at an activity group I take her to, a little boy fell off the slide and landed right on top of Jessica. Now, this little lad was a fair bit chunkier than Jessica and he landed with quite a splat. He cried his eyes out. She just carried on. This little lad's mum was almost embarrassed by her son's roaring as Jessica ploughed ahead regardless.

It made me proud and it made me sad. Premature babies often have high pain thresholds apparently. I've often wondered whether this might be true as Jessica rarely cries. Sometimes she attacks her food with such ferocity I can only assume she must have been starving but you will never hear a peep from her. My poor girl, so beaten down by her early life that she can ignore these later pains.

I don't know where I am going with this post really. I seem to judder back and forth between elation and upset. I still want another baby. Greedyguts that I am.

My mum's theory is that I fall pregnant easily and, therefore, I will miscarry easily.
Easy come, easy go?
Except that the going isn't easy. Not really.

Letting go

Even after over a year of trying, I am still not good at letting go.

At accepting Georgina's death.
At accepting that I did not cause it, that I could not have prevented it, that I could not have saved her from pain or from death.

There is nothing to be gained from clutching at this thin little memory of my tiny daughter, worn insubstantial from months and months of my hands worrying at it, turning it over and over, round and round, holding it up to the light to see if I can see something new there.

At risk of this turning into some kind of meta blog, where all I ever post is 'what she said' and link to another blog which is written better than this one, I've been thinking and thinking about this post of Jill's at Only A Whisper for months now.

As Roald Dahl said '"I've seen one of my children die. It's easy, anyone can do that. I'm ready."

I saw my daughter die.
I watched her take her last breath.
I don't think it was physically easy for her, the process of dying.
It was painful and difficult.
But she let go.

So gracefully.
My tiny little girl simply let go of whatever it is that holds us to this earth.

She tried to carry on breathing, her heart tried to carry on pumping.
But she couldn't, her organs couldn't function for her.

She let go. She showed me what I have to do.

This song plays in my head at the moment.
I think it is more about the end of a love affair rather than a death.
But the words have hooked themselves into my brain.

'Such a painful trip,
To find out this is it,
And when I go to sleep,
You'll be waking up.

Four, three, two, one,
I'm letting you go.
I will let go,
If you will let go.'

I should let go. Georgina already has. A long time ago.

Her body failed her.
A body that I have thought about so much, loved so fiercely.
A body that is ash and has been ash for so much longer than it ever housed a living being for.

Her grip on us was so tenuous, so short-lived, so gentle.

But I'm still holding firmly on to her ghost, with white knuckles, trying to keep her here.
I don't think I'm helping any of us, not my husband, not Jessica, not myself, not Georgina. But I am at a loss. I am lost. Immobilized. Somewhere at the tail end of last summer. As it turned to autumn and I went back and forth to the hospital. I'm still stuck. Frozen in time and space.
Afraid to let go, afraid to keep clinging on.
I have to let go.
Of Georgina.
Of everything.
Sooner or later.

And for my next trick . . . another vanishing act

When I returned to work two weeks ago, I was pregnant.
Not very.
8 weeks.
But I'm not anymore.
There was no heartbeat on the early scan.

It was strange to be in an environment where my previous pregnancy is considered a lengthy and successful one. But I suppose it was in the only way that truly matters, in that it resulted in one living child.

I could hear the woman in the next room sobbing her heart out. I felt so sad for her. It reminded me of the crying I used to hear in the NICU from time to time.

I didn't cry. When the doctor told me that there was no sign of a viable pregnancy, that my uterus contained only a sac, it felt strangely right. This is how my pregnancies seem to end. Abruptly.

I suspect he may have found me somewhat cold.

I don't know what to do anymore. Perhaps there is something wrong with my body?

I felt so hopeful. Now I just feel foolish and greedy. For wanting more. I already have more than enough, far more than I deserve. I have my two beautiful daughters. It felt like a betrayal, to want another.

And what I really want is my previous pregnancy back. To make it different. To give birth to my two beautiful daughters healthy and screaming. Not fragile and muffled and close to death.

I want to undo all those memories, unravel them, unknit them. Take them away from my sister, my husband, my parents. They should never have been there, they should never have had to see my girls. It was all my fault, this body that can't seem to do anything as it is supposed to.

There, at the swirling epicentre of disaster, is always me. The centre of attention. Ashamed and embarrassed of my inability to do any of this.

And how would I feel if I ever was to have a healthy pregnancy that went to term and resulted in a living child?
What if I was the woman with balloons and flowers and a crying newborn on her chest?
What if my husband was the man 'wetting the baby's head' in the pub with his brother?
What if my parents and my sister were the smiling, doting grandparents and aunt?

Perhaps then I would know precisely what I missed out on?
Maybe that would just make this situation even more unbearable.
Maybe that person just isn't me. Won't ever be me.
Maybe. Who knows.

The strange case of the vanishing twin

Well, as you can probably tell from the trail of rambling comments I tend to leave in my wake, going back to work didn't really have much impact on my time here in blog world. I've been doing a bit of reading in the dead of night, when I can't sleep, and I'm writing this whilst I am waiting for my mom to arrive and take Jessica for the day.

Going back to work has been . . . peculiar. I sometimes feel as though nothing ever happened, that I was never pregnant, that I never gave birth to my two beautiful daughters. As though my life just chugged along and I never took this mad swerve off to a world of NICUs, ventilators, human beings who weigh less than two pounds and babies dying in front of me. Including my own daughter. All of it seems too implausible when placed alongside the world of desks and telephone extensions and neat little spreadsheets of figures. It feel as if only one could possibly be real, that they couldn't possibly co-exist. One must surely be make-believe. Surely.

One of the things I find most disconcerting is the vanishing of Georgina. Before I fell pregnant with twins, I didn't understand how much attention pregnancy in general seems to attract. When I announced I was expecting twins, everyone who works with me seemed interested. Or perhaps just out of politeness. Who knows?

Quite a few people who I had never really spoken to before asked a number of questions. Had I undertaken fertility treatments? Did twins run in the family? One that came up surprisingly frequently was had I done anything special to conceive twins? Like eating certain foods. I didn't even know that people would actively seek to conceive twins. I thought it just happened. Or it didn't.

But now, nobody ever mentions the fact that I had twins. That I had two daughters. That I have two daughters. Some people kindly ask after Jessica. Some with a kind of idle curiosity, just how much did she weigh again?

Not one soul has breathed a single word about Georgina. Not even a sorry.

I like it that way. But, at the same time, I don't like it that way.

No pleasing me eh?

Replacement

Following on from my earlier ramble about why I decided to have children, I'm going to go back to the issue of 'so-called replacement' children to borrow a turn of phrase from klepsydra.

I think that this an issue that is at once simplified and complicated by losing one of twins.

Simple because, after the girls were born, they ceased to be the 'twins' but became two separate, distinct individuals. My daughters. I loved them both. I wanted them both. No question of replacement. I may be deceiving myself but I think that I knew them, their personalities. I think my daughters were quite different people.

But more complicated because of the time frame. Everything happened at once, birth, death, motherhood, prolonged hospital stay, fear of continuing health problems.

I found that, after Georgina died, many people said to me, "at least you still have Jessica".

This angered me because the implication seemed to be
that Jessica was some sort of consolation prize,
that the absence of Georgina in my life could simply be patched over with the presence of Jessica,
that Georgina wasn't worth enough to be grieved over, that her existence could simply be dismissed by a chance of focus.
It didn't seem to do either of my children justice. That they could be so easily replaced or that I might not have the one I wanted but, hey, at least I had a child. I did. I do. I am grateful. But it doesn't stop me wanting the two children that I anticipated.

But I can see why people said it.
Given the circumstances, I am incredibly lucky to have any children surviving from a pregnancy that was cut so short.
I can't deny that Jessica's survival has helped me to recover from some aspects of the experience.

Events conspired to make Jessica feel like a substitute at times. I did not see very much of Jessica for the first few days of her life. Initially the girls were in the smaller of the wards, opposite one another. Georgina on the left and Jessica on the right. Because I knew her sister was very ill and would most likely die, I felt (perhaps wrongly) that the medical staff were encouraging me to sit with her. They kept telling me that Jessica was stable and one of the doctors in particular was extremely positive about her chances of survival. So I spent most of the first three days huddled over the incubator on the left and this culminated in my holding Georgina for the first time just before life support was removed from her.

I know I stayed with her body for some time, until her heart stopped beating. My husband and I bathed her and dressed her. Then we left her body and went back into the ward to huddle on the right hand side of the room with Jessica. It was a very peculiar thing, to walk straight back into that room where my other daughter had just taken her last breaths.

I think that I may use Jessica's survival to comfort myself. At my lowest ebbs, when I miss Georgina terribly, I do tend to take comfort in Jessica's physical presence. Even if she is sleeping, I like to go and sit in her room and listen to her breathing. To try and catch a little splinter of her sister. Just a tiny sliver of that daughter I will never hold, whose breathing I can never hear.

I think that there is a terrible, gaping hole in me. A void. An empty place. Where Georgina should be. And I don't think that anything or anyone else can ever fill that space. Her sister cannot fill it. She is busy occupying her own spaces. Another child cannot fill it. They will be in a different place. Anything or anyone I attempt to put there just gets swallowed up. That spot is for my Georgina. That specific human being. My daughter. She is irreplaceable. All children are.

And that is without counting the tangle between Georgina and Jessica. There lies a loss that I can never comprehend. I can attempt to give Jessica another sister. But it will never be her twin sister. It will never be Georgina, the sister that grew with her. The sister that accompanied her when she was only a few cells. She is irreplaceable.

When I contemplate that uniqueness, those strange chances, the impossibility that, from all those potentials, Georgina came to be. That she survived for 23 weeks in the womb. That all those cells came together in the correct places. That she had limbs and eyes and a face. That so many things that could have wrong before that point, didn't. And then I lost her. To an infection. That still makes me want to howl and howl and howl. In fury and despair and horrible, horrible sadness. And it makes me so angry. So angry on behalf of all our babies who came so far, some of them much more developed and healthy than my Georgina. So angry that they had that chance ripped away from them.

If I had another pregnancy, another child, it is possible that some of the grief I have could be assuaged.
The grief that I never managed to experience the third trimester of pregnancy.
The grief that my body let my family down and brought my husband and my family, not the incredibly happiness that we were all so confidently expecting, but a time full of so much heartache and terror.
The grief that the one experience of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood that I have diverges so dramatically from that experienced by the majority.
The grief I feel that Jessica, who is a twin, is an only child with no siblings at all.
The grief that I feel that I somehow wasn't a proper mother to my girls. That I failed to keep them safe. If I could have another try, to prove that it wasn't my fault the first time in a way.

But none of these minor gripes really touch the sides of the loss that sits where my eldest daughter should be. I can't replace her. I can't even hope to try.

I was listening to a programme about graveyards on the radio this morning and the presenter stated that most graves remain unvisited after an average of fifteen years. Don't ask me how they arrived at that figure but that was the length of time quoted. He said that he often visits a graveyard nearby and, in this graveyard, is the grave of a child who died forty five years ago. And there are still often fresh flowers on that particular grave. This didn't surprise me. Because I know I will always miss Georgina. My sweet little Georgie.

I know that void inside me will change. Time will erode the jagged edges that border it today. I may decorate it with flowers and candles. I may be able to hang some beautiful paintings on the walls. But it will always be there. A space where something irreplaceable and so, so precious to me once lived and breathed.

* * * *

I'm going back to work tomorrow. I have been on leave since the girls were born, nearly fourteen months ago. I feel quite anxious about how to behave. Do I try and pretend to be my old self? Or do I try and adopt a new persona? I don't think that my current mode of gibbering wreck is going to cut the mustard somehow.

I'm not sure what this is going to do to my blogging. I usually blog and comment whilst Jessica is taking her naps but, obviously, I will now be at work during that time. So if my rambling comments tail off a bit, it is because 'the toad work is currently squatting on my life' to steal a phrase from Mr. Larkin.

Perhaps I have run out of things to say anyway? I seem to be repeating myself lately.
Anyhow, here is a song about work . . .

Motivations

I've been reading so many interesting pieces of writing on blogs recently. These two have been occupying my brain for the past two or three days.

'so-called replacement child part 1' at klepsydra

'words pouring out' at Fionn

I started writing comments on both occasions but I got a bit carried away. Rather than take over either of these good folk's blogs with my rambling, I thought I would grab (or perhaps more accurately steal?) these topics, bring them back over here and ramble away on my own blog instead.

As I read them (with a thousand apologies to the authors if I have the wrong end of the stick) these posts revolved around two major topics

(a) what motivates us to have children in the first place? Do we have children in order to fill a void in our own lives? In the hope that they will make us happy or give us purpose that we would otherwise be lacking? Or to occupy the void left by the loss of an older sibling?

(b) Following on from the final question, the notion of so-called 'replacement' children.

I've been racking my poor old brain over these questions.

Why did I decide to have children?
Why did I want to have children?
Why do I want to have more children?
Is Jessica Georgina's 'replacement' child?
Are any further children that I bring into my family condemned to be 'replacements' for Georgina in one way or another?

Well . . . . why did I decide to have children?

I suppose you could argue that the decision I took was rather the decision NOT to have children earlier by taking precautions for the past fifteen odd years or so. If I had left it up to nature alone and dithered over taking the decision NOT to fall pregnant my eldest children would be in secondary school by now.

But, having taken birth control for many years, I made a conscious decision to stop taking it and I certainly did this in the hope that I would fall pregnant and have a child.

It seems rather frightening that I conceived two children deliberately - not accidentally, as the result of one too many glasses of wine which I believe is partially the reason for my existence on this planet -  yet I really have no clear explanation as to WHY I did this.

I think I can probably provide some sort of rationale for most major decisions that I have made in my life. This isn't to say that I have made good decisions necessarily but at least I have some vague inkling of why I acted the way that I did, why I took the routes that I took. But having children? Suddenly everything seems much more murky.

I've been trying to peer into my motivations for wanting children but I've actually found it extremely hard to grasp any of the specifics.

Perhaps because I run a pretty fine line in the self deception department? I've often thought that if, through some horrible fairytale type mechanism, all my inner workings were laid bare I would run screaming from the monster that suddenly appeared. Perhaps I don't actually want to know why I want(ed) children? Were my motivations purely selfish? To make myself happy or to fill my aimless existence with something, anything. I hope not but it is very hard to decipher when I stand so close to myself that I can hardly make myself out.

Perhaps because some of my motivation is hardwired into that old, old part of the brain that drives the basic impulses, to eat, to breath, to run from danger, to reproduce?

Perhaps because the decision to have children was one that I made a very long time ago? I have always wanted children or at least I can't remember a time before I knew I wanted them. My mother has always been involved in the care of young children and as I grew up I spent a lot of time with children younger than myself. I loved looking after them, I liked their company and their honesty. I used to daydream about the children that I would have when I grew up.

When I started my periods at the age of about thirteen, I remember crying and crying over the 'children' that I was losing. I thought of it as ' there's that little one's chance gone' in a rush of blood and teenage melodrama. Never mind that I was a million miles from having a boyfriend, even further from having much idea what to do with one if I had happened to come by such a creature and being the kind of teenage girl that actually prefers books to boys at that age.

As I grew older I realised that there were other things I wanted too. I wanted to study, stay out late, have a career, have boyfriends who weren't interested in having children, a house and to be irresponsible. But my future children were always there, I confidently assumed that they were waiting in the wings, definitely part of my ten year plan. I had a notion that I wanted my first child whilst I was still in my twenties. I don't know why? Perhaps in imitation of my own mother.

Perhaps I wanted them because I was, intermittently, part of a large family and then a small one? My mother is one of five children and I am one of fourteen cousins. The majority of my family live in South Africa but I was born and raised in England. I did go back to South Africa many times throughout the course of my childhood and always felt  . . . .hurt? excluded? . . .I'm not entirely sure. I was part of this family that I at once belonged to and did not belong to. The little English girls that huddled on the outskirts of a family that seemed so loving and involved with one another. Different accents, different appearance, different. Just different.
I think it made me want to anchor myself  firmly to something or somebody. My little English family of four seemed so damned insubstantial, a puff of wind could blow us away. One of us could be taken out at any second. Four, three, two, one. Almost a premonition of my own little family of four that disintegrated so rapidly and lost one of its members in a haze of hospitals and machinery.

So there probably are reasons but they are lost in the mists of time, in my befogged and befuddled adolescent brain, made by a person who is no longer.

Perhaps I had my children for all the wrong reasons?
I hope not.
I hope that I had them out of an attempt (perhaps a misguided one) to love them.
I just don't know.

But there is no escaping the fact that it was partly my decision.

To bring these children into being and subject them to this bedazzling, disorientating and appalling experience. What right did I have?
Those poor, frail little scraps of life. Such tiny glimmers of people.
To bring them here and have them stuck full of needles and tubes.
In all the noise and light when they should have been in the quiet dark.
I can only plead that this was not I what I intended. Truly.
I wish I could apologise to them in a way that they could both understand.
My dead daughter and my living daughter. I am so very sorry my dear sweet ones.

Sometimes I think we would have all have been better off if I had just left well enough alone. Kept taking the tablets that stopped my body overproducing babies and then melting down before it had finished the job.

But I can't leave that thought of  'another' alone. Another child, a phantom child, who seems to tug at my skirts and at the edges of my thoughts and dreams. But I'm not entirely sure if that child is a future child, an unknown child or if that child is, in fact, still my Georgina.

My daughter, Georgina.
I want her back so very much, against all possibility and reason.
But she isn't coming back.
Having another child will not bring her back.
I'm worried that my brain has not quite grasped that final fact yet.

******

Which brings me to the idea of 'replacement' but I think I'll have to save that for another day.
This post is getting far too long already.

October 15th

Candles burning this evening for all our children.
Those I know and have remembered by name tonight and the countless, countless others.
My love to you and to the families who miss you so very, very much.