Torture is...
- Vomiting every day for months but not be rewarded with a live healthy baby
- Telling your living children their sister isn't coming home to live with them
- Seeing a person who is due at the same time as you often
- Seeing an active baby on ultrasound with an obvious defect
- Having to make horrific decisions
- Seeing multiple specialists that give no hope for your baby
- Putting on a brace face, daily for weeks and months
- Listening to women complain about the little things of parenting a perfectly healthy baby
- Driving past the hospital your baby didn't come home from
- Going through a labour knowing your baby is already dead
- Having a silent birth with no baby crying
- Waking up days later with a flat stomach
- Producing milk that will never feed your baby
- Having uncaring, uneducated doctors say stupid things
- Having fights with funeral companies
- Going shopping for a toy for your dead baby at the same time as going birthday shopping for your living child
- Feeling panic rise as someone asks you the question of how many children you have
- Enduring painful procedures
- Waiting for answers
- Being made to wait in hospital waiting rooms full of pregnant people
- Seeing the pity on people's faces as they don't know what to say as they try to get away as fast as they can from the conversation
- People not acknowledging your babies life, name and story
- Your baby not having ever existed legally on this earth
- People giving you their newborn babies to hold only weeks after losing yours without even thinking how it might affect you
- Having one photo album that will never have photos added
- Having to pack away maternity clothes
- Looking at an empty room that was designed to hold your 3rd baby
- Revisiting the ward where your daughter was born still and silent
- Discussing and trying to understand genetics and medical terminology with specialists
- Pretending to function and be motivated
- Forgetting details about your baby
- Wishinf you took a certain type of photo
- Making baby clothes that people can hardly believe would ever fit a human being
- Giving your daughter one last cuddle
- Seeing and touching your daughters coffin
- Placing your baby in their coffin for the last time
- Walking out of hospital without a baby in your arms
- The never ending fear that you will never hold a healthy baby in your arms again
Torture is waking up everyday knowing you are one day further from that final cuddle and goodbye.
Well I could keep adding to that list but I'd be here all night. I'm pretty sure I'm in
that stage of grief that's called ANGER - I hope this is a quick stage because I don't like it :(
I love your list. As in... I relate to it, but HATE that such a list exists. And HATE that you feel the same things I do, but glad I'm not alone.
ReplyDeleteThanks Firefly, it is very isolating isn't it? But agree glad to know we aren't alone, even though we feel like it.
ReplyDelete