disappearing act

it looks like i disappeared, but i'm still here. i'm making some of my christmas gifts this year, and they've been taking up a lot of my time.

it feels so foreign to be happy about the holidays. last week we bought a fake, full-size christmas tree, put it up, and decorated it. we haven't done in years. and actually enjoyed the holiday? we hadn't done that since our first christmas in this house. 2005--merry christmas to the happy couple in your new home. 2006--still going through the motions, but we've been trying to have a baby for a while now...where is our family? 2007--after almost a year of infertility treatments, the holiday cheer hurt us so we avoided it all. 2008--two dead babies and one live one hiding inside...what were we supposed to feel? and then there's now.

before i did any christmas shopping, i got the twins' gifts for toys for tots. i had planned on doing it whenever i shopped for the ham and my niece. sort of like shopping for all the babies together. but my mother-in-law wanted to go before thanksgiving, and i was glad to do their shopping before i could run out of money. it's only one toy per twin. but it feels pretty good to know that somewhere, on christmas morning, a little girl will be so excited to open up her my little pony, and a boy will be trying to impress his family with his transformer. all because of two little babies who never even took a breath.

we ordered the twins their cemetary box again, too. we went looking for one and couldn't find one that was exactly what we wanted. they were nice and offered to make one special for us. i felt no desire to mention who the box was for this time. last year it was bursting out of me, written all over our faces, that it was for our two children. this year, hubby held the ham, i strode purposefully in to explain what i wanted, without any tears.

the ham is very excited these days by pictures of babies. when we pass by the huge mirror above our fireplace while we're holding her, she squeals and laughs and flirts with herself in the mirror. the other day, i finally dug the twins' magnet pictures out of the bag where we'd been keeping them in our bedroom ever since the house renovations were done following the fire. (there are still no pictures up on our walls. when would we ever have time to do that?) when i put them on the fridge, the ham was so excited. she kept picking up malachi's picture (and eating it, as she does with everything except her own food). it was sweet and not connected to the fact that they're her brother and sister. it's not like she knows (right? does she?). she just likes baby pictures...apparently even very red premature babies.

i have so many things i want to say, but in the interest of actually getting a post up, i'll save it for next time, whenever that ends up being.

i would be crazed

a lot of people around me are having babies and announcing pregnancies. within the last couple of months, 3 friends have given birth to new babies. i can't say much about the pregnancies yet because none of them have officially announced them. but i am amazed by how many of them there are.

i wonder if i would have survived this time if my little ham had not become part of our lives. if all i had were memories of a really short pregnancy, a traumatic miscarriage, and a silent home afterwards. if every time i saw a new baby or heard new of another life beginning inside someone, the rage and fury and utter depths of sorrow would descend on my chest and weigh me down until i really couldn't breathe.

i love my niece to pieces. she's becoming this really fun, cool little person. my goddaughter. she's also the closest person in age to what the twins would have been. sometimes when i'm watching her, i blink and instead of thinking, this is what i'll be seeing in 8 months when the ham is that age, i think, this is what i would have been seeing right now, seeing double, if they hadn't died. when i think of her as a newborn, it makes me sad. i remember the feelings of loss that filled me every time i looked at her.

but now, in yet another way, i'm becoming so plain vanilla. i take my friend's new baby in my arms and marvel at how new and wrinkly he is. without making a scene or even thinking of any of my past heartaches. i'm too busy focusing on: how small and light this baby feels...wondering whether his older brother is going to fall and hurt himself as he climbs over the restaurant booth...measuring how tired my friend and her husband seem, wondering if i could ever manage 2 kids and still do normal things like meet friends for lunch at a restaurant...and always, always, always, keeping one eye and ear on my little ham as she sits up like such a big girl at the booth, her little forehead barely clearing the table edge.

(is that really all it is? am i just so distracted that none of it gets through the barrier of attention stretched so thin?)

when i hear about new pregnancies, i am genuinely happy. i think about the pure disbelief and shock and anger i felt when i saw positive pregnancy test last september. then i remember how happy i was to see the two lines when i took a test the day after the nurse told me i was pregnant almost two years ago (with the twins, but i didn't know it was twins yet). just because i felt like, after almost 2 years of trying to conceive, i deserved to see what a positive pregnancy test looked like.

at some point, some point since the ham was born, my main pregnancy memories have shifted, and when i think of "my pregnancy," it is my pregnancy with her that i am thinking of. i think this is simultaneously heartbreaking and healthy. i think that's how i'm able to hear all the news, see all the happy-sleepy new moms, hug all the newborns, without it breaking me, or even hurting. every newborn i see has her face behind it. the twins', and hers, and the happiness of seeing hers is covering the sadness of seeing theirs. swaddling the sadness with my love of the ham. it's there, but it's safe and warm and sleeping...not harming me right now.

all the little thoughts that add up

there is a family at the ham's daycare who has an older girl, maybe 3, and twin 1-ish-year old boys. the parents are so young. seeing them, i marvel at how i look way more tired than they do, and i only have one to contend with. i got a lump in my throat the first time i saw them. in some other bizarro universe, that could have been us.


my life is falling again into some kind of routine. work, eat, play with the ham, feed the ham, bathe the ham, rock the ham to sleep, eat, go to sleep. i like it. when i'm going about my daily business, i think to myself that i'm happy. sometimes i feel guilty when i think that. i think of each twin's face and i feel guilty. but then i think, they would want us to be happy, right? if they had any say at all in getting the ham here, as i truly believe they did somehow, then they meant for us to be happy.


the ham is such a little joy. she crawls all over our house now. today we went to the baby store and bought some baby-proofing supplies. with every stage i see how yes, it would have been manageable with two. crazy but manageable, just like it is now.

we're so very poor. we haven't been so tight with money since we first moved into this house. and before that, since we first got married. last month we overdrew our checking account the very first week we had to pay for the extra day of daycare that i added on so that i wouldn't lose my job. luckily at some point in the past, i had added overdraft protection. it was still scary to log in to my online banking and see negative numbers in red boldface.

there are so many things i want to do. not just for the ham, although of course i want to buy her the moon and then buy her a pony and then buy her something to make the moon even better. but i want to be able to donate money for charities in their names like we did last year. how selfish i feel, i'm keeping our cleaning service but not donating to the m@rch of d!mes. (in my defense, sometimes i feel like a neat freak who hates to clean. i'm becoming almost obsessive about not having any dirt in the house, now that the ham is spending a lot of her time licking various random spaces on our floor.)


and yet with all the many complications life has to offer, still everything lately feels so easy. work, eat, baby fun times, sleep a little, rock-a-bye baby, go back to sleep, time to blog/email/return a phone call, time to try to pay some attention to poor hubby and thank him for all his help around the house. i think human beings subconsciously aim for an equilibrium of happiness, a general balance towards a pleasing routine.

i've been remembering this time last year a lot. being in the range of about 15 weeks pregnant, again, at this point in the month last year. with 16 weeks, 2 days just creeping up and waiting for me on thanksgiving day. i guess by now my poor mind and body deserve a bit of a break, some enjoyable and usually mindless happiness where i can lose myself in the tides of mommyhood.

any sleepy mommy

a woman at work told me she has never seen a mother so proud of her baby as i am. she said i just glow.

it's true, in contrast to last year, i'm sure i do seem like i'm positively radioactive. i went through years of infertility. that's got to wear a person down a little. then i was pregnant, with 2 babies, and it was exhausting and i felt sick all the time. then i wasn't pregnant, and i was sad all the time. i felt like a wilted flower, soft and drooping and dead inside. then i was pregnant again, and i was still sad and i was unhappy because i wasn't happy.

she was one of the people who was afraid of me after i lost the twins. she came by and hugged me and said how sorry she was. but then she sort of avoided me. she herself is a twin. my company has an unrealistic proportion of people who either are a twin or have children who are twins. out of a company of 20 people, 6 of us belong to the twins club.

as i find myself becoming a regular person again, i feel the twins slipping away from me. some days they feel very close. i'll be lying in bed, just about to fall asleep, and i'll suddenly think my babies! but other times, when i'm tired and unloading the ham from her carseat on our way into the daycare center, i just feel like my life is so normal. i could be any sleepy mommy.

my parents almost never mention the twins anymore. they still visit their grave when they come out here, but they don't really talk about them otherwise. they tell us how nice whatever decoration we have up looks. hubby's parents mention them but i know they are so ecstatic about the ham that i almost feel bad responding.

it's true, i don't think most other sleepy mommies glow as much as i do. they love their babies but they don't have that memory permanently etched in their mind of two tiny, frail, dead bodies that are their children, fading forever further into the past. i love to just look at the little ham. i see in her all that i lost and all that i know i am so lucky to have. lucky doesn't cut it, it's a word that means nothing to me, just a filler for that word that doesn't exist. fortunate, blessed, providential. i look at her and i am full of love. i glow because there was once them, and now there is her.

the fishermen three

this year, instead of my mind wandering to halloween costumes for my little twins, i have been daydreaming of three costumes. costumes that would have worked as a set for my twins, whose 18-month-birthday was this month, and my 6-month-old ham. it's funny how even in fantasy, my mind has to retain some level of realism. the costumes would have had to be simple and inexpensive. maybe even homemade.

i can't remember exactly when i started daydreaming about having all three of them. it was never an option, really. not unless they were born very early and hubby and i were extremely eager to jump back in the sack after their birth. i haven't stopped daydreaming about the twins being here with us. but i can no longer imagine life without the little ham. and so my mind goes.

my recurring favorite costume idea seems to be wynken, blynken, and nod. i don't remember the whole poem very well, but this line keeps coming back to me:

"wynken and blynken are two little eyes
and nod is a little head"

i used to have a little paperback book (which i think my sister has now) that depicted the three sort of as fishermen wearing pajamas and long stocking night caps. so i think i would have borrowed the book and used that as a jumping off point.


"and some folks thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed
of sailing that beautiful sea--
but i shall name you the fishermen three:
wynken,
blynken,
and nod."

pay attention

Hi Reba,

I was just thinking of you today and wondered if you could send some recent pictures of your babies. I would love to see them!! I hope all is going well at [company where i work]!

Take care and enjoy the fall,
S.

????????????

the first email i saw today when i got to work, from a woman i have worked with remotely in the past. when the twins died, she sent me one of those perfect, says exactly what i needed to hear cards. she too had suffered a miscarriage before her living son and daughter were born. she was positively thrilled to hear about the little ham's hard-won healthy birth. she understood. she seemed to, anyway. except how could someone who gets it possibly have been so careless?

i know i shouldn't have let this get to me. and i didn't, too much. i just shook my head at her across the many miles. i didn't cry and i went ahead and had a perfectly fine day.


thank you all for the probably obvious suggestions about sending myself the picture of the newborn ham before my cell phone service expired. the problem was that i didn't think i had internet service on that phone. it turns out i did. i wasn't able to send it in a text message to my new phone, but i did manage to email it to myself. so i have it. yay. thank you.

it doesn't take much

what a stupid thing to be sad about.

hubby and i got new cell phones today. our contract had expired on the plan we were sharing with hubby's parents.

i remember getting this cell phone two years ago. we had just finished iui #2. how can i not remember whether we knew already that the cycle was a bust. i guess these things really do fade over time.

i held the phone in my hand in the car on the way home (my in-laws were driving) and exclaimed how someday i would get a very happy phone call on this phone. this would be the phone i would answer when someday, the nurse told me that i was pregnant. (i was basing this surety on the fact that i worked business hours monday through friday, and the clinic, which was open those same hours, always called me on my cell phone since i was never home when they were open.)

how bizarre that when i did finally get my happy call, it was on my home phone! we had a huge snowstorm that day and my office was closed. and later, when my next pregnancy was confirmed, it was also on my home phone, because they had squeezed me in on a saturday.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

whenever i had an ultrasound done with the twins, i would take a picture with my cell phone and set the ultrasound photo as my background. my last ultrasound with them was the day before i went into labor. i still remember taking the photo of their picture, angling the phone in the natural light coming in through our big picture window in the dining room, so that i wouldn't get any glare. i remember flipping open the phone two days later to call work and tell them what had happened...seeing my twins' picture, and crumpling into tears.

with the ham, i felt a sort of detached superstition about doing the same thing. i did take a picture of her 18-week ultrasound, when we found out she's a girl, but i think i left that one up there till she was born. in the hospital, one of our first moments absolutely alone together after she was born, i snapped her photo and it remains still my last phone background.

the thought of parting with this single picture of her pains me. it's like parting with all these memories that i have made, silly, tiny, stupid little things. it's not like the memories go away just because i'm donating the phone.

of all the stupid things to be upset about! to let something like this bother me. how silly, but how true. i'm someone who cries when i sell my car. so i guess i shouldn't be surprised.