love is blonde

“Fake it til you make it.” I’m working on being more positive. I still have many, many ugly moments. I’m also good at procrastinating. So I made this to print/copy/paste/carry everywhere with hope that it starts to sink in.

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. Thank you for keeping me going most days.

I don’t believe Miller is an angel, or that he is up above watching over us. I don’t believe that things are “meant to be” or that “everything happens for a reason.” I don’t believe I will ever meet Miller again. Sometimes I wish I believed any of these things, but I don’t.

And yet.

I find myself searching for signs of him everywhere. A butterfly lands on my window. A candle flickers near his ashes. The sunset paints the sky a particularly crazy color. A phantom kick pokes my belly.

And the most recent thing, I see Miller’s name everywhere. I know it’s a common last name and I’m sure it exists now no more frequently than before, but…

These photos were snapped in the last week, all around my neighborhood. If you’ll indulge me (and I have a hunch you will, because you have been truly amazing with the support and the kindness), if you see Miller’s name out there somewhere, take a photo and send it to me. Maybe I’ll start a little collection. [Edited to add: Here is the flickr set.]

For now I’ll allow myself this little bit of magical thinking, even as I accept that he is only in my heart.

We got the autopsy results. The writing is cold and heavy and clinical and I’m having a hard time understanding it completely, but from what I can decipher, our little guy had a lot of problems going on with his insides.

We knew he had an intestinal obstruction, but it was way worse than that. His small and large intestines were rotated, jumbled up, and didn’t have the right connections and openings. His lungs and kidneys were misshapen. The placenta was too small. And he had that goofy extra thumb.

They also saw signs that the cord was wrapped around his neck and his leg, and it cut off the oxygen supply in the blood. It hurts my heart to think about it.

But when I imagine another ending, one where the cord doesn’t get tangled up, and maybe he lives to be born, it’s not necessarily a happy ending. He would have faced multiple surgeries beginning at birth, at a minimum. I have no idea what the prognosis would have been. I can imagine some pretty awful worst case scenarios though.

I am left feeling so broken and so empty, and yet grateful that my sweet son didn’t have to suffer. I will suffer for him. I miss him. It’s hard to wish for him to be here now that we know so much more about him.

There are so many more questions. Namely, WHY? Why, oh why, would something go so wrong with our little baby? And what comes next? Will this happen to the next baby? Will there even be a next baby? It’s an avalanche of questions, most of which can’t be answered.

In my heart he was perfect, but now I know he was not. And I love him fiercely anyway.

Be loved and be free, sweet Miller.

There is very little I can do for my son. I can’t hold him, soothe him, feed him, or snuggle him.

I can look at his photos and bury my face in the blankets that were wrapped around his tiny body.

I can drive to doctors appointments all over town, seeking answers. I can ask doctors what they think happened to my sweet son. Was it his own cord that killed him, or was something else wrong?

I can try fiercely to remember his every detail. I can picture his perfect ears, sweet little button nose, and red lips. I can recall the feeling of cradling him in my arms.

I can look at the ultrasound photos of him as he grew from a little blob into a little baby.

I can reach out to other babylost mamas and tell them I hope today is a better day, even if I mean it for myself as much as for them. I can ask my mom what she remembers about meeting Miller. I can talk to Andrew about the first time he felt a kick through my belly.

I can give vials of blood to make sure something in my body, or in my genes, didn’t harm him. I can write letters to him in a journal, and let my tears smudge the words.

I can pore over the hospital records. I can read what the surgeon noted about how he delivered the baby. I can see his Apgar score. Zero.

Zero.

It still hurts so very, very much.

I summoned up some courage today and logged into Fertility Friend to delete my pregnancy ticker. You know, that cute little thing that tracks down the days to 40 weeks. I tried to do it with my eyes squinted so I wouldn’t see the numbers, but it was too hard to miss.

31 weeks and 5 days pregnant. 58 days to go.

Except not, because Miller will never get to count any ages, not even to zero, and especially not past 26 weeks and 5 days.

Some days are okay and some days are hard. Actually, most days are okay but nights are brutal. Mornings are a close second.

I find myself starting to feel anxious for the test/autopsy results. I have an appointment with my RE next week, and my OB the week after that. I’d like some answers before those meetings.

Some days I want the answer to be “cord accident.” This would mean that it was a horrible accident, but probably one that wouldn’t be repeated in another pregnancy. It would mean that there was nothing I could have done differently to prevent the outcome.

But it would also mean that Miller wasn’t supposed to die. That he was a healthy baby — our lottery winning baby — and that a stupid, random accident took away his life.

Some days I’d rather hear that Miller had something wrong with him that simply made him not ready or healthy for the world. Maybe a genetic issue (even with seemingly normal chromosomes…) or some other underlying condition that we didn’t know about before. After all, he did have two left thumbs (did I tell you all that already? It was weirdly cute), the intestinal obstruction, an a two-vessel (instead of three) umbilical cord. All of these can point to bigger issues. But we did so many tests and scans and procedures and didn’t find anything else wrong, which doesn’t make sense.

I don’t want something to have been wrong with him. In my eyes he was perfect. He grew right on target and he was a beautiful baby. It’s hard to imagine what could have been so wrong.

I definitely don’t want to hear that something was wrong with me or my body. It’s not that I wouldn’t take the blame a million times over if it brought Miller back to life, but because I’d worry that any future pregnancy would be at risk. And I’m already going to be a huge anxious mess if/when we get pregnant again. I don’t need any more high-risk issues added to my chart.

The other possibility is simply “inconclusive.” I don’t really wish for this either. It gives us nothing. Nothing to watch for next time, nothing to answer our questions, nothing to explain what happened. And no peace.

So I can’t decide what I want the answer to be. But maybe I need to stop thinking that answers will make anything better.