Love Letter (Capture Your Grief Project - Day 23)

Dear Freddie,

You are my only true love and you are my proudest creation. I know a mother is always biased but you were the most perfect baby I have ever had the privilege to lay eyes upon. 

I love the way your skin was so soft and smelt of that beautiful newborn smell. I love your hair, how the midwife said "it's strawberry blonde!" but really it's a light brown. A perfect blend of mine and Mattie's. I love the way it's tufty on the top but thicker and curly at the back. I love your face. I could write that sentence 1000 times over. Your little button nose, your furry little eyebrows and your chubby cheeks I would have never stopped kissing. Your mouth is my favourite thing about you, it is so perfect and pouty, again it was a gift from your Daddy. I love how grumpy you looked, it always made me laugh. I love your beautiful hands and how perfectly they fit into mine. I love your funny little, well actually not so little, feet and your squashed little toe, I love that it made you special.

I wish I could talk about your eyes, I bet they would be big like mine but blue like Mattie's.

I wish I could have heard your voice, that scream I waited 9 months for but it never came.

I love you so very much Freddie Richard Jenkins. I will never love another more than you and I will never stop loving you.

Grief.

Is My Body Giving Up On Me?

Another moaning and miserable post, shock! I honestly don't know what is going wrong with my body currently. I feel as if slowly but surely it's just shutting itself down like an old computer. Bit by bit, I'm breaking and I feel eventually I'll just switch off altogether.

Initially, I was so surprised at how well my body was recovering from giving birth. I had no tears so no stitches were needed and the bleeding stopped after 5 weeks, right on track. My periods began again, with only a 5 day late window. So far so good. My body slowly shrank back to almost my pre-baby body size. I still needed to tone up but I could fit back into my size 10 jeans after a week. My boobs probably took the longest to settle. I was still producing milk after a month and had to wear breast pads all day and a sports-bra to bed. Eventually they settled and give or take a few stretch marks (I went from an A/B cup to almost an E) they're back to normal. We were given the green light to start trying again from both my doctor and consultant so we did. Everything seemed to return to normality, or as normal as life can be nowadays, and my body was doing just fine.

Then came the back pain. It started in the last month of pregnancy with Freddie. The place I work for are honestly nasty people when it comes to pregnant women. It's nothing against the people I work for, they're fantastic. But the company needs to seriously change how pregnant women are treated. I was heavily pregnant and on my feet for 8 hours, with a 45 minute break. I wasn't able to sit at the till and had to always be busy...tidying, cleaning, fixing displays etc. I was at breaking point by my last shift and my back has paid the price. For the first month or two when Freddie was born the pain went and I thought it had gone for good. But it has suddenly returned and it's worse than before. I've tried yoga, exercise, long walks, changing posture but it's still there. An acute ache. To top that off, I think my wisdom teeth are coming through. I've had really painful jaw ache and my glands are the size of golf balls. Luckily this pain isn't constant and only seems to flare up in the evening and is quickly solved with a paracetamol and a cup of hot tea (how stereo-typically British is that!).

My most worrying issue at the moment is my period. Or rather, lack of it. It is now 2 weeks late. The latest it normally arrives, as mentioned earlier, is 5 days. And yes, I've taken a pregnancy test *5 to be exact* and no, I'm not pregnant. I know stress can alter your cycle but I've actually had a relatively stress free month. I've taken pre-natal vitamins, I've started fertility meditation (thank you Olivia if you're reading!) and I'm exercising and eating better that before I was pregnant. So I'm at a total loss. I've never had a period this late before, well apart from when I was pregnant. It's not like I'm even willing it not to come. If anything I do want it to come so I can get on with trying again. This just isn't like me at all and now it's starting to bother me. I don't know whether to go to the Doctors or whether they'll just dismiss it (like they always do). I don't want to go back on the pill to regulate them either.

Has anyone else experienced something like this or can anyone recommend something?

Normalizing Grief (Capture Your Grief Project - Day 12)

The first thing to clear up is that there is no path of "normailty" with grief. There is no set steps of grief. Grief cannot be put into a category as grief is different for everyone. You can't compare someone grieving the loss of a parent to the loss of a baby or the grief of a pet to the loss of a friend. You just can't. Look around you, everyone is totally different so why should we be expected to grieve the same? I remember trawling the internet when Freddie first died. I didn't know how to grieve. I wanted to know how I should be behaving. All I found were "The Five Steps Of Grief". Aka the biggest load of shit ever. Chances are, at some point you will feel those emotions. But definitely not in that order and almost certainly not one at a time.

I couldn't find a picture that showed how grief is for me. So I wrote about what it feels like, for me anyway. It's not particularly well written but I just wanted to get it out in it's most raw form otherwise it wouldn't be true to my feelings. Anyway, here it is. My grief in a very small and in a no way totally exclusive nutshell.

The Island 

Grief is a really hard place to find yourself in. It's like you've been shipped to a totally foreign island. No one there speaks your language. Sometimes a passer by might try to understand you but eventually they give up and walk away because they just can't get it. They can't understand you because they don't come from the same place. You're trying to find your way around this island but you have no map so you're totally lost. You wander in a confused daze while everyone around you carries on their day. Even worse, you don't know your destination. Everyday you try and concentrate on "where am I going?". You never find the answer so you just carry on, aimless. And this island is noisy, so noisy. There are voices constantly ringing through your ears and you don't know if those voices are yours or someone else's. You can't ever turn them down or shut them off so you can't ever sleep, not properly. When you go back to continuing your pointless journey you're exhausted and you can't tell anyone because they can't understand you. Maybe sometimes you find a fragment of a map and you think you're going to be okay only for it to be blown away by the wind or for someone to snatch it from you. Your hope is constantly taken from you in one form or another. Maybe sometimes someone offers you a tissue once in a while to dry your tears but then they leave when the tears don't stop. You hope that one day a map will arrive for you and you'll know your destination. You hope that maybe one day someone will arrive and they'll be able to speak your language. At times that hope is so very strong and you try to hold onto it with all your might. But at other times the hope drifts away and you let it because you're tired and you're broken.

I'm not sure if grief will ever truly be normalized. We accept that people grieve and we try to help as best we can but there's only so much a person can do when they aren't feeling that same feeling. As a person that is grieving I think that's something we have to accept. Unfortunately, we aren't designed to take on another person's emotions and feelings. We can sympathize, we can try to help but we can't read minds. We can't absorb grief, even though we wish we could if it meant we could fully understand or half the pain of a loved one. That's one of the hardest lessons I've had to learn about the grieving process. You can't force someone to understand, nor can you expect them to. That's just how grief works. It's never going to change so I had to.

Trying To Conceive Again

Ugh. I wish I could just end the post there. I think that sums up nicely how I feel about this. Just ugh. I'm fed up of "trying" already and it's only been 3 months. A fellow bereaved mumma recently informed me that on average it takes a woman nine months of trying to get pregnant. I was honestly shocked. Freddie was a happy accident. He wasn't planned but so dearly loved and so very much wanted. I got pregnant so quickly AND whilst on the pill. So now that we are actively trying and waiting for that big fat positive, it feels like we've entered a time warp. It feels like all I do is wait to get pregnant. 

One thing I am sick of is being told to "stop trying". I don't get that, I really don't. As children we are constantly being told to "always try your hardest". Then when you're older and you try at something, you're told to stop. It's very easy for someone who has had a succession of happy pregnancies and no problem getting pregnant to say this, but it's not as easy for the person receiving the information to accept. 

It's honestly all I think about these days. I downloaded 3, yes you heard me THREE fertility apps on my iPhone. I diligently log my information with them daily and follow their advice religiously. I should go for a run whilst eating an avocado? Done. I should bathe in a pool of goats milk? OK, sure. *Please note none of these actually improve fertility...I don't think anyway*. I've recently ordered myself vitamins to help with conception and I've started gymnastics in order to get myself back to full health. I want this, so much.

I feel like I should just say that my desire for a baby is in no way me trying to replace Freddie. That's totally impossible and has never been my intention. He was my first son. I will never get that back, ever. But I do so desperately want to fill the emptiness in my arms and in my heart. I am a mother and I want to be able to mother. There's only so much love my dog will accept! It's what I'm here for, I know it and I feel it. Even when I was little, I spent hours playing with my dolls. Caring for them, dressing, washing and feeding. All of it. I have 3 younger siblings and I loved helping my mum look after the youngest two. I was shocked when I went to a pregnancy class and found out so many new mums-to-be hadn't ever changed a nappy in their lives! Motherhood is something that has always come so naturally to me and now I'm having to fight to have that opportunity. It is so very unfair.

Trying to conceive is also seriously testing my patience. I'm currently at a loss. I tested early and got a negative so waited patiently for my period to arrive. A week after it was due and it still isn't here. I tested again and got yet another negative. I feel like my body is mocking me. I just want my period to arrive so I can go again but it's just not happening. 

So that's where I am with trying to conceive again. Essentially, I am no where. I'm starting to lose hope. I know that having a bicornuate uterus can affect conecption and I'm starting to wonder if that was it. My one chance to have a baby and now it's gone. I'm trying to stay positive, I'm trying not to "try" too hard, I'm trying to not stress but it's so hard. It's almost impossible when the only thing you want in life seems out of reach.

Baby Loss Awareness Month

How did I even get here? I think I find myself asking this nearly daily. All I know is that my baby died and that I'm still clinging on. My life prior to Freddie dying is an insignificant haze. It's like a cloudy dream that doesn't seem real and I struggle to remember it. Even the time that has passed since we buried Freddie up till now is a blur. How am I still here? How on Earth am I getting through this? Can I keep going? I honestly can't answer those questions. All I know is I'm taking everything day by day. I love going to sleep, it's an escape from this horrible nightmare that I've found myself in. I love going to adult gymnastics because my body is in so much physical pain it takes away the emotional pain. I love running around after our puppy, Olive because she stops me from just spending my day crying in bed. But do any of these things make me truly happy? No, of course they don't. But they help the day to pass by and for every day that passes I tell myself I'm another step closer to being healed from this pain. Not cured because it will always still be there but healed so that the scars remain but life carries on and maybe I can be happy again. So that's a very jumbled description of where I am, from June 23rd 2015 to October 1st 2015. If you're going through the same thing I'm hoping you'll be able to make sense of my ramble above because you all get it. You know all too well that life these days is merely about surviving, no longer about thriving. At least, not yet anyway.
So it's October, somehow. I can't actually believe how quickly time seems to be moving around me even though I feel as if I'm stuck still in time whilst everyone continues around me. It's the month where we are able to do two things.

1) Raise awareness of baby loss. It's real people, it happens. 1 in 4 people have lost a baby whether that be in early, middle or late pregnancy or even after the baby has been born. It's not a horror story people whisper about. It's real. Fucking. Life. There should be no stigma and no shame. No one should feel embarrassed to say that they have lost a child and yet we do. I've been left cringing over the fact I've blurted out "my baby was stillborn". But why? I'm proud that I had him and that he existed. Please never shy away from someone who has lost a baby. Ask them if they want to talk about it. Something we do and sometimes we don't but that's OK. It means so much that you asked. Ask what the baby's name was. Show them that you care and you know that baby is real. And above all never ever say the words "at least". It never leads to anything good and we don't want to hear "at least you can try again" etc.

2) Celebrate the lives of our babies. No matter how long they lived they still lived. Tell people, show them a picture, say their name. Let the world know how proud you are to have been a mother to your baby. Whether it be your first or fifth! I'm taking part in the Capture Your Grief project (read more here!) to celebrate Freddie's life and to explore my grief. I'm also hosting an intimate fundraiser for family and friends to raise money for Sands. It's just a small gathering that I have named the PJ's and Wine Party (it's pretty self explanatory what we'll be doing) but it's still raising money AND I'll be having fun whilst doing it. I think it's important that we remember that this month, it can be happy. Which is something I have to keep reminding myself, that is OK to enjoy life. If not for yourself, enjoy it for your child when you can.

I really hope that this is a gentle month for you all. I'd love to hear what you're up to through this month if you would like to share in the comments or you can always email me for a chat (just go to the Contact Me page).

Capture Your Grief - 2015

I am so excited to take part in the Capture Your Grief project this October. In some ways it is sad that I'm at a point in my life where I am grieving for my baby but I'm glad that I have the opportunity to focus the grief into something like this project. I know a lot of fellow grieving mums (and dads!) read this blog so I want to make everyone aware of this amazing event and encourage you all to take part!

What Is It?:
It's so simple, anyone can do it. You can choose to share it on social media or keep it in a private diary/scrapbook. Its a series of topics, one for everyday of the month of October and for each topic, you take a photo of what it means to you or what it represents to you. It's totally personal and subjective to you so you're totally in control. It has been created for us to explore our grief in order to help us on our journey of healing.

How Can I Take Part?:
Just have a camera! You don't need to be a photographer or have an amazing camera, it's not about getting professional photos, it's about capturing something that truly resonates with your grief and healing process. It only takes a few seconds to take a picture and upload it or to print it out and pop it in a diary.

Where Can I Get More Info?:
Right here! Or on the Facebook event here! Simple.

How Can I Follow Your Project?:
I'll be posting my pictures on Instagram (follow below) with the hashtag #CaptureYourGrief and #WhatHealsYou. I'll also be creating a photo diary/scrapbook which I will be doing a post on when the project is over!

Let me know how/where you'll be sharing your pictures in the comments!