Relationships

Everyone’s invited to my birthday

/ Sarah K Reece / 8 Comments

Waiting for You-001

I’m not that great at birthdays, to be honest. I often get depressed and confused, and spent too much time wondering about the state of my life instead of arranging a lovely celebration. Choosing who to invite fills me with gnawing anxiety in case someone feels left out, and trying to word “please don’t bring gifts if you are broke/forgot it was on until an hour ago/would find that stressful BUT equally if gift gifting is something you love and part of your love language I will not be angry/set them on fire/refuse to speak to you again if you do” so that it fits on an invite gives me a headache. The event itself, which I find mildly terrifying but slightly less awful than not having an event, either falls to my long-suffering partner or friends to conjure, or in a last minute fit of bewilderment gets sprung on my nearest and dearest with anything up to 6 hours notice.

This year will be different! With encouragement from Rose, I am working on a project I have been thinking about for a while – I will be hosting an art exhibition for my birthday instead of a party. It will be exciting, give me something to focus on, justify the expense and time, give people things to look at that are not me, be open to everyone who wants to come, and there will still be cake! Win-win.

I’ve chosen the topic of pregnancy, loss & motherhood as that’s been a huge focus over the past few years and I would love to showcase the artworks. My artbook Mourning the Unborn will also be launched and available for sale, as will prints of the art. I am working hard on the second draft of the artbook at the moment, which will be my first ever publication! I have also put in a new order for 24 karat gold leaf and look forward to showing my beautiful hand gilded prints for the first time!

The Opening Night (ie when cake is being served) is on
Friday the 22nd of April,
The Box Factory, 59 Regent St S, Adelaide
(map)
starting at 6pm

If you are on Facebook the event details are here. This is a public event, open to all.

The art exhibition will be available to view between April 19th – May 19th on Mondays to Fridays between 4-6pm. The venue is wheelchair accessible.

Pregnancy & Grief

/ Sarah K Reece / 6 Comments

The most wonderful news came in last night – the laws here in South Australia have been changed and just in time for Rose and myself. This means that she will be able to be on our babies birth certificate and has full legal recognition as their parent, alongside me. We were so happy we cried. It makes such a difference for our little family.

I am 15 weeks pregnant now and my bump is too big to fit my jeans or a lot of my skirts comfortably any more, although I still weigh a lot less than I did at the start of this pregnancy. I am experiencing a little less intense nausea and getting about 2 good days out of every week, but the fatigue in particular is still severe and demoralising. My world is home at the moment; I do housework, and household admin, and debriefing for people, and drive people to appointments when needed. A lot of time is needed to rest. Eating is still a bit tough and often takes some time to recover from. I’m hoping that as the pregnancy progresses I might start feeling better and better. Rose is busy and productive with her full time study, and the teen staying with us is a studious school student, so I feel a bit lost without a project of my own, in that rather unglamorous and unrecognised place of spending my health on whatever needs doing I can manage around the edges. I’ve been getting very teary and distressed at the prospect that I might not make it back to paid work or wind up with a degree or a career despite all the work I’ve done towards those goals.

Rose is such a help. She doesn’t get my distress personally – her focus is on being a Mum and that fills her world. I always wanted kids and work outside of the home and I’ve been so ill for the past 6 or so months I’m starting to lose hope. She was up with me until 1am last night while I just cried my heart out. It’s a madly intense grief and it’s all tied up with self worth and a sense of significance and belonging and connection and making a difference in the world… I don’t feel any sense of judgement towards others who need support or are sick, I’m just struggling to navigate it myself. It’s a little better than it was 6 months ago when it actually felt like if I couldn’t figure work out and find a way through I couldn’t survive. Planning a baby has kicked my sense of wanting to financially contribute to my family into overdrive, far beyond my capacity. And where pre-Rose my focus was strongly about contributing to the world – doing something of value whether I got paid or not, with a family I suddenly also needed to bring in money. Those are very difficult values to pair up at the best of times. I feel like I’ve been mangled between them.

It’s become such an obsessive focus for me that I’ve been unable to do other things that I love, like paint, because it doesn’t even feel like I can breathe until I figure this out and am on track for a paid job. Combine that with very poor health and that’s a long time of beating myself up and not breathing. I was chatting with a friend the other day who was angry about someone who was breaking the law and being horribly irresponsible and I mentioned that I was not feeling like I was being very responsible at the moment. She looked at me oddly and said that being on disability support wasn’t criminal or irresponsible. I know that but it actually kind of surprised me too. The kind of urgency I feel is as if what I am doing now is illegal and I must find an alternative. I know it’s not rational but it’s incredibly difficult to put the brakes on it.

I find it so much easier to be brave about my mental health than my physical health, which is the reverse of most people and probably partly a hangover from having all my physical health issues treated as psychosomatic for so long. To talk about having a child while on welfare, in my culture? It takes more courage than I have most days. I get attacked, like everyone who’s poor or queer or has a disability does when they want kids of their own and it’s just too much to bear a lot of the time. Too public, too vulnerable, too much vitriol from too many directions. All spewing the same message of worthlessness, as if I haven’t heard that enough in my life, felt it enough. In some ways being a parent feels like crawling back into the school yard to let the bullies have another go at me. See if you can hit me where it already hurts, some of those wounds aren’t very healed still. I feel an intense grief to be where I am, such a sense of lost years and lost health, so much pain and chaos. So many dashed hopes and so much hard work.

All my accomplishments start to twist in my mind and what I was once proud of, like my extensive voluntary work, I start to feel ashamed of, that I was foolish and trusting and exploited. That I somehow fell short being good enough to pay. That I trusted the wrong people, made the wrong decisions, invested in the wrong career paths, and cared too much about keeping my precious ethics intact to deal with the real world of work – which is that I am nobody and have no power and no voice and should simply have put my head down and done whatever was asked of me. My overinflated sense of personal responsibility and grandiose ideas are the real problems. My sense of connection to and trust in other people twists too. I feel very envious at times, and in some cases very burned and bitter, in others just overwhelmed. It’s a painful place to be in.

One thing that has helped a lot has been reading Mary O’Hagan’s memoir Madness Made Me about her terrible years of suffering and her path into advocacy and activism. Maybe because she makes herself so accessible, I was surprised that her road into paid employment was simpler than I thought it would have been. Maybe she was gutsier than I’ve been about pursuing grants, but I could see for a moment that she was in a time and place where there were opportunities for someone intelligent, passionate, aware of the dynamics of power and with a capacity to doubt all the simple answers. It unhooked me for a minute from my frantic soul searching to figure out where I’ve gone wrong or what else I need to do to try and make it across the divide of activism and into paid employment. Some of the answer here is being in an environment where the opportunities are present. I have a lot of opportunities around me and very few of them are paid, and none of them are employment or regular work. Some of the answer too is that most of the other mental health peers I admire so much and have been trying to emulate haven’t had to deal with the multitude of issues I’ve been hit with such as severe physical illness and years spent as a the carer for other people. Many have experienced one or two of the batch but being hit with childhood bullying and abuse, a repressive religious environment with queer sexuality, family violence, severe physical illness, homelessness, years of intensive caring, major mental health challenges, poverty, isolation… It’s been a complicated life.

Some days it helps to remember that for someone who has come through what I have, still being here is a success. Not having died when I first wanted to at 10 or at 18 or 23 or 27 is a huge deal. I accidentally burned my wrist on an oven tray cooking this evening and it was very triggering because my wrists were often the target of my desire to self injure – such an intense, shameful, private drive that I spent many years learning to understand and dismantle. That’s something I’m proud of too, and it’s something else I can talk about openly and with compassion when I’m connecting with someone else in that kind of pain. It matters that I can do that even if I don’t get a badge with my name on it and a pay check. I’m not useless or lazy. (I’m so scared that I’m useless or lazy)

It helps to remember that I’ve brought things out of nothing and made things that help ease pain. I’m so, so beyond sad that I haven’t been able to grow them bigger, that the DI is just a little website and a few brochures that the spiritual-cause people find too clinical, the clinical and diagnosis people find way too maverick, and the rest find too mainstream. I know it annoys in some way almost everyone connected to it because trying to find a middle ground between all those perspectives is irritating to everyone. It seemed like a good idea anyway, a safe meeting place for everyone. I don’t know. I know that some people found it helpful and if it really is a good approach I’m sorry to everyone else that I couldn’t get the message out any further or louder and that it will probably die with me. I’m just too tired to do much more. But all the little things count too, right, not just the movements that gain momentum and change the world in a big way, it’s also all the little pebbles bouncing down the cliff years before the avalanche that makes the big difference.

That’s another pincer – that what I’ve dedicated my life to wasn’t worth the cost, or that it is important, but I can’t take it any further anyway. Either way I’m swamped in grief.

I want everything to be better before the baby gets here, in an insane way I know I can’t achieve. I want the house to be organised and the back yard to be planted and clean of poop, and to have resolved my work dilemmas (do I have enough spoons to be a part time receptionist and a Mum? How can I know? I know I don’t right now – how many months after the birth is the fibro likely to still be severe? Is there any point in hoping anymore?)… I want to be a better person and eat less chocolate and watch less TV and be calmer and cry less and… sigh. It’s all so painfully vulnerable!

It’s not enough to stop living while I try to force myself through this brick wall. I’ve worked so hard to be here, and it’s not my fault the wall is so high. I need a hand over it and I haven’t found one. I have to be okay with that, at least for now, and that means letting myself grieve, and it also means going back to the things that give my life meaning and joy. If I can’t do ‘real work’ it’s okay to spend time on my voluntary work. It’s okay to make art even if I’m doing it while the rest of my household is out doing real work. If I can’t find a work related project then I’m going to make a life enhancing project I can work on on my better days and get excited about and feel connected to the world with. (hold on, my love, one day there’ll be a place for us) Not so many years ago I was friendless, suicidal, recurrently homeless, terrified of my multiplicity, and deeply wounded. Not so many years I couldn’t shower without assistance or make it through the shops without a wheelchair. I remember a time when my pain was so bad I would scream myself to sleep. Here I am, fattening with a little dragon wriggling inside me, loved and safe in my home and family that’s suddenly 3 of us and waiting on the 4th. I refuse to keep suffering to punish myself for not having recovered further and to motivate myself to reach that one last big goal I can’t seem to secure. It’s okay to fail, it’s okay to fall, it’s okay to hurt about it, and it’s okay to build yourself some kind of compassion and forgiveness out of all that blood and broken bones. It’s okay to live anyway.

What do you do when the dreams burn down? What I’ve always done, mourn and howl and dream new dreams. When the bullies make me bleed I paint my face with it and refuse to become one of them. I find my warrior and call them out on it. I run into the wilds where they can’t trap me. I’m 15 weeks pregnant and sometimes now whole days go by where I’m not afraid the baby will die. It’s the most wonderful and joyful thing, especially last thing at night when I’m lying in bed in the quiet and Rose rests her hand on my bump and all the world is just the sound of our breathing and the warmth of our skin. It’s humming with usefulness and competence on the good days, making phone calls, mopping floors, paying bills, listening to people who need a compassionate ear. And it’s pain and vulnerability, ugly and awkward and embarrassing, it’s snot dripping from my nose and making my sinuses ache, and feeling obsessive but unable to let go, and getting cabin fever from another day aching and hurting on the couch, and getting afraid that maybe I’ve complained too much on Facebook or not said enough to my friends how happy I am to be pregnant. It’s waiting and waiting and waiting and following all the instructions about forbidden foods and drinks and worrying that lying on my back will reduce the blood flow to the baby and going to mummy events and feeling weird and alienated and icked out by the overwhelming pink and pastels and brutal birth stories. It’s strangers touching me and not being able to reply to messages despite feeling guilty, and wanting to make art but feeling like it’s in a locked room and I haven’t done enough to earn the key yet. It’s wanting to but still not being able to talk to or write to this baby directly.

15 weeks pregnant is not a stretch cream or baby formula commercial. It’s life and it’s messy and some of it really, really hurts. And I’m sobbing with sadness about my career at the same time that I’m overjoyed beyond words to be pregnant. It’s feeling useless and horrible on the bad days and proud of myself for making sure my people have clean clothes and for navigating difficult conversations well on better days. It’s not a happy ending, it’s not recovered, it’s not out of danger or no longer at risk.

It’s not without pain, but neither is it without meaning. It’s precious, and it takes courage.

Poetry in the Night

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Today I had a root canal re-drilled and packed by my dentist. I did admin, made phone calls, cooked dinner. Adult mode, functioning mode, clear mind, to do list, one thing and then the next, daylight.

This evening I’m picking up the teen staying with us from their work because they finish too late for safe travel on public transport. It’s dark and raining a little and I didn’t want to get out of my comfy chair and do more things.

But now I’m here… I remember how much I love the night. The rain calls to me and I feel the day slip away from me like a dream. It’s beautiful here, the world shines and smells of wet earth. I think about a talk I’m going to give to some doctors about psychosis soon and how, if I can, I will try and hold the space and evoke a little of the night in it, bring them here. I think of how we talk about feelings and altered states in white rooms under white lights, dressed in suits. And I think about the strange people like me on the edges of the known world, feeling things in the night. I think of my friend who died alone with her face cupped in her hand. I think of Amanda Palmer touching my face as I told her about my friend who killed herself. Belonging is about feeling. It’s about the night. I’m whole here in a way I can never be in the day. I think about waking two nights ago to the terrifyingly familiar thought “Nothing makes any sense”, a lingering echo of my recent plunge into the void. I think of waking this morning from dreams of ecological disaster and wondering what world my child will walk and how long it will last. I think of myself birthing in the dark, face painted like I’m in a psychosis, sailed far into my own deeps, beyond shared understanding or common language. Naked and bearing down on the world, bringing whole galaxies of neurons into existence within a tiny new body for my lover to press to her face and gift with a name.

13 weeks pregnant

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

I’m 13 weeks pregnant and starting to have much better days between the bad ones, which is tremendously exciting. I’ve withdrawn from my Childcare Cert 3 as I am missing immunity to parvo and just don’t feel comfortable being around kids with all the illnesses while I’m pregnant. Fortunately Rose has immunity to everything so she can’t bring home anything dangerous. So it’s full steam ahead for her.

We have a new house guest this week, which was rather unexpected. A teen needing a place to stay turned up a few days before we were about to dismantle the bed in our second room, so the timing has been fortuitous! We’re not sure at this stage how long this arrangement will be so we’re preparing a little for all eventualities and keeping an open mind. We’re a bit startled to say the least, but the teen in question is lovely so there’s been fun times between extra admin and driving around. We’re adjusting as quickly as possible and tomorrow is their first day at a new school! Life is just full of curve balls.

Today was a marvellous day off and I celebrated by cooking pancakes for breakfast after a good sleep in. The warm weather and rain storms have been good to our garden and it’s full of life. Rose and I got our hands into some soil weeding and planting some new annuals in our strawberry patch. We also bought a white mulberry tree for the back yard! Once it’s bigger I think it will make a perfect living cubby house. I remember wonderful afternoons spent reading in the shade of a mulberry tree as a young person. 🙂 Life is rather wonderful.

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Our gorgeous hollyhocks that self seed through the garden

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My favourite colour hollyhocks

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French lavender growing rampant

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Princess Liliies

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Iris

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The new patch of annuals

My first book in print

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I have just collected the prototype/artist’s proof of my first printed book and I am so excited! It looks even better than I expected. This is a printed version of the handmade art book I painted and embroidered last year. I have been working towards this for some time, hoping to create something that evoked the handmade, precious feel of my original, at least a little, but was a much cheaper option for people to purchase.

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There’s some small issues I’m going to sort out in editing before trying another print – particularly the loss of image in the centre as the booklet does not open flat. But I think in fairly short time I will be ready to put it up for sale here on my blog. The first!! Of many more lovely projects like this, I hope. 🙂 🙂 🙂

All is well

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We had a scare recently, which has ended up fine. We took a little holiday; an overnight stay with friends out by the Murray River. It was a really good time but when we went to bed late and happy we found I’d had a small bleed. I’m glad Rose was with me because we were able to keep each other calm and get through the rigmarole of phone calls with not very good reception and issues with returning calls from doctors on helplines not reaching us and so on, without panicking. We wound up getting help from the local ER who reassured us they had supplies to help us if needed, and it was okay to get some sleep and see where things stood in the morning.

We were extra concerned because I have a negative blood type and our donor has a positive one, so anytime there’s a possibility of mine and bubs’ blood getting mingled I have to get checked for antibodies and given a shot of anti D to prevent me forming antibodies against the babies blood. We hadn’t known about this issue or we’d have made blood type part of our donor preferences because it does add a fair bit of stress! But, some things you learn along the way.

I talked softly to Rose and stroked her face until she fell asleep, then googled minor bleeds or small discharges of old blood and reassured myself they are common and usually hormones bothering the cervix rather than a miscarriage.

We were able to reach our own hospital the next morning who were wonderful and told us the window for administering anti D is quite generous, so have lunch with our friends as we’d planned and then come in. A couple of hours in hospital last night, and we were able to see our little one on the ultrasound screen and check their heartbeat which was good and strong. At first I was chilled by their stillness, but after a minute or so they woke up and have a little stretch and kick. There’s simply no better sight in the whole world than a wriggly baby.

We had to wait for the blood test results and there was a very stressed, teary woman in the waiting room with her guy giving her a hug. It was so strange and sad being on the other side this time – the last time we spent hours on that room it was when they’d told us Tam had died and we needed to wait to see a doctor. We both wanted to say or do something comforting for her but didn’t want to intrude either. We tried to throw sympathetic glances their way and empathised about the uncomfortable seats. I felt terribly awkward and kept getting confused and thinking we’d got bad news too and having to untangle that she was upset but we were actually okay. We came home in a daze of relief.

Today we were both tired as all the buried feelings wash out in strange bursts. I woke unsettled and alone because Rose had quietly got out of bed without disturbing me – usually she wakes me to kiss me goodbye. She was only in the lounge feeling sick and having taken today off child care placement after throwing up. Later as I cuddled her in bed she told me “Sorry your armpit is all wet with my tears” and I told her that sounded like a great title for a book of weird poems.
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Our little one protesting being woken up. 🙂

Joy in the Rain

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

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We are in our second trimester and the joy of being pregnant is bubbling over for Rose and I. We are starting to believe this baby will make it into our arms. It’s been a long, hot summer for us, swinging from one heatwave to the next, long stretches of days in the high 30’s or low 40’s where I’ve been sick, weak, exhausted, and stuck indoors for weeks on end. The weather is just starting to break and we’ve been having storms here, freezing rain, thunder and lightning. My beautiful love couldn’t resist and at 1 am went out to dance in the rain. When I finished throwing up dinner I caught this photo of her and snugged myself in a blanket to sit outside on the porch watching her and the lightning.

I’m getting windows of feeling well for a couple of hours some days at the moment. Rose has finished her last work contract and started full time study in Child Care which is making her extremely happy. The cooler weather is much kinder to me. Autumn is not yet here, but I can feel it coming. The garden is full of late roses and irises. We can turn off the air conditioning and open up all the windows and smell the wet earth and basil. My tummy is gently plumping and I sleep with a body pillow at night to ease the joint pain. There’s hope and friends and new books and lovemaking in the mornings. There’s joy again.

12 week scan went brilliantly!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Everything was fantastic. We got to watch the cutest, wriggliest little froggie ever while the lovely ultrasound lady took measurements and tracked their growth. Everything was spot on; they had fluid in their bladder which means their kidneys are working, the umbilical cord has the correct three vessels, we even got to see through the top of their little head and the little walnut brain in there. Wow.

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They moved around so much it wasn’t easy to get measurements and I had to keep wriggling my hips or laughing to jiggle them into a new position – the laughing wasn’t hard, Rose and I are euphoric. It was incredible to see such detail – watching them open and close their mouth, wave their arms, curl their fingers around their face. Their heartbeat was strong and fast, 153 beats per minute. Everything is going exactly as it should. Everything’s okay. 🙂

Finding new dreams

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Today was a great day. I was sick for a few hours after eating each time, but that left me a few hours where I was up to sitting at my computer… And I have finished the prototype of my photobook based on my hand made art book: Mourning the Unborn. I’ve ordered the first test copy and it will hopefully be here in a week or so. Eee! Then for tweaking and editing and… I’ll be able to show you a finished photobook that’s lovely and simple and nowhere as costly as the original. 🙂

I am not good at the first time I try to do something. I feel anxious and overwhelmed and want to get it right and don’t like experimenting. If I have a hands on teacher I’m sorted, if I’m teaching myself it can take me a long time to gather the skills and develop the confidence to get my prototype off the ground. This drives me crazy and I really admire people who jump in and learn as they go and don’t worry about making it perfect first time. Once I get the first one out there though, all the brakes come off and I’m away laughing. The second of anything is a breeze for me, at least by comparison.

Soooooo, published books have been on my goal list for years. A photobook and a non-fiction self help book are so different I expect the first of each will be a challenge, but I’m determined to get off the starting block and Rose is keen to help me. I think watching me transform from puddle of sick misery to my familiar vibrant self has inspired her to help me find some project to work on in my better moments.

We had a lovely conversation about goals and plans for this year this morning and I’m a little unsettled but also hopeful and releived. I’m finally starting to be able to step back from my intense distress about not working (for pay) and supporting my family the way I want to. I’m accepting that currently I’m so ill it makes no sense to be applying for jobs. So Rose and I have been talking about projects I feel inspired by, that I can pick up and put down between good and bad hours or days, and that might develop into a small passive income stream that helps me feel I’m contributing.

Books/publications are one part of that, and the others we’ve talked about are an etsy store for art prints and so on, and instead of a birthday party every year (which frankly I’m triggered by and rubbish at anyway), organising a small exhibition of art work.

I wish things were different. But I’ve got to work with what I’ve got and where I am. At the moment, that’s very little health and a powerful need to be involved in some way that meets twin needs to feel I’m financially contributing and making some kind of difference to someone vulnerable or in a rough place. Focusing on that feels scary and liberating, and I’m hoping I can get some more of those bright moments when I light up and forget being sick to energize and inspire me through the projects. 🙂

For everyone who’s been patiently waiting for me find some way back from my misery, who’s supported me or sent me encouragement or let me know that in some way I’ve made a difference – thank you so much. You are brilliant and you help me feel like less of a failure. I so appreciate it. ❤

Into the Second Trimester

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

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We made it! We’re starting to believe we might all be okay and to look to the future and make longer term plans.

I keep trying to blog but frankly I’ve been so sick I haven’t been been able to put together a coherent post. I’ve had a few windows of feeling better which I’ve put to good use by catching up on 6 months of business admin, various bits of housework, and baking my Mum a birthday cake. Mood wise I cope with a day or two pretty well but by the end of day 3 of feeling horrible, Rose tends to take a very teary person to bed.

As far as we know, everything is going brilliantly with the pregnancy. We’re hoping like crazy that the second trimester might start to be a bit easier on me, currently I’m still losing weight and struggling to eat. We have another ultrasound later this week which is nerve wracking and exciting. Hopefully this time we’ll get to hear a heart beat.

I had a brilliant day today, after a rough morning Rose took me to meet a friend of hers who works as a doula (a pregnancy and birth support person) and we had a great conversation. Funnily enough we found parallels between her work in changing experiences of childbirth, and my work in changing experiences of psychosis which was really inspiring and gave us something of a common language. It was exciting. We also share some experiences around health problems and chronic pain, which is brilliant for me because I’ve struggled to find other people who are going through pregnancy and parenthood from these backgrounds and who can understand some of my particular concerns.

I am so excited to be pregnant, but I also have a tangled relationship with pain, hospitals, working with medical people, being given intimate exams by strangers, being told not to worry, being called a good girl by patronising people who are wearing all their clothes when you aren’t, and many other common aspects of pregnancy and labour. I have past bad experiences of not being taken seriously, of being misdiagnosed, of suffering from intense pain that wasn’t believed, or wasn’t able to be medicated, or was thought to be psychosomatic. I feel very anxious and out of my depth facing labour at times, and my usual approach to feeling this way is to do some research. I’m keen to find safe places and people to dig into this territory with and start to find my own path. As much as possible I want to feel skilled, competent, resourced, and informed. I’m scared and I don’t expect to stop feeling scared, but I don’t want that fear to run the show or limit my choices.

This isn’t the pregnancy and experience I might have had if things had gone according to my original ‘plan’ and I was starting a family much healthier and younger. It’s also not the same experience I had being pregnant with Tam. I find myself grieving for those at times, and struggling to figure out how to turn my longer, more complex history into a resource rather than the mixed bag of hopes and triggers I’m currently dealing with. I want to untangle things enough that I can begin to see the possibility of good outcomes as clearly as the bad ones – most nights I still have nightmares where the baby dies. A friend gifted us their cot and I’ve been frozen with distress at the prospect of an empty cot in the house. I cope okay with the clothes and toys and carriers and so on, but the thought of facing another loss and coming home to an empty cot is simply unbearable to me. Rose took over thankfully, and it’s been dismantled and packed away into the shed.

There’s a fair trauma history here like scar tissue all over my heart. I most hate the feeling that pregnancy is a kind of ‘winner takes all’ situation, that at the end of all this bravery and misery all is made right if we are given a live baby, and all is shown to be hopeless folly if we face death again. I’m trying to find some way to make my choices and our journey meaningful, whatever the outcome. Isn’t that always the way, with life? The challenge for all of us?

So today it was exciting to feel like I’m finding what I need! The services of a doula are sometimes seen as a kind of luxury, but right now for our family this feels like exactly what we need – support that is informed, non-judgemental, and open to the grief and trauma Rose and I are carrying as well as the joy and opportunities we might otherwise miss. And it was exciting to talk shop with someone who was interested in my ideas and experiences too. When I’m a bit better I’m looking forward to doing more writing and giving talks again, and a little work is trickling in again which is making my heart sing. I wish I could be a doula too, but for people in mental health crisis, to help them deal with a first psychosis or navigate being diagnosed with DID, or a severe dissociative episode. That would be brilliant.

Keys to locked places

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

 

I’m 10 weeks pregnant and have been so continually sick that I’ve been unable to enjoy almost any of it. I get a good hour or half day here and there, but the rest of the time I am deeply miserable. The nausea is intense, to the point where I sweat, salivate, and tremble. Sometimes even the vibration of speaking will set off my gag reflex. Smells are intense and mostly horrible. The hot weather has left me weak and exhausted. 2 months of this has thrown me into a perpetual flashback of sick years where this was my life. It’s my nightmare – sick and needing Rose to do everything. Useless, exhausted, and depressed. Housebound, often bed bound. Joint pain, muscle pain, headaches. Thinking with sad longing of my old electric scooter. Visiting friends as long as Rose can drive both ways, and falling asleep on their couch anyway. I’ve been here before and the memories are so painful. I am so tired of being sick.

I know what it’s like to have an unborn child die, and I know that one of the things that burns is hearing women who are pregnant complaining about how difficult they are finding things like morning sickness when you’d give anything to be dealing with that and still have hope of a living child. So I don’t say much.

And I don’t say much because people love to tell me that what I’m going through now is only the tip of the iceberg, that the third trimester is exhausting, that labour is far worse, that chronic sleep deprivation and caring for an infant will make these days happy memories of vigour and health.

And I don’t say much because even my own lovely doctor wasn’t particularly sympathetic about morning sickness that doesn’t involve frequent vomiting, at least until she discovered my significant weight loss and realised I have been very sick. Then she told me that actually lots of women find the first trimester incredibly difficult, and it’s not uncommon for them to be in at their doctors in tears, ashamed and overwhelmed and saying they can’t cope after all and maybe they shouldn’t be doing this.

I don’t say much because I’m grateful grateful grateful and don’t want to lose this baby.

I don’t say much.

I, who have bared so much, find myself silent and stoic, head bowed, making bargains with the universe. If I accept this, will you turn tragedy aside from my family? Does the suffering make my child stronger? I have fought shaming and silencing in so many ways and yet here in a second pregnancy after loss, I find everything has changed. It’s such an effort to share this time, I stir myself from muddy deeps and swim oh so slowly towards the surface, weighted by dread. I fear attack, fear shaming, fear all those who believe that the world is just, that good people are taken care of, that fertility is somehow fair: an indication of boon or blessing or divine right. In my mind I can follow the tortured logic and understand people’s need to calm their own hearts but my heart doesn’t understand, doesn’t forgive, it’s just dark and thick tongued and wordless and afraid.

I didn’t just lose Tam, I’ve lost those beautiful weeks and months of heartfelt joy this time around. That calm certainty that things would be okay; all the stars in their right place and me in mine. (We think we are kind when in fact we are merely happy – CS Lewis) This time around the highs are followed by plunges into deep lows. We talk with qualifiers – if the baby comes, if everything works out. I find myself drawn to stories of tragedy with children and feel like I’m falling into a dark world I can’t get out of. Infants dying in the NICU, 3 year olds with cancer, 7 year olds who drown. I feel like I was so arrogant to think that if I did everything right, I could somehow bypass more savage loss. I could move out of the underclass, plagued by poverty, homelessness, and sickness into a bright ‘normal’ place where things like this don’t happen. That I’ve suffered enough and worked hard enough, earned my way out of more pain, as if life is about what we deserve. Isn’t that the illusion all hopeful parents have? That we can build a pastel coloured wall around our children and keep them from all harm? And when harm comes to your family anyway, the whole strange pastel mummy world seems so bizarre, such a fiction of security. We lie and lie and lie, and create these strange microcosms where nothing casts a shadow and nothing ever dies, and I cannot even breathe in them.

On good days I don’t just feel better, with the health unlocks all the memories of strength, hope, and vigour. I sing and play and work and find myself for moments in the sunlight feeling connected or excited or content. On good days I feel stronger than the bad stories, stronger than the fear and the sense of loneliness and cabin fever. On good days I feel like I will be my own kind of parent, strange and deeply loving, not squeezed into the strange mould I feel advancing upon me, I remember that there’s more than one way to do this right and that authenticity is more important than people pretend, and that some mothers climb trees too and understand both the lure and the fear of the backyard after dark. On good days I can breathe.

Most days, Rose sings to our unborn child, lullabies to quiet all three anxious fluttering hearts. Recently we lay naked in the summer night and she asked me to teach her a new song, something I loved. I thought of us the week before, driving to our first scan, making ourselves face this terrible laying bare of all our hopes and illusions. We sat upright in the car seats, that willing of the body to do what it does not wish to do. We sang to each other, tears masking our faces as we breathed in terror and breathed out our last courage. I sang songs by one of my favourite artists, Nick Cave, and so in bed I sang Into My Arms to her again. There in the warm dark, her fingers tracing my skin, I felt some shadowed part of my heart unlock and found a small sense of peace. A vision of myself rocking a baby and singing Cave rather than inane children’s songs to them in the small hours. It’s the first image of motherhood that exists in my mind beyond the fears of loss and the laughing tales of misery my culture gives me at every turn. I feel like myself in that vision, and in that moment I’m not afraid.

Another night recently we go to bed and I lose my grip on the crumbling stoicism and howl with a broken heart about so many things. How different this pregnancy is and how much I want to enjoy it and feel excited and connected to our growing baby. How deeply sad I am about my business failures and losses, and all the jobs I applied for last year and didn’t get, and the career that I so deeply wanted and have worked so hard for and now… realise that I might never have. Grief, grief like losing a piece of myself. My broken, frozen system, out far beyond all certainties and lost past the edges of the maps. All these dreams. She holds me, my love. She holds me and I weep onto her chest, she soothes me running her hands along my back as I shudder with pain. I find my voice in the darkness and I stop being strong and I stop accepting the pain as my part of the bargain and a little love seeps in through her arms, her kisses. My dark and silent prison unlocks a little. A little light reaches me, and I don’t feel so alone or so afraid anymore.

There’s a first time for everything

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

We had a good scan!!

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One, perfect little baby, wriggling and alive. Exactly the right size, and a strong heartbeat of 173 bpm. Due in early August. This is what we think we’re seeing in our picture:

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Everything is fine. Placenta is anterior, kidneys, ovaries, and cervix all look good.

After an interminable wait in a room full of pregnant couples, we were in and out of this appointment so fast we hardly had time to register that everything was actually okay. We’ve been stumbling around in a state of teary happy shock ever since. Our first prenatal appointment is in two weeks and this time we’re actually going to make it and get our orange book. No showbag has ever been as coveted.

Today there are happy tears and chocolate and the joy and relief of our friends. Today is a good day.

9 Weeks Pregnant

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Well, we’ve made it this far. Tomorrow morning is our first, all important scan. If all is well, our little frog is about the size of a large raspberry, or for the geeks, the One ring. I’ve been pretty constantly sick this pregnancy and have lost quite a bit of weight due to the nausea. Combined with the heat I’ve been pretty useless, although I am still surfacing bit by bit from the pit I’ve been in, getting flashes of insight that my sense of being lost, loathed, and exposed to ridicule are products of my own mind rather than the reality of my life and work. Bitterness gradually eases into grief and self care.

Rose and I spent this morning weeping in each others arms, planning for possible loss. What we’ll name them, what our fears are, who we might ask for help. Then we had a quiet day doing whatever we needed to to stop clawing the world apart. I read on my lovely new kobo ereader, napped, had a bath, and we played a board game with a friend in the evening.

The world is suspended. Rose and I have never had a first scan with good news. Tomorrow morning feels like going to the biggest lottery in the world – a huge dream come true or a whole world dashed. The stakes feel unbearably high. We laugh, do things together, cry, feel numb, retreat into silence, reach out, over and over again. All possible worlds lie before us. And our minds try to break down the odds, understand the future we need to prepare for. They whisper that all is well, they whisper that a good scan tomorrow is still no guarantee, that 8 month pregnancies can still end in loss, that 3 year olds drown, that Mums die in car accidents. That tragedy is always part of life. One way or another our hearts will be broken. We try to face mortality and bear the unbearable.

Our hearts are not up to the task. If our hopes burn, we’ll burn with them, and what walks from the ashes will be different to who we were before. I can’t predict anything with any certainty but that; every step on this road changes us both. So we try to be kind. This is what it is to be alive, humour, love, terror. The lights that guide us and the darkness that parts us. Hands reaching across the dark.

8 weeks pregnant

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

I’ve had my last blood test for the year – HCG levels are still rising, and I’m plumping out in a way that suggests our little frog is growing well… Next week is our all important scan. This week is Christmas, which is slightly awkward considering my random food aversions and morning sickness that’s set off by eating, drinking, brushing my teeth, getting out of bed, or being in the presence of other people doing these things.

My sister is nearly ready to take her cat and dog home, they’ll be missed but I am seriously looking forward to having the extra room here. Major furniture rearrangements are being planned for next year, in which I shall likely cook brownies to thank the people doing the actual lifting of heavy things. The spare bed is going to be dismantled and I’m going to set up a study/studio space away from the pets and baby. I’m very excited about it!

Here is Barloc, he needed a big cuddle after my sister left the other night. He’s looking forward to going home for Christmas.

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Every day that goes by, Rose and I breathe just a little easier. Maybe everything will be okay this time. Maybe we’ll get to enjoy some of this pregnancy and settle in to the next trimester. So far so good.

In the meantime, I have a lovely Christmas planned with several events with friends and family, all relaxed and low key. Rose and I are bringing food to each and I’m thrilled to be doing some Christmas cooking. Today I’ve baked gingernut biscuits (so I have something tummy settling to nibble on), and I’ve prepared the soft centres for my famous coconut rum truffles. Tomorrow I’ll do the macaroon base for my gluten free banoffee tart and then dip the truffles, and on Boxing day I’ll bake a pavlova. Little by little coming back to life, both us growing and waiting and hoping.

7 weeks pregnant

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Still pregnant. 🙂 Life is on a kind of hiatus while the days pass slowly by and we wait to see if this one will stay with us. ‘Morning’ sickness is giving me a tough time, as are an ever increasing list of food aversions. Crackers and fruit are currently my friends. Rose brings home fresh fruit and juice every few days from our local market. There’s a lot of hot weather around and between the servers nausea and heat I’m often stuck home getting cabin fever. Tonight she took me out to the pool to float in the cool water and I came alive for the first time all day. You really are a little froggie, little one. At night we take turns sleeping in front of the air conditioner in the lounge, the sofa is permanently set up as a bed and I nap on it during the day.

You are the size of a blueberry today. Half a matchstick. A small raspberry. A tiny lizard. A little frog. My body is changing around you, swelling up like fruit ripening on the vine. Deep in my gut, tendons pull and yearn as I roll you from my left side to my right while sleeping. You feel like a ship berthed inside me, rocking against my bones, easing into the swell.

Rose and I remember the peace of Tamlorn with wistfulness. We are different mothers to you, hearts a little more scarred, a little more torn open. Trying again is like walking into fire; we are often numb and feel sad about it, but it’s the platform for our courage. We love you no less.

I’m still a half ruin of who I was, my internal world which is usually so lush and verdant is an echo chamber, an empty beach. I have a half life here, full of bewildered grief. My old life flaps around me like tattered flags torn from the mast and I don’t know what to do with it. When Rose holds me, I’m a ship in her bay, rocking to the beat of her big warm heart. She is your Mother, little one. She sings like the sun setting, broken heart still holding hope.

The fear will never stop, come what may, will never truly go away. It’s become as much a part of me as the colour of my blood. The feel of her hand in mine is a kiss of electricity, a burr of tiny insects clicking wings and tuning antenna. The feel of you within me is an ache that nothing can ease, a star strung in a dark sky. A void, and within it, a tiny, distant light.

There’s so much I don’t know. So many questions I can’t answer for you. So many doors I can’t open to you, people who will judge you by me, trials I can’t make any easier. But you are loved. It’s not much, and yet it’s everything. Sail home, little sailor. Swim home, little frog.

6 weeks pregnant

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

I thought I was doing someone a favour this morning but I think it backfired. It turns out that nervous student on first day of placement + very hot weather + morning sickness is a recipe for vomiting, nearly fainting, and somewhat traumatising all involved. There was a lot of fluster. Sensible instructions like “don’t just feel for the vein and then get the needle and poke it in, you have to feel again and make sure the needle will be in the right spot!” were emphasised by a slightly harassed supervisor. I nearly had the opportunity to drink the special extra fun sugar water from the fridge when it was confused with the regular cool water. And I’ve been sternly instructed that however well I feel I’m supposed to lie down for tests in the future because pinning green/white pregnant ladies to the chair is hard on blood techs. I’m not sure why they don’t have sick bags handy considering how many people go woozy with blood tests – and repeat missing the vein tests especially, but fortunately those bags they send off the vials in are handy and don’t leak. Fortunately for me I’ve been doing extra work on my needle phobia in acupuncture sessions.

I’m hanging in there. Froggie is the size of a ladybug. I’m getting a lot of nausea and food cravings and aversions. Rice crackers and fruit are my friends. I wish I felt a whole lot more excited and happy but mostly what I feel is massively vulnerable, and relief that I’ve still got a stack of symptoms that reassure me I’m still pregnant. I’m doing my childcare cert 3 and applying for other jobs, and sleeping on the couch in front of the air conditioner. Rose sorted out my resume for an application last night because I was wrecked and fell asleep – it was so lovely of her and felt like old times with her helping me try and get something for work sorted out. Week by week I’m gradually getting better, but I’ve been a long way down and my energy and confidence have taken huge hits. I find it hard to share about, partly because I’m still figuring out what happened, and partly because it’s easy to swamp me with shame and guilt while I’m still so rough. The days go by very slowly, it’s taking a very long time to reach 8 weeks and our first all important scan. Just breathing. Just hoping.

Please may our baby live. Please may life make sense to me again. Please may I find my place in the world.

5 weeks pregnant & somewhat out of my mind

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

Mornings are not my best time currently. Not nausea but they are often my peak time for feeling rubbish about everything. The night before last I had a nightmare that I’d been pregnant with twins but at least one had died. I woke up into my ‘new normal’ misery and hyper awareness of death and loss and mortality. My sense of death was so strong. I didn’t feel pregnant any more. All my symptoms went quiet and my head blew up. After a few hours I was able to gather my courage and go for the blood test I’d been booked in to. This was to test the HCG levels and see how the pregnancy is progressing. The wait for the results was miserable. I am crazy emotional. I cry about everything. Happy tears. Stressed tears. Everything.

My people are looking out for me. I feel so vulnerable! I’m such a fighter usually, it doesn’t feel like me. But I’m not alone, people are holding my hand. 10pm last night and my lovely GP emailed the results and they are fantastic. HCG level significantly increased – a strong result, an excellent suggestion that everything is progressing well with our little froggie. The relief was like a warm shower after spending a day in the cold rain. So much for intuition. All that guff about trusting your feelings… well sometimes you have to tell your feelings to bugger off.

My days tend to be pretty quiet at the moment, I potter around home trying to calm my anxiety, do some housework and admin. In the evenings there’s baseball and boardgames and DVD’s and hanging out with friends. I miss work and I miss study, but the childcare cert starts this week so I’m hoping it will help scratch that itch. Most mornings I drive Rose to work which is a bit painful if I’m short of sleep but such a nice way to start my day when I’m feeling horrible and that everyone else is out contributing to the world and being a useful citizen and I’m home contemplating another load of dishes and listening to the dogs fart.

I’m holding onto the things I do or have done that are useful or have been helpful to Rose and others. I hope that we’re not in for more tragedy and recovery. Rest is very hard for me, and I flounder when I don’t have a clear plan about my future. I miss everything, miss the hearing voices network, miss my colleagues, miss study, miss feeling that I’m finding some kind of place for myself in the art world, or that my business was growing and going to take me somewhere. Most of all, I miss feeling like myself. I so want to feel part of things again. Patience doesn’t come easily, but I will keep holding on.

But we’re pregnant! I’ve booked my first hospital appointment for mid January. Our 8 week scan falls Christmas week but considering how badly our last one went, we might push it off until the week after. Finding any kind of emotional stability is hard enough as it is! In the meantime, we’ve put up our Christmas tree, Rose is diligently collecting poppy seeds from our garden, and life with all the mad ups and downs, goes on.

Team

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

Second game of baseball last night. For a newbie I did well; helped get someone out, and held my ground batting. Didn’t actually get a good hit in, but I didn’t swing at the dodgy pitches, which takes nerves. I’m proud of myself. It was such a good tonic. My adrenaline was so high during the game my hands were shaking – there’s a fair bit of pressure standing at the plate and wanting to do your team proud. But it’s like it’s retraining my anxiety, because in this context I’m focused, I’m running around, and the rush of adrenaline had a context and a value and a chance to wash out after the game. So different to the chronic stress I’ve been going through. I’m hopeful it’s helping, at the very least I’m really enjoying it and it’s a welcome break from my own thoughts and fears.

I love my team. There are some more experienced players but many of us are new. We cheer each other on, there’s always someone around to ask about weird rules I don’t understand. I don’t feel like I’m letting anyone down just because I’m inexperienced, they cheer for small successes and improvements. I love being part of it. They’ve nicknamed me Dreads.

I have a sense that the connection I get sometimes when gaming with another person, where we’re in sync and supporting each other and completely focused because the task needs all our concentration – that thrilling sense of being part of something greater that moves fluidly as a single entity, almost a dissolving of self… I think that can happen in a brilliant sports team too, where the mood starts to homogenise and the goals are unified and the focus is present and it draws all these different people in together to be part of a whole. It’s intoxicating. I’d love to experience it in that capacity.

I love Rose, too, she’s on my team and did really well under pressure, hit a great ball into the outfield and ran around the bases. She’s asleep on my left arm at the moment. She’s been back at work since the ptsd like a trooper. She’s made radical changes in her life lately; taking up gym, starting the new childcare course next week. It’s inspiring. And she’s unfailingly kind to me when I’m vulnerable,which has been a lot of the time lately. We’re a good team.

Today we’re both going to my first ever acupuncture appointment, which given that it involves needles I’m nervous about. However I’ve been coping pretty well with my phobia lately so I’m hopeful I’m manage it. It’s supposed to help with maintaining a pregnancy, assuming there’s no severe genetic problems. Our important scan is going to happen right around Christmas, which could be tough if it’s not good again. I find myself hoping things will end quickly if they’re not going to last, less time to fall in love, less time to reset my body back to being ready to try again. But maybe we’ll get lucky. I keep having strange dreams where I give birth without warning in weird places like public parks or toilets. In the meantime it’s the brightest of talismans, the most shining symbol of hope, and Rose and I whisper it back and forth to each other – I’m pregnant.

Figuring out Ovulation

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Following my miscarriage earlier this year, my cycle has been impossible to predict. This has been a huge spanner in our plans and we’ve tried a number of things that haven’t worked. You can usually predict ovulation a number of ways, such as charting your temp, tracking mucous changes, keeping a watch for ovulation pain, and using various prediction tests. Unfortunately my cycle length was now swinging from 28 – 39 days without warning, none of our prediction methods were working, and the tests were not helping either. I was not producing enough LH to trigger those tests, and in the combined Estrogen LH tests simply recorded 10+ days of ‘high fertility’ and no ‘peak fertility’. Especially when you’re using a donor, this is beyond frustrating to try and manage.

We did two things that seem to have helped, firstly I started taking 1,000mg vitex every morning, which may or may not have helped my cycle straighten out enough that the prediction kits worked this last cycle.

Secondly I started tracking everything by hand – apps are useless in a situation like this. I charted all my cycles since the miscarriage, and then figured out when ovulation must have happened by backtracking from the next period. Ovulation almost always occurs within a window of days 12-16 before a period. I also tracked my cycle lengths and found my longest and shortest current cycles. Based on that info I was able to predict a large window for our current cycle – my predicted ovulation time for if I had a very short cycle, and if I had a very long cycle. Given that we were using fresh donor sperm and it can live in the body for several days, we could then arrange our insems for every 3 days within that window of a couple of weeks. Frustrating for all involved, but far better than what had been happening where insem dates were sometimes a week away from ovulation dates due to the vast differences in cycle length from month to month.

If you ever find yourself in this situation – firstly, you have my massive sympathies! And secondly, try tracking just your new, post miscarriage cycle and give yourself big windows of possibility to work in.

In other news, we have our first blood test back and HCG levels are excellent meaning that I’m currently pregnant (sometimes a pregnancy test will read positive but you’ve already miscarried), and that I’m low risk for some of the crappy possibilities such as an ectopic or blighted ovum. Excellent news! Possibly challenging is that being around sick little kids is not a great idea, and I had just signed up for childcare training and placement. Something else to figure out. But all things are good so far with our little frog, and our GP is over the moon and being really helpful about how anxious Rose and I are to know things are okay. 🙂

I’m pregnant

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

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Baby due midwinter 2016. 😀 Rose and I are two happy, dazed, teary ladies. We did a pregnancy test last night and another this morning and both have strong pink lines.

It’s early days. We’re at 4 weeks. If we can make it another 4, and have a good scan, then we’re through the high risk stage. Our miscarriage risk drops to about 2% and stays there for the rest of pregnancy (unless other stuff happens). Physically I feel great apart from being very tired and wanting to eat everything in the house.

Two nights ago Rose went to sing to my tummy like she has been for months and I asked her to stop because it hurt too much. We tested last night after I spent half an hour crying on our bed because it was so scary and overwhelming to have so much riding on it. I’ve been seeing whatever counsellors I can find with fertility experience lately, to help me get my head back together. One told me that the stats are that most couples who stop trying to get pregnant do not do so because there’s no money left or no hope left but because the emotional toll is too much. I completely understand that.

Last night I give Rose the test so she can be the one who tells me. I’m washing my hands in the bathroom and she comes up softly behind me and hugs me gently. She brings the test around so I can see it and it’s a strong positive. We cry and laugh and hug and pull back and hug again. Later she lights up – ‘Hey this means I can sing to your tummy again, right?’ Yes, love. Sing all you want. She hasn’t really stopped singing since.

A year ago with Rose

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

A year ago, I planned a trip for my beloved Rose. I took care of all the details and kept a lot of secrets about where we were going and why. I put a lot of thought into making it special, which was especially tricky given that her available weekend kept changing, as did our financial situation. But I was determined, and friends helped out with good advice and suggestions. In the end, it was all rather perfect.

I borrowed a friend’s van with a bed in the back of it. I wore the rainbow skirt she loves. We stopped for lunch at her favourite beach and sat on the shore watching the water as she told me stories about her childhood.

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I took us to a forest. It was beautiful, there were birds, butterflies, kangaroos, foxes. Kookaburra’s serenaded us in the evening.

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On the way there, we stopped at a nursery and bought some plants. They now have pride of place in our garden and the roses are in full bloom at this time of year every year.

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This is one of the roses – Jude, an Austin rose. He is stunning.

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That night I laid out dinner – platters of all Rose’s favourite treats. I carefully dropped a towel on the ground near her chair, and rolled up my sleeves so the words I’d written there earlier would be visible. I found the jewellery box I’d been keeping carefully hidden for weeks.

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I went down on my knees and read her my poem in a trembling voice. Then I opened the ring box to show her her silver and sapphire ring.

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She said yes. We both cried. We read the poem again. We hugged and kissed and ate beautiful food and toasted ourselves.

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And she’s stuck by me, through all kinds of calamities. She shines so brightly in the good times, and she’s so tough in the hard ones. I’m so glad to have her in my life, to reach out in the darkest of nights and feel her there, breathing, or even weeping, in the darkness beside me. She is precious, and I’m deeply glad to be her family.

Trying to get pregnant and breathe

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

Today, I called the SANDS helpline and spoke to a lovely woman. I so needed to hear that the mess I’m in is ‘normal’. It makes sense. Other people who have been here get it, in all the horrible intensity. Trying to get pregnant again after we’ve lost Tam has bowled me over. I had no idea how hard I would find it. After the devastation of losing Tam, on top of the terrible string of losses Rose has endured, by mid year things felt so right and ready. We had a donor again, I had some fantastic opportunities for my business, Rose was working…

I remember that when we first started trying to conceive, I was haunted by a death sense that took me by surprise. Trying again after loss has magnified that to proportions I can hardly fathom. When Rose crashed into severe PTSD and couldn’t work, and my own business hopes were dashed, I went into meltdown. I fought and struggled and tried to find a way through. In the end I’ve had to accept that I can’t stop it happening and just accept it and be patient.

Some days I shift my sense of accomplishment to things like – well today I’m not in hospital. I’m not costing the taxpayer money for a psychiatric bed. (which would be find if I needed it, of course, but hooray that I’m not) I don’t have a string of medicos giving me conflicting advice. I get to choose my own reading materials from the library and I have control of the remote for the tv. Plus, I’ve showered, dressed, hung out with friends, and have all my pets around.

This week has been a lot better. I’ve had a number of good days, and the bad days have reduced me to ‘useless’ but been nowhere near the intensity of 8 hour crying jags or 6 hour panic attacks. I actually felt well enough to call a helpline today – I know that sounds oxymoronic, but it’s really risky for me to reach out when I’m not okay at all, because there’s an even chance of not getting help and then I’m in terrible trouble. Today I could risk it and it helped a lot.

It feels like my life has stopped. Every cycle we aren’t pregnant feels almost like we’ve lost another baby. I’ve never cared a whoot about my own ageing, but I fell apart in the shower the other night suddenly noticing changes to my skin. I’m plagued by nightmares about my friends and family dying. Sometimes when we’re not pregnant I’m heartbroken and relieved in equal measure because at least that’s a baby I won’t miscarry. I can’t breathe properly, all the time. Remember that nightmare ten days between our ‘it doesn’t look good’ scan and the ‘they have died’ scan with Tamlorn? Like my life is on pause. Just trying to catch my breath, all the time, every day. A scream inside that never draws breath. Trying to force myself to be reconciled to something that everything in me simply cannot accept.

I feel crazy. I’ve been vaguely aware of ‘baby mad’ people from outside and never expected to be one myself. I want to be able to have a life while we try to get pregnant, and that feels impossible at the moment. I can’t fathom how that’s the case, but but right now my reality is that most days taking care of myself – eating, drinking, coaxing myself to sleep, staying in touch with my people, and so on, is all I have in me. I can’t tell you how frustrating, humiliating, bewildering, and scary that has been! It is so incredibly hard to maintain any kind of perspective and it’s unbearably vulnerable.

It’s unbearably painful to keep trying, and it would be unbearably painful to stop trying. I chose this and I felt ready and I thought we could ride the roller-coaster and walk into whatever came without regrets but now – I feel trapped. I can’t breathe. I can’t make it happen. I’m out to sea and helpless. We might get pregnant and we might not. We might carry to term and we might not. All the assurances people give us (it’ll happen when it’s time, when you’re ready, when the universe or God decides it’s right etc etc ad nauseam) belong to another world, an illusionary place where there is justice and fairness and a grand plan and some kind of certainty. I don’t live there! I’ve read the stories and talked to the people and I can tell you for absolutely sure that fertility is not fair and there is no certainty. If I knew we would never bring home a live baby I would stop right now and throw no more of my life away on this impossible dream. No more days just trying to breathe, talking myself gently through every hour, every minute. On the other hand, if I knew we were going to conceive this month and carry to term… nothing in the world could stop me. But I don’t know, and I feel powerless. How to live without regret in the face of such unknowns?

I am so frightened. I’m scared that I’ll never feel better, that I’ll have post natal depression, that I’ll be an awful parent, that we’ll never have a child, that all our friends will leave us, that we’ll have another miscarriage, or a stillbirth, or a baby who dies at 2. I’m scared that I’ll lose my mental health, my family, my tribe, my capacity to work, my lovely partner. What am I willing to give up for this? What if it doesn’t work?

Strangely, just being able to ask these questions helps so much. It gives shape and form to pain and darkness. If I can name it, understand it, share it, it’s not so overwhelming. I spoke to a stranger on the phone today and told her how agonising it has been to watch my beloved Rose suffer through PTSD. Night after night of screaming pain, to be holding her hand when she can’t even feel me there. And somewhere in all my rambling I said the thing I haven’t been able to say even to myself – Rose has loved so deeply and lost so many babies, I am afraid that if we never bring home a little one of our own, her heart will be broken beyond repair and I will lose her. I type that with tears running and my face aching with a scream I can’t sound. She hurts so much and I can’t bear it or take it away.

I don’t know how I found myself here, feeling so stuck, feeling that all my world pivots on a single dream I have so little control over. I can’t go forwards, I can’t go back. I can’t breathe. I’m ashamed and embarrassed and confused. I am good at reconciling myself to terrifying things! I’ve supported people I love through suicide attempts, I’ve built a life from homelessness and isolation, I’ve escaped communities in which I was dying and I’ve been able to grieve my losses without going back. I am good at this!

But oh, watching my love in pain. Oh, oh, my heart. Like an addicted gambler, where the stakes are everything I have done with my life until now – each month I roll the dice and hope. I can’t bring the stakes down, can’t end the game, can’t breathe.

Yes, said the woman on the helpline. It makes us feel crazy. It sends us into breakdowns. It isolates us.

Writhing like a worm on a hook. Silent because too many people already think I won’t be a good parent, or that I’ll regret it, or that I’m not up to it. Silent and frightened and embarrassed as my sense of the world falls to pieces and I’m in the biggest free fall through the deepest black pit.

I didn’t have any idea just how hard the last few months were going to be. I wanted to be able to handle them so much better! I’ve tried very, very hard to do so. And I’ve done a lot even in this distraught place that I’m proud of. I’ve helped my love find the support she needs, held her hand and cheered her on as she’s moved into an incredibly fast recovery and return to work. I’ve supported my sister through a tough time. I’ve not leaned too hard on any one person, but I have asked for help and been honest about how not okay I am. And I’m still here, still with Rose, in our lovely home, caring for our pets, gardening, looking after myself, hanging out with friends. I might have flunked college and given up on my business and not been able to write or paint and have no idea what I’m going to do for work – but I’m still here. My life has  not burned down around me. I’ve read a lot of books. I’ve even joined a baseball team, just last night, with Rose and a couple of friends. I still have my life and I’m starting to come out of the deep darkness. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to hear a beautiful talk about supporting trans men at a local pregnancy service a couple of days ago and my heart was so buoyed by it – I love work like this so much! I can’t wait to be well enough to get back to it. Our stunning garden blooms outside my window and it feels like a metaphor on a day like today. All that hard work months and years ago, and today when I have done nothing – not even got dressed, I just sit here and watch it bloom. The effort pays off and carries me through the times I can’t do anything. I rest and it carries me through. I rest and it carries me. For that I’m thankful.

Here I am, sitting in a tin can

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Today has been stupid hard. Took me till past midday to get out of bed and that’s only because I gave up on the idea I’d feel any better at some point, but had at least stopped nearly throwing up.

Now I’m sitting in a pub with my sister listening to Bowie and I feel more normal, more a freak but more sane, than I have in a long time. There’s a bunch of working people letting off steam, singing half the songs and downing cider and craft beers. They’re gorgeous, so much more themselves then they ever are during the working day. We stop being cogs in a machine at night. Sometimes I kind of forget that’s true of other people too. I fall in love with them all, they are human again, shedding roles like dead skin. I wonder if any of them work in mental health and if they’re assholes during the day. By night all is forgiven, there’s a brotherhood here. The more extroverted/soused are dancing by the DJ. I’m drinking a cider chosen for the picture of gumboots on the label.
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The beat thumps in my throat, welcome change from the lump the size of a baseball I’ve been trying to breathe around. I’m wearing eye shadow for f sake, when did I last do that? I’ve spent the last year trying to get pregnant, turning myself into some frighteningly narrow idea of a parent. How can you live for a kid who doesn’t even exist yet? How have I lost my sense of self? Why When’s the last time I did something as myself not as a parent in waiting? What would I want myself anyway, a generic parent starving, or some actual weird-as person being themselves? Easy to answer, hard to do. I’m freefalling without roles and grasping for instructions (someone save me!) yet none of them bring me back to myself like being here tonight. (I promised, no more saviours, still have the scars from the last one) Obedience will make me whole? I f doubt it. Outrageous defiance is a likelier path, love.

I take off my coat just to feel the cold on my skin. I remember there used to be no better protection against the brutal day than black lipstick. Nothing has brought me into line like age, nothing has made me afraid of other people’s opinions like pregnancy and loss. But here? There’s nothing to be afraid of here. We know life is short here, and the world is a mess. Might as well drink. Might as well dance. Might as well sing along in a corner and remember how much I enjoy writing and how comfortable I am wearing the identity of writer like a very worn in coat. ‘Freak’ settles into my soul like a stiff drink. Being alive is such a weird mix of selflessness and self centredness. I have to know what I need and want, have to be able to run from the things that burn and numb. No more making ‘art’ at noon under fluorescent lights. This is better than temazepam.

Like all midnight epiphanies, this will be gone by dawn. I’ll turn back into the broken girl and nothing will make me whole. But I’ve seen something here, some part of my compass that isn’t broken, some sense of self that isn’t ruined. And after the day comes night, always. I’ll find my way again.

In memory of our Tam

/ Sarah K Reece / 6 Comments

Tamlorn was due today.

It seems so much died with them. A fork in the road and a different path forced upon us. I don’t know how that can be but it seems it is. Somewhere out there, in a different universe, two happy ladies are so bouyed by the pregnancy the work stress doesn’t tip one of them into ptsd. We don’t lose our donor, we go to the pregnancy expo full of excitement, we don’t push the business hard and wind up falling down a hole of broken expectations and pressure. Such a little thing and yet our whole year is different. Our whole world.

My sense of faith or meaning about life and death, any possible afterlife, has splintered. Sometimes we comfort each other that if they all still exist somewhere, Leanne and Amanda and Grandma would take excellent care of Tamlorn. I can’t imagine three people with more love and skills and care and humour. And maybe all the others I didn’t know so well would help too; Bethy, Tash, Nana, Bradbury, Pratchett… Somehow every possible answer seems to hurt more than it comforts. This loss makes me need a certainty about death I simply can’t have.

We are still trying to get pregnant, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It seems so little, but it’s so consuming! The roller-coaster emotions make me feel crazy and I work hard to hide and suppress them. Rose and I are so gentle with each other, constantly making room for both hope and grief, reminding ourselves life is still wonderful without a child, that whatever the outcome is we have each other, and yet it’s like trying to calm a storm by talking to it. Beyond our power by far! It consumes everything. Our whole world becomes balanced on pinnacles between ecstacy and devastation.

I’m always trying to manage fear. I’m frightened of losing our donor again, frightened Tam was my one and only baby, frightened of getting pregnant and losing another one by miscarriage or stillbirth or leukaemia at 3 years old. Life feels like a lottery and the bland reassurance of those who’ve won and spun it into some kind of ‘just world’ (don’t worry, of course it will work out) is balanced by the raw pain of those who’ve lost and are childless following eleven miscarriages or other patterns of tragedy and loss.

The best feeling in my world is that moment before getting up to do a pregnancy test. Everything glows with possibility. Our bodies fit together, skin warm and soft, and the morning is gauzy with the film of dreams. We promise not to be devastated, that it’s early days only, that it’s okay to grieve, we can do this. We feel strong and settled and ready.

The worst feeling is another negative test. Coming up with all the reasons we might still be pregnant anyway. Trying not to feel that empty pit inside. Patting each other – it’s okay to be disappointed, we’ll be okay, we’ll try again, while inside we’re both dying. Wastelands and ruin and fears that we can’t counter that perhaps all this is futile. It might be. The only thing that would be harder than trying, is stopping trying. What started in joy begins to feel like a trap. We can’t let go of the dream but the dream is all fire and pain. We surface from misery briefly to remind each other that life will still be worth living if we can’t have children of our own.

We claw for balance, serenity, perspective, and it’s a veneer only over so much shameful intensity. We glory in our roles as aunties of others children, come home feeling blessed to be trusted and embraced, remind each other it’s significant and meaningful and worth putting effort into. And cry as quietly as possible when we’re alone, trying not to be ungrateful. We try to protect each other from our anguish and find gulfs open between us that we have to work hard to bridge with something other than raw hurt.

The very worst of it – worse even than platitudes or instructions to worry less or being told it will happen if we’re really meant to be parents – like a divine benediction, like the gods blessing the ascension of kings – the worst of it is feeling so alone and ashamed by how incredibly hard it is, so disinclined to let anyone know because it seems crazy, and if we seem crazy maybe we shouldn’t be parents after all. The pain of longing reinterpreted to prove our lack of worth and fitness. We’re not so far into this that I can’t recall my own bafflement at ‘baby-crazy women’ and wonder why they can’t just live their life and let it happens if it happens. It so seemed like such needless fuss, such obsession, but on this side of the fence it’s the dream that drives you and it burns.

On bad days I’m glad of a negative pregnancy test because at least that means I won’t miscarry again, or break our hearts with a stillbirth, or lose an infant to an accident. I like to take risks where I feel I can survive them not working out and I’m beyond that place at the moment. I can’t bear the thought of another loss and I don’t know how I’ll find any contentment in the moment or belief that things can work out. I read of women who’ve suffered catastrophic losses and their stories leave me gasping for air, completely unable to fathom such grief. I reach out to Rose and she tells me we’ll take this one miscarriage at a time if we must and my throat closes over and I can’t breathe at all.

What helps is sitting in the night with Tamlorn’s ashes or going to stand by their tree. What helps is spending time with other people who have walked this road or walked roads like it and seeing that the trauma and pain and sense of being crazy and need to hide it are nearly universal. They are normal responses, not well understood by those who’ve not been there usually, but very much the norm, especially for those of us with losses, fertility issues, a donor, and a culture that can be harsh about queer parents. Our sense of fear and vulnerability and exposure is strong. Our need for swift blessings to show the benediction of the universe is much higher.

The pressure on us to be highly emotionally invested but at the same look calm, balanced, and even slightly indifferent, is high. We feel crazy counting days and tracking cycles and collecting clothes, and we’re aware we mustn’t look crazy because it’s only recently that queer parents were even allowed to live openly together, to both call ourselves mothers of our children, and that is still being argued in courts of public opinion that talk about deviance and harm to innocents. (homosexuality was only decriminalised 40 years ago in South Australia) We’re still being held accountable for other people bullying our kids because of us. We still get looks of revulsion when we walk hand in hand. And we are some of the luckiest queer women in the world!

We lost so much with Tam, far more than I realised at first. My cycle is still unpredictable, which apparently is common following a miscarriage. We can’t track it accurately at all – on one set of tests I apparently never ovulate or produce any hormone surges, on another I’m about to ovulate constantly – we gave up testing after 9 positive days in a row. My cycle is now a different length each month. We guess the relevant week and scatter insems through it and hope, and try not to think about it. I try to imagine a future where things work out okay, and I stop reading the anguish of the women in my miscarriage support group. Being pregnant was the most wonderful experience. Trying to get pregnant has been a kind of hell. Normally dreams sustain me and only hurt when they fail. This one cuts deep as you hold it, brings life and death unbearably close, gives me joy and takes my breath away with pain.

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White poppy

On Monday this one white poppy bloomed in the sea of red in our garden. Rose found some comfort in taking it as a token of Tam’s nearness. We talk back and forth to our garden, to Tam’s tree. It bloomed with a thousand blossoms, none of which set fruit. Red poppies in memorial, white poppies for peace. Today we’ll take flowers down to the ocean and set them in the water. (we hold hands like widows over graves)

Oh darling Tam. Do we mourn you or ourselves? You were loved every moment of your short life, we tell each other that. At times I think all the ills of the world could be righted if we could but love it and each other the way we loved Tam. In my minds eye I see myself as a bringer of death, my womb as a coffin, a portal through which souls come into the world to die, and there’s a stream of dead babies flowing away from me to the afterlife. My soul is twisted under the weight of knowing I’m not supposed to care this much, think this way, feel these things – and of not wanting to, either. Spare me the burning intensity, the clinging awareness, the cloying emotions. Spare me 3am and nameless dread. The stakes are high, the bets are placed, and each month the dice rattle in the cup like old bones; I wear a scarlet dress to hide the blood.

Darling Tam, who sometimes seems so close, when I close my eyes I can almost see us together in another world. You are nested between our bodies, fat and pink and milk-drunk, with eyelashes soft as moth wings. Our hearts are like ripe grapes on the vine after rain, overfilled and torn open. It’s a sweet pain.

Dearest Tam, tell my people that I love them. Love them fiercely from this side of the valley. Forgive us that we could not keep you here or hold you longer. Help our hearts tear open with love and heal again with the same love, every day. Happy birthday, darling unborn. I hope you are at peace. May we find some too.

Tam’s tree

/ Sarah K Reece / 6 Comments

If I’d been able to put something up here three days ago, I’d have said we were going okay. Rose held my hand through the stall at the Pregnancy Loss walkathon. It was just like old days, her stalwart, me skittish. Not many people were interested in the stalls, but I did sell one print.

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Two days ago I’d have said I think we’ve turned a corner. I let go of all my fears and plans and expectations and found some sense of ground beneath me, the present moment full of light and glory. For a couple of days I could breathe most of the time and coax Rose into doing things that helped us both feel more alive. I so wanted to write that post and share that news. We made each other laugh, even in flashbacks and darkness, and the darkness was less dark, less painful, less total.

Today, I couldn’t sleep for hours. I’d settle then startle awake to some concern, personal or existential. I deeply want to caretake my people and my networks but I’m too heartsick to do it. I can’t get back on my horse. I can’t be inspiring or hold hope or protect or save or make things better. I’m here, in the mud, too injured to climb back on my horse. Here in the mud, knowing that my life is beautiful, my tribe is beautiful, that I’m vomiting pain in a life I’ve worked so hard for and built so painstakingly. I’m peirced through by a sense of failure and loss and my own woundedness. My baby died. My love is hurting. My business runs at a loss. The word ‘recovery’ is like a spear in my side. I want to be riding my horse. I’m just going to lie here and hurt.

I know some of you are in the mud too. Broken dreams and hurting hearts. A memory of strength and energy and courage. And it’s so desolate and desperate. I know I’m not the only one and I’m not alone. Whatever your life looks like on the outside, you can choke on pain. Something inside screaming out for help and nothing you do calms it. Working hard to do things that might help, to shore up the river banks and sand bank the doorways against the sense of self hate and defeat.

The day with my art prints stall was very long. I took some art supplies and started a new oil painting. It’s Tam’s peach tree in bloom.

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