miscarriage – Page 8

UFC…

Published on January 19, 2016 by Mae @ Rainydayinmay1 Comment

photo-1450849608880-6f787542c88a If relationships had a UFC competition, I would win every time. The premise could make for a great reality show, except for the fact that after the first couple of episodes viewers would stop tuning in… why? Because I’d lose too and the same thing would happen every single week.

This is going to come across so much more pity party than it is. The fact is, I’ve had so much alone time lately to process through things, and this is all what I’ve realized as it continues to unfold in my actual life: I fight for the people I love. I pour love and effort into those relationships. I am easy to toss away. Roll credits…

My mom was quite possibly one of THE WORST mothers on the planet. She psychologically tortured me, sold me to a man sexually for money, successful made it so that as a small girl not only did she throw me away but she put such a wedge of distance between my family and I so that I lost everything… And even though, for the longest time I saw her true colors, I still loved her and wanted to be with her. When I was an adult and I had more power, I poured love and forgiveness and effort into my mother. I honestly believed if she would just open her eyes, her quality of life would change and we could both finally be happy. This of course never happened. The majority of our relationship was thousands of miles apart and up until near the end that made it easier… It reached a point though where her mission was to emotionally break me and turn everyone I loved against me.

My father left when my mom was pregnant. I grew up with his family telling me I was a bastard, deliberately making my childhood difficult and reminding me on a regular basis that he denied I was his because he was simply so disgusted to be my father. At nearly an adult I met my father and learned he has 4 other kids who he was an amazing father to, but if a relationship were to be maintained there all of the effort would have to be mine.

Two sets of people, after I was sent to live in a group home at twelve, “wanted me”. They asked my mom and my mother responded with “I don’t want her, but I don’t want anyone else to have her either.” And that was that, on they went with their lives.

In the middle of that there were a few deeply personal friendships, some more than others, that ended when they left and I was left scarred.

I married my husband younger than I should have and we were both pretty loaded down with personal baggage. After 5 years of marriage, 7 miscarriages, a grueling illness related to them, and one crushingly failed adoption- my husband had an affair with a woman who he delightfully pointed out “can have kids so I love her”, and then tried desperately (in a near psychotic episode of trying to “give me” to another man) to end our marriage. I forgave, I fought him to save our marriage but I was disposable to him.

A couple of years later, having gone through counseling and feeling the most emotionally healthy I’d ever been, I once again resumed the fight for our marriage and we reconciled, on his terms. Fourteen years, almost to the day, later, I was out. He was done and no longer wanted me, again. It didn’t matter if it hurt our family, it didn’t matter if I’d done nothing with my life but support him in his career and raise our family, often alone. None of that mattered because he was done. I’m sure you have noticed the theme there. And it’s not that he’s a bad guy. My husband is the best man I’ve ever known. I love redemption stories and he is my favorite of them.

I have never fought for anything like I fought for motherhood and my marriage. Having my family together is seriously the happiest times in my life and the only times I’ve ever felt like everything would be ok and it was worth it. And now, just with the snap of a finger, it’s done. I had been in therapy due to my mother and the end of her issues before I severed the relationship. Through that process I was encouraged to make an exit strategy, from my marriage. I was severely depressed and a heavy emphasis was put on my marriage because I was so depressed and my husband wasn’t really present or being supportive. It was constantly stressed that my environment was not healthy, which it wasn’t. It was an environment where I was responsible for everyone’s happiness and needs being met and I was left drained and dying, empty. My exit strategy was a long time away and I was such a mess emotionally, I believed my marriage would somehow work out but I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Life as it was then was one I would have died in. That entire way of life could have changed though, if he’d felt I was worth his time or physical effort. He didn’t and in the end, he decided me leaving was best for them.

Since I’ve been gone I have realized that several key relationships in my life rely on my effort in their lives or their need for me to do something for them. Without those things, there is virtually no relationship. I’ve distanced myself from those people, which is healthy and obviously they don’t care anyway. There is no consideration for me, no follow through and no effort for our relationship outside of mine. It’s a healthy distancing and considering how gapingly wounded I am from the loss of my life, (husband and family) they don’t really feel like much of anything.

My husband has stolen the motherhood I fought so hard to have, after such years of loss and agony. The relationship I went to hell and back for, with my 16-year-old is now that of a surface level pen-pal as I’m thousands of miles away and completely broke to try to fix it. He believes this is best for her, while he lives the life I designed and I’m completely alone with nothing I gave everything for. Aside from the fact that man has no idea what it means to sacrifice something or fight for anything if it isn’t career focussed, I am the great big loser…

My hindsight advice would be that if you are stuck in a dark depression, guard your heart and find someone to talk to who isn’t focussed on an agenda. When you are sick like that, and no one does anything for you while everyone depends on you- don’t make ANY major decisions until you feel better. Try and feel better. Take a break, get away for a while. No one is more impressionable than when they are desperate.

My advice to myself is that I am worth fighting for, even if no one else has ever thought so.

My heart screams and aches to fight to mend my beyond broken family and put it back together again, but it’s been made clear to me that I’m not worth the effort. And also IF he were interested in trying, which he isn’t, it would still be on HIS terms. History is a bitch, plain and simple. It repeats itself and cycles the hell out of you, until you just give up. I give up. I’m a pen-pal, not a mother. I’m soon to be an ex-wife, again. I am disposable to anyone and everyone and I’ll live with that. People love to say “you are so strong, stronger than you think.” I think it’s often said to bring them comfort, because I can honestly say it’s pretty hurtful for me to hear. Obviously those people don’t really pay attention to my life or live in my head. I am not. I am weak and the ironies are: that I fight for people I love and am not worth fighting for; and that I am the sort of person who grows stronger and more alive by my connections with people, but I don’t really get to have those. My loyalty is both a character strength and obviously larger weakness…

If my life became a reality show about someone fighting for people, it would be an example because no one has fought harder or sacrificed more for the people in their lives than I have. It would also tank with ratings because the episodes would always end with me in the ring and the other person looking me in the eye and saying “eh. I give up…” and walking away.

Finally…

Published on December 10, 2014December 10, 2014 by Mae @ Rainydayinmay4 Comments

I know a very beautiful woman who, while she is a mother to two, has also opened up her life to be a surrogate for someone else. As someone whose womb tragically failed me, the very idea of this is foreign, magical and exotically lovely. I know many would balk at a wife and mother doing this for another, even a stranger, but I have to question: could there be any greater ministry?

Of course there are already born motherless children, and so many homeless and hungry… But every day I grow more and more in my absolution that not everyone is cut out for adoption. It’s the whole had I known perspective.

Several years ago a very amazing woman, (a different woman) offered to be a surrogate for us. She too was a wife and a mother. (I feel it is important to share those details because there is this stereotype with surrogates that displays a very different type of woman.) This surrogacy never came to fruition because we all lived in a state which didn’t allow surrogacy and there wasn’t really a way around that. It was a nice five minute dream, but one we realized quickly was very expensive and beyond anything we could ever really touch.

The path of infertility is a dark and isolating one. You never realize how many pregnant women there are, until you’ve had a miscarriage. You never realize how many babies are everywhere, until your arms and heart ache every second of the day for your own baby. When it becomes profoundly obvious to you that a woman’s body was designed to bear a child, and yours cannot, there is no worse feeling in the world. It is more painful than rejection and far more humiliating than any failure… And this is the heart to which so many women come to adoption. They come to adoption, full of hope and expectation. They allow that word to touch their dreams.

Finally…

Adoption in and of itself is a word that builds hope. In the general population it stirs a positive emotion.

For so many, many, many children, it is a dream. There are so many children (just in America. I’m just talking our foster care system right now, though I know it goes far beyond that.) Who fall asleep dreaming of a family to Finally come and love them. The one thing the barren mother, broken by her inability to be a woman, and the abandoned child, simply broken, have in common is their dream of that same beautiful word…

In the mind, adoption makes so much sense. Pair the childless mother with the motherless child. Each desperately, achingly wants what they do not have and viola! Finally!

In truth though, life is messier than that. This isn’t some meet cute motion picture. Adoption is hard. It can be (but maybe not always, I hope) ugly. It can be worse than anything you imagine. The world full of babies and women who can be women, the way they were made to be, are always the first to judge when an adoption does not work out and the parents admit defeat and give up. They do not try to empathize with how completely hellish the interior of this journey can be for everyone. Sometimes that is the best course of action, and sometimes it isn’t. Before I was an adoptive mother, I certainly didn’t understand. Now I do. It’s hard to wrap one’s head around though… How can someone abandon a child who has already been so abandoned? But nothing is ever that simple.

My beautiful, bright adopted daughter hates me. She can get over it sometimes, for a day or two, and when that happens life is glorious. We really enjoy each others company and have a lot of fun. It’s beautiful and my husband and I will remark about how maybe we are actually sort of close… because, the truth is, I think she loves me too. The best she knows how, anyway. The hatred trumps love though. And as awful as it sounds, through so much work, and help we’ve learned (though she has trouble seeing this) it isn’t personal and it isn’t about me. It’s about her, though she directs it at me. I didn’t do anything to earn her vindictiveness or cruelty, but I’ve been receiving it for years. It’s a very isolating place to be, and I’m pretty empty anymore.

Some weeks ago, in a rare moment of candidness I asked her why she feels she hates me so consumingly and her answer shocked me to my core. I expected some “because you hold me responsible for my actions” nonsense (we get that thrown in our face a lot, because she’s a kid and that makes sense!) Defiantly she glared at me and with absolute disgust in her voice she spit out “Because you adopted me.”

Startled I questioned, “Me personally? You wish someone else had adopted you?”

And she scoffed like I was stupid. “No, I don’t want other parents. I just think adoption is an evil thing and no child should ever have to go through it.” She proceeded to rant about how some kids are products of horrible divorces, or have major disabilities. Despite having an early, pre-childhood of major abuses, she views adoption as her life’s affliction and the thing she’d one day over come.

Another Finally I guess. Finally, a reason, though it makes no sense and hurts my heart and makes me so confused… And feeling so isolated and alone here on my island.

I’m noticing a lot lately that the world is full of three types of people. One- the person who loves and is willing to give so much of themselves, even if it doesn’t make sense to their observers. Two- the people who judge the surrogates and givers of the world. These are the same ones likely condemning the broken, for being broken. There is a lack of empathy, replaced my their need for opinion. And Three- The ones who act the supportive and empathetic part, but are unavailable and their support empty.

Seeing this makes me know who I want to be, for sure. Even if I’m only half a woman…

Hurting where you’re at…

Published on June 20, 2014 by Mae @ Rainydayinmay7 Comments

As part of a writing group challenge/link up, I was supposed to write on Hurt this week. This week… The week that my world has felt rocked in every negative way imaginable… This week, the week that I’ve had to confront every horrible feeling of abandonment from my own adolescence as my husband and I face horrible choices, as parents, that I just knew I’d never have to make.
This week, I don’t know how to write about anything but hurt. I also don’t know how to write about where I am. I think, most accurately of all, I feel like I no longer know how to write at all…

I am disjointed, broken, aching and throbbing on some metaphorical floor, while really I am numb and driving through daily details with reality hovering just over head. This reality, the blackest of dark clouds which funnel and threaten to destroy everything, it no longer scares me.

I am here, yet not. Tear empty and without thought… Nothing makes sense and I’m reminded that hard choices, tough choices, the choices that leave us hovering over the toilet as vomit spews from our mouth- those choices are the ones we never want, but will inevitably come at some point. I secretly wish that I could wake up one year from today and see that everything turned out ok, and that I handled these things before me beautifully. The scariest thing, (so I lied, I guess I am still afraid) is that neither of those things will be true.

When I lay bleeding in hospital beds, or bathroom floors, or that one time standing, in my neighbor Heather’s kitchen, miscarrying my babies- I believed I had never known a pain like that. Physically, I didn’t care what my body felt, but heart-wrenchingly that hurt was soul shredding… Years later when my sweet twin girls, who we’d had for 10 months and were adopting, were suddenly ripped from my arms, I revisited a different angle of that hell. Since I became a mom there have been many moments of ache closely similar, I guess because I’m similarly vulnerable, and because this motherhood journey has not been an easy one. This past almost-year though, nearly every day has felt like some awful Groundhog Day version of those moments, twisted into something achingly unfair and worse. I haven’t the strength for many more seconds of this, I haven’t the water for many more tears…

Why Mother’s Day is Crap…

Published on May 12, 2014 by Mae @ Rainydayinmay2 Comments

Mother’s day is my least favorite holiday in all of the calendar year days to celebrate. It isn’t that I don’t love my bio-mom, because I do. Very much. And it isn’t that I don’t honor the memory of my mom or my grandmother, who both stepped in when I needed them the most. Until yesterday, I’m not even sure I could summarize why I’d just rather ignore it completely…

Years ago, on my friend Mindy’s first mother’s day she gave me a sweet little mother’s day gift. A loving little gift for me, and a gift to tuck away for my someday baby. In the note which accompanied, she thanked me for loving on her sweet baby girl and she expressed her faith and optimism for my someday mommyhood. In that small gesture she acknowledged that I was more than my miscarriages and infertility. I was more than my broken heart and empty longing, but she did this is a personal way that was real and did not place any pressure on me. Years later Mindy would have a brilliantly huge birthday bash where friends from everywhere would travel to pay her honor, and speak. I would share my memory, and publicly fall apart in a soppy mess of tears. Partly this is because I don’t publicly speak, partly there were other reasons but significantly to this post, it is because her beautiful gesture will forever be one of my Top Ten Life moments. It meant more to me than the majority of gifts that I’ve ever been given, and to tell you the truth, I cannot even remember what the gift for me was exactly. Something from Bath & Body Works I think. Because, the what was completely irrelevant. It was the why, and the how, and a little bit of the when… For Mindy, it was her first Mother’s Day, as a mom. It was her first Mother’s Day without her mom. It was a crappy day for her even beyond that last tragic reason because she was not acknowledged or appreciated… So much went into something so small and meaningful.

Beyond that one tiny instance though, Mother’s Day for me has meant blinding reminders of my miscarriages and infertility. It has meant a world full of Hallmark holiday expectations met with reality that is far more hurt filled… And by this I don’t mean that I expected beautiful and expensive gifts from my kids and instead got a handmade macaroni card… I mean, I am a mom to hurt kids, who were hurt before I got the privilege of being their mom. The very real truth to this is that sometimes they feel really hard things and they lash out and punish, and the person on the receiving end of that will be me. And it sucks. And this always falls on my birthday, and this always falls on Mother’s Day (and other holidays. and non-holidays, and days that start with consonants and end in y’s.)

While I believe that people mean well, I have to question why there is an intolerance to actual Motherhood, an insensitivity. Attachment disorder aside, events like baby showers, baby dedications, etc. can be very difficult for someone who has lost a child or struggles with infertility. I was shocked yesterday when we went to church (just my husband and I, as our daughter was at youth group elsewhere) and dozens of people we’ve never met where telling me Happy Mother’s Day. (and not just me, EVERY adult woman.) At one point I logged on to Twitter/FB in the afternoon and saw hundreds of tweets/posts from friends who are either fellow adoptive moms, other women who ache for babies, or friends who have lost children talking about how difficult of a day it was. Women who feel isolated by their hurt should not have to go into hiding days before a holiday meant to make them feel loved, should they? This just makes me sad. There has to be a way that we can embrace the broad spectrum of motherhood and all of the different types of women that it holds within it, whether they are grieving, feeling unloved, aching to be a mom or just tired and under appreciated. This is not a one-size-fits-all holiday, but it’s up to us (women) to take notice and acknowledge each other to make that difference. The type of mom, in the type of family that this cookie cutter holiday caters to, is the minority, and if you look close you’ll see that a large portion of moms spend their special days in misery, and then to top it off there is the guilt that follows, from feeling miserable.

We keep Mother’s Day REALLY low key around our house. Chw will make breakfast. We don’t usually go to church (for the reasons I mentioned above) but did yesterday because Gen really wanted to. We might go to the book store, or a movie, and then we just hang out at home. I like the low key… Last week was a hard week full of lots of anger and hard, mean words. I like the quiet days, they suit me just fine. My favorite “Mother’s Day” will always be that one, the year before I became a mom, with the thoughtfulness my friend displayed though. If only we could all be a little more like that…