I didn't cry in the car the other day.
I didn't freeze up.
Or stare straight ahead.
Or feel the crushing weight of the world on me.

I admit that I did pause.
I was introspective - I always am now.
Loss has done that to me.

But I didn't lose it and that is saying something...

more on that later.

The other night hubs and I were laying in bed, the two kiddos swaddled between us, and we had a conversation that went something like this.

Me: Do you feel like their arrival has brought you any healing?
Hubs: Yeah... a little. You?
Me: Yeah, me too.

It got me to thinking about this word - healing.
What exactly is healing?
What does it mean in the day to day?

I knew that there were pieces of me that could only heal with the healthy arrival and safe homecoming of the snowflakes. Being pregnant with them hadn't healed me. I had been pregnant before. Birthing them didn't heal me. I had done that before too. But getting to bring these little ones home. Watching them grow and live and thrive and change each day of these last seven weeks. To certain wounds that came with losing Peyton, with never bringing her home, with never seeing her grow, with doubting my abilities to create healthy life - to these wounds in particular my little snowflakes have brought healing.

And then there are parts of my heart and soul that still need healing.

I was told my child would die.

Nothing can take that back. 

I had to make end of life decisions.

Nothing can help me live with them. 

I held my daughter as she struggled to draw her last breath.

Even as I type these words, there is a weight that sits on my chest with a familiar heaviness. I don't know what it is to NOT feel it when I think of my sweet Peyton's moments on this earth. It's possible I never will.

That doesn't mean, however, that I won't, in time, learn to live with decisions I have made. It doesn't mean that I won't find a way to forgive myself my humanness. I can't turn back the hands of time and unlearn the painful lessons of loss, and I will always bear the scars of what Peyton's life was, but that doesn't mean the pain can never be dulled or the wound healed. There are so many things in my life now that felt impossible just a short while ago.

Last year at a meeting of my bereaved mothers group, the women went around the circle talking about their losses and what had gotten them through, and every woman in the room said that had it not been for her other living children, she would never have been able to go on. I remember looking up at them when my turn to speak came, with tears streaming down my face, and saying, "and what about me? I have lost my only child. How do I go on?"

They had no answers for me and I realized in that moment that I had to find my own.

I had to find a way to go on knowing that it might never involve other children. Knowing that a doctor, with a wall full of degrees, had told me that having other children would be an impossibility.

I had to find a way to go on just in case there were happier days ahead for me.

I wanted to give up after that meeting, but I refused. Instead I woke up the next morning, and the one after that, and on and on even on the days that I didn't want to wake up. Even on the really hard days. I drew a breath. And then another. I existed because it was my only choice, and as I did, little by little, my life was improving. I didn't know it then. I couldn't feel it then. Even through my diagnosis of infertility, and my failed first round of IVF, I was working towards my future.

That, too, was a part of my healing.

Which brings me back to what happened in the car. An ad played on the radio. It was a Mother's Day ad on a local rock station. It went something like this:

"She endured morning sickness and carried you for nine hard months. She spent countless sleepless nights taking care of you. She put up with you during those tough teen years. She loved you through all your bad decisions. This Mother's Day, do something for her in return..." 

After that it went on to hock some contest prize pack or product.

In the past that seemingly benign ad would have left me frozen. I would have said to myself: I carried her for nine long months but never got to see her teen years. I would get stuck on how unfair that was. I would think about the way I had been cheated by her birth.
By her short life.
By her death.

I would start questioning myself:
Will I ever be a mother?
Am I still a mother?
How can I be a mother if my only child is dead?

On and on would go the cycle of dismay over having to live childless in a world full of children.
On and on would go the fury at not knowing how to define myself.
How to define her.
How to define US.

But this time it was different. This time the ad played and I actually HEARD it. Not the isolating meanings that it would have held for me in the past, but just a silly ad on the radio about the crap kids sometimes put their mothers through. For the first time since becoming a mother three years ago, I realized, I almost felt a part of the club. Something that was only possible because I hadn't given up on trying.

I don't mean on trying to conceive.
I mean on trying to live.

I now have living children to show for my hard work.
Children who keep me up all night.
Children who will one day be teenagers, then adults, and eventually find themselves listening to just such an ad wondering what last minute gift to get me for Mother's Day.

For the first time I heard about Mother's Day and didn't immediately want to crawl under my covers and hide from the cruelness of a world that made me go on without her.

I am a mother.
I will always be different.
I have three children who exist in two very different worlds but I am a mother who loves them all,
and I am healing.

I can't be like other parents. For one thing there are certain neuroses that I exhibit that most other mothers wouldn't understand. I am hyper vigilant about protecting my children from carcinogens and I can't say that that will ever end. That, and doing whatever I can, whenever I can, to keep them healthy, even when it seems overboard to those who have never suffered loss, are two things I won't ever make excuses or apologies for.

That being said, I am parenting twins after loss and can honestly say that while one might expect me to assume the worst, I don't.

I don't double check to make sure that they are breathing.
I know they are.
I don't hold back on making plans for their futures.
I know those days will come.

Somehow, despite what I have been through, I still manage to always assume the best for their future, and at times even my own now, and that, too, is a sign to me that I am healing.

I think that in the loss/infertility world, what has been taken from us is so organic, so deeply a part of our being, that to expect us to compensate for what is missing overnight is unfair and unrealistic, but somehow, as hard as it may be at times, we find a path towards moving forward with the memories of our children, and we survive.

Each of us will write a different story.
Some will go on to have more children.
Others will not.
But all of us, with each day that we draw breath and work toward our future, regardless of how bleak we think that future may be or how far away our "happy ending" may feel, is doing the hard work of healing.

In our own ways.
On our own timelines.
Even though in the moment we can't see it,
by living we are all healing,
bit-by-bit.

I didn't cry in the car the other day.
I didn't freeze up.
Or stare straight ahead.
Or feel the crushing weight of the world on me.

I admit that I did pause.
I was introspective - I always am now.
Loss has done that to me.

But I didn't lose it and that is saying something...

more on that later.

The other night hubs and I were laying in bed, the two kiddos swaddled between us, and we had a conversation that went something like this.

Me: Do you feel like their arrival has brought you any healing?
Hubs: Yeah... a little. You?
Me: Yeah, me too.

It got me to thinking about this word - healing.
What exactly is healing?
What does it mean in the day to day?

I knew that there were pieces of me that could only heal with the healthy arrival and safe homecoming of the snowflakes. Being pregnant with them hadn't healed me. I had been pregnant before. Birthing them didn't heal me. I had done that before too. But getting to bring these little ones home. Watching them grow and live and thrive and change each day of these last seven weeks. To certain wounds that came with losing Peyton, with never bringing her home, with never seeing her grow, with doubting my abilities to create healthy life - to these wounds in particular my little snowflakes have brought healing.

And then there are parts of my heart and soul that still need healing.

I was told my child would die.

Nothing can take that back. 

I had to make end of life decisions.

Nothing can help me live with them. 

I held my daughter as she struggled to draw her last breath.

Even as I type these words, there is a weight that sits on my chest with a familiar heaviness. I don't know what it is to NOT feel it when I think of my sweet Peyton's moments on this earth. It's possible I never will.

That doesn't mean, however, that I won't, in time, learn to live with decisions I have made. It doesn't mean that I won't find a way to forgive myself my humanness. I can't turn back the hands of time and unlearn the painful lessons of loss, and I will always bear the scars of what Peyton's life was, but that doesn't mean the pain can never be dulled or the wound healed. There are so many things in my life now that felt impossible just a short while ago.

Last year at a meeting of my bereaved mothers group, the women went around the circle talking about their losses and what had gotten them through, and every woman in the room said that had it not been for her other living children, she would never have been able to go on. I remember looking up at them when my turn to speak came, with tears streaming down my face, and saying, "and what about me? I have lost my only child. How do I go on?"

They had no answers for me and I realized in that moment that I had to find my own.

I had to find a way to go on knowing that it might never involve other children. Knowing that a doctor, with a wall full of degrees, had told me that having other children would be an impossibility.

I had to find a way to go on just in case there were happier days ahead for me.

I wanted to give up after that meeting, but I refused. Instead I woke up the next morning, and the one after that, and on and on even on the days that I didn't want to wake up. Even on the really hard days. I drew a breath. And then another. I existed because it was my only choice, and as I did, little by little, my life was improving. I didn't know it then. I couldn't feel it then. Even through my diagnosis of infertility, and my failed first round of IVF, I was working towards my future.

That, too, was a part of my healing.

Which brings me back to what happened in the car. An ad played on the radio. It was a Mother's Day ad on a local rock station. It went something like this:

"She endured morning sickness and carried you for nine hard months. She spent countless sleepless nights taking care of you. She put up with you during those tough teen years. She loved you through all your bad decisions. This Mother's Day, do something for her in return..." 

After that it went on to hock some contest prize pack or product.

In the past that seemingly benign ad would have left me frozen. I would have said to myself: I carried her for nine long months but never got to see her teen years. I would get stuck on how unfair that was. I would think about the way I had been cheated by her birth.
By her short life.
By her death.

I would start questioning myself:
Will I ever be a mother?
Am I still a mother?
How can I be a mother if my only child is dead?

On and on would go the cycle of dismay over having to live childless in a world full of children.
On and on would go the fury at not knowing how to define myself.
How to define her.
How to define US.

But this time it was different. This time the ad played and I actually HEARD it. Not the isolating meanings that it would have held for me in the past, but just a silly ad on the radio about the crap kids sometimes put their mothers through. For the first time since becoming a mother three years ago, I realized, I almost felt a part of the club. Something that was only possible because I hadn't given up on trying.

I don't mean on trying to conceive.
I mean on trying to live.

I now have living children to show for my hard work.
Children who keep me up all night.
Children who will one day be teenagers, then adults, and eventually find themselves listening to just such an ad wondering what last minute gift to get me for Mother's Day.

For the first time I heard about Mother's Day and didn't immediately want to crawl under my covers and hide from the cruelness of a world that made me go on without her.

I am a mother.
I will always be different.
I have three children who exist in two very different worlds but I am a mother who loves them all,
and I am healing.

I can't be like other parents. For one thing there are certain neuroses that I exhibit that most other mothers wouldn't understand. I am hyper vigilant about protecting my children from carcinogens and I can't say that that will ever end. That, and doing whatever I can, whenever I can, to keep them healthy, even when it seems overboard to those who have never suffered loss, are two things I won't ever make excuses or apologies for.

That being said, I am parenting twins after loss and can honestly say that while one might expect me to assume the worst, I don't.

I don't double check to make sure that they are breathing.
I know they are.
I don't hold back on making plans for their futures.
I know those days will come.

Somehow, despite what I have been through, I still manage to always assume the best for their future, and at times even my own now, and that, too, is a sign to me that I am healing.

I think that in the loss/infertility world, what has been taken from us is so organic, so deeply a part of our being, that to expect us to compensate for what is missing overnight is unfair and unrealistic, but somehow, as hard as it may be at times, we find a path towards moving forward with the memories of our children, and we survive.

Each of us will write a different story.
Some will go on to have more children.
Others will not.
But all of us, with each day that we draw breath and work toward our future, regardless of how bleak we think that future may be or how far away our "happy ending" may feel, is doing the hard work of healing.

In our own ways.
On our own timelines.
Even though in the moment we can't see it,
by living we are all healing,
bit-by-bit.

My house hates me.

Don't look at me like that - it's true.

When Peyton died, our seemingly perfect house had over $40,000 worth of unnecessary repairs come up over the first six months to a year of our grieving - talk about an expensive distraction.

Now, here I am, hugely pregnant and on bedrest, and our house has decided to turn on us again.

Honestly, at this point I no longer know whether to laugh or cry.

Yesterday morning I woke up to an odd sound. In my slumber filled haze I thought it was the dog licking something - herself, some furniture, something she had picked up off the floor. "Be quiet Charlotte," I muttered into my pillow, but the sound persisted. When I opened my eyes, I was astonished to find that the sound I heard was water dripping into the room from above our window casing. We live in the northeast and have had a TON of snow and ice in the last month - apparently yesterday our roof decided it had had enough.

I called hubs at work in a panic because there was water everywhere, and I am on bedrest, and what the heck am I gonna do about something like that? He came home and raked what he could off the roof (which, while it was a valiant effort, was kind of useless against the 8-12 inch thick ice pile-up that we have going on up there) and to both of our surprise, the water stopped.

Phew!

I had had an NST scheduled for the morning, and I asked hubs if he needed me (what I thought I was going to do, I couldn't tell you) and he told me he had it covered, so I headed off for the hospital. We were predicted to get a major storm, but luckily it was supposed to be clear until well after my appointment. I arrived at the hospital and wouldn't you know, they put me in the bed RIGHT NEXT TO that same woman from last week... the one with the junk food and the soda and the healthy babies - what are the odds? They did a BP check, overall pretty good though a little high, I am assuming from the stress of my house revolting against me, and hooked me up to the monitors.

The nurse asked how my morning was going, and I told her about the leak, at which point she told me a horror story about it happening at her mother's house, and how it did super extensive damage, and blah blah blah. She then told me to not go into the attic to check it out (like I was gonna do that anyway) and that if it started again, to let someone else deal with the leaking water. Well that is sort of hard when you are home alone. I mean if there is  a new leak that pops up, I can't just let it pour in without going over to stick a bucket under it or something.

After scaring me about all the crap that could be in our leaking water, and all the damage it could do and dollars it could cost, the nurse asked where the babies were, and I told her. She tried for a while but couldn't get a heartbeat on Baby A. The nurse kept leaving me and saying how strange it was that it wasn't monitoring, and then she would come back, contort me into some strange position where I had to hold this pad with one finger and that pad with another and I couldn't get to my ginger ale and boy did I want that ginger ale...

What may come as a shock was how unconcerned I was through this whole process. The snowflakes had been so incredibly active all morning and I think that is why. Sometimes my little baby boy A likes to hide from the NST pad so knowing this helped too.

Well an hour went by - then two, and still nothing but spotty recordings of his heartrate 99-200-154-96-202 like that it went on and on. I heard the nurse mutter something about "go see if you can find those twins" to another nurse, and a new woman appeared. She wheeled over the ultrasound machine, found the two babies and figured out the big mystery - both of the snowflakes are now lying transverse (horizontal!) Baby A has been head down and low for months, where as B will flip from vertical head down to transverse from time to time. I guess A got sick of having B sitting on his head, so he flipped too!

I have to admit, I was really frustrated and disappointed by this discovery.

I know it sounds silly to be upset over this but I really REALLY want to VBAC these babies. The nurse gave me some bullshit about how whatever the doc chooses I should be happy, and I wanted to scream because not for nothing, I know many women have c-sections without any issues, but my c-section with Peyton caused me MANY issues, not the least of which was robbing me of my fertility, so I am really not walking lightly into having another one like it is no big deal.

I am a realist, I know the possibility, and maybe the probability even, are there that I will have to c-section these babies, but that doesn't mean I am not wishing for VBAC. C-sections limit the number of children you can have, and we have always wanted a large family. I just don't think that unless you have had a c-section to bring a child into this world, and then lost that child, that someone can fully understand. It was also because of my c-section that we had to wait a year to start trying again, and another 6 months after that to discover I even had an infertility issue... so now that I am beating a dead horse here... let's just say I don't want one. I may need one, but I certainly don't want one.

Once the babies were found on ultrasound, my NST went a lot more smoothly. They checked my fluid, which they told me was wonderful, and sent me on my merry old way. I came home to find hubs working like mad at trying to get ice off the roof to no avail. I usually feel pretty grown up but I have to say, when things like this happen with our house I feel like a kid who is in over her head.

So after a long (and exhausting for hubs) day, we moved back into our bedroom last night- finally! We have been staying in the guest room for about a month - since the infamous mercury incident - and the water dripping in the guest room was just the motivation I needed to get out of there. I had been holding off, since we had put in new wood floors in the bedroom and I wanted to give them time to off gas, but I figured a month was sufficient.

 Well, to say last night was a sleepless night would be an incredible understatement. For whatever reason I was nauseous all night, and kept getting up to deal with morning sickness. At about 4AM, I finally closed my eyes and kept them shut, but wouldn't you know... 7AM I woke up to new drips - IN OUR BEDROOM! UGH!

Ty Pennington where are you!?

Hubs was outside shoveling, and looking mighty exhausted by it - poor thing! The storm we got last night was very wet and heavy, and I could see that each shovel-full was making him wish he had stayed in the midwest, rather than move up here to all this snow and mess to marry a northeastern girl!

I peeked my head into the guest bedroom to see how the dripping was going in there, and what had been a controlled drip into a bucket, had spread overnight into a splattering mess! Hubs came in and I gave him the bad news about the leak getting worse, and he headed back out, head down, to re-roof rake the roof! After that, he put more plastic and buckets and towels down in both bedrooms, and looking defeated, headed for the shower.

"We are gonna laugh about this someday." I called to him from the bottom of the stairs.
"About what?"
"About our house deciding to fall apart over the last month of this pregnancy. About not being able to get anything ready in time because of it. About all of it."
"We are?"
"Yes. We are."
"But not today," he grumbled.
"No," I admitted, "not today. But someday."