Sept. 26: I am having these muscle twitches in my lower abdomen that feel exactly like a baby inside me with the hiccups.
What the hell does it mean? It seems cruel and hopeful at the same time. It seems more cruel to my empty body than the usual sights that stalked me this morning at the public library: the mother with the two small daughters who opened her van door with its two carseats next to me just as I was getting out of my car; the woman with the preschooler and toddler walking by me as I entered the library; the hugely pregnant woman with the toddler boy passing by me as I went to buy some tea at the library cafe.
I know these are common sights, as are the multitude of hugely pregnant women I seem to see every day, and the FIVE friends and acquaintances I've learned are pregnant in the past couple of months. I want to believe these are good omens of another, healthy baby in our future, and good reminders of our Elise.
But these twitches...the hiccup-like ones are new. I've had phantom ones that were occasional, like the kicks and punches with which Elise once poked me. When I read about others having these ghostly movements in books about stillbirth, I could hardly believe it. But then they happened to me.
And I don't know what to do with them. I do remember seeing an item at the popular museum show Bodies: The Exhibition in Seattle that has stayed with me: in the room about fetal development, a passage read, "Fetal cells stay in the mother's body for years after birth." I felt comforted by those words. It seemed like a physical element of Elise's spirit living on in my life.
I think I need to rethink my connection to my body, let my body into my consciousness more. The weight loss, the illness, the feelings of disconnection are telling me this, not to mention the words of my massage therapist and acupuncturist. I'm not sure how to do it. Maybe I'll start by taking myself for a walk.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Integrating
Sept.25th: It’s been so long since I’ve written that my readers must have given up on me by now. I’m still here, but words have been absent from my state of mind until recently: I agonized through the writing of my conference paper and finally e-mailed it late to my panel chairman on Saturday the 15th, while Dan was out running a race and I was in charge of Felix. This day of course, Felix didn’t want to just zone out in front of his DVDs when I plugged him in to finish that infernal paper, but said, “I want to watch with you, Mommy” for the first time ever. Of course. So that made it even harder to write, but I finished the paper, and didn’t look at it again until the morning of my conference panel in Salt Lake City. Luckily, it was coherent.
I’ve been writing in my journal nearly every day, as an ongoing therapy that helps me unload my anxiety, sadness, and estrangement from words, ironically. I write about how I have nothing to write about. I write 3 pages, as prescribed by Julia Cameron in her “morning pages” prescription in The Artist’s Way. I usually feel off-kilter if I don’t write in my journal, even if I’m convinced I don’t have anything to say in it.
Today I went to meet with a fellow professor who kindly made an agreement with my worried chair / boss to be an official mentor for me. He wasn’t in his office though. I asked the secretary of his department if he’d been in, and she said she hadn’t seen him. I hope he is okay…the last time I was supposed to meet with him, almost a year ago when I was on the search committee for an anthropologist of Japan, I didn’t show up because I was in a delivery room waiting to give birth to Elise.
Sarah walked by while I was waiting for my official mentor this morning. We hugged each other a long time: one of her coworkers was killed in a car crash a few days ago, a woman with three children and two stepchildren, a husband who adored her, with whom she was looking forward to retiring with, Sarah said. My heart feels heavy with empathy today. Another friend’s sweet, beloved dog died, just got terribly, suddenly sick while she was out of town. He was not much more than a puppy and so cherished by her ever since she’d found him abandoned in the desert by the Colorado River.
Anne Lamott writes in her newest book Grace (Eventually): “It’s fine to know, but not to say, that in some inadequate and surprising ways, things will be semi-okay, the way wild flowers spring up at the rocky dirt-line where the open-space meadow meets the road, where the ground is so mean. Just as it’s fine to know but not say that anger is good, a bad attitude is excellent, and the medicinal powers of shouting and complaining cannot be overestimated.” My share of anger is definitely there, and my friend Tracy and I wished we could choose any number of others to get rid of (how about just ONE, perhaps Osama bin Laden?) instead of losing innocent babies, or good people or creatures that leave behind so many broken hearts.
I think I am figuring out how to integrate my pain into my life—something I’ve been frustrated with and confused about for many, many months. I can’t describe the exact process, except to try and try again to be patient with myself: be patient with my anger, my denial of Elise’s death, my depression, my impatience; and credit myself for my self-care (the therapy, the support group, the tears and conversations with Dan, the attempts to reach out to family, the outings with friends, the yoga, the massage, the antidepressants, the acupuncture, the exercise…and yes, the complaining!). I walked home from campus today, and the maple leaves on Grand Avenue are a lovely gold and red. The air was clear and chilly, the sun warm, my steps grateful.
I’ve been writing in my journal nearly every day, as an ongoing therapy that helps me unload my anxiety, sadness, and estrangement from words, ironically. I write about how I have nothing to write about. I write 3 pages, as prescribed by Julia Cameron in her “morning pages” prescription in The Artist’s Way. I usually feel off-kilter if I don’t write in my journal, even if I’m convinced I don’t have anything to say in it.
Today I went to meet with a fellow professor who kindly made an agreement with my worried chair / boss to be an official mentor for me. He wasn’t in his office though. I asked the secretary of his department if he’d been in, and she said she hadn’t seen him. I hope he is okay…the last time I was supposed to meet with him, almost a year ago when I was on the search committee for an anthropologist of Japan, I didn’t show up because I was in a delivery room waiting to give birth to Elise.
Sarah walked by while I was waiting for my official mentor this morning. We hugged each other a long time: one of her coworkers was killed in a car crash a few days ago, a woman with three children and two stepchildren, a husband who adored her, with whom she was looking forward to retiring with, Sarah said. My heart feels heavy with empathy today. Another friend’s sweet, beloved dog died, just got terribly, suddenly sick while she was out of town. He was not much more than a puppy and so cherished by her ever since she’d found him abandoned in the desert by the Colorado River.
Anne Lamott writes in her newest book Grace (Eventually): “It’s fine to know, but not to say, that in some inadequate and surprising ways, things will be semi-okay, the way wild flowers spring up at the rocky dirt-line where the open-space meadow meets the road, where the ground is so mean. Just as it’s fine to know but not say that anger is good, a bad attitude is excellent, and the medicinal powers of shouting and complaining cannot be overestimated.” My share of anger is definitely there, and my friend Tracy and I wished we could choose any number of others to get rid of (how about just ONE, perhaps Osama bin Laden?) instead of losing innocent babies, or good people or creatures that leave behind so many broken hearts.
I think I am figuring out how to integrate my pain into my life—something I’ve been frustrated with and confused about for many, many months. I can’t describe the exact process, except to try and try again to be patient with myself: be patient with my anger, my denial of Elise’s death, my depression, my impatience; and credit myself for my self-care (the therapy, the support group, the tears and conversations with Dan, the attempts to reach out to family, the outings with friends, the yoga, the massage, the antidepressants, the acupuncture, the exercise…and yes, the complaining!). I walked home from campus today, and the maple leaves on Grand Avenue are a lovely gold and red. The air was clear and chilly, the sun warm, my steps grateful.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
A Break from...
I’m taking a leave of absence from my teaching this semester. I hadn’t posted anything in here for a while because I’d been freaking out about going back to classes, and then freaking out about not going back.
Even my body was telling me something wasn’t right: several people have remarked that I look like I’ve lost weight, and I got a stomach bug the day before the fall term was to begin that kept me home my first day of classes.
Again, I’d been doing everything to help myself heal: I got a massage from the fabulous Heidi, who sensed an emotional blockage in my belly region or chakra. I’m not well-versed in the chakra lingo, but the fact that I’d been going around with my stomach in knots, that my waist was shrinking with the weight loss, that my appetite was poor, and that I caught the flu two days after the massage, tells me my belly was trying to telegraph something. Also, it had been nine or ten months since Elise’s birth—the body remembers such timing.
When I told my mom about my leave last night on the phone, I didn’t hesitate, even though I had it in my head that Mom would never approve. She asked “How are you?” and I said I decided to take the leave. Surprisingly, she responded the way everyone else has: “That’s good. You need to take care of yourself.” She passed right by the news to tell me she was sending me a Joseph Campbell book, Pathways to Bliss. Her gesture is so touching: my mom the Catholic, who knows I am no longer a Catholic, much less a Christian, is reaching out to my intellectual side, and the part of me that still believes in some higher power or spiritual essence.
And the universe / God / cosmos / spirit seems to be speaking to me with synchronicity: the same day at lunch with Maxwell, we were talking about how life can be so cruel. “How do we go on?” I sighed with my head in my hands. Maxwell said that’s where mythology and theology must have stepped in. I’m not sure they’re for “making sense” out of this life, but maybe for imagining something beyond this existence with all its pain, for hope and deliverance.
Not that I don’t see the beauties of this life: my husband who is so loving, gentle, wise, fun; my sweet little son; my friends who don’t fear my sadness; the family members reaching out to us.
The other night at our SHARE meeting, I marveled at the courage and love of one couple who decided to carry their son to term after discovering at the twenty-week ultrasound that he had no kidneys. He lived for fifteen minutes after birth. His mother spoke of her gratitude for the experience of her first pregnancy with him. When I think about Elise, I picture her face as I gazed at her while she lay in my arms. Whenever I see her Papa’s funny long toes, so long they hang off the front of his flip-flops, I remember that she had his long slender fingers and toes. Somday I want to remember her with joy and gratitude.
Even my body was telling me something wasn’t right: several people have remarked that I look like I’ve lost weight, and I got a stomach bug the day before the fall term was to begin that kept me home my first day of classes.
Again, I’d been doing everything to help myself heal: I got a massage from the fabulous Heidi, who sensed an emotional blockage in my belly region or chakra. I’m not well-versed in the chakra lingo, but the fact that I’d been going around with my stomach in knots, that my waist was shrinking with the weight loss, that my appetite was poor, and that I caught the flu two days after the massage, tells me my belly was trying to telegraph something. Also, it had been nine or ten months since Elise’s birth—the body remembers such timing.
When I told my mom about my leave last night on the phone, I didn’t hesitate, even though I had it in my head that Mom would never approve. She asked “How are you?” and I said I decided to take the leave. Surprisingly, she responded the way everyone else has: “That’s good. You need to take care of yourself.” She passed right by the news to tell me she was sending me a Joseph Campbell book, Pathways to Bliss. Her gesture is so touching: my mom the Catholic, who knows I am no longer a Catholic, much less a Christian, is reaching out to my intellectual side, and the part of me that still believes in some higher power or spiritual essence.
And the universe / God / cosmos / spirit seems to be speaking to me with synchronicity: the same day at lunch with Maxwell, we were talking about how life can be so cruel. “How do we go on?” I sighed with my head in my hands. Maxwell said that’s where mythology and theology must have stepped in. I’m not sure they’re for “making sense” out of this life, but maybe for imagining something beyond this existence with all its pain, for hope and deliverance.
Not that I don’t see the beauties of this life: my husband who is so loving, gentle, wise, fun; my sweet little son; my friends who don’t fear my sadness; the family members reaching out to us.
The other night at our SHARE meeting, I marveled at the courage and love of one couple who decided to carry their son to term after discovering at the twenty-week ultrasound that he had no kidneys. He lived for fifteen minutes after birth. His mother spoke of her gratitude for the experience of her first pregnancy with him. When I think about Elise, I picture her face as I gazed at her while she lay in my arms. Whenever I see her Papa’s funny long toes, so long they hang off the front of his flip-flops, I remember that she had his long slender fingers and toes. Somday I want to remember her with joy and gratitude.
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