Functioning

Yesterday we squished approximately 75 crickets and dropped, maybe, 200 slugs in soapy water.  For some reason all my (too small) bathing suits are in the babies' room and, in preparation for our vacation, I had to retrieve them to try bottoms on, so in addition to mass murder, I went into the almost nursery.*  We did not fill out the adoption agency's application form.  We did not buy groceries for the week.  We did not go to bed at a normal hour.  I then had dreams about finding insect infestations on our plants until I gave up and got out of bed at 5:15 this morning.  I still didn't make it to work until 8:30.  This is what functioning looks like.

*Tops are another story, although I did not get to nurse our babies I did lactate, my breasts are now about 3X their pre-lactation size.

From infertility treatments to cervical insufficiency

For years we tried to get pregnant via ICI at home.  LOTS of people we know were successful at this, using known or unknown donor sperm resulting in beautiful babies, toddlers, children and young adults all over the place.  Our schedules are tricky, my cycles are trickier, after years of trying we decided to see a reproductive endocrinologist.

Time of Day

My mother is a cartographer by training.  [I am not, so this is not an inexact description.]  It is possible to look through a lens down at a photograph of a landscape and the shadows of the clouds on the mountains will reveal the time of day that the picture was taken.  Capturing a still image of a transient shadow of something almost insubstantial creates a permanent time stamp.

The babies nursery has one wall painted purple, the others still cream. One giant giraffe. Two dressers. One baby bath. Drawers full of baby clothes. A gift bag full of sympathy cards.  A permanent time stamp.

I struggle with the urge to finish the nursery. To hang their names on the wall, to reorder the returned cribs. To unfold the handmade blankets. To have a room finished and permanent.  To further encrypt the message currently stamped on the room, to make the message unavailable to anyone without the appropriate lens, without the key.  And then to loose the key, to hold the nursery as a marker for them, of them. To deny the message entirely.

Facebook

We had our babies service on Saturday and it is way to much for me to even begin to write about now. Today we posted the front of our babies memorial card on Facebook.  We talked about it and there are pros and cons.  There are two big positives for me.  First that more people will know of our beautiful babies including folks I see rarely and who don't know we lost them.  Second knowing others who've experienced similar losses was tremendously helpful to me and if our sharing can help others not feel so alone, I want to do that.  The negative possibilities include stupid comments, creating stress for pregnant women and being vulnerable (that one is a positive too).  In any case it's done.

Guests

And now it begins.  It's a little false to think of this as a beginning because we've been super focused on the service for some time now and since last Friday all of our time has gone to doing physical things to get ready - preparing the yard, buying and planting flowers, cleaning, killing aphids, cleaning.  7 am to 9 pm on Saturday, for example. But tonight at 6 pm R's dad and wife arrived, after a day long flight, for our babies' memorial service.  We have both taken Thursday and Friday off work to prepare.  And so it has begun.

R's dad is a retired pastor and is officiating the service, I have never seen him preach, this is an odd way to experience something that was a central part of R's life.  I am not religious, R is not either at this point in her life. R's dad has agreed to present the service we have written and we created a space for him to speak as a grandfather and to include religion if he would like.  R's dad's wife, S is reading a poem R's aunt wrote and there is a call and response poem as well as music. We are also speaking, we each wrote something and then spliced it together so it goes back and forth between us.  I have no idea how it will feel to stand up and speak our sorrow and love. I hope this goes well.

By this, I mean the service, having house guests for almost a week, surviving, all of it.

I wish I meant, I hope being parents goes well.  I wish this was a beginning not an ending.

The color blue: On naming the unnamable #MicroblogMondays

I heard a story on NPR documenting the history of the color blue, the short version is that it didn't exist because there was no name for it.  As evidence, a man never told his child about the color blue and apparently she couldn't see it either.  Aside from the ethics of experimenting on children, I wonder what other parts of our existence are not experienced as fully as they will be in the future because we don't have a word for them?  Might some part of my time with my babies be more deeply known if only I had the word for it?

Erratic Fingernails

I keep my fingernails short.  When they start to have any length to them they irritate me, I am constantly aware of them, touching the keyboard, brushing against my skin, getting dirty in the yard.  For the past several weeks I have been cutting one or two nails at a time - whichever ones are bothering me the most.  This is the first time in my life that I have ever not systematically cut all the nails on my left hand and then my right.  When I realized I had been doing it, I felt out of control--like I was making decisions without my knowledge.  It's such a small thing, fingernails, but it feels like everything.  Like the pattern that can be seen in this one series of events is the mirror for everything else in life.  Things are pretty hard today.  Irritation and heartbreak are everywhere.