Not So Happy Announcements

Nothing can ruin my day quite like a pregnancy or birth announcement. It’s something I’m not proud of, and quite frankly, an aspect of my new normal that I downright hate. I’ve had to endure many of them over the past year and a half, and each one comes with pain, shame, guilt, anger, jealousy, and a feeling of defeat. Very rarely does happiness enter that emotional equation, which leads to a type of self-loathing that I have never experienced before in my life.

Celebrity announcements are the worst. You don’t even want to know my reaction to Jessica Simpson and Kim Kardashian. I don’t even know these women, and yet I can feel the bile rise in my throat every time I see a story about them. I don’t wish for bad things to happen to them or their babies (I’m not that terrible). I just want them to go away. I don’t want to hear about how easy it is for them or monitor their baby bumps and cravings. I like my celebrity gossip and read People and US Weekly online every day. Lately, I have to scroll quickly through their newsfeeds to skip the multitude of stories about them each day. You really have no idea how many celebrities are procreating until you’re trying to avoid news about it.

Then there are the strangers on Facebook. The ones where I have to see their announcements, comments, ultrasound pictures, and new baby photos because my friends comment on them, and Facebook thinks I want to know about that (oh how little you know me, Facebook). More people that I don’t know, but can cause tears to flow seemingly from nowhere.

And then there are my poor friends. I have a couple of friends who have had the misfortune of having to tell me in person that they are expecting. Bless their hearts, they tried to do the right thing and tell me privately (which, by the way, is the right thing to do). I remember one friend who had to tell me her good news just weeks after Vivienne died. I can still see the fear in her face at having to tell me she was pregnant. It was the happiest time of her life, but you’d never know it by how she felt having to tell me.

It’s no one’s fault that this happens. I certainly don’t expect people not to get pregnant, or to not be happy about expecting a baby. I don’t expect people not to share their joy in welcoming their child to the world. This is a situation without a good resolution. Unfortunately, some people’s happiness causes me pain. It doesn’t make their happiness wrong, and it doesn’t make my pain wrong. It just is. It’s an unfortunate aspect of how I live my life now, and one that I wish more than I can say I could make go away.

I have to admit that I had a lot of hesitation in writing this post. It’s not an easy thing to admit that you can’t be happy for people when they have good news, but unfortunately, it’s true. I really wish that I could find happiness for them, but if I’m being honest (which I vowed to be when I started this blog), I only feel bitter. And that bitterness cycles into me feeling like a bad person because I SHOULD be happy for them, but I can’t. It’s a spiraling of bad emotions that I really can’t do anything to prevent or stop. Another aspect of this “new normal” that I completely despise.

What is Normal Like?

In the months after Vivienne died, it would cause me a lot of pain to hear people talk about their pregnancies and children. It still does, but lately, I find a new phenomenon happening. When people talk about it, I start to wonder what it’s like. I don’t wonder what they are actually experiencing, it’s more that I wonder what it feels like to experience it as the majority does, and not as someone who has lost a child.

I wonder what it’s like to get a positive pregnancy test and be hopeful and make plans. I had that with Vivienne. I’ll never have it again. If I’m lucky enough to get a positive pregnancy test, I will wonder if it’s  another miscarriage or ectopic, and I’ll be too scared to hope that maybe, just maybe, this is a baby we’ll get to keep. 

I wonder what it’s like as you progress with a pregnancy to be out and about, wearing your cute maternity clothes, and doing things largely in the same manner as before getting pregnant. I only got a little past halfway there with Vivienne, and I have maternity clothes I’ve never worn. If I can get pregnant again, I will likely spend a portion of that time on bedrest, and you can be assured that I will spend the entire experience feeling like I’m made of glass. 

I wonder what it’s like to go through pregnancy and plan for bringing a baby home, not thinking for one second that there is a chance you won’t get to do that. As I hope for the possibility of getting pregnant again, I actually think about things like not having a baby shower or decorating a room until the baby is actually here and healthy. We’d started those plans for Vivienne and never got to finish them. And now I wonder if I could ever do that before the baby arrived.

I was meeting with a vendor the other day at work. It was the first time I’d met her, and she didn’t know my story. As we talked about a project, she said she wasn’t around when that happened because she was still home with the baby. I have to admit, I was distracted after that. My mind immediately went to “I wonder what that’s like.” I wondered what it was like to go through a pregnancy, have a baby, take your maternity leave, return to work and be able to talk about your child without making people uncomfortable. What is that normal like? And I realized that I’ll never have that normal. I may go on to have another child, but I’ll never have that normal experience that it seems so many others get to have.

I’m trying to convince myself that having a normal pregnancy experience doesn’t matter – it’s bringing home a healthy living child that is most important. Of course I recognize that. And I know that a healthy living child makes it all worth it. But, I have to admit that I find myself mourning the experience that I’ll never get to have. I hope more than you’ll ever know that I’ll get to have another child, and that I’ll get to raise that child. But my path to getting to that point is nowhere near the normal experience, and it never will be. And that makes me sad.