It has been quite a while since I posted anything here. Partly out of simply being busy. Busy loving my job, busy being a wife, busy
teaching, busy with appointments, busy, busy, like everyone! But more so because
it’s been a tough time waiting and hoping for another baby to love while continuing
to face the lifelong grief of losing Mira.
I have not been in a place to want to share the pain of waiting, even
though I still (and always will) love sharing about Mira and believe sharing
about grief is so important
But today, I have so many thoughts that I want to write
about.
Let me just start by saying COVID-19 sucks. It sucks for everyone. And there are so, so, many specific groups it
sucks extra for. And, yes, my mother
taught me not to say ‘sucks.’ But this
warrants it, right Mom? It is terrible
for the elderly and those with preexisting conditions for obvious reasons. It is terrible for those with depression whose
symptoms worsen with isolation. It is
terrible for those on the Autism Spectrum who find a disruption in routine more
than just inconvenient. It is terrible
for those working in healthcare. It is
terrible for small business owners, hourly service workers, and all of us who
live paycheck to paycheck.
It is terrible for beavered parents though too. You may not
have thought of that one, and that is okay. ( I am sure there are many groups
of people that I do not realize how this could affect them.) But because you may
not realize how this impacts us, I wanted to take some time to talk about how
COVID-19 feels as a bereaved mother. I
honestly thought it was just me at first, but then I saw the comments and posts
pouring out on the online support groups I am a part of, and though each
person’s story and specifics are different, I think I can overwhelmingly say,
this is extremely tough for beavered mothers. (Though I want to make it clear I
am not trying to say we have it worse than other people, but each group that is
struggling has a unique point of view and I want to offer ours, or at least
mine.)
The first thing that hit me when the threat of COVID-19
became serious in the US, was that this feels so much like when Mira died. Not the intense pain and grief, obviously,
but the ‘emotional’ atmosphere. The
feeling is so similar in so many ways, but I am not just seeing Joe and I react
to it and I am seeing EVERYONE. The
feeling is a PTSD trigger for sure (not in a Millennials overuse the word
‘trigger’ way, in a real way). When Mira
died, my world stopped. Right there.
Everything stopped moving. There was no
going to the store. People stocked my
house up with food. Joe and I didn’t go to work for a time. Our daily routine stopped. Everything just stopped. We stood in amazement that the rest of the
world kept moving. It was surreal.
Everything for us had stopped.
When your child dies the dishes don’t matter anymore. You might not get out of your pj’s the whole
day, I mean, who cares? Your child
died.
All the sudden everything is stopping again, but this time
for everyone. Joe’s work has shut down
and he is home. I am working for home,
though with much less work than I would have at the office. We aren’t going out to eat, no one is. We made sure we have enough food in the house
for a week or two to limit grocery runs.
It feels so similar. But this
time we aren’t dazed at how the rest of the world keeps going, because it
stopped too. Though this ‘stopping’ is
not as all-encompassing as when Mira died, it is so similar that it wakens
those responses in us loss parents, especially those of us with PTSD.
As loss parents, we know people die all too well. We don’t find statistics comforting. A 1-3% death rate for this virus means little
to us. We know what it is to be in the
minority statistic. We know each of
those people in the 1-3% had loved ones whose world now stopped in a way that
is beyond ‘social distancing.’ We know
that pain. We don’t want anyone to feel
it. We don’t want to feel it again. Statistics hold little to no weight when your
infant died, which has a less than one percent chance of happening (America’s
infant mortality rate is 5.8 per 1000 live births).
For me, personally, I am not fearful of getting the virus, I
am young and healthy. I take every
precaution anyway (as we all should!) to protect our vulnerable, I know the
pain of loss, I will not put it on others.
Joe, I know, fears me getting sick.
It is so common for a loss Dad to become over-protective of their
spouse, and Joe is for sure. I tell him
I am in no danger even if I get COVID-19 as I have none of the preexisting
conditions, the rate of death is less than 1 percent! But of course, that does not give comfort to
someone who lost a child, someone who is already in the less than 1 percent
camp.
Us loss parents, we learned that things are not in our
control a long time ago. So, we control
what we can. Our child’s loss was
completely out of our control. We did
everything we could to save them. In the
end, it did not matter, we lost them to Heaven.
Things outside of our control are especially tough after that. It is not in our control if we get the virus,
or worse, if our vulnerable loved ones get it.
That is scary. It is also not
currently in our control if we go to work, if we go to the movies, if we go out
to eat, or really much of anything else right now. It is needed.
And I fully support the measures my state has taken to enforce social
distancing. But I think we can all agree
it still is not pleasant. And since last
time everything in our world spiraled out our control our baby died, well you
might find that us loss parents start holding tight to what we can control as
these memories come flooding back.
Last, but certainly not least, to discuss is the jokes about
children right now from everyone else in our lives. The jokes circulating FaceBook about having a ‘baby
boom’ in nine months are not funny for us.
As someone who has lost a baby, then waited my due time to be cleared to
try to have another, and then got a negative test month, after month, after
month, those jokes are little stabs to the heart. They aren’t meant to be hurtful; I know. But they are.
Four years ago, Joey and I decided to bring a baby into our home. There is still no baby here in our house. That
sucks. And 1 out of 8 (infertility stats)
of the other couples you know felt a similar stab in their heart when they see
those jokes too. We would LOVE for a
couple weeks of forced quality time with our spouse to lead to a baby.
Beyond the baby boom jokes is all the joking, also sometimes
serious, complaints about being home with your children right now. Parents needing so much wine to get through
the time with their children. They are distracting
from work. They are misbehaving. The posts are everywhere. Avoid Facebook? Doesn’t matter, the jokes are in person
too. At the store. From friends and family. My coworkers jokingly
complain during video meetings that the children are causing chaos. God, do you know what I would give to have my
2-year-old causing chaos right now? To
have a toddler that I had to balance care for while I worked? To have the responsibility of caring for my precious
little human? It is okay to complain
sometimes, I am sure being a Mom/Dad to living children is especially hard
right now. But don’t forget how lucky
and blessed you are to have that child there to annoy you and love you. Some of us can only dream of that and we are
being reminded of that an awful lot right now.
I guess my point is, COVD-19 sucks for everyone. And there are many specific groups it is pretty
terrible for, and one of those groups happens to be beavered parents. I certainly am not comparing our current
struggle to those who are most vulnerable to severe reactions to COVID-19. I am just hoping we will all remember to
think of everyone who this is extra hard for and remember the bereaved Mamas
and Daddies when you are praying.
