Sometimes.....

I feel like I will never feel happy again.

I look at the photos of me in frames around our house and think that that girl is gone forever.

It seems like everyone else has their babies but me.

I find it hard to believe that I will ever have my own take home baby.

I worry what would happen if it happened again. Whether I would survive, could survive.

I think it might be better if I didn't, because then I would be with William again.

I think I am being punished.

I wonder if there really is a God.

I have to believe there is a God - that William is with him and that I will see him again.

I worry whether William will remember me.

I wish this had never happened.

I am glad that it has, because if it hadn't, I would never have known the joy of carrying William, seen how beautiful he was when I held him, and he wouldn't be waiting for me in Heaven.

I feel like running away, far away to somewhere like South America. Starting again and pretending this isn't me. That I'm happy and carefree. A girl whose heart hasn't been broken.

I have so much resentment and hatred inside I feel like it could consume me.

My heart actually aches for William. I can feel the physical pain inside my chest.

The grief overwhelms me and I cry just as hard as I did the day we lost him.

I wonder what this has done to my relationship with my husband. Are we closer for having gone through this together or has it tainted our marriage with a sadness that can never be overcome?

I feel betrayed by old friends who I thought would be there for me but who abandoned me when I was most in my time of need.

I am surprised by how wonderful some friends can be.

I find it hard to believe I am a Mum.

My heart fills with warmth when I tell myself I am William's Mum.

I find it hard to believe that I will learn to live with this pain and have any kind of 'real' life again.

I have to believe there is a happy ending for us, that my husband and I will have a take home baby. That we will be a proper family here on earth, not just in Heaven.

Mummy's Day

It was Mother's Day yesterday here in the UK and to say I was dreading it was an understatement.  At one time I had been so excited about this day - after all, this year was supposed to be the year I would be receiving my own Mother's Day card and not just giving one.

After losing William, the day can now only serve as a reminder of what I have lost.  In the weeks preceding, everywhere I turned were references to Mother's Day - signs out side card shops, bouquets filling the entrance to the supermarket, hell, even the M&S advert was promoting a £15 Mother's Day meal you can buy and cook your Mum.  It feels as though the the entire country got together and took it upon themselves to have a special day to remind me (as if I could possibly have forgotten)

YOU DON'T HAVE YOUR BABY.

YOU WON'T BE GETTING A CARD. 

YOU AREN'T A MUM.

And perhaps its not just the entire country who is saying that to me. Perhaps, if I'm honest, it's the way I really feel about myself.  It's definitely the way I think my friends, even my very close ones, feel about me. If they were asked which of their friends were mothers, I don't think I would be included in the list.

My counsellor is always saying  "You ARE a Mum" to me. On the one hand I love hearing that but on the other I find it very hard.  It brings tears to my eyes every time.  You see, I don't really feel like a Mummy.  Deep down I know I am William's Mummy but I never had a chance to mother him. So now I have this title of "Mummy" but its a role I can't fulfil as William isn't here. It leaves me feeling stranded. I have all of this motherly love to give and no one to give it to.  It is a difficult position to be in and one which I don't think will ever change until we are lucky enough to have another child.

I am incredibly lucky to have an amazing husband who completely understands how I feel about being/not being a Mummy (I guess because he feels the same way about being a Daddy too). He knew I was dreading yesterday and he was very aware that the day was certainly not going to be anything like I'd imagined when I found out I was pregnant just under a year ago.

He knew I didn't feel like I deserved a card but he gave me one anyway and inside he told me that I was the best Mummy in the world for protecting William and going through all of this pain so that he didn't have to. He also gave me this beautiful Sweet William candle which we lit last night before bed and thought about our little boy.

As you can imagine, it made me cry, but as I was reading the words he had written in the card, I felt, for  perhaps the first time since I had held William in the hospital, that I was a Mummy. My husband was right.  Isn't the role of a parent to love and protect their child? To do what's best for them? To put the child's needs before their own? Isn't that what we had done for William when we sent him to Baby Heaven? We loved him. We wanted to protect him. We wanted what was best for him. And, even though its broken our hearts we chose to take that pain than for him to suffer for even a second. We made that decision as his parents. We made that decision as his Mummy and Daddy.  Nothing can ever change that.

Termination For Medical Reasons (TFMR)

What is it? Well, it's pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. You decide to end your pregnancy because your baby is suffering from a medical condition so sufficiently horrendous that you think they would be better off dead than alive....that is if they would even make it out of you alive in the first place.

You can elect to do this at any stage of your pregnancy but if it's after 24 weeks, the hospital will only allow it if two medical consultants consent to it too. I was 26 weeks pregnant when we were told there was a problem with William's heart and that we had a decision to make. Before you even start researching the medical condition which has decided to afflict your baby, you know the outcome for the little mite isn't going to be good when they tell you as they told me....

"I would support you in your decision if you choose to bring this pregnancy to an end and I know there are several other people in this hospital who would also do so".

If you do decide to end your pregnancy the methods of doing so also differ depending on how far along you are. At 28 weeks (as I then was) the process of ending your pregnancy is two fold. It isn't pleasant but it's not something you can really sugar coat (although I will try) so if you don't think you are going to like reading about this bit you may want to skip onto the next post:

Sonographer man sticks a needle into your tummy and into your baby. The baby gets a hit of valium so he feels super dooper relaxed and stops kicking the hell out of you. Feeling all chilled and nice and cozy in your tummy the baby snuggles down for his final Mummy Tummy Nap. Whilst off in baby dream land the sonographer man gives your baby another injection right into his heart to send him to Baby Heaven.

I don't like to think too much about what was in that last syringe as the reality of allowing someone to inject that into your baby is just too horrific.  It's made worse by the fact that the medical professionals all refer to that bit as "feoticide" which is a term I loathe and which reminds me of homicide and murder.  Instead, I like to think of this last injection as a huge dose of love mixture from me and my husband and something akin to Red Bull. We loved William so much that rather than him suffer a minute of pain we gave him some Red Bull to give him wings.

The second stage is relatively simple in comparison. You take a tablet to soften your cervix and two days later go into hospital to be induced and give birth. The labour itself is like the birth of any living baby (so I'm told) although you haven't got all of those happy pain suppressing natural endorphins flying around your body and so it tends to hurt like hell once it all gets going. On the up side, most midwives don't want you to be in an physical pain given you are already suffering enough so they will pretty much offer you every drug they have available to them the minute you start to feel anything.

When we first had to consider ending the pregnancy I thought this process was so horrific that I didn't think I would be able to get through it. Even if it meant William being born alive and having a lifetime of suffering. I just didn't think I was strong enough and couldn't handle the pain of losing a baby.  Ultimately, however, I decided that I would feel more pain and guilt watching him suffer from the minute he was born and that my reasons for continuing with the pregnancy could not simply be that I was too much of a coward to do what might be the right thing for our baby.

Once the decision was made, I didn't want to know anything about William (I can't believe I even thought that now), didn't want to know the sex (we didn't know he was a boy at this stage) and I wanted to be knocked out, for them to take him out of me and for me to wake up, bump-less. I certainly didn't want to give birth to him or to see him or hold him. I rang every private hospital and asked if I could pay for a c-section as the NHS wouldn't allow it. They all said no.

I talked to a counsellor and they said the process was there for a reason. That I wouldn't come to terms with it if I went to sleep with a bump and woke up without one. I thought "what does she know" and that the medical profession were cruel, unbelievably cruel, for making women go through this process when they were losing their baby.

In hindsight, I can see the counsellor was right. It was hard, so so hard but I am glad I went through it. William went to Baby Heaven straight from my tummy and went to sleep when he was with me, all warm and safe. His birth was really really peaceful and gentle and as a result, no harm came to his tiny little body. It also gave my husband and I the chance to see just how beautiful and perfect he was and to hold him and say goodbye properly.  I can now say, without a shadow of a doubt, that holding him in my arms was one of the highlights of my life, no matter how sad the circumstances, and I wouldn't give that up for the world.

Note to William: Mummy may have allowed you to get your first hit of drugs when you were with her but getting high, even with a parent, is a big no no. Do not even think about it in Baby Heaven...even if its someone disguised as Jesus telling you to drink the special wine and eat his magic bread. Just. Say. No.