Aversion Therapy

As you may have already read, I tend to try and avoid all pregnant people and/or babies as they are painful reminders of what we have lost. I don't see any pregnant friends or any friends who have young babies. If I get on the tube and there is a baby I get off and go and sit in another carriage. If I'm queuing to pay for something in a store and there is a pregnant person in the line, I go to another checkout.

Realistically, I'm not going to be able to do this forever. There are going to be times where I get on the tube or I'm in a restaurant and someone walks in who is pregnant or has baby.  What am I going to do? Stand up in the middle of my meal and just walk out? I am going to have to get used to be around bumps and babies or its going to get out of control. Plus, I don't want to cut those friends and family who have babies out of my life forever. I've already lost enough. I don't want to lose them all too.

So, I've enrolled myself in an Aversion Therapy course. I am the tutor and there are no other students (not surprising given I made the course up myself in the privacy of my own living room!) so I can pretty much dictate the rules and what the course involves.

There are five stages to my made up course which are as follows:

Stage 1: Learning to tolerate pregnant strangers.

Objective - student must be able to be in the presence of pregnant strangers without welling up in tears and staring at their baby bump. In order to pass stage 1, student must be able to sit or stand next to a pregnant stranger.

Stage 2: Learning to tolerate stranger babies

Objective - student must be able to be in the presence of stranger babies of all ages (including newborn). In order to pass stage 2, student must be able to tolerate hearing the baby cry and seeing the mother feed baby.


Stage 3: Hanging out with friend's babies who were born pre-William

Objective - student must be able to spend time with and play with the baby.  Student must be able to tolerate hearing the baby cry and be able to watch the mother interact with or comfort the baby. In order to pass stage 3, student must be able to hold baby...and then be able to give it back to the mother.

Stage 4: Hanging out with pregnant friends


Objective - student must be able to spend time with friends who are pregnant and have announced their pregnancy since William was born. Initially, the student will be expected to do nothing more than spend time with the friend and look at her from the neck up only.  Over time, student should endeavour to make general enquiries about the pregnancy (an example might be to ask the mother when she is due). In order to pass stage 4, student must be able to look at the friend as a pregnant person - i.e. someone who actually has a bump body below her neck.

Stage 5: Hanging out with friend's babies born post-William

Objective - student must be able to spend time with babies who are born after William was born. Student must be able to tolerate hearing the baby cry and be able to watch the mother interact with or comfort the baby. In order to pass stage 5, student must be able to hold baby...and then be able to give it back to the mother.

So far, I think I'm hovering around stages 2 and 3. I stood behind a pregnant person in the queue in Starbucks today and didn't freak out. That being said, I am not sure I could stand to sit next to a pregnant stranger on the tube. I can also walk past mothers with prams and have been in a cafe at the same time as a baby (although I did end up bursting into tears but that was because the baby was sat in the same pram we'd bought for William) but I can't stand hearing them cry. I've also spent time with and held two babies who was born before William came along.  Both of them were girls and about nine months old. As a result, they looked nothing like William and were able to interact with me as they were no longer little newborns. I didn't find it easy to be around them and when I left I noticed I had a nervous heat rash all over my chest so it obviously really affected me.  As a result, I think I need to work on this module and I'm not ready to graduate to stage 4 just yet.

I have had the odd mental moment where I have thought about taking this aversion therapy to the extreme and skipping to stage five which involves me going to John Lewis and just standing in the baby section watching all of the pregnant families around me. In reality, I suspect this is not sensible and it will only end in one of two ways:

(a) Claire breaks down in hysterical tears and has to be taken to the Manager's office so that they can call her husband to come and collect her;

(b) Claire is taken to the Manager's office by Security so that they can call the police as they suspect her of being a baby snatcher given she has spent the last hour not buying anything and staring at other people's babies.

So for now, I'm sticking to the therapy plan above. It will be interesting to see what happens when I go back to work next week. I know one of the secretaries at work is pregnant and I have a sneaky suspicion one of my friends at work is pregnant (although she hasn't told me yet).  Ordinarily I would avoid her but as she works in my office its going to be pretty much impossible so I might be moving on to stage 4 sooner than I think.

Baby Loss Buddies

This whole baby loss experience (for want of a better word) can be pretty isolating. Sometimes I feel like I want to cut myself off from the rest of the world and hide in my house with the curtains drawn. In reality, and especially if I do want to start trying to get my life back, I appreciate that that is not practical.  I do need to have some interaction with the outside world.

My husband and I are really lucky. We have some great friends who have been hugely supportive throughout this whole ordeal and offer to meet up with us whenever we want - we only have to ask. Here's the problem....they all (and I mean ALL) have babies or are pregnant. Some of them even have more than one baby. One of them has two...and she's now pregnant with twins (now that's just plain greedy in my view).

I find it too painful to be around babies or pregnant people at the moment - I'm already in enough pain without actively seeking out more by surrounding myself with reminders of what we have lost. So, I pretty much don't have anyone to hang out with in the outside world.

I mentioned this to my counsellor and she said "you need to get some new friends". I laughed and thought she was joking. I mean,  I'm 31...where the hell am I going to go and pick up some new friends?  Everyone already has their friends by the time they hit 30. I can't exactly walk into a bar and go and sit at a table with a bunch of random strangers and ask them to play with me...did she not see Bree try and fail at that in Desperate Housewives last week?

Turns out she wasn't joking and she wasn't proposing I pick up some new mates in a bar. She wanted me to get a new, very special kind of friend - the Baby Loss Buddy.  A Baby Loss Buddy is someone who (as the name suggests) has also lost a baby and so has been through the same experience as you. They are in the unique position of being able to understand exactly how you feel - without you even saying it - as they have been there themselves. With them you can say anything. There is no filter on the conversation as they will not judge you. They understand. Completely understand.

This sounded like a great idea but the only problem was, where do you find yourself one of these Baby Loss Buddies? My counsellor suggested getting in touch with a help group like ARC or SANDS and asking if they could put me in touch with someone.  As it happened, I am already a member of the ARC online support forum and someone on there had asked if anyone in London fancied meeting up for coffee. So, I tentatively replied.

Last weekend four of us met up for brunch. I was incredibly nervous when I walked into the cafe. Since hiding away at home for the past five months I've lost a lot of confidence and so meeting old friends, let alone new ones, seemed really daunting. I was also a slightly worried that we might all be a bit depressed and that hanging out together might bum us out even more.

I needn't have worried. All three of the girls were so nice and within a few minutes we were all chatting away like old friends. So many of the things they said resonated with me and it was a relief just to know that how I feel is normal. That they feel that way too.  It's too early to tell yet whether we are the types of people who would be friends were it not for the fact that we have all lost babies but for now, just having that in common is enough for each of us.

And when I walked out of the cafe it felt like a little bit of the weight had been lifted. I actually felt happier and definitely not so alone.  Losing William has been the worst thing I have ever been through and it is very hard to see any positives that could come out of this. But, perhaps I will now make a couple of special friends as a result and that would be nice.  I really hope that is the same for William too. Maybe the babies of my Baby Loss Buddies will make friends with William and he will have some mates to hang out with in Baby Heaven. That would be really cool.

Rock Bottom, Fifty Feet Of Crap, Then Me.

So I pretty much thought I had reached rock bottom in this whole utterly shit situation but it turns out you can feel worse. Yesterday my best friend had a baby. The baby wasn't expected to arrive until the end of March but she was taken into hospital 6 weeks early as her waters broke. I knew she was in hospital and so for the last couple of days I've been bracing myself for the news that the baby was here.  Last night my husband walked through the door and told me the baby has been born. It's a boy.

I feel like my heart has been ripped open.

The news, although half expected, has devastated me. They didn't know the sex and so there was always a 50:50 chance it would be a boy but I have still been saying "please let it be a girl, please let it be a girl" every day.  If the baby had been a girl, it would still have been hard but the fact that it is a boy is so much harder.

It feels like just as I was scrambling to my feet, trying to get up off the floor, someone has come along and hit me with a tonne of bricks and knocked me over again.

Since we lost William I haven't seen my friend. The thought of seeing her with a bump when I had lost mine was just too painful. We were so excited when she became pregnant 10 weeks after me and had talked about all of the things we could do with our babies. I'd imagined our babies being best buddies and us all hanging out together.  So much of the future I had imagined for William was connected to their baby in my mind.

My friend could not have been nicer and said she completely understood why it would be too painful for me to see her. She said we would wait until I was ready before we saw each other again and in the meantime, we could keep in contact by email, which we have done.  It hasn't been easy. It's hard for her to support me when I won't even see her and I feel sad that I have not been of support to her too whilst she has been pregnant. This is one of the happiest moments of her life and I haven't been able to share it with her.

I've spent a great deal of time thinking about when the time might come when I could see her again. I knew it wouldn't be whilst she was still pregnant but thought I might be able to see her once the baby arrived. Now he has, I still don't feel I can.

As her baby has arrived early he is now only 5 weeks younger than William should be. It feels like I am being tortured knowing that for the rest of my life, I will watch a little boy grow up and reach every milestone at the same time that William should be. I don't know if I can face seeing that for the rest of my life.

So, that leaves me in a state of limbo. I've lost my baby. Am I now going to lose my best friend too?

I know it is my choice but in reality, it doesn't really feel like I have much of a choice. Self preservation dictates that I don't go out and openly seek yet more pain on top of that which I have already suffered. And yet I am torn. I miss my best friend.