I was going to clean, but then something caught my eye and I had to read it and it made me think about something.
I was reading an article on Still Standing. It's an online magazine that talks about loss and infertility. It was started by women who are on my Facebook so I see links to the new articles a lot, and I click on ones that peak my interest, which is a lot of them so I do my best not to click because it just end with me clicking one link after another tell half (or more) of the day is gone.
Anyway the article that got me thinking is this one: What I Mean When I Say My Daughter Was Stillborn The title caught my interest because I had just talked to someone last Tuesday and I had brought up my daughter Serenity, I've been thinking about Serenity a lot since her birthday is coming up; just over a month away. She would be three. I was talking to a first time mother and I was glad that she didn't try to tell me that everything would be alright with RR, and that she didn't pull away from me the moment that I mentioned her. I know that it's scary for people to hear about babies being stillborn, even scarier for a pregnant woman to hear about it. But I do think that it is something that women need to hear, because I feel that it would have been easier for me to learn to live with happened if I had known that it was a possibility before it happened.
BUT that's not really what this post is about the part of the article that got me thinking was where she says "Your baby dies, and then you give birth... to your dead child" This brought back a very vivid memory of my senior year of high school, my English four class to be exact. A girl named Stephanie, asked a question, I have no idea where it came from, but she asked and since no one else answered not even the teacher; I answered.
Her question was simple really, though it probably would have been better suited for a health or sex ed class. She wanted to know what happens when a baby dies before he/she is born. It's a question that people don't normally think about let alone ask. Who would really want to think about a baby dieing? I know that I don't want to think about it, but I do, every day. Stillbirth isn't even mentioned in school sex-ed classes, neither is miscarriage but at least people know that miscarriages happen. So here Stephanie was asking this question, that apparently no one knew the answer to, except me, because I had lived her question, I had lived the answer. And so I answered, I told her the truth, that the mother still has to deliver the baby, and I told her how I knew the answer too.
I'm not sure how much later but later that semester my molly bears arrived, one for each of my little ones. Three bears that had no added weight, and one that weighed three pounds just like Serenity. I could barely put Serenity's bear down for while after I got her and I brought her to school with me. I would only put her in my book bag when I absolutely needed my hands free, other then that I held her. In my English class I was asked why I had a bear (or two) with me and I explained just how important the bear was. I would even let them hold her so they could feel her weight. Three pounds is not a lot, but it's not something you expect a teddy bear to feel. The good thing was that people understood why I had her with me, she was, and is, all i have of my daughter.
I could write about this all day but I really do need to do house stuff; so I'll leave it at that.
~Cathrin
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