Goodbye Baby

On flourishing beyond trauma, an unwanted pregnancy, the pendulum of healing, and walking the line

I'm not sure what occurred first. Either he poured my drink everywhere, leaned on it and slipped, or he randomly fell off his chair and my drink spilled in the process. The long pause before a wail was my sign that the pain was real. I set down the Plexiglas bowl and wiped my hands. This was going to take a few minutes.

A second later, I swooped-up my baby—my toddler—from the floor. After the cursory check for blood or welts, I settled into embodying the Comforter. Kai fell into me, wracking with sobs. I wrapped my arms around him so completely my fingers could touch my own shoulders. Kai is usually so active and busy that he rarely wants to cuddle. I relish the moments he leans in. I savor in the closeness.

Imagining

Often, in moments where Kai lays against me like this, I try to imagine that he is a newborn again.

He is smaller than one of my breasts. At a minuscule four pounds, his weight barely registers against me.

It doesn’t work. The human clinging to me now is too lanky, too full of flesh, breath, voice, squirmy limbs, and vivacious life to be a newborn. Then I'm filled with sorrow for how he lived when he wasn't going to live, when he shouldn't have lived. At least, he shouldn't have compared to the others.

Survivor's guilt rushes in without warning. When so many mothers grieve everyday for their little ones, how is it that he became a happy baby?

Shaking off the intrusive thoughts, I continue to rock my crying son. Inhaling in his soft hair, I try to remember what he felt like when he was a little older. Maybe a few months old. Or five or six? No, he is too loud for that. Fine, then: ten or eleven months? But I can't really imagine him as much younger than he is. I don’t remember him as younger. And it devastates me.

It feels so unfair. It wasn't just the beauty and joy of pregnancy that was stolen by lupus, but in many ways, my baby was too.

*Trigger warning. This post talks a lot about trauma, loss, and pregnancy that might be hard for those who struggle with fertility, have had traumatic pregnancies, or have experienced loss in any form. I hope most will be able to feel less alone reading this. However, even if your experiences/feelings have been the opposite of my own, know yours are still valid and matter. As always, I encourage you to reach out for support when dealing with these triggers because you are loved and worthy.*

The burning question

I thought I had wrapped up my years of early childhood motherhood with a nice little bow by the time Kai had arrived. Those days of diapers and pumping were far behind me; I had moved on.

Of course, I have regrets as I parented those other children, as you can see in the article that comes before this, On Parenting: The Story of All of Us. But I also discovered a path of flourishing, something available to each of us, with or without children.

But what does flourishing in parenthood look like in the face of trauma? Now that is the question, isn’t it? That is what I ask everyday, while tightly rocking my own son.

It is what I ask when my friends tell me about their miscarriages, their hopes dashed with tears.

It is what I screamed at the sky when one of my dearest people, my cousin, delivered her son stillborn.

It is what I asked as I witnessed acquaintances grappling with their children's tragic deaths.

What would flourishing be for the Israeli family who’s child was kidnapped by Hamas? And it is what I ask when I open my newsfeed each day to see yet another set of Palestinian children, parents racked with grief bent over their little ones’ mangled forms. Even if I claim to have an idea about what flourishing looks like, my frustrated “why’s?” are my lament.

It’s what I ask today, this question that burns as I grieve a new tragedy in Tanzania. Twenty-five lives were snuffed out when the brakes on a semi-truck didn’t engage. Eleven of these were spiritual co-workers, smashed and crumpled in a bus as they turned onto the road that brought them back to their base’s entrance. Some were locals who’s orphan care work we supported. The surviving wife of the base leader directs one of our anti-trafficking partners. A couple of the deceased were dear to my former housemate; she is my family and she used to live with them.

Each of these individuals belonged to a family and a community. Many were spiritual parents. Why, oh Lord? (Donate to cover funeral costs.)

I hold my baby tighter as I ask how it is possible to flourish when Death is hungry and seemingly all-consuming.

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy;

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10 NIV

Unwanted pregnancy

The air sucked into nothingness, mimicking my lungs. The bathroom became a black hole the instant I saw the results on the plastic peed-on stick. You know how there are different types of unplanned pregnancies? Well, my pregnancy with Kai was one of those very unplanned and preventing kind of pregnancies—and to top it off, I was on a trip away from my husband the whole week I was ovulating.

The two years before this had been hard in ways I had never imagined—losing community, losing freedom, and nearly losing my life and other loved ones’ lives. As the summer of 2021 rolled in, my family was just beginning to emerge from our shell. We made it! I had just made major life-adjustments, including finally deciding to go all in as a writer and coach after devoting fifteen years primarily to my kids, ministries, and nonprofits. I was beginning to feel hope again.

But there I was, holding a positive pregnancy test. Just like that, my dreams were smashed on the floor. And I had no clue that the “hard season” before was just a joke compared to what was coming.

Did you know I used to work for a crisis pregnancy center as a peer-counselor? And yet the first thing I did when I found out about this baby’s existence was to sit in a steaming jacuzzi for hours, praying for a miscarriage. The tables flipped quickly when I was the one with the unwanted pregnancy. I felt so much guilt for wanting this baby to disappear. It wasn’t like I was a teenager—I already had a family and stability. And I knew so many people who struggled with infertility or were broken-heart as they miscarried.

What gave me the right to feel and respond this way? Shouldn’t I feel joy because of the new life growing within me? But, we can’t always conform our feelings and experiences into the box they are supposed to fit into. Sometimes I still feel shame that I didn’t want Kai even the littlest bit.

I spent the first three months of this pregnancy in mourning. I wept in front of the doctor, too, when I found out we were having a boy. If I was going to have to have another child, at least let him be a girl! I prayed his DNA would change in utero.

If I was listening to another woman telling me these things about her unplanned pregnancy, I would probably just judge her. I’d want her to get over herself. But there were so many complexities surrounding not wanting Malachi than just being selfish.

Baby Announcement @18 weeks: November, 2021

Valuing life

Valuing life is complex. On rare occasions it can become a tricky—a horrifying—balancing act.

By the time I made it to my twenties, my fear of an immaculate conception faded and it was replaced by another fear. I was so scared that one day I would become pregnant, and somewhere in my second trimester—long after the baby was fully formed, but not yet viable outside of the womb—I would find out I had a horrible disease, like cancer. I would be forced to choose between the baby’s life and my own. This fear was at the top of my list of worst-case scenarios.

My body began crashing hard by the time my second trimester rolled around, and I was hospitalized and diagnosed with lupus by sixteen-weeks. I hadn’t even gotten around to telling the world I was pregnant—I didn’t want to feign happiness when I had anything but. My pregnancy announcement was coupled with the announcement of a disease bent on killing us. I made the announcement because we needed help. It was hardly joyful.

My doctors were pressuring me to terminate for the sake of my life. My kidneys were rapidly failing, along with other systems in my body. No one knew if I would or even could recover. And besides, the baby very likely might not survive.

I really did value living. I had already seen the effects of my last near-death experience on my family. I couldn’t leave them; their lives mattered too. And yet I persevered in the pregnancy. There was never enough evidence not to. The weight of one life over another life never tipped enough to one side.

It was only in retrospect that I realized I lived through one of the greatest fears of my twenties, in the second half of my thirties. What still confuses me is that I risked everything to fight for Kai’s life, while at the same time I didn’t want him. But fighting for him made me want him. Our relationship became exceedingly complex, just like my value for life, where I walked the line.

Separation

Kai isn’t just the Trauma Baby. To me he might be, but to everyone else—including himself—he is a classic, active, vivacious, nearly two-year-old child with an easy-going personality. He loves watching Bluey, pouring water everywhere and on everything, taking lids of sharpies, collecting balls and trinkets to drop behind him as he walks, and exploring outside (to eat snails).

One of my current homework assignments in therapy is to practice seeing Kai as his own person. I am trying to separate Everything Terrible from him. It is as if I am holding a sieve, in which all the trauma can be gently sifted away. It feels more like I’m pulling off skin or cutting the fat off a roast with a dull knife (and the roast is me). It is exceedingly difficult.

Each time I call him a toddler, or even Kai (not “the baby”), I am actively submitting to the fact I lost his infancy along with his pregnancy.

Forgetting

There are two types of forgetting. One from time and and seasons past. Many of my other kids’ childhood experiences have been lost this way. This is bittersweet, but it is also normal and expected. The other type of forgetting is trauma. All that remains are fragments upon fragments.

My memories of baby Kai are the trauma type, barely fragments, from just last year. Even these are crushed by an avalanche of what I do remember—hospitalizations, illness, insomnia, and feeling like I was going insane.

Recently, I went through my husband’s pictures during the end of my pregnancy with Kai, his birth, and part of the year following. I was proud of myself that I was able to look at these. It was a big change that I wasn’t so triggered by these pictures that I couldn’t function. Then I spent an hour going through Auntie Meg’s pics of the first year of Kai’s life. How could it be me in those photos? I wasn’t there, was I? It confirmed what I suspected—I lost much of Kai’s infancy to PTSD and illness.

NICU days aren’t always about the baby

Unfortunately, I do remember everything scary, triggering, and life-threatening. Kai was somewhere in the background.

For example, I vividly remember the wires and tubes connected to Kai’s minuscule body in the NICU, a body that was actually quiet robust compared to some of the other babies in their pods around us. I held Kai close as I heard the code for a dying newborn, the signal for the parents to get to the baby’s side to say goodbye. The alarm put into sound the last few months of keeping Kai alive in me. Hearing it, the fear spiked for a moment and then I was washed in relief, and after, guilt. Kai had already made it through his worst, but their child, whom they had also worked so hard to keep alive, took his last breaths.

I’d alternate between gratitude and a trauma-response fear in the NICU. I carried Kai and sacrificed my own health to the extreme to keep him alive. It was now time to fight for my own life.

I remember the meetings with the lactation consultants in the NICU, bravely mediating between the NICU pharmacists and my nephrologist. I only cried a little during my attempts to latch Kai to my breast—I was too tired and ill. I’d observe that my nipple could cover his whole face and marvel how they could get a feeding tube up such a tiny nose. The lactation consultants would stand behind me, gently reminding me that “fed is best.” They were kind enough to assure me that I wasn’t a bad mom as it became evident I was too sick to produce, encouraging me to focus on my own recovery. Breastfeeding was just another thing to add to my list of Things to Grieve Later.

I also acutely remember passing off Kai in the NICU to whomever I could, trying to avoid another accident. My husband would push me in wheelchair to the restroom, or I’d try to hobble behind it, as if it was a walker. My body was flailing, including my bladder and bowels, on the combination of heavy new drugs, diuretics doing their work, recovering from an ileus (a paralyzed digestive system), a preeclampsia magnesium drip, and fighting off c-diff. It was too much. I didn’t always make it.

I know many parents NICU experience is all about their child. For me, though, it was all about shifting to my survival, knowing he was safe and secure in the hands of my husband, nurses, and later, my family and friends to care for him at home.

No wonder I don’t remember most of the first year of his life. I was trying to come back to mine.

Following the Pendulum of Healing

When we experience pain and suffering, we tend to see it in extremes. If we want to avoid it, we distract ourselves and hide our pain under platitudes and happy thoughts (even if our bodies keep freaking out, trying to get us to deal with what’s inside). When we are ready to validate and process our pain, we swing to the other extreme, zooming in so deeply that we can see barely anything beyond the pain. It can be consuming, a dam unleashed, swallowing us (and sometimes those around us) in the cascade.

This pattern of extremes makes sense. But as I heal, I need to follow the pendulum’s gravity as it centers. To flourish, I need to hold a dialectic, a both/and. This honors the truth, empowers me to be thankful, and it brings me back to reality with a little more sanity.

Instead of stating that I forgot all of Kai’s infancy, I can recognize that even though I only remember a little bit, and even if they were combined with negatives, at least I still have something. I still want to acknowledge the good. As the pendulum of healing slows, I swing back the other way, to remember the good. For the sake of this exercise, I’ll temporarily block out the negative side to see what I forgot when I zoomed in on the pain.

Good things from Kai’s infancy:

Insomnia, flashbacks, panic. Reading spy novels and eating Cheerios while feeding Kai throughout the night.

The lymphedema wraps in our pictures and not being able to hoist myself up from my chair. I was still unable to find shoes large enough to walk outside in. My hands shook so badly during those six months that I couldn’t even take a picture without it being blurry. So many times I’d have to try again. The photo shoots of adorable Kai in the front yard.

The uncomfortable moment when I would have to ask a visitor to wear a mask, as I was so very immunosuppressed. Friends visiting and loving on Kai.

We couldn’t even celebrate Kai properly! I felt so much disappointment when my babyshower had to be cancelled due to an emergency admission in the hospital. Many people who I really hoped would come were not able to when it was rescheduled. I felt so tired at the shower, indifferent to what was happening with Kai during the shower. I felt frustrated I couldn’t engage with a group like I used to. Kai had a baby shower with delicious food. We also were able to encourage a new mom!

Not being able to breathe walking up the hill to the toilet. Having diarrhea from that new immunosuppressent medicine. I also had so much insomnia on those trips. I felt so guilty that my kids as they had to set up and tear down and I couldn’t help. My lymphedema leg wraps were disgustingly dirty. I also had my blood pressure rise when I woke up with cold-like symptoms. It was so stressful to try to decide which combo of medicine I needed to give myself so we didn’t have go to the nearest hospital. Then I was unable to find a close parking and I hadn’t yet received my new handicap pass. As I could barely walk, I was sure we had to leave the lake we were supposed to spend a day at. I was so anxious as I tried to break the disappointment to my kids, until my friends found a solution. Then there was the time when we took a “hike.” The stroller was my walker, but we had to bring a chair with us I could sit and rest every dozen yards while. Everyone kept waiting for me. I got to be outside and go camping with Kai as an infant three times! It was crazy and hopeful. My friends made it possible.

I won’t ever actually be able to cross out the negative. These are real parts of the story. But to flourish on the other side of trauma I am trying to see the good parts, too.

Here now

Tonight, before I laid Malachi in bed, he let me rock him for a few minutes. He was cuddled against me, blanket in one hand as he drank his milk. Again, I tried to remember holding him this way when he was only a few months old. Again, I failed. He knew something was up, making eyes at me and cracking a smile.

The sorrow doesn’t feel as acute this time. Over these weeks I’ve been working on this, it has gotten a little easier to see Kai as his own person. Even if I have to say goodbye to the baby he was, at least I am here with him now.