Just told Griffin that friends are coming this weekend to play D&D and he got REALLY excited. Then he tried to “get” me as a goblin, so I cast a spell on him. Then he said, “well, I have 100 hit points and you have only 5, so I won.”
— Text message from Sarah this morningÂ
Everything below is in Griffin’s words. It’s a bit stream-of-consciousness, but we just asked him to talk about Kindergarten. Occasionally we prompted him to give further details. – Andrew & Sarah
I like the puzzle maps. They are maps but they are puzzles: Africa, United States, and the other one that kind of looks like Africa (“South America?” “Uh-huh!”).
The trinomial and binomial cubes are boxes with blocks inside them and you try to match the pattern on top of the box.
I like the reading corner because it has a chair and there are two reading corners, one in the back of the room and one in the front of the room. I like the the one that’s up high with the stairs to go up, in the front of the room. I like to read the garden books and I like the pretend books and I like sitting in the reading corner too. There is only one garden book; it’s like a pretend garden and it goes all over the roof and he goes through it. It has lots of white flowers and yellow ones too. The pretend books are not real so like they are real books but they are not real people and stuff.
I like the computers too in the multi-purpose room. We try to match words sometimes.
We eat with silverware and sometimes our fingers. We have lots of tables which we have to set up. We sing this song before we eat:
For the golden corn and the apples on the tree,
for the golden butter and the honey for our tea,
for fruits and nuts and berries that grow along the way,
for birds and bees and flowers, we give thanks every day.
We also have another song that we sing at the rug:
Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Going up the tracks,
Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Then we come right back.First we go to Malaya’s house,
Then we go to James’s house,
Then we go to Crosby’s house,
Then we go to Tegan’s house.Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Going up the tracks,
Choo choo choo choo,
Choo choo choo choo,
Then we come right back.First we go to Griffin’s house,
Then we go to Harrison’s house,
Then we go to Serenity’s house…
We keep singing like that until we go to everyone’s house.
The play structure! I love recess. Now we go on the play structure. The grass is medium new and medium not-new. The play structure is new; it was already built when I started school but the grass was new so we played out back instead of in the front. We like to play and tag and in the sand box. I like playing on the play structure too. We get to go outside every day, except when it is raining or super super cold.
I like my teacher Kristen and also Angela and Corinne, my side teachers. Angela passes out the food and she speaks Spanish.
I miss my sister when I go to school. It is a long day; I sometimes get tired.
When I get home, I like to snuggle with Maggie and also I say, “Hello Mommy and Daddy” if Daddy is home. I like to play with Maggie and when Mama and Daddy make dinner we like to play.
I’ve been struggling with how to write this post, or even whether to write it at all. Should I write it just for me, or write it to share? And I’ve decided to share it because this type of loss is something that is all too common among women, and I feel like we just don’t talk about it enough: I have had two miscarriages in the past year.
Andrew and I have been very lucky with our pursuit of expanding our family. Griffin and Maggie were conceived and birthed with very few complications. Two for two made us confident in the decision to try for a third, albeit a little more cautious considering our ages (I am 37, Andrew 42).
Miscarriage number one happened in March. I knew it was a statistical probability, but when it actually happened, I was a little stunned. It was still early in the pregnancy (I should have been around 8 weeks), and I was just starting to wonder about the baby and how it would change our family. After we found out the pregnancy wasn’t viable, I mourned the loss of a possibility more than an actual baby, and told myself to feel thankful for the two healthy kids we already have, feel thankful that I didn’t lose a baby later in pregnancy or at birth, or god forbid, lose a living child. I truly was thankful for all of those things, AND there was still a sense of loss that was greater than I expected. Much greater. It really threw me, including making me question whether we really should try again for a third child. I struggled with rocking the boat of the good thing we’ve got going on with the four of us, whether I wanted to risk going through a miscarriage again, how far I would be willing to go for another child…
In the end, we decided to try again. I got pregnant again at the beginning of August. The estimated due date would have been Andrew’s birthday in April, and we joked about how it seems like we’re destined to have all of our babies in April (Griffin’s birthday is April 8th, Maggie’s is April 24). I hoped the baby could wait until May, just to make life a little less crazy in April. I was relieved that this pregnancy felt different from the last: I had nausea, I was exhausted, and just overall, felt more pregnant than the last time. Then I had an early ultrasound, and the dating showed us off by about two weeks. This was a bit of a worry to me, but there was a heartbeat, so I clung to that. Then, three weeks ago, I began to bleed. We found out a few days later that this pregnancy was also not viable. I should have been 11 weeks.
I am mad. I am disappointed. I am weepy. I feel a little broken. I wish I had some answers. I am holding my two kids, whom I adore, adore, adore (even when they’re driving me nuts), tighter and making sure they hear me say, “I love you,” all of the time. I am marveling at the wonders they are, and thankful for the relative ease with which they came into our lives. I am in awe of how other women do it: those who keep on trying and do not succeed, those who lose their babies later in pregnancy or shortly after birth, those who lose their growing babies or children. This LOSS. It is deeper than I ever knew possible. To be attached to a being who doesn’t even exist yet feels so strange, and yet, there it is. There is truly no amount of logic that can explain the sadness of losing the idea of what could be, especially in the face of the richness that I already have.
There are many ways that people explain or deal with this type of loss. Many people take comfort in the idea that their unborn children wait for them in the afterlife. I respect that belief, but I do not believe in divine intervention, heaven, or an afterlife. What brings me comfort is the idea that women have held this loss before me. They have held it, grieved it, and pass on the knowledge of the struggle to me. I have met a lot of women since revealing I have had a miscarriage who have this knowledge, and while I don’t think it should define us, it is a part of who we are. This kind of knowledge deserves to be shared, whether it is a quiet acknowledgement or detailed processing with friends or family, I encourage people to talk. I hope it helps.
Postscript:
This post was written as a way to talk about my miscarriages, and I had started writing it before the second miscarriage had passed and completed. (For those unfamiliar with miscarriage, it generally takes a few weeks to pass, from the start of bleeding to the end.) This second time around, I did pass most of the miscarriage naturally, but unfortunately, not all of it passed cleanly and I started to hemorrhage in the middle of the night. This resulted in a large amount of blood loss and a visit to the ER. While in the ER, as I was being assessed, I suddenly started going into hypovolemic shock (shock caused by an excessive loss of bodily fluids). It was the scariest event of my life, and for a few incredibly terrifying minutes, I felt like I might die. Thankfully, the ER team at HCMC stabilized me quickly, and with fluids and a procedure to stop the bleeding, I was discharged to go home six hours later. This fact, that I was in serious medical distress at 5am and discharged on my own two feet by noon, continues to baffle me. Luckily, I did not need a blood transfusion, but I am anemic and have been slowly recovering with lots of rest, nutritious food, iron supplements, and TLC from family and friends. Frankly, my ER experience has eclipsed my feelings about the pregnancy loss. The potential for loss had I not gone in to the ER has haunted me the last couple of weeks, and I have spent a lot of time feeling grateful for trusting my instincts to get medical help when I just didn’t feel right, grateful for the support network we have, and most of all, deeply thankful for my life and three of the most important people in it.
