Two weeks today since I went in for a 9-week ultrasound and found out my twins had died at 7 weeks. A week and a half since I went in for the D&C. And I’m still crying randomly. :smack:
I know it’s partly psychological and partly biochemical. I’m just sick of it. I want to be able to move on, I want to be able to accept that I won’t have children-of-the-body and discuss rationally with Husband the idea of adoption (which might not even be an option, depending) or remaining a family-of-two. But I can’t do that yet, because I am not yet a rational person who can discuss the issue without crying. :rolleyes:
So how long do I have to put up with this? When will I be normal again? I would very much like to be able to mark it on my calendar, and that way I can look forward to that date and know how much more crap I have to deal with. Right now I have good days and bad days and days when I don’t really feel sad but I notice myself acting like a sad person, which is frustrating.
Gaaaaah! Emotions are STUPID!!!
Note: I know that I won’t actually be able to put a date on the calendar and cross off days. But it would be very nice if that were possible.
As hard as it is, try to be patient with yourself. Would you expect someone else to “be over it” by now? You are healing, and healing takes time. As my therapist told me, you can’t speed up healing. You can only slow it down, and a good way to do that is to be hard on yourself.
YMMV… but when I had a difficult miscarriage back in 12/04, it took me about 1 week before I could do anything but cry. I wanted to be alone. It was about a month before I was ready to “talk” about it. And about six months before the miscarriage went from “open gaping wound in my heart” to something approaching a tolerable amount of pain.
Maggie, give yourself some time to grieve. This is a real loss. It will take some time. Consider therapy, or a support group.
Two weeks?! Your body needs time to heal and so does your mind. My mom died two years ago and I still can’t read about the moment in the funeral when the clods hit the coffin or in a cremation when the button is pressed for the fire without tearing up a little, and we weren’t even that close…
Give yourself time to properly heal. It will be better for you and for everyone else in your life, including, if you go that route, your adopted child.
As everyone else said, and as you know, it’s only been a short time, sweetie. {Maggie} I know it sucks and you want to be done with the worst part, but yeah, the biological component really doesn’t help. Look up some grieving information. Not on how to get over it, but how to bear it until it finally, incrementally, lessens enough for you to be yourself again. Big hugs.
As of tomorrow it will be one month since my boyfriend passed away. The only thing I can offer you at this point is a listening ear and a boat load of commiseration. I too am looking forward to whatever that magical date is on my calendar. Just know that you are not alone. Feel free to PM me anytime.
{{{Maggie}}} In my experience, that feeling of being *tired *of being sad is the first tiny hint that you will someday come out of the worst of the pain. It means that some tiny part of your mind is starting to be ready to move forward. The rest will get there.
A while back a few friends and I were talking about trauma and grieving, and the general consensus was that it mostly takes six weeks after anything really terrible before you move out of the initial raw-gaping-wound phase. This was just a pub chat and we may have been talking bollix, but for what it’s worth…
I agree. Give yourself permission to feel everything you feel - even things that you might think are inappropriate. You feel what you feel, and you feel it as long as you feel it - acceptance goes a long way towards helping you feel better. A note on acceptance, since people tend to misunderstand it - it means that you acknowledge what happened, and how it has affected you, not that you like it or agree with it or anything like that. It’s not a judgement; it’s just saying, “Yup, there it is. That’s what it is.”
That time-frame doesn’t sound unreasonable. I’m no grief counsellor, but I don’t think any of them would be too worried about you not moving on for quite a while yet (even if you’re tired of feeling this way).
Another way of looking at it - instead of waking up in the morning and saying, “Oh, crap, another day of lugging this burden around,” you could say to yourself, “Another day is another day closer to feeling better.” I hope this helps even a little.
Grieving takes a lot of energy and it’s exhausting. It’s also necessary. Losing a child is devastating and I believe that grief is a necessary thing because it forces you to deal with the loss, then you can accept the new normal and move on. And it is a new normal.
And, like the current Pit thread, the correct response to “Why don’t you do x?” is “Fuck you, that’s why.” You don’t owe anyone anything. Not an explanation of what happened, not to put on a happy face and go out if you don’t feel like it, not a damn thing.
It sucks, it really does. But like a kidney stone, it’ll pass. One day, you’ll know the worst of it is over and you can get back to the business of day-to-day living. But the outside world will wait.
If you need to talk to an anonymous stranger who’s been there to rant n’ rave, rant n’ rave away.
Just backing up what the others said - two weeks is really no time at all. It will end when you are ready for it to end… except it never really ends, you just find a new normal.
Grief is a very personal thing and there is no right or wrong way to go about it. So if you feel like sitting at home, putting a sad movie on the TV and bawling your eyes out - do that. On the other hand, if you feel you need to get out of the house and do something completely different for a while, something that will distract you and maybe even make you laugh for a little while - then do that. Your grief will still be there, unfortunately, when you get home.
Take care of yourself, and know that we’re thinking of you.
It doesn’t, but you do get better at dealing with it and that will definitely happen for you in time. The whole process sucks ass [that’s the official technical term] and I’m sorry you’re going through all of that. Eventually you’ll have some more energy and you’ll be able to start planning what you want to do next, and that doesn’t sound easy either but I think it’ll help when you have something to focus on.
Part of your problem is you seem to think you can hustle things along, put a deadline on the end of grieving, etc. That’s a little misguided, but probably stems, at it’s heart, from the very human condition of lacking self compassion. Having compassion for the suffering of others, is only half the lesson of compassion - the easy half.
I know a little trick that might help you get over the hump, so I’ll share it. I know it sounds somewhat silly, but I think if you just give it a try, you’ll see it really does work.
You need to sit somewhere quietly, with your eyes closed and your breathing calm. Try to empty your head of thoughts. Now, think about all the millions of peoples live’s playing out, right now on our earth, and imagine that right now, somewhere on the other side of the earth is a mother grieving just as you are, the tragic loss of her beautiful twins. Think about her pain. Feel your own pain in whatever way it physically manifests; your heart, your breath, your gut, your head. Now manifest compassion for her, (It should be easy, you can feel her pain, after all!), with all the focus and concentration you can muster, send that compassion out to her wherever she may be.
This whole exercise should take no more than a few moments of focus, to accomplish. You can do it several times in a day. It works because it sort of tricks your subconscious mind into manifesting some ‘self’ compassion, which is all you really need!
I am truly sorry to hear of your loss, my heart goes out to you. You’ll be in my prayers and I wish you nothing but good luck in the days ahead!
Time slows down when you’re going through something this difficult. It’s only been two weeks, sure, but they are two very, very long weeks filled to the brim with days where every single minute is filled with agony. It’s “only” two weeks is a better way to put it.
What I tried to do is give myself temporary breaks from the pain by reading complicated, technical novels (I read some of the Jack Ryan books; can’t think of the author at the moment) which took a lot of my mental energy. I also napped a lot, but waking up was hard because of the instant between sleep and remembering was so fleeting, and remembering “I lost my baby” was so painful. (She was just under a year old.) I sort of threw myself into work and wrote a lot of things where I had to interview a lot of people and do a lot of concentrating. When I got back to my pain, it seemed like it didn’t have the same power, afterward.
These things helped me; I don’t know if they’ll help you. You have my prayers and best wishes; grief is hard. You just have to endure it.
