Today I'm potty training and cleaning out closets and watching Cars and making lunch and reading blogs and playing pretend.
And thinking of the Wednesday six years ago that my firstborn entered and left the world.
Happy birthday, Sam and Emilie. You are always missed and forever loved.
It’s that time of year again, where everywhere you turn there are reminders (usually in pink) that Mother’s Day is soon upon us.
And I have a lot to celebrate—a fantastic mom, a terrific mother-in-law, two wonderful three-year-olds. But the people I can’t celebrate with are never far from my mind.
I have been thinking about Sam and Emilie more than usual lately. While spending time with friends and feeling thankful for the job of motherhood, watching my living children running across the playground. While chatting with another mother whose loss is more recent, reflecting on what it took for me to earn those motherhood duties.
Mother’s Day was hard when the world didn’t consider me a mother, and it’s hard now when the world considers me a mother of two. The fact that I’m a mother of four will always make the holiday bittersweet.
•••
And if you’ve ever wondered why I’m so quick to blab about our reproductive struggles, here’s a more eloquent reason why than I could ever create (via a little pregnant, and made for National Infertility Awareness Week):
What IF? A Portrait of Infertility from Keiko Zoll on Vimeo.
Today is National Prematurity Awareness Day.
I have experienced the extreme ends of prematurity being the mom of two sets of preemie twins. My first set, Sam and Emilie, died due to being born too early. My second set, Henry and Eleanor, arrived at 35 weeks and came home from the hospital with me. I had steroid shots to develop their lungs, and they were fortunate and never needed NICU time. They both had reflux, and never caught on to breastfeeding, but that was it. No developmental delays or lasting health issues that often accompany being born prematurely.
We dodged the proverbial bullet with Henry and Eleanor, to have babies a month early with no problems. We weren’t so lucky with Sam and Emilie, who were with us for only an hour, born too early to even try to revive. I don’t get to watch them grow up, so I cannot tell you about the issues we face with them. Instead, let me be selfish and tell you how their prematurity affected ME. I know that some of my lingering issues are due to the entirety of our reproductive journey, but the loss of my first set of twins is always at the core.
I did not enjoy my pregnancy with Henry and Eleanor. I never had a baby shower, nor did I send out birth announcements. I did not bond with them when they shared my body, finding it easier to keep a mental distance in case they, too, did not survive.
I did not feel like Henry and Eleanor’s mother until they were three months old. I kept expecting them to be taken away from us like their brother and sister. I still have a difficult time accepting their good health, always wondering when the other shoe is going to drop.
I have a hard time congratulating friends on their pregnancies, my happiness for them overridden by my mind racing with fears of what could go wrong.
I have difficulty being around pregnant women in general. My OB/GYN’s office and Babies R Us can still fill me with panic.
A lot of prematurity stories involve the life-threatening ups and downs of NICU stays. But our story shows that prematurity can affect a family in a myriad of ways. For me, it robbed me of my children, and of being able to enjoy and participate in one of the most basic of life’s functions.
Science and research has saved a lot of babies who would have been lost even a generation ago, but we still have a long road ahead. I hope that some day no parent is able to make a list of prematurity’s aftermath.
Yesterday would have been Sam and Emilie’s fifth birthday. A tough day, made tougher by the fact that it was such a normal day. We had some workers come to the house to begin cleaning gutters and cutting down trees, postponing their work when the rains that kept us inside all day arrived. We watched lots and lots of TV, recuperated from colds, pestered Daddy when he came home for lunch.
And some Sam and Emilie-related events, too, to remind us that our version of a normal day with our family will never be what we expected it to be. We toasted them with a Dr Pepper. We visited the hospital to donate some baskets to the infant loss program, ones that will hold other families’ losses like the basket we still cherish held Sam and Emilie’s bodies. We ate supper at the Steak n Shake whose drive-thru we always visited after our infant loss support group meetings. And after Henry and Eleanor went to bed, Andy and I got out their brother and sister’s memory boxes, to look at their photos and hold their teeny tiny stuffed animals.
Our normal day reminded me how life goes on. I’m thankful for this; the “time heals all wounds” adage definitely has truth to it. But even on days that aren’t spent commemorating an anniversary, little things creep in to remind me just how we became parents. The involuntary inward cringe when someone announces a pregnancy, the startle I feel hearing another parent call for their own Sam or Emilie, the nightmares I occasionally have about being pregnant. I will always be affected by how our family came to be, but thankfully in positive ways, too. I witness every day how much Henry and Eleanor are loved, by Andy and I, as well as our friends and family; a love I think I would take for granted had we not been through what we have.
My four kids are very loved, and I treasure being their mother. I just wish my firstborn could be with me to tell them in person.
Sam
Emilie
Mother’s Day is tough for me. It was tough in 2005 and 2006, when the world didn’t consider me a mother, despite the birth (and death) certificates of two people who proved otherwise. It was tough in 2007 and 2008, when I had two beautiful, healthy children to celebrate, but still had two others I could not enjoy the day with.
It will be tough again this year. I am so grateful to have Henry and Eleanor, but a holiday that highlights the bond between a mother and her children is difficult to celebrate when not all of your children are with you.
But this year I hope to have a productive Mother’s Day weekend. I’m participating in the March of Dimes’ March for Babies, something I’ve wanted to do since Sam and Emilie were born. My family is the proud product of lots of science. Sam and Emilie were conceived with the help of Clomid, Henry and Eleanor were the result of in vitro fertilization. I’ve had two different types of cerclages as well as many different drugs to try to keep my pregnancies safe. I was even a participant in a scientific study during my pregnancy with Henry and Eleanor. None of this would have been possible without the research of wonderful doctors and scientists.
No mother should ever have to lie in a hospital bed, tilted back with her feet higher than her head, wondering if her body will fail her and cause her children to die. No parents should ever have to give birth, then leave the hospital with empty arms to head home to plan a funeral. No parents should have to spend the first few weeks or months of their child’s life in the NICU, wondering what health problems or developmental delays lay ahead, a scenario I’m still amazed we avoided when Henry and Eleanor were born at 35 weeks.
So on Saturday our family will be walking in honor and memory of our two sets of preemie twins. I’ve been a slacker and am down to the last minute for raising funds, but see that button over to the side there? If you feel like donating, you can click on it and go to my March for Babies page. I’ll leave the button up for a while after the walk this weekend, but until Saturday Farmers Insurance is matching donations.
I love all four of my children, and hope that by walking I’ll help other mothers be able to have a happy Mother’s Day with their healthy children.
Today is the anniversary of Sam and Emilie’s due date, and Andy and I had a bottle of Dr. Pepper tonight in their honor. Why, you ask? When I was pregnant with them, I craved Dr. Pepper and had a can of it every morning—my daily caffeine treat. It’s a silly thing to tie to memories of a pregnancy, but Dr. Pepper makes me think of Sam & Emilie. So much so, that for the first few years after we lost them, I couldn’t touch a drop of the stuff. But now I try to focus on some of the happy things about my pregnancy with them, not that it could ever balance out the heartbreaking things. So tonight, Andy and I poured ourselves some fizzy glasses and toasted all four of our children.
cheers
Lying on the ultrasound exam table, my husband at my side clutching my hand, I watched with excitement as two babies squirmed in my womb, each one fighting for just a little more leg room in my belly. It was my twenty-week check-up, and each baby was being measured and examined from head to toe. I closed my eyes, when necessary so as not to find out the sex of each baby, clamping my hand over my face so I wouldn’t be tempted to peek. As Baby A yawned and Baby B rolled over, my husband and I were overcome with awe that we had created these two perfect beings and looked forward to a future of coaching little league and helping with homework.
“Well, we just measured your cervix two weeks ago, but let’s check it again, just to be safe,” the ultrasound tech said as she was finishing my exam. The room suddenly grew silent as the tech stared at the computer screen. Turning to us, she asked, “You’re seeing the doctor after this, right?” A small knot of fear appeared in my stomach as the tech finished and sent us next door to meet with my physician.
My doctor walked into the exam room with a worried look on her face. “We have a problem,” she said. “You’re three centimeters dilated.” With our hearts in our throats, my husband and I raced to the hospital, where we were greeted at the entrance and rushed to the high-risk obstetrics unit.
In the blink of an eye, I was lying in a hospital bed, my feet higher than my head, a monitor strapped around my belly and I.V. and catheter tubes draped across my bed. A million questions swam through my mind. Would my children survive? How can I have contractions without feeling them? How could anything be wrong when I had just seen my babies heartily kicking around on an ultrasound screen?
A swirl of people came and went. Nurses materialized to offer words of encouragement and to administer first one drug, then another, in hopes of calming my contractions. A neonatologist popped in to scare us with doom-and-gloom predictions (“Your children won’t live until at least week twenty-three, and then there’s risk of brain damage, blindness, learning disabilities…”). A maternal/fetal specialist appeared to discuss a cerclage, a stitch that could be placed in my cervix in hopes of saving my pregnancy. We nervously watched charts and printouts and physicians’ faces for signs that my labor had slowed and my cerclage could be placed.
Through drugs that made me see double and too weak to roll over in bed, my labor was stopped and I was taken to surgery the next morning to get my cerclage. Through a fog of pain and drugs, I heard the doctor saying things had gone well, and now we should just hope for the best. I settled into my hospital room, ate popsicles, threw up popsicles, and greeted my mother and sister (or two mothers and two sisters; I was still seeing double), who rushed to town to accompany my husband in his bedside vigil.
That day blended into the next day into the next. Life became a nervous routine of medications and blood pressure checks and ultrasounds. I watched hours of television, not really following the programs as my mind drifted to the countless best-case and worst-case scenarios that played through my head. I knew now that I had a son and a daughter, having caved in during one of my post-surgery ultrasounds and asking to learn the babies’ genders. No more were they generic babies I was trying to save; I had a little girl and little boy whose lives depended on me. Instead of praying, I found myself silently talking to my children, as if I could will them to stay in my body.
After five days in the hospital, a glimmer of hope surfaced; I had stabilized and was doing well enough to go home. As my family struggled to remember all our parting instructions—How often to I take my antibiotics? Do we check my temperature in the morning or evening or both?—we were cautiously optimistic as we arrived home and turned my bedroom into a makeshift medical ward. We celebrated with ice cream and allowed ourselves to think that maybe we’d be one of the lucky families, telling our son and daughter stores one day about the scared they gave their mom and dad.
But then, on my second night at home, I noticed blood. My husband blew through red lights as he and my mother sped me back to the hospital. My husband and I were ushered into an exam room, where we silently watched cartoons, not wanting to speak, as if speaking about our situation would suddenly make it real. Finally, a young intern came in to confirm our fears. The cerclage was failing, and I would have to deliver. Our children would not survive.
As dawn broke, my husband and I practiced saying the names we had hastily agreed upon for our children. “Sam and Emilie.” “Emilie and Sam.” I struggled to realized that I would read these names on a tombstone instead of birthday cards and letters to Santa. The day went on forever and ever, each tick of the clock slowly bringing us to a conclusion that we didn’t want to face.
The delivery was quiet, almost reverential for my tiny son and daughter who would not be with us for long. There were no shouts for me to push, no excited snapping of photos. Sam came first, giving a small cry that immediately shattered my heart into a million pieces. Blinking back tears, my husband cradled his son, whispering, “Hi, Sam,” and my mother and sister counted his ten perfect fingers and toes. Emilie soon followed, her sweet face bruised from her delivery. As the doctors and nurses gingerly administered my postpartum care, I wanted to scream at them to leave me alone and didn’t they realize that my children were dying and couldn’t they come back later? I tried to burn images in my brain of my husband with his children and my mother with her grandchildren and my sister with her niece and nephew, knowing there would be no family pictures in the years to come. My husband stared in amazement as his daughter clasped her finger, and we all said our good-byes as quickly as we had said our hellos. Finally, my son and daughter were gently placed on my chest, and through their translucent skin I watched their hearts slow down and ultimately be still.
As swiftly as Sam and Emilie entered my life they were taken away. I had dreamt of baby showers and birth announcements but was instead given funerals and obituaries. Yet these tiny people and their brief lives had an impact on my life that no one else could ever duplicate. Sam and Emilie had made me a mother.
Last night was the annual candlelight ceremony hosted by the hospital where Sam and Emilie were born. Each December they have a ceremony in honor of families that have lost infants. We’ve attended every year from 2004 on, and this year brought Henry and Eleanor with us. We knew that having to monitor our second set of twins meant that we wouldn’t be able to fully focus on our first set of twins, but it is important to Andy and I that we start attending as a family. Henry and Eleanor did really well; Henry sat quietly on Andy’s lap, and I took Eleanor out in the hall to run off some steam after lighting our candles for Sam and Emilie.
A highlight of the ceremony is seeing the other families who attended our support group with us for the year or so after we lost the twins. All of us have gone on to have other children, and what fun it was to see them all run around together after the ceremony. Andy and I cherish these other families, although we wish we had met them for reasons other than we’ve all lost babies. But it is so comforting to be in a group where we can casually mention Sam and Emilie, and where others see Andy and I as parents of four children.
Sam and Emilie are in my thoughts every day, but especially at this time of year. Their due date was December 12, although they more likely would have arrived around Thanksgiving had my pregnancy continued to term. As I enjoy spending time with family during the holidays, I fervently wish that Sam and Emilie could be there to celebrate the day with us. They would be four years old now—what a fun age. I wonder what they’d be asking Santa for this year?
I know most days this blog is lighthearted, but it’s that way only because Sam and Emilie taught me to cherish every day with Henry and Eleanor. This web site will mainly be cataloging the adventures of Henry and Eleanor as they grow, but I also want to make sure I take time to remember their brother and sister, too.
I wrote a paper for an English class I took the year after Sam and Emilie were born. We were asked to write an essay about a personal experience, and I chose to write about the twins’ birth. It’s kinda long, so I’ll put it in a separate post. Their birth was a traumatic event in my life, but makes me so grateful for the happiness that fills my life now.
Since 2004, our trips to Carterville have included an element of sadness. My hometown is where we’ve buried Sam and Emilie. It’s tough not being able to visit them more often, but when they died Indiana didn’t seem like “home” enough to keep them here. It’s comforting to me to have them in Carterville, surrounded by people I knew—a guy from my high school, a former neighbor, the long-time local store owner.
I went to visit them by myself last Wednesday; I later found out from a friend that the day was National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. I always feel like a bad mom when I don’t go to see them every day when I’m home, but it seems weird to go to the cemetery without Andy. The two of us went together on Saturday before heading to lunch to get caught up with each other’s week.
After four years, visiting the cemetery has become normal to us, as evidenced by our “cemetery-and-pizza” lunch date. But you know what? It never stops sucking. I hate that family photos will never contain my whole family. I hate that I still cringe when I meet new people, dreading the “so, how many kids do you have?” questions. I hate that I can’t walk into Babies R Us to buy diapers without feeling a knot in the pit of my stomach. I hate that I couldn’t enjoy Henry and Eleanor’s pregnancy.
Losing Sam and Emilie, plus all of our other reproductive drama, changed my personality in every way, both good and bad. I’m less religious and more judgmental. But I’m also less focused on unimportant things and more grateful for my family. I believe that I’m a better mother to Henry and Eleanor because of what we went through. I have more patience with them than I ever thought I’d have. Even on days when I’m counting down the minutes to bedtime, I know that things could be a lot worse.
I don’t even think I’d have this blog if Sam and Emilie hadn’t taught me that every day with Henry and Eleanor is such a gift, and I should treasure my memories with them. I may be able to watch only two of my children grow up, but I’m a proud mother of four.
So I promise that this blog will mostly be about silly stuff like how Eleanor laughs when she toots and boring stuff like what we did over the weekend, but I do want to record things about our journey to our current happy, contented state. Because the four years leading up to Henry and Eleanor were definitely NOT happy and content. We pretty much lived in a state of “How could things get any worse? Oh wait, here’s how” for four years. I know everyone reading this (hi, Mom!) probably already knows our story, but let’s refresh with a little timeline, shall we?
April 2003
Andy and Jennifer decide to have babies. How hard could it be, right? Jennifer doesn’t like to ovulate and is prescribed Clomid. Clomid turns Jennifer into a raging bitch, at one point prompting her to tell Andy, “I can’t even look at you right now.” Still, after four months, they manage to get pregnant.
October 2003
Andy and Jennifer go to their 12-week appointment only to find out instead of a baby they have a blighted ovum. Oh yeah, and Jennifer also has a weird lump on her left ovary that needs to be checked out, ’mmmkay?
December 2003
Weird lump turns out to be dermoid tumor. Dermoid tumors can sometimes grow hair and teeth, but sadly, Jennifer’s didn’t. Jennifer wakes up from surgery to find out not only is she now missing one tumor, she’s also missing her left ovary and left fallopian tube, too.
January 2004
Andy and Jennifer are gluttons for punishment and decide to try to get pregnant again. Jennifer goes back on Clomid, Andy goes back to trying to avoid her wrath. Three months later, Jennifer’s right ovary morphs into Superovary, spitting out two eggs. Andy and Jennifer are shocked and thrilled to learn they are pregnant with twins.
July/August 2004
Jennifer learns at her 20-week ultrasound that she’s dilated 3 centimeters. The next week is frantically spent trying to save her pregnancy—a rescue cerclage, turbutaline and mag sulfate—but Samuel Elias and Emilie Anna are born on August 4, 2004. They each live for about an hour. Andy and Jennifer become parents, but in a way they never imagined.
January 2005
Grieving and not sure what the next step should be, Andy and Jennifer decide to start trying for another pregnancy. After three months, they take a break, go on vacation, come home and book an appointment with the fertility specialist.
June 2005
Before they can start fertility treatments, surprise! Jennifer finds out she’s pregnant. Without drugs, even! But after a few weeks of monitoring because something doesn’t seem right, surprise! Jennifer has internal bleeding! Surgery discovers that an ectopic pregnancy has burst, rupturing 75% of Jennifer’s right tube along with it. Out comes the ectopic along with Jennifer’s right tube.
September/October 2005
Andy and Jennifer pay the equivalent of Luxemborg’s GNP to the fertility clinic and start their first round of in vitro fertilization. Eight weeks later, after over fifty injections, bloating, surgeries, ultrasounds, and blood tests, they find out they were unsuccessful. Andy and Jennifer are quickly losing hope and decide to take a reproductive break. They go to Paris and eat crepes.
July/August 2006
Andy and Jennifer decide on a whim to do another round of IVF. Track marks soon reappear on Jennifer’s stomach and rear end. Superovary is a rock star and spits out 21 eggs, seven of which become embryos. Two embryos are transferred to Jennifer’s uterus by a female fertility doctor, while an embryologist, nurse, and Andy look on. Andy and Jennifer realize there will be some interesting “birds and bees” discussions in their house if these embryos develop into people. Ten days later, bleeding and convinced she’s not pregnant, Jennifer finds out she’s pregnant. Two weeks after that, Andy and Jennifer find out they’re having twins. Again. Panic ensues.
October 2006
Determined not to lose another pregnancy, Jennifer goes under the knife and gets an abdominal cerclage. While awake, she’s cut open and a stitch is placed around her cervix. These babies are staying put, and Jennifer now has the 6-inch-long scar to prove it.
March 2007
At 35 weeks, measuring 46 weeks pregnant, Jennifer has contractions and high blood pressure and has a c-section two weeks ahead of schedule. Eleanor Jean and Henry Nicholas were born one minute apart, small but healthy. The world breathes a sigh of relief.
.........................................................................................................
And there you have it. Hopefully I haven’t made too light of our situation. These truly were the worst four years of our lives. Am I still angry that we had to go through all of this? Absolutely. Am I also a little bit grateful? Absolutely. If we hadn’t had these experiences, I don’t think I’d see Henry and Eleanor as the true miracles they are. Every day with them is so much sweeter because of how hard we had to work to get them here.
I’ll write more in-depth about Sam and Emilie later, but for now, it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.
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