Comparing Losses

I’ve tried to figure out this parenting thing to the best of my abilities.  I’ll even say I’ve had some obstacles due to grief that have gotten in my way.  But one of the things I have noticed that we tend to do as moms in our culture is engage in mass amounts of competition using our children to secure our gold medals.  Some moms on blogs have even gone so far as to coin this phenomenon “mompetition”.  There seems to always be a way to measure your child’s “progress”.   I swear it starts almost immediately when that child pops out with height, weight and Apgar scores.  Then the prize winning questions start flying from other moms out there, and I swear their only agenda by asking these questions is for the opportunity to tell you their kid is better.  You may know the target questions:  How is your baby sleeping?  (You must answer in hours.)  When did you wean your child?  What age did your baby give up a bottle?  Is he still not potty-trained?  Does she still have her paci? When did she walk?  When did he talk?  Can he say his ABCs?  My kid was reading at 3.  Does anyone not see the problem with trying to teach a baby to read?  It’s alarming to me that we have DVDs that persuade us that this is a must.  We are so consumed with all this measuring and comparing our children’s so-called successes that no one has even stopped to consider what really are the most important questions in shaping the ideal human being?  What about these:  How does your child deal with real life experiences, emotions, her own pain?  Does your child have empathy?  Does your child prioritize the importance of compassion towards others?  What does your child really know about kindness? 

So why I am talking about parenting on a babyloss blog?  Well, because I think this madness is so embedded in our culture that we moms engage in this behavior with our unliving children as well, comparing our losses, trying to secure at least some ranking as a mother in a game where everyone loses.  Maybe you have never played this game, but I know I am guilty.  I just recently pulled the “you have know idea” card with a well intentioned friend, who was trying to explain to me how she got through her subsequent pregnancy after a 12 week loss in an attempt to comfort me as I was sharing how challenging being pregnant again has become.  I was amazed at the simplicity of her “solution”, but more amazed that she thought she knew where I was because of what she had been through.  But I wrestle with this (and now wish I would have handled this situation more delicately).  See, ever since I started this blog as the product of my 12 week loss sending me into a tailspin, I’ve been trying to sort through and make sense of my feelings.  Having now experienced both a neonatal loss at 40 weeks and more recently a 12 week loss, my mind can’t stop trying to process the similarities and the differences between these two events.  I know, I know, I’ve already preached to you on how and why not to do this.  In a past post, I told you this:  “We shouldn’t attempt to judge the volume, intensity or magnitude of someone’s grief.  Who has more, who has less?  Who cares?  My pain is my pain and yours is yours.  If it hurts you, I care about it”.  And I am not attempting to dispute my own words.  But the reality is that things are different.  I have been through a full term loss and now a first trimester loss and can say that these experiences were very different for me, in ways that should be very obvious and in ways that were not so much.  I began my 12 week loss with comparing while I was still in that ultrasound chair, when the doctor was scrambling to find that heartbeat, when I knew it was no longer there, when I knew babyloss was no longer a freak happening in my life.  I “at least”-ed myself to no end with this 12 week loss:  At least it happened now.  At least you didn’t carry the baby longer.  At least you’ve been through worse.  At least it doesn’t hurt so much.  Bullshit.  At least not in that very moment.  Grief began rolling in and I will tell you, especially in those first few stabs, grief does not carry a ruler, a scale, or a measuring tool of any kind. Grief just blindsides you with all its force, consuming you with its bold intensity. 

One of the things that I have come to realize is that grief sucks.  And I don’t think grief can be measured, although I now know from experience that some grief clouds are a little easier to navigate through than others.  Case in point:  a dear friend of mine lost her four year old to brain cancer a year and a half ago.  And if we’re competing in our comparisons, I’m folding my cards, she is hands down the winner.  No contest.  But what I’ve realized in playing this comparisons game is that just because she trumps me, just because her hand is better than mine, just because she will always be crowned the winner, it doesn’t mean that I don’t hurt.  It doesn’t mean that my heart wasn’t ripped away from me, chewed up into pieces and spit back out.  It doesn’t mean that I didn’t love, that I didn’t lose, that I didn’t own that grief from beginning to end.  After Wyatt left our world, whenever someone would tell me about their loss, especially an early one, in the back of my mind I would find myself uttering, “if you only knew” as I scoffed at their ignorance with grief.  I now think differently, I now know differently. Instead of my own ignorant scoffing, I embrace their grief, as if it were my own, and the only words I utter are “I’m sorry.  I am so, so sorry.”  It hurts no matter how, no matter who, no matter what and no matter when. 

About 10 years ago or so, a good friend of mine lost her baby at 18 weeks.  I was young, naïve and frankly stupid and didn’t really get her pain.  She was devastated beyond words.  She has been following my blog these days and has sent me so much encouragement.  To the point that I have felt guilty about how insensitive I was with her grief during that time that I had to  recently express my apologies.  And here is what she said in her response:   

It's funny what I still remember.   You and I went to Judge's.  You weren't insensitive at all.  I remember telling you something my friend said on the lines of "At least you didn't carry the baby through a whole pregnancy because that would've been so much worse."  Your comment to me was "It was the worst you could've gone through at the time."  I'm sure you don't remember the conversation but I do because even though you didn't know how I felt you knew it sucked! 

I well up with tears just reading this again.  First, because I am so thankful that I didn’t come off as an insensitive jerk in a time where I was completely clueless.  I’m certain that I remember being much more judging in my own thoughts.   But also because I’m amazed at how much these words resonate with me now and how they cause me to realize that comparing losses is truly not possible at all.  These losses do not come in isolation.  They are not neatly packaged as an entity all on their own.  Our surrounding life circumstances impact the effect of our losses more than the measurements of weeks ever could.  My friend’s example makes this quite clear to me.  If this is the worst experience that she has had, then it is the most pain she has felt and therefore it should not be compared to a full term loss.  She only knows this one.  She only knows this pain.  It hurts, it sucks, it does her no good to imagine a worse case scenario.  No good at all.  Her current pain and grief are most certainly enough.  I have a friend who recently had a miscarriage at about 6 weeks, she has other living children, she’s only known successful pregnancies.  She wasn’t expecting it.  She hasn’t visited this world before and it crushed her.  She said she had no idea it would hurt this much, she was embarrassed that she hurt this much, she thought maybe she was over-reacting.  My former competitive-mom-self might have internally nodded in agreement, but now, now I know she has a right to this pain and I say to her:  own it girl, own your grief, and don’t let anyone tell you you do not have the right.  We all have the right to embrace our pain.  We all have the right to feel the way we feel. 

And we can also look at this from another direction.  I have a friend who has experienced more babyloss than I can even bear to imagine.  She said that she had so many early miscarriages that they almost didn’t even phase her anymore.  She had experienced so much worse and knew this pain just wasn’t the same, it was not comparable to her.  I have another friend who told me something similar, she had an early loss about 6 months after her full term loss and she also said it was almost no big deal.  But my experience was different.  My first trimester loss pulled me down and dragged me through the dirt.  I had experienced a full term loss and I knew this was not the same, but damn it, it hurt.  The betrayal of my body once again, the embarrassment of believing I could do this easily this time, the injustice of it all, it all came back to kick my ass and it hurt like hell.  In some ways I think that having a prior loss made things easier.  I knew a greater hell.  I had been in a darker place.  I had held a real baby with a real name while he was taking his last real breath.  This 12 week thing should be easy stuff.  But it wasn’t.  It jerked me back into my past and caused me to revisit the dark, a place I never wanted to visit again.  I had put this crap behind me and moved on.  But here I was again.  In some ways I think that having a prior loss made things harder.  I had nothing to define this loss.  This baby had no name, no known gender, I did not give birth, hell, it was vacuumed out of my body, for God’s sake, I never even caught a glimpse.  The intangibility has been a huge struggle for me.  But the reality is, I will never know if my past experience made this loss easier or harder.  This loss did not happen in isolation, it is all part of one great big package, all bundled up in quite a heap of a mess.  Even Wyatt’s loss wasn’t delivered on its own.  I was still grieving the sudden loss of my dad which occurred 9 months before I was pregnant.  These two grief experiences couldn’t be separated, they were tangled and mangled up together as well. 

So, I guess what I’m trying to say here is that comparing losses doesn’t do anyone any good, even if it makes us feel like we’ve at least won at something.  I believe that my experiences have been different, I believe that there are differences, however, I now believe that drawing that line in the sand is much too simple of an answer.  Where do you really draw the line?  When is a loss “counted”?  Eight weeks, twelve weeks, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty?  What about infertility?  That’s a loss all in its own right.  The reality is that our lives are much more complicated than all this calculating and measuring.  Most of the time we don’t know the entire story, we don’t know what else is impacting someone’s pain, we may not know where that person has been or where they are going.  A wise friend posted this timely quote on facebook today: “It is virtually impossible for one person to damage another by listening to him, by trying to understand what the world looks like to them…”.  And I couldn’t agree more.  Instead of focusing on our obsession with measuring and comparing, we should be listening.  When someone tells us they hurt, they know of pain, they have experienced grief, let us show them that we have learned something about empathy, compassion and kindness in our own lives.  When we have experienced our own pain, let us not resort to belittling our experiences because we know of something greater, let us be comfortable with owning how we feel in the moment.  Let us be better human beings because we have known pain, experienced loss, have wrestled with grief and not resort to competing in the one arena where there are ultimately no winners at all.  Victory is achieved only through love and understanding.  When I can reach out to others and find my compassion in the process, no matter when their loss occurred, this is the only way in which I may make sense of my losses and this is the only time I can say I haven’t lost everything in this horrible game of losing an awful lot.