Am I Guilty?

I started seeing a new therapist today. It was our first session, and she asked me about what brought me to her, which -- right now, least -- is baby loss. One of the questions she asked me was whether or not I am feeling guilty. A good question, deeper than any my other psychologist asked me about my baby loss. Hence, why I decided to try a new psychologist (that, and some other reasons, but I digress).

So the answer is YES, I am carrying a lot of guilt around with me. In the session, I told the psychologist (let's call her Dr. P) that I was feeling guilty for feeling little pleasures lately, like enjoying listening to music loudly in the car as I drive and singing along. I don't often get to drive around sans kids, and when I do, I love to blast my music. It gives me pleasure, especially when it is summer time, a balmy night, and I get to drive around with the windows down with the music up loud (but not so loud that it bothers people in other cars -- I hate that!) It makes me feel good, but as soon as I realize I'm feeling good, a wave of guilt passes over me . . . like I should be mourning. I lost a baby. What happened was sad. It isn't right to feel good yet -- or is it?

I feel guilty that I didn't take my prenatal vitamins faithfully; they made me sick. I couldn't take them in the morning, or I'd be sick at work. Try barfing in front of teenage students -- mmm, not so good. I moved them to my bedside, trying to remind myself to take them at night before I went to sleep instead, but my bedside was so cluttered I often forgot. Or I was just so damn tired from being pregnant, I feel asleep at 7:30 p.m. and didn't wake up to do anything, including wash my makeup off and brush my teeth, let alone take a vitamin. Did that cause the Dandy-Walker, which led to hydrocephalus? I don't know. I'll never know, but I'm guilty that I didn't take that vitamin because maybe that was a cause.

I feel guilty I drank that Diet Coke -- the caffeinated kind. They say you're not supposed to have caffeine when you're pregnant, you know, but I had some. After I was through the first trimester, I switched from decaffeinated to caffeinated . . . it helped me wake up in the morning. After that during the day I drank sugar free Crystal Light and water . . . but the Diet Coke. I just couldn't stay away.

And I got my hair dyed . . . you're not supposed to do that, either.

But the choice itself? The choice to terminate? It is complicated. Given our disastrous diagnosis, the fact that our son would not live, or that if he did, he would have no quality of life, I do not regret our decision. There was no gray area with our diagnosis; it was not "iffy." It was pretty clear, according to the pediatric neurosurgeon, that there was no hope. (They have to leave a little window open to cover their butts, but we could read between the lines.) After all the diagnostic testing was done, it was evident to DH and I what our decision would be. Given the same scenario again -- God forbid! -- I would do the same thing. DH and I thought about the quality of life issue for Michael, about the lives of our living children and how they would be impacted, and about our marriage. We knew it would take a toll on our marriage, if not kill it, and neither of us wanted that.

No, I don't have any guilt that way . . . and yet I do. In my most forlorn moments, crying deeply in the shower -- which is the only private place for me to do so with two small kids -- I have cried out to Michael to forgive me. Way back on a really, really bad day (June 12) I posted that question on my support site: Does my dear angel son forgive me? I don't have an answer to that. That is where my guilt lies. I think so, if what I've heard and read about angels, spirits, and those who have "crossed over" is true. But I haven't "felt" his presence, in a dream or otherwise, so . . . I just don't know.

Does God forgive me? (I am almost certain so, but then convert-Catholic guilt factors in . . . I haven't been to Confession yet? So technically, I'm not absolved.) I still have to resolve the spiritual issues that surround my HC. I will; I'm working on that. It's almost like I'm "shopping" for a priest I can confess to . . . "Mmm, homily was a little too conservative today -- you're off the prospective Confession list!" And then again, do I really need to "confess" something that I know was the right thing to do? Weirdly, I feel like I do. I don't know why. Maybe it has to do with the sanctity of life, because it is sacred, you know? I never willingly wanted to make that HC. I was a good person with no good choices.

Talking About Grief with DH

The good thing about summer and not having to work is that one can take care of things that come up at inopportune times, like late at night, and not worry about the need to wake up in the morning for work. It's okay to have a breakdown at midnight because I can sleep in (which means I don' have to wake up at 4:45 a.m.). And if the kids wake me up early at 6:30, and I'm still tired, I can take a nap. That's what happened yesterday.

Let me also say that I've been trying to decrease my Diet Coke consumption lately. Of course, when I was pregnant with Michael, if I drank any Diet Coke, it was caffeine free. And since I tend to be an anxious person, prone to panic attacks, well, caffeine isn't a good choice of a substance to put in my beverages. Especially lately, as I've been dealing with grief and my new life. But I still love Diet Coke, and I powered down 24 ounces of the stuff last night at my mom's when I took the kids over for dinner. I don't know what I was thinking. I should have known better.

DH asked me later that night, "You're up past your bedtime aren't you?" That's what two cans of Diet Coke at 5:30 p.m. does to me now, I guess. Mind you, my bedtime is normally like 8:05 p.m., which is about five minutes after we put the kids to bed. AND I hadn't taken a nap earlier. So the fact that I was still up and raring to go struck DH as highly unusual.

So I finally climbed into bed at around 11:15. I still wasn't tired. I needed to talk. I got teary right away. I was headed for a crying jag, but I had no worries because there was no work to wake up for.

Let me just say that DH pissed me off earlier in the week. It was over laundry and it was stupid, but I was still harboring anger. So I started off with this, but it led into the fact that I've been disturbed by the fact that in the past two weeks we hadn't been "connecting" as we had during and right after our whole baby loss debacle. We used to sit on the couch each evening after the kids were put to bed and cry or just talk about things, and we hadn't done that in a month, and I missed that. (For two weeks DH was gone for business, and the past two weeks . . . like two ships moving in the night.) So that broke the ice and we lay in bed talking a bit, "connecting" as I had wanted to, needed to. This led to me crying and telling DH about a dream that my Aunt shared about earlier at dinner, that she had felt my grandma's presence in the dream, and that because of the dream, she was certain that grandma and Aunt H (my grandma's sister) had reunited, because Aunt H had just passed this week. It was like a message that Grandma and Aunt H were okay. I was jealous; I wanted -- I've been praying for -- that dream that gives me the certain feeling that Michael is okay. I've even thought about going to see a psychic medium because I so desperately want a connection with Michael. I told DH that I missed Michael; I confessed I thought about him daily--many, many times each day. I probably think about Michael and how much I miss him as much as most men think about women and sex each day. It consumes my thoughts. I don't cry, necessarily, but he pops into my mind often. I said that I hoped he was in heaven with my grandma. That he was there with DH's Uncle J, who just passed, too. DH said he thought about Michael, too, but that it is a little bit easier to talk about him when the subject comes up, as it did when he was away on business for those two weeks. I felt better hearing from DH that he is still feeling the pain, too . . . that I am not alone in this walk I'm making down my new life path. And I agreed that it is getting easier . . . slowly, but it is. So it was a bummer conversation, and we both got depressed a bit, but we ended up laughing, too, and we were able to drift off to sleep. And I felt better because the connection was made again.