I feel like I’m having trouble adjusting to the miscarriage… because I’m not having much trouble adjusting to the miscarriage. I just figured I would be more angry, more sad. Every time I thought about how there was always the possibility I would miscarry I thought it would be this terrible event that would send me crying in bed for weeks. But it doesn’t feel like that. It just feels like another frustration, another setback. Maybe after so many of them you realize it’s rather futile to freak out every time… or maybe you just get a little numb to it. Maybe a little of both.

I was always a little dismissive of therapy of any sort, especially since my first experience with it just made me want to roll my eyes. I need more than someone who just listens – I have a lot of friends, and I have my blog. If I want to just be heard, I can get that without sitting in a chair for an hour recapping my life in brief overview. What I need is feedback. Not just feedback… but observations. Friends are absolutely wonderful for providing emotional support and saying, “Yeah! That sucks!” I need that sometimes. But once in a while I need someone to step back and provide some insight. And that’s why I’m happy with my therapist. She has a way of giving me a different perspective, of pointing something out to me that I just wasn’t seeing. I find myself running over things in my head before my appointment, knowing that if I tell her what’s bugging me she’ll be able to help me figure out why.

And this whole not-grieving thing has been bugging me. Of course the answer is obvious, and my therapist helped me see it a little more clearly: I didn’t allow myself to bond with the pregnancy. Because of the previous loss, because of the very rocky start and continued bleeding, I really held myself back. Cautious excitement at the prospect of being pregnant, yes – but with some very large disclaimers written all over my heart.

I didn’t refer to a baby. Oh I referred to the hypothetical future baby that may result, but at the current time? I didn’t use the term baby in my head. I would say, “the embryo” – because that was something I was comfortable with, obviously there was an embryo since I watched them put it in. I would think to myself, if there’s a heartbeat, if there’s a baby… then I’ll be okay, then I’ll calm down. I just want to see it on the ultrasound first. I just kept picturing an empty sac, or something that stopped growing very early on and had no heartbeat. I am jaded. I know that it’s not a given that there’s a baby in there. I was holding my heart suspended until I was given the okay to start believing in it.

So in the end my fears were confirmed, there is no baby. And to me there never was – just an embryo that implanted in the wrong spot and wasn’t allowed to grow into what it could have. All my embryos were potential babies. I guess that’s another reason I’m dealing with this so matter-of-factly. This is not the first embryo I’ve lost. The first one I’ve lost after it actually implanted… but still. Every IVF cycle is an embryo, a little bundle of cells, a little baby-to-be that never makes it far enough.

The combination of all of it just leaves me feeling very unsurprized that it didn’t end well. I remember last Wednesday before my ultrasound appointment I was at work. I left just for an appointment, everyone assuming I would be right back. But I felt like I should clean up my stuff, close out my work. Just in case.

I know that I am far from giving up on this. The litany of my history has an almost comedic quality to it at this point, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve gotten pregnant twice. It works, damnit. Not every time, but it does work. It’s been dumb rotten luck that both times they didn’t end in a live baby – Devin’s case was such a freak accident, and with the ectopic it was just bad luck that it implanted in the wrong spot. (That part bugs me. If it had just implanted in my goddamn uterus I’d probably have a healthy baby inside me.)

Right now I am feeling extremely thankful that it has been over a year since I was pregnant with Devin. With so much time between the losses my memories of being pregnant are almost dream-like. Me being not pregnant is the “normal” state – I have had a long time to get used to it. I think about how I felt about my body for months after losing Devin, the feeling of disgust and overwhelming anger at no longer being pregnant… if I had gotten pregnant only to lose it again I think hell would have broken loose in my head. At least now I am able to process this loss for itself, and not as an extension of our loss of Devin… they feel like two very separate events.