Archive for November, 2006
November 26, 2006 at 11:36 am · Filed under About Deanna's Book, Miscarriage
I have been so struggling with this.
I’ve played with babies and angels and mothers and wombs and sorrow and birth and all sort of words. I have pages of combinations but they all came off as too television drama, or nonfiction sounding, or just plain overblown.
This morning I lay in bed, stressing over this, trying again to put together a set of words that would both let people know the topic but also not be too melodramatic. I thought of all the terms that are unique to these women–being pregnant, trying to get pregnant, losing babies, stuck in reproduction woes. I ran down the list of the abbreviations and terms on the site and then I saw it. I knew immediately this was the title.
Baby Dust.
What term could both embody the loss (ashes to ashes, dust to dust) and also the hope (we sprinkle each other with baby dust to encourage a new pregnancy.)
It’s perfect. And I’m very happy about it. I checked Books in Print and it doesn’t yet exist as a title. Joy!
I’ll change the blog name shortly.
I am about halfway through my outline. I will push hard each week night until the end of NaNo to see if I can get closer to the end. There are many surprises yet in store!
November 20, 2006 at 12:25 pm · Filed under About Deanna's Book, Deanna's Story, Miscarriage
I will put a new excerpt up soon, hopefully tonight. I cranked out another 20 pages yesterday and have propelled to chapter six. I am approximately 1/3 of the way through the novel.
I spun out Dot and Barry’s entire story of their love affair last night, and Dot surprised me by revealing more than I thought would be in the book. She lives in a trailer, has been deserted by her husband, and Barry comes along as her first true love at age 26. She already has five kids.
But she gets pregnant, and the baby ends up with anencephaly, and in a pair of very difficult scenes, a happy sonogram goes very wrong, and eventually she is forced to terminate the pregnancy to avoid endangering her own life in delivery.
I didn’t plan to write the termination sequence into the book, but when one of you ladies posted mentioned a family who got to hear their baby’s heartbeat on the monitors until the very last one, well, I had to write it. Along the way I mentioned another troubling story when the doctor commented on a woman’s weight as he put her in the stirrups, as well as a rather awful comment from my own nurse (I had to go to an abortion clinic like many of us do when we are in the second trimester before the baby dies) during my D&E warning me “not to cry or it would interfere with the anesthesia gas.”
Yeah, don’t cry as they take your baby from your body.
While I doubt a lot of caregivers will read the book–and even if they did they probably wouldn’t recognize insensitivity as it might apply to things they sometimes do or say–I do want people to be shocked by what has happened to people and hopefully speak up. Most of us, in these traumatic moments, don’t say anything at all. I didn’t. And while many wonderful ob/gyns and nurses (my regular ob/gyn and staff are certainly among them) are amazing and kind and help us through the process with sensitivity and compassion, many–so many–make our experiences even harder than they have to be.
I will post the excerpt when I get a chance to read over it (right now I am eleven orders behind on my photo work) and we can all feel what is like to see the heartbeat go from 180 to zero in the space of a lifetime.
It’s been a hard day or two of writing, and most everyone in the Austin NaNoWriMo group is prepared with Kleenex when I come to a write in.
But I’m doing okay.
November 12, 2006 at 9:24 am · Filed under About Deanna's Book, Book Excerpt, Miscarriage
I’m 11 days into National Novel Writing Month and have finished two chapters of the book. I am considerably behind at this point, having left town for the funeral and trying to catch up on photo shoots.
I have, however, written the section where we introduce the woman who runs the Pregnancy Loss Support Group, Stella.
Stella is big, loud, Jewish, opinionated, and funny. She has lost two babies, gone through six rounds of IVF, and at 44, has finally decided cats will be her only kids. Later in the book you will learn the devastating reason why she and her husband Dane can never adopt. When things get far too serious in the book, Stella will step up and remember that we can laugh at anything. We just need some perspective and to fill what we do have in our life with love and joy.
November 8, 2006 at 10:12 am · Filed under Deanna's Story, Grief
My grandfather died last night.
He had been in a lot of pain, and just had surgery the week before. He hadn’t been able to eat in weeks. His passing gives him ease from all that.
One thing that always happens when someone I know and love is dying is that I am desperate to talk to them, as if they could take a message from this world to the next and pass it on to my babies.
My grandmother was the first to die after we lost Casey. She had just celebrated her 80th birthday. She saw much of her family and had a happy day. She still got around all right and was as mentally alert as always. In the night she had an aneurysm and when they got her to the hospital they placed her on life support until all the family could gather.
I entered the darkened hushed room, the silence broken only by the occasional wheeze of the ventilator. Memaw’s chest rose and fell rhythmically with the machine. She was thin and fragile beneath the sheet.
I held her chilly hand, her grasp so limp. I had something critical to say to her, even though I was aware that she most likely had no hearing, no way to process the words. The doctors had told us she had no brain activity any more.
She would be the first to meet my baby; the first one to have known me in real life, with real hugs, to be able to embrace him too. I said to her, ”Kiss him for me Memaw. Hug our baby Casey, you lucky great-grandma, you.”
Despite her medical state, despite what we all knew about her condition, God or fate or whatever mechanism controls this world of ours let her muscle contract and her hand squeeze mine. I was glad, so glad, for a confirmation that she heard and understood.
Tomorrow I assume I will leave town, depending on the time for the funeral. Yesterday was a hard day, as many of you know, on the miscarriage boards. Women upset at each other, causing all sorts of distress. I had to intervene at a level I had not done in many years. I wasn’t even sure what to think. What do we have in this world if we don’t have each other? A lot of death and dying and grief.
I wish before my grandfather died I could have told him to pick up little Casey–well, gosh, I guess he’d be 8 by now and embarrassed by that–so maybe pat him on the shoulder, ruffle his hair. But because of all the good things in this world–love, support, care, empathy, understanding–I’m sure my grandfather already knows.
November 4, 2006 at 5:55 pm · Filed under About Deanna's Book, Deanna's Story
I have written some 40 pages of the miscarriage book. I am pleased with how it is going.
From here on out I will just post introductions to important characters and scenes that I think are interesting on their own.
Everyone’s support means so much. I’ve had a couple of breakdowns, an especially bad one at the end of chapter one when Tina asks her doctor not to let her premature baby hurt. In the novel I have specifically avoided situations too similiar to my own, but as we all do, I still spot those seeds of my own sorrow in the stories of others. Fortunately my fellow NaNo writers know it’s a tough book and are kind and understanding when I suddenly drop my head to a tabletop in the middle of a coffee shop and sob.
If you haven’t read chapter one yet, I have put it all together on one page.
Today I leave you with the link to George Canyon’s song, which was banned in some places due to its subject matter, which is crazy to me, but it is about a woman who, in death, is reunited with a baby she lost decades before.
This is the video for My Name.
Empty
Cradle, Broken Heart
