Archive for Relationships
December 1, 2011 at 2:26 pm · Filed under About Deanna's Book, Baby Dust, Relationships and tagged: Stella & Dane
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this topic since I started writing Stella & Dane. This couple has pretty tough beginnings, small town, disapproval, and both of them have a lot of growing up to do.
I know that in this story, they will weather more than the average couple. Two miscarriages. Multiple rounds of failed IVF. Eventually, they will give up on having children. And due to Dane’s terrible past, they won’t ever be able to adopt. I’m sure Stella often wishes a baby would drop from the sky.
By the time we meet them in my book Baby Dust, they are a well established couple, one to be envied in their devotion to each other after all this history. But how did they get this way? What built a relationship like that? It’s been on my mind as I form their love story.
I’m not sure I have the answer. The father of my angel babies and I divorced, and that shared history was lost. He and I were the only people who were really close to those babies and those hopes. It’s a hard thing. We clearly didn’t have what Dane & Stella had. We fell apart.
Recently two of my baby loss mom friends got divorced. In both cases, the men just walked out of the relationship. How does this happen? What causes it?
And more importantly, what creates a relationship that weathers this?
Disappointment in how the father handles the loss is one of the most common sources of upset in the emails and messages that I get. The fathers aren’t sad. They don’t get it. They want the moms to “get over it.” Is this part of what creates the rift? How do we get past that and back into a loving relationship?
I’d love to hear from moms with wonderful supportive partners after a loss.
And if you’d like to see how Stella & Dane develop, I have a mailing list where I share their story as it goes along. Currently they are still young and immature. Stella’s grandmother, the only person she’s ever felt loved her, has just died. And she’s ready to blow out of town, with or without her new man, Dane. But life is about to deal a severe blow, a course of events that their lives will never recover from. If you’d like to follow it, you can sign up and get updates as long as you want, unsubscribe if it doesn’t interest you. Stella & Dane’s list.
I’m about to get remarried. I can hope I’m doing better this time around, and we’ll have to adopt as I’m too high risk for babies anymore. I’m looking for answers too.
October 14, 2011 at 9:02 am · Filed under Family, Relationships, Remembrance Day and tagged: October 15th, social networks
I know many of you are hurting over family, friends, or coworkers who downplay the loss of your baby. They are not intending to hurt you, but they somehow think that if they don’t mention it, you will forget faster. Or that if they tell you that “time heals” or “you can have another baby,” you will snap out of it, and suddenly be the easy-going person you were before.
Tomorrow is your chance to tell them otherwise.
See, Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day isn’t something you made up. It’s real, it’s international, and it’s an opportunity to bring our babies back into our lives, and to share our experiences, and to remind people that we will never and should never forget.
Live by example, and use the events surrounding you as your chance to educate them about the Baby Loss community.
So post to your Facebook page, or Google +, or Tweet. Let them know you still think of your baby, and that you still miss that little person that should have been with you.
Social networks give us an opportunity like none other to advocate, to enlighten, and to spread good work.
So take a second to post a picture of something that has to do with your baby–a pregnancy test, or flowers you got, or just a poem or image. I’ll make it easy for you–here are several to choose from if you have nothing of your own:
Have a peaceful and healing remembrance day.
March 14, 2011 at 11:11 am · Filed under Grief, Miscarriage, Relationships
Yesterday at a support group meeting by the fabulous Face2Face Austin, one of the local groups started by Faces of Loss, Faces of Hope, we talked about how our parents handled the loss of their grandbabies. Especially sensitive is the discussion of “first” grandbabies and of other family members having babies during this difficult time.
Certainly among us, the grandparents handled things differently, running the gamut from overwhelming grief that impacted their lives significantly, to trying to pass off the loss as unimportant, sometimes with those horrid phrases we hate to hear, “It was God’s Will” or “It will happen when it’s meant to be.”
We wondered what resources were out there for grandparents. I did a fairly exhaustive search this morning, trying to come up with things.
Probably the most direct was at Mothers in Sympathy and Support, a long-standing organization dedicated to helping families recover after a loss. They have a page and a forum dedicated to grandparents:
http://missfoundation.org/family/grandparents.html
Sands has a pamphlet they will send out: http://www.sandsqld.com/booklets.html
There were several articles:
http://www.grandparents.com/gp/content/expert-advice/family-matters/article/mending-a-broken-heart.html
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art54923.asp
And a couple independent books:
Forgotten Tears: A Grandmother’s Journey Through Grief
For Bereaved Grandparents
I’ll take some time to consider what I might could add to the resources available. It does seem rather thin. If you have ideas, let me know–send your parents over here to give me ideas, and we’ll make them happen.
January 19, 2008 at 3:18 pm · Filed under Grief, Relationships
Losing a baby is one of the hardest things you will endure, but what happens when you also lose the relationship with the father?
It’s easy to think, “Who else will love and remember our baby but us?” You may feel as though you betrayed the baby somehow, that your love for that little one should have been enough to keep the family together.
It is even harder if these two are very close together, or worse, that the miscarriage seemed to be the final blow and the relationship fell apart at your darkest hour.
Realize this is a time for inner strength and renewal. Start fresh. Think new. Love harder. Vow to be happier. Know that your little baby changed your life–and surely, certainly it will be for the better. Find a partner who doesn’t leave when times are hard, who respects and loves who you really are, and with whom you can weather dark days together and not increasingly separate.
There is nothing harder than this–nothing. It will take everything you’ve got to trudge through each day. Don’t try to sort out your entire future. Don’t dwell on fears that you will be alone the rest of your life or that you will never have a baby. It’s not true, and you can’t know what will happen next. Focus on getting out of bed, what to put on, what to force yourself to swallow for breakfast. That is plenty enough.
Figure out who your real friends are, if you find yourself without any, join a grief and loss group to help you through. These days will be dark, so dark, and you will have to dig deeply into your inner reserves to find the strength to get through, but it is there. And as you draw from it, each day will get slightly brighter than the last, something random will make you smile when you never thought you would again, and these losses will be a part of what makes you a stronger preson with more awareness of life’s fragility and beauty.
We are not defined by what we have lost, or how, or why, but by how we survive it.
Empty
Cradle, Broken Heart
