Wishbone - dealing with the loss of a child

(guest contributors – Jianna and Brad Wright)

November 1^st, 2011
I was 38 weeks pregnant and was on my way home from my doctor's appointment.  Everything went well, I felt ok, the baby’s heart rate sounded good - everything was on track for the scheduled induction date one week away! 

As I drove down the highway, I felt her move and said, "Hi Baby, I'll see you in one week…I love you so much!”  That was at 12:30pm and that would be the last time I would feel her move inside me.  As the day went on, I knew something was not right.   I hadn't felt her move in a few hours, so I made a call to a friend telling her I was worried.  Around 5p Brad and I decided to make the drive back up North to check things out. 

We headed into the triage room at Avista Hospital and were greeted by my dear friend, Shannon, who just held me and told me everything was going to be ok.  I laid down on the bed, thinking to myself, "maybe they'll induce me tonight”, maybe we’ll get to see her sooner than we thought.  The nurse circled my belly trying to find the heartbeat, feelings of emptiness, confusion and fear slowly took over my body and mind.  "Certainly the machine must have a problem", that could be the only reason why we heard nothing.  The doctor was called in to do an ultrasound, it wasn't two minutes later she confirmed our worst nightmare.  Our baby, our sweet angel, was gone.  

Silence.  Anger. Confusion.

I was in such shock, I couldn’t even cry, all I kept screaming was, “How is this happening, why is this happening, PLEASE GOD give her back to me!”  Over and over and over- I don’t even know if I was making any sense.  But it was all that came out, all that I was able to say.  Brad was in the bathroom throwing up; our mothers were collapsing on the ground gasping for air, and I was just sitting on that bed repeating the same thing over and over again- PLEASE GOD GIVE HER BACK TO ME.

"Why?  That's what we ask; the truth is we may never know be able to know for sure why.  But we do know that there is no single 'should have done' or 'could have done' or 'did' or 'didn't do' that would have changed that why.  All that love could do was done.”                                                ~ Unknown

My doctor gently told me that we could either start the induction process or we could go home and come back.  “What? Come back?  No, I can’t go home knowing that my baby is not alive inside!”  But the alternative- how in the hell could I go through delivering my baby knowing that she wasn’t going to come home with us?  I was convinced that it wasn’t possible, that I did not have the strength and courage to go through with this.  I remember telling everyone that I wouldn’t make it through this, that I would never ‘heal’ from this, how could I deliver a baby that wasn’t living?

I had been induced to start labor around 10:00 pm.  As the night continued on and we inched closer and closer to delivery, our AMAZING delivery nurses (Celia, Shannon and Katie) held our hands, hugged our mothers, and gave comfort during a time of so much pain and chaos.  They assured me that I did have the strength and courage to do what NO mother should EVER have to do- deliver an Angel!

An Angel is BornIt was November 2^nd, 2011 at 6:22am, our Angel, ‘Baby Wright’, was born sleeping.  A girl, a beautiful, PERFECT little girl (with a TON of dark hair unlike her older brother Jace), weighing 6.5 lbs. and 19.5 inches long.  My labor was short and her delivery was VERY peaceful, emotional, but peaceful. 

The next few hours are a blur to me, I remember holding her, crying, telling her how sorry I was, how sorry I was that I couldn’t protect her, that she wasn’t with us. 

We left the hospital on a Friday afternoon, we had taken pictures with our daughter, dressed her in a cute outfit, kissed her a million times and said good bye.  It was and will be (I pray) the hardest day of my entire life.  I was leaving the hospital without the life that Brad and I had created, that I had carried for 9.5 months. 

The following days, weeks were crazy.  We were mourning the loss of our daughter, planning her service and trying to make life as ‘normal’ as we could for Jace Daniel.  Again, a blur…

Our Angel is namedBrad and I had a 'list' of names that we liked, but we hadn't officially decided on anything for certain, we wanted to wait see what our baby looked like before we chose a name. During my entire pregnancy, we had called her, 'Baby', that was our 'name' for her during that time.

How do I name a baby that isn’t here? How could I decide on what name ‘fits’ a baby that isn’t alive?  Questions I kept saying to myself and others so many times.  Her name for 9.5 months was “Baby”, and now we had to decide on a ‘name’ to give her?  I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t go down the list and pick one out.  I struggled with this for SO long, people kept asking me what her name was, was I going to give my daughter a name. 

I had this burning desire and need to name her.  Every child needs a name, and although we had named her, “Baby”, I couldn’t go on in life referring to my beautiful daughter as “Baby”.  I would wake up in the middle of the night, dreaming of her and what her name was, what she would look like, and simply calling her by “Baby”, haunted me.  I ran the ‘names’ on our list over and over in my  head, looking at her picture to see which of the ‘top two’ names ‘looked’ like her. 

I came home one night and told Brad that I had to talk to him.  I sat him down in the kitchen and just started sobbing, telling him that I couldn’t go on anymore not naming our daughter.  I told him that a name just kept coming up in my head, a name that only she could have and a name that would be hers forever!

Mackensie Owenn Wright

Angels on Earth
We would not have been able to go through what we did without the love and support of, Jody Elliott, and her team at Avista New Life Center. They gave us LOVE and HOPE!  They gave us an experience with our daughter, they gave us resources to use, pictures to cherish, footprints to copy, and hands to hold.  They gave us love, support, protection, strength and courage. 

Bereavement teams (and family and friends) are the glue that holds parents together during the unimaginable.  We were so touched and blessed to have been able to walk through this journey with this amazing team, that we decided we had to honor them in some way.  We had to  make sure that ALL hospitals are able to provide this support to families going through this journey.

In 2011, we established  the Wishbone Foundation.  The Foundation’s mission is to advocate for the support and development of labor and delivery bereavement teams in local area hospitals. Your participation will help change the lives of families dealing with the traumatic loss of a child.
This Foundation will protect their cause and help Jody and her team continue to do the impossible, lead parents through their darkest hour.  All proceeds from the Wishbone Foundation will be given to bereavement teams in Denver Metro Area Hospitals.

All our love- Brad and Jianna Wright

Naps, Feminism and Agnès Varda

(A word about this post: My daughter’s birth has given me the opportunity to rediscover my love of writing. Staying home with her also has allowed me to re-engage with film, another of my passions. This post is a reflection of where those passions intersect.)

I’ve written before about how my daughter doesn’t like to take naps, or at least she doesn’t like them until she’s fallen asleep (she seems to like them a lot at that point). While she sleeps through the night in her crib, she hasn’t taken a nap in that thing since she was about four months old. And believe me, I’ve tried. Three times. Three hour-long screaming meltdowns. So, no more trying for crib naps, at least for a while.

In the morning, my daughter naps in my arms after I bounce her on a yoga ball for a few minutes. In the afternoon, she sleeps in her carseat after we return home from visiting Mommy at work. This system works fairly well, most of the time.

I cherish those morning naps. I love that she sleeps in my arms. In fact, it’s one of the best parts of my day.

You see, while she naps, I watch movies. God bless Hulu Plus and the Criterion Collection.

Since I gave up on morning naps in the crib, I have watched more than 20 movies in the Criterion Collection. From the auteurs of the French New Wave to Akira Kurosawa’s film noir series, I get to watch these movies in 30 to 45-minute increments. It works out well, because I get to watch great films, and I don’t have to turn the volume up too loud because they’re all subtitled: French, Japanese, Italian -- loud enough to hear the sound, quiet enough to let my daughter sleep peacefully.

I love it.

(Note #2: Being a stay-at-home dad has a lot of advantages. I feel so blessed and privileged to be able to be the primary caretaker for my daughter during the day, but I recognize that so many parents don’t have the means to make that choice, nor should they feel compelled to do anything related to their children’s care due to societal pressure. This was the choice that my family made, and we feel like it’s the right choice for us.)

I’ve always been a film buff, and I have dabbled in making films over the years. Having the opportunity to watch great films while my daughter sleeps in my arms is one of the current joys of my life. I’ve watched all of Eric Rohmer’s Moral Tales, and I have discovered the work of Agnès Varda, the only female director among the French New Wave filmmakers.

Agnès Varda is awesome. I have watched four of her films so far -- Cleo from 5 to 7, Le Bonheur, La Pointe-Courte, Vagabond -- and they are all worth watching. She is by far my most favorite New Wave filmmaker. I think most of the rest of the guys in that sausage fest are way too full of themselves and their genius to make consistently compelling films.

Exceptions: Band of Outsiders, Masculin Feminin, Last Year at Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour. In other words, Godard and Resnais get passes for making two masterpieces each.

There are no easy answers and no easy perspectives in Varda’s films. Too often, I think that filmmakers make films with an ambiguous tone because they assume that critics will fill in the gaps where they’re too afraid to have opinions. If these directors’ movies are inscrutable, critics will assume that they have something profound to say (I’m looking at you, David Lynch!).

But this isn’t the case with Varda. My feelings about her characters are always complicated, and I think that she uses her camera to complicate my feelings toward the characters I’m supposed to revile or identify with. That’s because Varda’s feelings about her subjects are complicated.

All of Varda’s films are real reflections of society, but they also feature people who don’t quite fit perfectly into that real society. What’s interesting about her approach is that it doesn’t diminish how real those characters are. Vagabond is the most clear depiction of this unsettling dichotomy. The movie is about a fictitious itinerant girl who’s found dead in a ditch. Her life is reconstructed by the filmmaker and the people with whom the girl interacted. The “vagabond” has made a choice to reject societal norms, but her choice isn’t viewed sentimentally. Sometimes, her life seems romantic; at other points, it seems dirty and awful and pathetic. In some ways, the movie is more about the society that takes her in or rejects her or takes advantage of her or treats her with envy or indifference.

There are several tracking shots that follow our vagabond that end without her in the frame. You could argue that this is a visual representation of her existence outside the norms of society or her lack of engagement with the people who offer her connection...

So, how is this about the Parenthood Journey?

Well, I’m talking about naps and feminism, baby!

I get to watch these movies while my daughter naps in my arms, and these movies get me thinking about who my daughter will be and the women she will look to for inspiration. Varda wasn’t just a trailblazer (a cliche too often used for creative women artists); she started the French New Wave. La Pointe-Courte, her first film, which was clearly experimental in the fashion of the New Wave, premiered in 1955. For those keeping score, that’s four years before The 400 Blows (Truffaut) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais), and five years before Godard’s Breathless. Interesting fact: Resnais edited the movie!

Feminism is manifest in all of Varda’s films. Each of the films I have watched are keenly interested in the roles women inhabit in French society, and Varda presents those roles with frank, yet complex honesty.

Varda’s confidence, creative vision and her willingness to present an honest, complicated perspective inspire me. I hope that she inspires my daughter, too.

As for me, the dad of a daughter, I am struck by the compromises I have made as a parent. I never thought I would use the “cry it out” method of sleep training at night. I never thought that my daughter would take her naps in my arms or in her carseat. In fact, those two sentences don’t seem like they should even come from the same parent.

Right and wrong answers aren’t as simple as you would think when it comes to being a parent. There are so many decisions you have to make, and as much as you would like to judge parents who do it differently, you’ve got to realize that you are at the mercy of the same chaos as they are.

Varda’s films have helped me realize that it’s ok to have complicated thoughts about other humans. Everyone’s perspective is three-dimensional about other three-dimensional human beings, but it is a limited perspective. We all watch each other and we make judgments about the behavior of other humans all the time, especially as parents.

But that doesn’t mean that we understand what’s happening outside the frame. Varda helps me keep that in perspective.

And for what it’s worth, Varda has been added to my mental playlist of women artists that I plan to share with my daughter. Here’s hoping, that while she’s sleeping, my daughter has already started to absorb the playlist.

I'm a mom.

(Guest Post from Gayle Bell)

I’m a mom. This is a huge part of my identity, but it isn’t the whole of it. I’m also a professional. So, I’m a working mom, but that doesn’t capture all of who I am either. And really, it doesn’t differentiate me from any other mom. ‘Cause, let’s be honest, all moms work: diapers, laundry, dinner, bath time, bed time, doctor appointments, etc.

With my induction into the mom world, I felt pressured to choose a side. There is a war raging between the stay-at-home moms and the “working” moms, and you’d better arm yourself and storm the field! Are you going to commit forty hours a week to a purpose that contributes to the world around you? Or are you going to contribute to the world in the most important way by being a mom to your children twenty-four hours a day?

I refuse to take a side. Both sides infuriate me.

I am a mom twenty-four hours a day. No parent stops being a parent when they step into the office. You still check every message on your cell phone just in case something’s happened. Your heart smiles and breaks a little at the same time when you look at the pictures of your darling child or the most recent art project from daycare that adorns your desk. Parenting never stops whether you work outside the home or not. And every parent is contributing to the world around them. You certainly don’t have to go to an office to do that.

Even if you do choose a side, you’re still not safe in the ranks. Are you a working mom who wishes she could stay at home, is riddled with guilt about it, but has no choice? Or are you an empowered woman who can have it all by being the perfect mom and a high-powered professional, setting an example for your daughters to emulate and your sons to deeply respect?

Again, I will not arm myself. Right now staying at home is not an option for me, but I don’t see that as necessitating a sense of guilt. To be honest, I’m not sure I would want to stay at home if it was an option. I like my job, I believe in what I’m doing there, and yes, I want my daughter to know she can be a strong, independent woman with a career, if she chooses that. But I also don’t necessarily think I have to have a career to teach her that.

I will not arm myself because I’m a parent and a human being, and I recognize that all parents—all humans—face struggles. Parenting is hard, gloriously hard in a most fulfilling way, but stinkin’ hard. So, no, I won’t battle with other parents about the best way to parent. I don’t have expendable energy to invest in a battle, and I certainly don’t want to drain other parents of their precious energy. Parenting is hard, and I see it in every beautifully frazzled parent I meet. Parenting is hard, but it’s a hell of a lot easier when we shoulder the burden together. No, I won’t arm myself to battle you, but I will bend myself to get beneath your load with you so we can stand up together and march on as parents.

Gayle Bell is a mom to 1-1/2-year old Tessa and wife to Jason. She runs the College Achievement Program at Denver Academy, an independent school for students with learning differences.

Parenting and Judgment - Jennifer's story

My parenting journey to date can be described in one word…judged.

My partner, Jamie, and I had been together for 8 years and finally agreed to take the plunge into parenthood. Due to a number of reasons, we chose adoption and due to our finances, we chose foster care adoption. So after MAPP classes, home development workers and lots of paperwork, we were certified as we simultaneously accepted the placement of a 10 day old little boy. He was tiny, red-headed, beautiful, and suffering withdrawals from prenatal exposures. We were told to go to the NICU to be “trained.” My mom came in town to help and she went with me to the hospital. The “training” was the infant CPR and SIDS videos that new mothers watch before discharge. We held him and fed him and left the hospital. We headed to Wal-Mart later that day to meet the social worker and get his clothing allowance. 

The social worker walked in and said, “Don’t get too attached. He is going to a family placement.”  

Sucker punched, I went home in a daze. My mom started offering suggestions about not taking him, letting him go to another family, and the dangers of falling in love and then losing him. It was too late. I loved that boy the minute I held him and ultimately, Jamie and I decided to keep going.   

All three of us went to the hospital the following afternoon to sign the discharge papers and bring him home. This is when we learned that he had some heart problems and would come home on heart failure watch and seizure watch. This is when we received a chart to score his withdrawals so we would know if/when to rush him back to the ER. It was scary and intimidating and I was in love. My mom was not; however, and started again with the” letting him go” talks. At one point, she let me know that I had “no idea how to care for a healthy baby much less a sick one” and “what would I do if he quit breathing.” 

I had been judged….. and I was found lacking.

We went home. My mom left shortly after. We started parenting. And now 18 months later, we are waiting on a court date to finalize our little boy’s adoption. He has brought us so much joy.

And weaved into his first year and a half has been many more lessons about judgment.

*He laid his head on my chest in those first days home, listened to my heart beat and noticed my unfamiliar smell. He judged me…I was deemed NOT his biological mother. We started our journey toward attachment.

*He was carried constantly from day one (due to advice from the NICU nurses and due to attachment). I rarely put him down and affectionately called him my kangaroo baby. I was judged…I was found spoiling my child.

*We have co-slept in various forms from the beginning and still do today. I have been judged…I have been found ignorant by many.

*We spent A LOT of time in doctor’s offices. I filled out the paperwork. I placed my name in the mother’s information section and I wrote in his medical history in the notes section. I was softly asked by multiple nurses what drugs he was exposed to in utero.  I answered the whispered questions and watched them avoid eye contact. I was judged…I was found a drug addict, an unfit mother, and I harmed my baby.

The list goes on and on.

I have learned that parents are quickly judged in this world. Parenthood is hard. The learning curve is steep and swift and by the time we get the hang of it, the short people change the game. We have our own insecurities. Our kids have unique personalities. And standing up under the weight of the added judgments can be so H.A.R.D. 

I know that this journey has changed me. I am quicker to smile at the mom with the screaming toddler in the grocery store. I am slower to knock someone else’s ideas and strategies that work in their families. I am learning to breathe and relax and remember that this is not a race or a competition. I am learning it is easier to navigate this journey when we reach out and take each other’s hand and let the judgments fall by the side.

Jennifer

(Jennifer and her partner, Jamie, have one son.)

“Hi Daddy.”

Being a stay-at-home parent, I find myself swinging from identifying everything my daughter does as a milestone to feeling like nothing ever changes. What this really means is that I feel like I’m either making things up or depending on other people who don’t spend every waking hour with her to tell me if something has changed.

“She’s gotten so big!” people say.

“Really? She looks exactly the same to me,” I say. “But did you notice that her babbling is more complex today?”

“I don’t know, she sounds like a baby,” people say.

The difference between the perspectives makes sense. I watch her all the time, so I don’t notice a lot of physical changes from day to day or even week to week, because they’re so gradual. But because I watch her like a hawk, I’m constantly looking for even the slightest developmental deviation from her norm.

So, my lesson for the day: Developmental milestones line the walls of a dangerous rabbit hole from which there is no escape or, to use another hole metaphor, developmental milestones are the event horizon for the black hole of parental insecurity.

I offer you two examples:

Example #1. Crawling

My daughter doesn’t crawl. She kind of inches toward things, occasionally, ending her quest by rolling over or turning in a circle and finding something new to grab. Honestly, she would much rather make googly eyes at people and smile at them until she breaks down all social boundaries. She also grabs things a lot. And she sometimes puts those things in her mouth. And she likes to walk around the room with me holding up her arms.

But she doesn’t crawl.

If Eleanor snakes her way toward a toy that’s more than a foot or two away, does that mean she’s “creeping?” If I want to make her development sound more impressive, I suppose I can call it that. Though, to be honest, she doesn’t seem the least bit interested in “crawling.” I can’t say I blame her. I don’t crawl. Her mommy doesn’t crawl. Why should she bother?

Most of the new parents I know have babies who are just a bit (three to five months) older than Eleanor. I occasionally see their children and I am in awe of their incredible, sophisticated physical coordination. They seem to be ready for elite gymnastics compared to my daughter.

Of course, I only see these kids every once in awhile and they are older than my daughter and it’s really an unbelievably stupid and unfair comparison game but I engage in it anyway even though I try not to.

Developmental milestones are so subjective! In fact, I direct you here for an interesting recent development in the debate about crawling.

Example #2:

I would not consider my daughter “verbal,” but she has uttered several variations of “Hi Daddy” over the last couple of weeks.

“Hey, Da-Da-Da.”

“Hey, Daddy.”

“Hey Da.”

“Hi Da-Da.”

I am not so vain that I think this actually connotes the same meaning in Eleanor’s head that it does to me, but I will take it. In fact, sometimes I even think she thinks that my wife and I are both “Da-Da.” I suppose I do believe that my daughter thinks this is some sort of way to greet the people who care for her when she remembers that they exist.

So, do I count this as speech? Has she spoken her first word? Who knows? The longer I exist as a parent (and I am going on eight months), the more I am thinking that these milestones every parent keeps track of are way more fluid than I once believed.

A fascinating aspect of the first word debate is the nature of language acquisition itself. It has been noted by many linguists how remarkably similar the words for mother and father are across the world. Hundreds of languages have essentially the same words to denote parents.

But don’t jump on the Tower of Babel train too quickly. Those same linguists have a pretty good theory as to why those words are so close, and it has (mostly) nothing to do with the common ancestry of languages.

“Ma-Ma” and “Da-Da” and “Pa-Pa” and “Ba-Ba” happen to be the first speechlike sounds that most babies make.

So what do I make of this? I think it means that parents have been making up developmental milestones for thousands of years. Apparently, we all cling to the hope that our babies are turning into normal, healthy children and we will use any evidence at our disposal, however flimsy.

***

When she was about four months old, my sister was playing with my daughter, saying her name over and over. Then Eleanor “spoke.”

“Ey-lah-no!”

She did this three times. She has never done it again. I choose to believe that, while I beamed with pride at the time, my daughter had no idea what sounds were coming out of her mouth. As an aside: I also choose to believe that my daughter’s first word is not a narcissistic declaration of her own identity.

I’d rather go with, “Hi Daddy.”

Being a stay-at-home dad is an excruciating exercise in waiting. I read the baby books and anxiously wait for (and sometimes preemptively identify) each new milestone that I am supposed to see next. But I’m never quite sure when they come, and I question their relevance anyway. I’m constantly trying to remind myself that it doesn’t really matter. Is she healthy? Is she happy?

If so, that’s good enough.