Two weeks.

It’s been only two weeks for me.

Last night I sat down to have a talk with my husband. After a few days of not having explosive tears, I got all weepy again. I know it’s hormones, because I keep going back and forth on it, and sometimes I’ll be just fine and sometimes I’ll be all in tears. Fortunately (in a way), I’ve been sick lately as well, so the red-rimmed eyes have been taken as congestion speaking instead of me being upset.

I think he understood when I told him flat out that for a while this was unfortunately going to be the way it was, and I didn’t have control over it. I’m not “normally” a weepy woman, and he knows it. But I’m lucky that he’s as obsessive a researcher as I am, so he “kinda” understands what’s going on.

Something I explained to him last night was that to an extent, I understand post-partum depression now. Because while the child was growing inside of me, I could feel it, even if the child wasn’t old enough to start kicking yet. And I likened it to when an amputee has “phantom pain” where they feel the limb even when it isn’t there anymore. I can feel the lack of it being there, and my system still hasn’t gotten to the point where it “understands” that it isn’t there anymore. It’s like the rational side of my brain knows it isn’t there, while the hormonal side still thinks it is.

Something someone said at one point was “nine months on, nine months off” for the pregnancy weight. I honestly feel that it’s the same thing for the hormones. The hormones build up for however long you’ve been pregnant, and takes just as long for those hormones to wear out of the system once the child is gone (hence a lot of post-partum depression issues). Losing the child this early doesn’t mean the hormones just disappear when the child is gone. It’s going to take a while for your system to “re-normalize”, and afterwards it still may not be the same as it was before this happened.

And I think by explaining it that way, my husband actually understood. He doesn’t understand what the hormones are like personally, but he’s seen the changes over the last three months… And if they’re taking as long to wear off as they did in coming, then he can understand that a little better. Especially after the OB told us that one of the reasons women tended to be more fertile in the three months following a miscarriage was because the progesterone takes about that long to fade off to “normal” levels.

I hate to say it, most guys need the “clinical” aspect of things to help them understand the emotional aspect of things. They aren’t going to understand it on a personal level, so they need to be helped to understand it on a professional level.

I think I sank it into his head how much I need him to understand it last night. And while he still doesn’t understand it from deep inside, I think he understands enough to keep his mouth shut at the stupid moments.

He's actually understood more than most guys, I think. I've seen on the pregnancy loss groups where husbands haven't understood why the wife is still so emotional a month or two or more after losing a child... But I can be grateful that he's been pretty understanding so far. I don't want to be one of those women who four years after having a pregnancy loss still talks about her "angel baby" like it's something that actually came to term. It's something that deserves to be remembered. But I think that how long it continues to hurt depends upon how long it was there to begin with. I think I could deal with this a lot better if I had lost it back at 6 weeks or 8 weeks. Losing it at 11 weeks put this so close to "real" that it just doesn't feel like I can turn back like it wasn't actually there. But I am at least not one of those women who got all the way to viability age. Some of the women on my group have had stillbirths all the way up to 31 weeks, where it's not just a fetus, but a child at that point. I can be grateful it didn't reach that point.

But I'm scared. I'm scared because while I really want to try again, I don't want to be one of those women. I wasn't this scared the first time. To my brain, miscarriage was a statistic, not something that was going to happen to me. Now that it has, I don't know if I can put myself through it again, especially if it happens later than it did. A big part of me wants to take the chance. And a big part of me is terrified of that chance.

I don't know if I can take losing another one. Especially not if it's later term. But I desperately want to try again.

And I just want my system to be normal again. I keep taking my basal temps, trying to figure out if my system is "normalizing" yet, and it so isn't. Of course, getting sick in the middle of that really just doesn't help.

I so don't want to go through this again. My OB says that it shouldn't, and that women tend to be even more fertile after miscarrying once. She said 40% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, even for people who are otherwise healthy and should have no problems. But while the odds should be fine, I just don't want to be in that realm of women for whom it isn't.

God, I don't know what I want anymore. I want to have a kid. I just don't want to wind up in pain again. And in order to have it all, I need to take the risk.

It was just so much easier when I didn't really register what could happen.