Unfortunately, that pregnancy resulted in a missed miscarriage and my short attempt at a pregnancy blog turned into an infertility blog and stayed that way through four more IUIs and through four subsequent IVF transfers. Luckily, I discovered the wonderful ALI community and shortly after my first miscarriage, started connecting with other women going through the same thing, which has been and continues to be a lifeline for me.
In November 2011, on the anniversary of our first loss, we learned that I was pregnant with our twins, Aminadav and Naava, following our fourth IVF transfer. This blog then became "The Journey to Babies G" since we were blessed with two little ones on the way. When I lost Aminadav and Naava due to pPROM, my blog name became somewhat complicated for me - my twins had died, so there was really no longer an ongoing journey towards plural babies G, but at the same time, I wanted to continue to honor them in my blog name while also acknowledging that our journey continues.
I chose the name 1000 0ceans after the beautiful Tori Amos song of the same name. One Thousand Oceans means many things to me - the tears I've cried for my sweet babies, the distance I feel from the other much happier reality and trajectory that was our life just a very short time ago, and the elusiveness of this journey that keeps taking us to unexpected places as the years go on. Here is the blog post I wrote very shortly after Aminadav and Naava's death on 1000 Oceans and what it means to me.
Thank you to Mo for posting the Tori Amos song 1000 Oceans. I have been listening to it on repeat over and over the past couple of days and really connect with it right now.
Maybe because 1000 oceans feels like how far away I am from Aminadav and Naava, the two little souls that we came so close to spending our lives with. Maybe because it feels like 1000 oceans is what separates me from a totally different life in a parallel universe, the universe we were living in until last Sunday.
When I suffered my first (much earlier) loss, I spent a lot of time afterwards reliving over and over again in my head those happy last few days before the ultrasound that showed our baby had no heartbeat. How I felt like such a fool knowing I walked around so smug, so expecting of a baby, that unknown to me, had stopped developing.
These days I spend a lot of time reliving over and over again my last few days with Naava and Aminadav before my water broke and all hell broke loose. Our last few days as a family of four. I don't think so much about those initial awful moments when my water broke (more accurately exploded), the complete terror I felt and my shrieks and screams, over and over again, to Y on the phone, to myself, to the neighbor who called the ambulance. By then our fate had already been sealed. Those are not the moments on repeat.
Instead I think of those last few days on bed rest, how much time Y and I spent together in those last evenings, lying on our bed watching sitcoms once he moved the television set into the bedroom with our cat, Harriet, at the foot of the bed. (Harriet is usually not allowed in our bedroom nor are we typically the watch tv in bed type of couple - these are the types of allowances we made during this time.)
How the four of us would lie happily in the bed together in the evenings, Y and I both stroking my swelling belly out of habit. I was already having complications at that point but we were still happy and so blissfully and innocently in love with each other and with our sweet babes.
The hyperemesis, the bleeding, the bed rest - it all seemed part of a rite of passage during a difficult multiples pregnancy following infertility - challenges and some physical suffering for what would be a great reward. But not this - not this awful, horrible thing that came next. There was no rite of passage and there were no rules. No illusions of stay in your bed and you'll be safe, no bargains to be haggled, and no reward.
I think of our last Shabbat together, which was right before my water broke. I was so desperately bored and listless. I think of the fool again. There she is. There she is on the couch so bored, oblivious that these are her final hours with her babies. Always the fool. Always obliviously unaware to what happens next. It's never a happy ending. We've played out almost every possible variation on reproductive misery over the past few years; the only outcome that seems to have evaded us is the one that is most statistically likely - The Happy Ending.
I replay over and over again our final days with Naava and Aminadav, how as anxious and worried as we might have been, we still fundamentally believed that they would stay with us. I look back on my life in a parallel universe, a slice of time and a trajectory that existed such a very short time ago, but that life is now 1000 oceans away.
