TTC After Loss

I spent this weekend with my mom and grandma. (We went out to grandma’s camper.) I didn’t realize until I got back Sunday night how angry and stressed I was after the supposedly “relaxing” mini-vacation.

In particular, my mom had some wonderful things to say about miscarriage. On Friday, in the car on the way out, we got on the topic of IVF and infertility treatments (not for me, just in general). She said that she thinks women who have recurrent miscarriage just aren’t meant by God to have children, and that they should just adopt. My own mother said this to me, months after my miscarriage. (She also has a best friend who tried for about a decade to adopt before success!) Of course I got angry immediately and told her how that was an incredibly insensitive and ignorant thing to say (maybe not in those words), and that everyone deserves their own child, no matter how hard they have to work at it. (Not everyone gets pregnant without a second thought like you, mom!)

Then, later in the weekend, we were talking about someone I know who I suspect recently had a miscarriage. I mentioned that she’d had two abortions many years ago, but I don’t know if that would give her problems TTC now. So my mother said that some people don’t deserve to get pregnant. I forget the exact wording, but she said it in a way that implied some people deserve miscarriages. ARGH! No one deserves a miscarriage! And having abortions in the past doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a baby! We have no idea what the reason for them was, but I had to remind my mother that abortion is not something taken lightly. It’s not a fun thing to do on a Saturday night!

So that was just wonderful. If I have another miscarriage, my ignorant mother will think I don’t deserve a baby. She also must think I did something to deserve my miscarriage. (Hmmm, I did go through a little stealing phase at 16, maybe that’s why my baby had to die!) I know in the back of my mind that there are many people out there with idiotic opinions on TTC and having babies, but I guess I just forgot that my mother was one of them.

She was a huge bitch the whole weekend outside of this, as usual. She even called about an hour after dropping me at home and was upset that I ate dinner without calling her. (She would have wanted to eat together.) Does she not get it? She criticized me and my husband all weekend, she acted like a complete bitch, we did almost nothing but argue, but she wants to spend MORE time together? As my mother-in-law would say, my mother is one of those people who just sucks all the energy out of you. She thrives on taking energy from other people.

I was having trouble keeping this pregnancy a secret from my mother. This weekend, I suddenly got the strong desire to NEVER tell her about this pregnancy. In fact, I’m trying to figure out how to keep her out of the delivery room without completely ruining our relationship or having to hear her bitch about it forever. This may be a failed mission. I’ll bet OBs and midwives come up against this problem often, though. Maybe mine will have a good suggestion for this.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS