Friday evening, my friend M. came over to meet Ethan. I've been friends with M. since Jr. High, over 20 years. (Ugh, I feel really old, seeing that.) In the past few years, M. has become very busy with her family & job, so we don't get together often, although we live 20 minutes away from each other.
She asked about Ethan's birth, b/c I had only given her the highlights when we talked on the phone. M. has 1 son & had him by C-section, so we compared C-section stories. At one point though she said something about "first-time deliveries". It made me catch my breath, Ethan is not my first delivery, how could she forget? (DH heard her say it too, she implied that this was our first time, like her first & only time in a delivery room.) She caught herself quickly & moved on to a different topic. I didn't call her out, but I made it a point to mention Sara then, comparing the 2 labors & deliveries.
It hurt. I know she didn't mean to hurt me, it was just a slip of the tongue. She was caught up in her son's birth story & it just came out. But it did hurt. It hurt that for even a split second, one of my oldest friends forgot that I had been pregnant before, that I had delivered a beautiful daughter who had died.
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3 comments:
I am so sorry; I can only imagine how that must have stung.
People are just so careless with their words sometimes.
I'm sorry. That has sorta happened to me too a few times at work. A few women were talking to me about giving pregnancy and giving birth like I had never done either before. I don't know about you, but it would not surprise me if you, like me, remember every painful detail about Sara's birth better than Ethan's. I too made a point then to bring up Jimmy's birth. I wanted to say, "look BIT@H, I've been pregnant more times than you so I know a lil' more about this than you!!
I know they mean well by trying not to bring it up, but they don't understand that it makes us feel like they have forgotten that Sara/Jimmy ever existed. And that hurts.j
This weekend, at the anniversary party we saw lots of family. Family that we haven't seen in a couple years that heard about our losses, but werem't around when they happened. No one was insensitive, but they just tried to pretend that it didn't happen, or tried to compare my losses to theirs. It was even more difficult to be surrounded by 3 newborns and 2 screaming toddlers. It really made me think about what we were missing. As I held a 15 month old falling asleep on my arms, all I could think about is that I should be holding Sam in my arms not just in my heart. It was a tough weekend in those regards.
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