Bad Bad Baby Boards!

NOVEMBER 6, 2010 - 8 weeks pregnant

Dad took us to Frankenmuth on the way back up north. I couldn't wait to get in the car after dinner so I could unbutton my pants! They might have been tight because I ate too much but I chose to believe it was the baby.

NOVEMBER 8, 2010 - 8 weeks, 2 days pregnant

We were down state for 5 days and I never felt any morning sickness. In the back of my mind I was a little bit worried about this. But believe me, I got all 5 days worth today! I was in bed allllll day. No TV, no computer. That's how crappy I felt. I kept telling myself that this was a good thing and I definitely wasn't going to complain about it like a Fertile Ho. As bad as I felt I also knew how lucky I was to experience this because not everybody gets a chance to.

NOVEMBER 9, 2010 - 8 weeks, 3 days pregnant

Whew, I felt way better today. Since I'm not working at the moment I've been using all of this extra time to watch baby shows. (I had to stop watching them after the miscarriage but they were still recording on the DVR). I watched the whole 2nd season of Teen Mom in just a few days. I told myself I better hurry up and watch them while I had the chance. I was also watching 16 & Pregnant, A Baby Story and Bringing Home Baby. And when I got tired of that I would play Wii. It was right after a boxing and baseball session with Brian that I started spotting AGAIN! GRRRR! I am so tired of this roller coaster. Make me happy one day then miserable the next! I was so angry! I told Brian we never should have told people this early. We've jinxed ourselves!

I got back on the computer and did the worst thing I could do - I started reading pregnancy message boards. Not just any pregnancy boards, but the Pregnant After Loss boards where every single poster had lost a baby. This might sound therapeutic. Hearing stories from other women going through the same thing must be quite comforting, right? WRONG!!!! I looked up the antonym of the word "therapeutic" in an online thesaurus and it gave me the word "damaging." That would be putting it mildly. Those boards are bad for so many reasons.

1. These aren't just women who have had miscarriages. Miscarriages are like ice cream sundaes compared to what some of these women have been through.

2. They put their stories in their signatures so even when they're talking about something mundane like a sale at Babies R Us (BRU as they call it), I still have to read about how this person lost a 3-year-old to cancer, this person had a miscarriage at 13 weeks, this person lost her baby at 20 weeks because of an incompetent cervix, and this one had to deliver a dead baby who died from a brain hemorrhage!

3. Before I came to these boards I'd never heard of an incompetent cervix or premature rupture of the membranes or any of the thousands of things that can go wrong but now I had another thousand things to worry about, and not just during the pregnancy but for the child's entire life. I thought my worries would end after the first trimester but they weren't even going to end after the birth! I still had SIDS to worry about, terminal illnesses, deadly allergies, school shootings, drug overdoses, car accidents....Geez, how my parents have been able to sleep a single night in the last 31 years I have no idea!

4. You think I'm negative? These women make me look like Gidget! Some girl posted that she was happy to have seen a heartbeat at 8 weeks because her chance of losing the baby had now gone down to 5% (the same thing that I was thinking right now). The poor girl was attacked! She was told that percentages didn't mean anything if you were in the smaller number, that she could easily be one of those 5 and that the doctor who gave her that number was wrong anyway because tons of babies were lost after 8 weeks. How can anyone with a heart tear down someone who was only trying to look on the bright side?!

5. Not only are they negative, but a lot of them are just cruel self-righteous bitches. They act like they are the only woman in the world who deserve to have children because they have successful careers, successful husbands, the best health insurance, the best mini-van, the best nanny on standby, they're already wait-listed at the most prestigious pre-school, they've got a Babymoon booked on Bora Bora and already scheduled the pin-striped diaper service. And because they are the only women who deserve to have children it goes without saying that their opinions are the only ones that matter. God forbid some unsuspecting mother-to-be says something about buying her baby a winter coat or putting a baby-mirror in their car or feeding their baby anything but homemade baby food. A lot of people who are pregnant for the first time don't know about certain dangers and it's ok to educate them, but these bitches berate them and tell them they can't believe someone like them can have children and they can't. I mean, I used to say the same things about people like Casey Anthony and other child-abuser/child-killers, but I would never even think something like that about someone who fed their baby Gerber!

6. And lastly, being around such a condensed group of women who have all lost babies makes it seem like nobody in the world ever actually delivers a healthy baby that comes home from the hospital and lives a long, happy, healthy life.

Disclaimer: I should tell you that the girls on the Loss boards are not the only pompous bitches...the truth is that they are on every board. If you don't believe me, go onto a baby name board, mention that you're thinking of naming your unborn daughter Nevaeh and watch the attacks begin.

Brian told me to stay off those boards. My mom told me to stay off. Even my Dr told me to stay away. But did I listen? No. Instead, I read the stories of all the poor babies who died and I didn't get out of bed for a week.