sorry it's been so long everyone

Its been almost a week since my last entry. Just one more of these 50+ hour workweeks to go, then hopefully I'll have more time to spend on this blog. I had my second interview (not including the pilot) this past Monday morning. My most immediate impression of this interview was that the emotion that the participant brought to the interview was surprising (why it was I don't know) and courageous. I had forgotten to bring tissues and a resource list to this interview. I tried to be more aware of myself when I was asking questions this time. As I have transcribed the audio recordings, I am noticing how much trouble I have making my questions come out clearly and concisely.

As with last the last interview, a lot of this participant's story resonated with my own. The participant began crying within 5 minutes of the beginning of the interview and cried off and on. It was difficult, once again, to maintain that "boundary" rather than simply telling him that I had also experienced what he was describing or that I had also cried for hours upon thinking about the same thoughts he was sharing with me. There were a number of times that I sensed my facial expression stating what my mouth was not being aloud to voice. At times, especially when the participant was crying, I didn't know how to respond. I wanted to hug him, I wanted to thank him for crying, I wanted to stop the interview because I was afraid it was too painful. I never wanted him to stop crying, not once, but I was consistently afraid that he was worried that I was judging him. Fortunatly for him, whether this was true or not, it didn't stop him from letting out his tears. I wanted to cry myself, but my tears were not manifesting outwardly this time. My experience has been that there are times when my tears are all there only they just don't come streaming down my cheeks.

There were two things I noticed from this interview that I will mention here. The first I didn't realize until today when I began transcribing and heard the participant responding to my opening question about his experience of miscarriage with his recounting of what his wife went through. Hearing this made me realize how entwined the stories of fathers who have experienced miscarriage are with their wives. I suppose on one level, there is a couple that is experiencing this life event, but it still seems oddly not the father's experience when they tell me "their" story. At least initially, that is. I guess I need to wait and see if this is really a trend or not.

The second thing came to me as a message when the participant was talking about knowing when the child became a child inside the womb. What came to me was that, regardless of what medical science or religions say, the child's life begins no later than when the parents' hopes begin to form within them.

Sarah and I are planning on getting our tattoos in a couple weeks. I'll post some pictures after we get them. The lady who is doing them is very interested in the meaning and ritual of tattoo art. According to Sarah, who spoke with her, this woman is very excited about our tattoos and why we are getting them.

I wish I felt like writing more, but I don't. Sarah and I are having a bit of a rough night tonight. Not so much with each other, rather more in the way that the miscarriages tend to creep up on us and bring us down.

embedded meaning

I have been extremely busy lately with work and schoolwork. Transcribing takes so incredibly long to do. For each hour, I only transcribe ten minutes of audio recording. I have managed to finish my introductory letter, informed consent form, and (what I am now calling) the demographic sheet for my research. Now that those are done, I can really focus on setting up interviews and looking at the data they produce. Oh, yeah and transcribing, of course.

Through talking with Muriel while I was working on my introductory cover letter and informed consent form, I began to see how much of my experience of miscarriage was embedded within the documents. There were certain words and phrases that divulged my perspectives on men and miscarriage. For example, I had originally signed off on the introductory cover letter with: "With sincere sympathy for your loss." At first glance, it appears clear and innocuous, right? Well, there are two things to point out here: first, the word "sympathy" here reveals my assumption that these potential participants perceived and experienced their miscarriage similarly to how I have; second, the use of the word "loss" assumes that they were disappointed about the miscarriage and that they experienced the miscarriage, as I did, as a baby being taken away. Such a simple statement intended to show my caring toward men who are considering becoming participants and look how muddled it is with my own experience. It's rather fascinating to see, I think. It's exactly this kind of wording and embedded meaning that I will be searching for and analyzing in each transcript.

my nephew, the pterodactyl

Sarah and I went to the hospital to visit my sister and her family this afternoon. She had her first child, Aiden, around 2 AM Wednesday morning. They'll come home tomorrow. I visited them by my self on Wednesday when I woke up. I was still feeling emotionally raw, but wanted to make sure my sister and Eric knew that I was proud of them and thinking about them (even though I had been a serious wreck the night before--didn't talk about that). I was a bit weepy all that day. Not actually crying, but just really sensitive. You know, when you would prefer to just cry and get it over with. Well, today was a bit better. I waited until Sarah got out of work and we both went over there. Sarah held Aiden for most of the time we were there. I had moments of wanting to hold him even though generally the thought of holding babies that small makes my mind conjure dark, morbid images of me dropping them. A fear I didn't realize I had until my niece, Audrey, was born a few years ago. Not going to try to analyze that one right now. Admittedly, it was difficult to see Sarah holding Aiden. I suspected it would be and I was correct, not too much of a surprise.

I love hearing his little cry. He sounds like a pterodactyl.

They definitely seemed comfortable changing diapers and clothes and carrying the baby, yet watching Jessica and Eric work the breast pump machine and breast feed helped me to realize that their inherent parenting skills aren't any greater than ours. They still looked a little unsure, and rightfully so since neither have had a child before. It's just that I now see how some part of me felt that Sarah and I must be flawed as parents because of our miscarriages and that, by virtue of Jess having a healthy pregnancy, they were not flawed like us. It wasn't something I was conscious of until just a moment ago when I sat down to write this entry and was reflecting on being around them in the hospital today.

when will my water break?

In AA there is a saying: "Fake it 'til you make it." I have been trying this approach with my sister Jessica's pregnancy since January this year. I got a call tonight at work from my mum saying that Jessica's water broke and they were going into the hospital. Haven't been feeling really tip-top this evening and that pretty much threw me over the edge. I tried to believe that it wasn't going to upset me. I tried to pretend that I would feel really happy and excited. A part of me certainly wants to feel happy and excited for her, but that part of me is currently getting its ass kicked by many other parts of me that are in pain and not pleasant to be among. I need to attend something like a My-younger-sister's-first-
pregnancy-went-full-term-and-now-she-will-have-the-family's-first-
grandchild-and-all-I-have-to-talk-about-are-two-miscarriages Anonymous because I have got some painful issues and my water won't break. I want to be able to write about the parts of me whose ugliness I am witnessing right now, but if my sister ever read this...I mean, it's not fair to her that I feel this way and yet it doesn't feel all that fair that I feel this way. Maybe fairness has nothing to do with it. I fucking hate the way I feel. It seems so self-indulgent, so incredibly selfish. Sometimes I am just too mixed up inside to even manifest anything physical. I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to laugh, and somewhere, way down in there, I believe I must want to smile. Right? It's got to be there somewhere, huh? This is my little sister. The same little sister who chose me as her Man of Honor at her wedding last Fall. The same little sister whom I felt so close to, so connected, up until she announced (like a bomb) that she was pregnant at the end of last summer. Shouldn't my fraternal love be greater than all that?

When does it all stop hurting? When can that part of me that wants to feel happy and excited for Jess be bigger than those other parts of me that are in control now? Was the whole purpose of our miscarriages to get me to do this research? And because I am doing just that now, does that mean we won't have to suffer any more miscarriages of our own? Fucking hell.

My wife just called from the hospital to encourage me to come and wait. The thing is, I want to do that, well, some part of me does. Definitely not all of me. That phone call succeeded in giving me one more reason to feel upset with myself, like one more punch in the stomach.

new resources

I just wanted to bring to your attention some new resources I have found. I am the most excited about the .pdf document for men about miscarriage that you can download from the link under "RESOURCES" on this blog. As there is not a lot of easily accessible literature about miscarriage for men out there, I am especially excited that this document is so well-constructed and thorough, not to mention current (last update in 2006), as well.

Please feel free to share any resources with me in the comments section. Or if any of you are looking for more books, journal articles, etc., let me know. I have looked at a lot of resources and am pretty discriminating, which is to say: I know what is helpful, what is less so, and what is junk.

i wish i were a seahorse

I had my second interview Wednesday, which was quite different from the first. The interview lasted about as long as Monday's. I felt giddy afterward. I got a real taste for how brilliant semi-structured interviewing can be when done properly. I really focused on allowing long moments of silence, which often led to what appeared to be more reflection by the participant and then more responses. I was very intent upon formulating my questions as open-ended and found that doing so forced me to think more critically about the question: is this leading?, is this too narrow?, et cetera. I only shifted to asking close-ended questions toward the end of the inteview when time was more of an immediate consideration and I was looking for quick clarification.

I can see now that Monday's interview was great for what its purpose was, which was to dive in and really get a sense of how to move around in all this data collection business. It served this purpose perfectly, but Wednesday's interview was of a very different quality. It is because of this that I have decided to use Wednesday's interview as data for research rather than regard it as a pilot. I checked this with my participant and he was totally fine with that.

I shared with him my impressions and talked with him about the things that he had brought up in the interview that I could relate to. One of the topics raised relates to identifying as a “feminine” male who feels forced in many ways into a “traditional” supportive, provider role. Granted at the moment this is not an issue so much for my wife and I because we both work. Yet we have had some very emotionally heated conversations about what our work dynamic will be like when we have kids. In the past I have felt as though I have very little say in the matter; essentially, Sarah gets to choose first what she wants to do and I get the far less appealing, left over option: working and being less available to be with our future children. Mind you, this is how it feels to me, not how it necessarily actually is. My childhood history was one where my father, as the primary provider (he owns his own business), was consequently gone a lot, leaving me with many memories of spending time with my mom and building our relationship. My father and I have, I believe, only really begun to build a relationship and know each other in the past seven or eight years. I want to prevent this pattern from emerging in my family's next generation. I don't want to have to work all the time in order to make it possible for us to pay the bills as well as pay the consequence of not seeing my children grow up. Sarah and I have talked about both working part time jobs when we have children so that we can have a more egalitarian approach to work and family life, but I have many doubts that such a plan will be successful. For one thing, there is the issue of health insurance...and on and on the list and the argument goes. See, I (we) get all worked up about what we will do when we have kids. But really a large part of this issue, for me, is that I feel begrudged that the default is for me to play the societal role of the working father. There is a lot of discussion about women, mothers, putting aside their aspirations in order to stay at home with the children, but very little acknowledgement, in my opinion, of those fathers who would prefer to more spend time at home to be with their family. (I know that I can be a damn good father, that's largely why I work with kids for living.) Yet I feel pressure to conform to this provider role. Even more, there is this small and very ugly voice in me that judges other men who, for whatever reason, do not work to support their wives and families. It's infuriating and just absurd that this voice exists within me, however, it's there all the same, so the least I can do is call it out. But I also point out this hypocritical voice because I assume it is speaks from a cultural teaching that I received growing up and have been conditioned by to some extent. As diminutive as it may be at this point, evidence of the conditioning still remains. The power of cultural conditioning, huh?

Basically, I fear that I am going to be relegated to being a detached father who works and has a relationship to my children that is supplementary to their mothers. That is a tremendous fear of mine. Biologically, the baby will naturally bond to its mother in ways that the father can’t. Babies of my species don't gestate in men and currently I am unable to lactate, so I have that much more ground to make up, but "I can't right now, Daddy's got to go to work".

[I am thinking too much about these blog entries. I write them for days, editing them and thinking them over. So, I apologize for my sporadic updating. I am trying to relax into them a bit more.]

further notes on pilot interview

So far it has taken me about two hours to transcribe twenty-five minutes of today's pilot interview. As difficult as it is to strain my ears and sustain my mental attention in order to decipher some of the data, it is providing a helpful retrospection. I am using embedded notes within the document (a very useful tool in Microsoft Word) to comment on new insights I have as I am listening to this interview again and transcribing it. I have made notes about how long I allow pauses to sustain between myself and the participant before I ask another question, I have noted certain language that I hear myself using that reflects biases that I have identified. And after talking with Muriel this afternoon, where I ask close-ended questions, I am noting alternative ways that I could rephrase my questions to become open-ended. I also talked with Muriel about how much of my own story to divulge in these interviews. I mentioned that I had observed during the interview this morning a compulsion in me to share my story with the participant in an attempt to acknowledge and affirm the validity of what was being shared by them. On a few occasions I did actually speak about an experience of mine, but most of the time I just noticed that I was feeling compelled to do so. Muriel pointed out that I could convey my understanding to the participant through reflexive listening without the danger of the participant overlapping my story with their own.

Ok, so things to keep in mind for Wednesday's pilot interview:

• practice reflexive listening
• make an effort to allow for extended periods of silence
• aim to ask questions in an open-ended manner

initial interviewing impressions

Conducted my first pilot interview today. I came face to face with my inexperience interviewing. This has been something I have planned to work on throughout the past two years at Goddard, but have never really successfully worked it into my studies until now. Just a few minutes ago, I was checking to see how well the recorder had picked up the conversation. It seems to be ok, a bit noisy, but I can work with that. I intend to at least begin transcribing the interview this afternoon.

Some impressions: I found myself wanting to share my own experiences with my participant this morning. How do I navigate that though? I don't want the telling of my experiences to influence the response of my participant. Yet, as my friend pointed out this morning, what if, in telling my experience, I assist my participant in articulating something they have felt but have not been able to bring into words? It seemed that, as the interview progressed this morning, I became less concerned with how I was going to conduct this conversation (conduct being a key word here) and more at ease and willing to let the conversation flow. At moments, my pilot participant would ask me what areas I had intended to cover with my questions this morning, which felt like, in a sense, we were stepping in and out of roles. In fact, by the end of our time this morning, the interview was bidirectional, much more comfortable, and equally as enlightening. It illuminated how unnecessary my tension was about being prepared for this first pilot interview. I noticed that as the conversation diverged from the specific topic miscarriage there continued to emerge little gems of information about my participant's response to his miscarriage experience.

Looking back at this pilot interview, I received what I needed from it in the way of practice as well as understanding about how this data collection process might be like. I have some notes about what areas I specifically want to talk to men about regarding their miscarriage*, I have a better sense of the possibilities of approaching those areas, and I have a much clearer awareness about the unnecessary tension I am carrying with me about this project. I am going to be fine, I can see that more now.

Wednesday morning I have my final pilot interview with another friend. After today, I already feel much more relaxed about going into this interview with him.

*Areas I want to cover with participants:

• knowledge of miscarriage before and after event
• responses from & interactions with others (medical professionals, family, and friends)
• relationship between belief system and event of miscarriage
• emotional & intellectual response to pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage
  

ask me no more questions, tell me no more lies...

I am really struggling to get myself moving. I am telling myself that, because I have been working so much lately, I don't have time enough to unwind and do what needs to be done for my research at this stage. Yesterday at work one of our clients said to me: "You don't have kids do you?" As with all the other times people have asked me that question in one form or another, I was at a bit of a loss as to how to respond. This particular question was uniquely penetrating though, perhaps simply because of its rhetoric, leaving me wondering what part of me was divulging this information without my knowing. Wanting to be truthful without crossing appropriate boundaries, I responded, "No, but my wife and I are trying."

"Yeah, I knew you didn't," he stated.

Was my behavior betraying me? Is there something I would have done differently if our children had lived? Would my client's grilled cheese and soup have tasted better? Would I have delivered it to him in a different fashion? Is there something inherent in a parent of children who enter this world breathing and heart-beating that I, somehow, lack because our babies didn't make it that far?

Somewhere there must be hidden outside of my wife's and my view a chart that measures whether or not Sarah's pregnancies were considered viable enough, alive enough, hope-inducing enough, that we can use to judge whether it is just of us to label ourselves parents. I think social taboo keeps this chart tacked up on the inside of its front door, just out of sight of visitors at the door step.

My parents have had a hell of a time with how to respond to the inevitable question: "Do you have grandchilden yet?" I admit, unabashedly, that a part of the hell they have endured when considering this question has come from me and my anger expressed to (at?) them. "You had better fucking say that you are grandparents," I howl at them in my head. But I realize that then they would have to answer any subsequent question ("Oh, how many, how old?") with, "well, two, but they were only 10 and 12 weeks when they died." See, the inquiring grandparents who ask my parents these questions in the first place do not want that much truth, its too much. I know very intimately how much it is indeed, and, yes, I agree it does feel like too much. (Information like this changes things, it alters assumptions.) But all the same, I want to be seen as a suffering PARENT. Not potential parent, almost parent, trying-to-be parent.

In all honesty, sometimes I respond to queries of my parenthood with the easy "not yet." At other times, I tell inquirers about the miscarriages. Questions are not easy to navigate. They depend on many subjective factors, both known and not-known. A good thing for me to remain mindful of when asking others questions, for sure.

not knowing

Had an edifying conversation with Muriel this afternoon. She is so solidly supportive of me. I told her about my meeting on Monday and the plan to do two pilot interviews next week. In response to me telling her that I felt unsure and unprepared for my meeting on Monday, she reminded me that not knowing is part of this research process. Very wise. We agreed that a demographic questionnaire would be useful, so I am going to draft one before my first pilot interview on Monday. I also have to get together a cover letter, letter of consent, and page of resources to distribute to the research participants. Clearly I have my work cut out for me this weekend.

I received wonder-full responses today regarding this blog. I feel a kind of relief to have this space to record what is going on for me. I get to let others know what's going on with me without necessarily having to talk with them. I saw my sister tonight, felt her belly. She is huge. Sarah wasn't sure that she would want to come up to my parents' house tonight because we have both been having some rough days lately. The miscarriage blues crop up without notice and sometimes last an afternoon or evening. Other times, they last days, waxing and waning in intensity. She did come up though for a bit. It has been a while since we both hung out for any length of time with my family. Sometimes it is too much with her being so obviously pregnant. I try to be in her company but end up oscillating between hating myself for being angry that she gets to have a child and sheer sadness that we are not as close as we once were. Its a shitty predicament that I have opted to avoid for the most part these past five or six months.

But tonight I felt ok. I felt my sister's belly and she and her husband explained to me what part of the baby's body I was feeling. I miss feeling connected to her. I have to believe my raw, paradoxical emotions about her pregnancy will ease at some point so that we can reconnect.

entering the maelstrom

I met with three friends today to discuss my project, specifically the interviewing portion of it. I have about four months to gather personal narratives. I am guessing that I will end up interviewing around a dozen men, but with the methodology I am using, grounded theory, I have to let the data and analysis determine the total number.

The meeting went well. I was nervous, felt unprepared. Having never done a research project like this, there is a lot that can overwhelm me. There is so much to think about and plan, let alone actually trying to do any of it.

I am planning on doing semi-structured informal interviews, but don't know quite yet what my main question(s) will be. It seems like using a demographic questionnaire could be very useful in gathering data before the interview, which I could then rely on as a reference during the interview. My original plan, based on the methodology I am using, was to ask just a couple open ended questions and then allow the interview to progress as a conversation. This seemed simple to me until this meeting when it became clearer to me that I need to think about what questions might come up in the "conversation". In the appendix of Claudia Malacrida's book Mourning the Dreams, she lists the questions she asked in her semi-structured interviews. The group of us decided that we would use her interview guide as a jumping off point to determine what questions are important to ask within the scope of this research project. To do this, I will do two pilot interviews next week with two of the men in the group that met this morning. Hopefully these interviews will be able to help me discriminate which questions are more useful right now. (a brief surge of anxiety). So this weekend I will need to prepare the demographic questions and prepare the interview questions based on Malacrida's guide. (yikes, there's another surge).

I try to imagine what I would ask myself as well as what I would want someone to ask me and not ask me. As pointed out at the meeting: do you know what questions you are not planning to ask, and why you are not going to ask them? I still need to go over the discussion notes from my meeting with my advisor, Muriel. More after I have that conversation later this week.

broken levees & dandelion seeds

Somewhere inside of me sadness accumulates. I see my pregnant younger sister who is enormous, I read in an email about my nieces longing for her father while she is away from him overnight, and I notice on my wife's naked body tiny dandelion seed markings in pen, trial placements for tattoos to commemorate our lost babies. For two days I feel darkly moody. I don't know what I want to do, or to eat even. Do I make a snowman outside or lie sadly on the couch reading "Fun Home"? It won't matter what I do until the levee breaks. My sadness pulls at me just enough so that I feel its tug, but not enough for me to discover whence the pull comes. Like a magnet rather than a taut rope; I can't seem to easily follow the tug to its source, only feel its force reacting within me.

The first crack starts as I feel sorry for myself for not building a snowman with my wife. Such childhood activities ought always make one happy, satisfied with life, right? Well...not so. My wife comes in, sits on the couch and the crack seeps silently. Eventually, my tears are spotted, the levee is now rent.

"I miss our babies...I miss our babies...I miss our babies" on and on and on inside my head. The words never make it out my mouth. When my tears begin to subside--"I miss our babies...I miss our babies...I miss our babies"--and again I get to cry. I fear that without the words repeating in my head, the levee will seal itself back up.

I turn to my wife, and ask her why she chose a dandelion seed and if she knows what dandelions represent. At first she replies that it simply came to her to use dandelion seeds. Then she shocks us both: most people think of dandelions as weeds, something to get rid of, but they're actually both food and medicine for us. "Ah, I understand now," I say. And then it hits her too and we both sit in awe. An apt metaphor for the general perspective and response to miscarriages.

Later I decide I want two dandelion seed tattoos as well. One on my hand perhaps, where it will remain public. For the other, I will shave a space over my heart on my chest and let the hair grow back to obscure this more private remembrance of our loss. I live in this world where, at times, I want to be asked about this pain and sadness, while at other times I want to keep it hidden from sight, just knowing it is there, so close.

received knowledge

This blog is for any of you who have ever experienced a miscarriage, but especially those men out there. Just starting this blog has been a cathartic and, now I see, necessary process for me. My wife and I have had two miscarriages (within 7 months). Know that this blog is not likely to be an upper. I intend to journal my thoughts and feelings about my own experiences relating to our miscarriages. Additionally, I am in the midst of my senior thesis on men's experiences of miscarriage, so I am also going to use this as a space to reflect on my experiences doing this research. In the world of qualitative research my experiences are dubbed "received knowledge." In my study, it will be important for me to try to identify where the knowledge that I have recieved through my experiences overlaps that of the other men in my study. Even more though, in my inner life, it is imperative that I try to identify my responses to my miscarriage experiences as well as my research so that these internal machinations don't take me over.