How can it be 2011?

I gave birth to a daughter in 2008 - a beautiful, bouncing baby girl as the rhetoric goes. Oh my, she was beautiful. I don't have words to describe how precious she was although I try. I pour words into this place about her and to her but I'm not skilled enough to render how truly gorgeous my little girl was or how deep my love for her has settled into me.

2009 has rolled past, 2010 has been and gone. How? How, when my world stood still that day have I suddenly found myself 26 months further on, living and breathing? Surely, it was only yesterday that I undressed her tiny body and tucked her inside my nightshirt, hoping my body heat would warm her rapidly cooling little body? Three Christmases, three New Years and it still hurts like hell that she died when she should have lived. She feels so present, curled up in my heart and she feels so distant, flying in the stars.
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I gave birth to a son in 2010 and he lived. When he breathed, I breathed out and I have had almost twelve months discovering that the treasure at the end of the rainbow is not actually gold - it's chubby baby thighs and milky breath tickling my neck at 4am.

2011 - the year my son turns one, my daughter turns 3 and I continue to straddle the twin worlds of love and loss.

With love to all who are navigating it all too. May 2011 bring you only good things.

A void

I have been avoiding coming to my blog, reading other blogs, commenting on blogs. I haven't avoided thinking about blogging friends though - this part of the internet has been my virtual home for nearly two years now - a place that I buried myself in for a while back there. I still potter on with my daily life and wonder about the mums who are completing difficult PALs or who are trying to embark on one, mothers who are learning about the joy and the strain of motherhood after loss. And it's all still important to me but, with a dodgy internet connection and online shopping to be done, it was easy enough to claim that precious screen time needed to be spent elsewhere. But, that wouldn't be the whole truth - the decision to step away was somewhat more deliberate than that. These times come along sometimes, it seems to be just part of the cycle.

I don't know what I expected for two years. Something more gentle maybe. But, no. What I got was a stumble, a head first pitch into the deeper recesses of the grief pit. Because there is still a void - a hole that will never, ever, never be filled. Most days I can step around it - carefully, but relatively surefootedly because I know the terrain by now but not this time of the year.  I celebrated my daughter's second birthday without her, just as I will celebrate her fifth, her eighteenth, her twenty first... We do celebrate but it is a conscious choice to do so - to do it in the face of an overwhelming urge to roll into a ball, refuse to leave my bed and focus on the void.

And gradually, imperceptibly, the depression lifts again and I only realise how low I actually was in hindsight.

And then it's Christmas - a whole bundle of conflicting emotions to try to deal with. I can't avoid Christmas, even if I wanted do, not with exuberant living children writing Christmas lists and begging for the tree to go up. I think it's good for me to be pulled out of myself and I am finding some seasonal joy this year as we sing along to carols and make mince pies. There are moments of intense sadness - of course there are. Emma isn't here and she should be, no amount wrapping paper covers the void. I took a Christmas wreath to her grave and cried harder than I've cried for a long time. I hang her decorations on the tree and feel again the paucity of what I have for her, compared to the piles of gifts hidden upstairs for her siblings and I feel angry all over again. Angry for what I've been cheated out of, angry that SO many of us face this Christmas without our babies and angry for her, that she is missing all this. Except I don't really think she is missing out on it all. I truly believe she is somewhere safe and well - somewhere I hope to join her one day, if I find my feet with my faith again. Somewhere, where Christmas is celebrated without sadness and only joy.

But, still, at this time of year I long for there to be no gaping hole in my life and I struggle to comprehend that there is - and always will be.