Where I am right now: Two years, seven months and seventeen days.

Well, right now? Right this second? I'm creeping back in a slightly embarrassed manner. I said goodbye, I meant it, I've regretted it, I've felt released - and I'm back to join in with Angie's project. Back for good or a one-off curtain call? I don't know ... but I really, really wanted to participate in this one. And if you have too, then I want to read your words. I will. I want to savour them and feel them nourish me. I haven't had a chance yet but I will. Our words are too important not to be mulled over and cherished.
So, me ... two years, seven months and change, more than halfway towards her third birthday? Wow. When did my girl get so big ... oh wait she didn't ... she doesn't. She's my forever baby, frozen in time and warm in my heart still. The glass over her photograph feels cold when I press it to my lips to kiss her but sometimes it's warmed by the breath of a sibling who has reached up to kiss it first. We all still miss her.

Life IS good. To say otherwise would be a lie and would do a disservice to my three living munchkins, who thrive and have remained alive since I last posted three months ago. This is despite me seeing dangerous accidents and untimely deaths around every corner. I was ever thus, but pushing a dead baby out of my vagina? That kind of confirmed to me that I can't always protect my children, even if I wrap my body around them and try not to let go. But, two and a half years out, I can (if absolutely, definitely necessary) let my older children play in our garden or in the common land out front, without supervision (for at least two minutes!), and not assume they will break bones, be kidnapped or die in some hideous grass-related incident. This feels like progress to me.

We laugh and we love. I defy the hardest heart not to be melted by Toby's gruff little belly laugh that wobbles his baby chubbiness or the tears of mirth rolling down my big boy's cheeks, as daddy does something hilarious or the radiance of my only living daughter's beams when I collect her from school. I don't know if we laugh more heartily because we have cried longer and the joy is hard won. Perhaps. But we laughed a laughed a lot before October 2008 and we lost that ability for a while. I'm glad it's back.

I'm glad too that I can be sad now - and it isn't always about 7lb 4oz of scrumptious still baby. Back at the beginning, any sadness, any stress, any difficulty - it all came back to Emma's death. I couldn't feel an emotion as separate from my grief. It was all, always, about death and dead babies. I was utterly consumed by the enormity of my daughter's life, snuffed out before it got a proper chance to start. It will never be less than the most heartrending, tragic thing but Emma's death is not always the place I return to, when life is tough. Life is able to be hard again, just because life is sometimes hard not because I am a dead baby mother.

If that sounds as though I've "moved on" or gotten over her. Oh no, never ever ever. I sometimes worry about the distance between us, my second daughter and me but then, something happens. I hear about another baby dying or I am confronted by a pregnancy announcement I have been secretly dreading and I realise that I am still damaged, still hurting and still wounded. It might be something much less momentous - a smell, or a facial expression I catch and I'm back there ... that room at the hospital, smiling because I am delirious after a labour gone awry and because I am holding one of the most beautiful babies I have ever been blessed to meet, waiting for someone to tell me it's all been a big mistake. She's just asleep and, if I just call her name gently in her ears, she'll wake and turn to me with hungry mouth and unfocused, dreamy, newborn eyes. She never did and you don't get over that, EVER.

But, I remember reading Glow, back in those early months and there was a remark or a comment from someone sometime further down the path than I was and it has stayed with me ever since. Somebody (apologies for (mis)quoting you without remembering who you are) said that she had reached the point where her grief was "a small patch of [her] soul, rubbed raw." I thought it was beautiful phrase and I wanted that to be me. It sounded like a reasonable aspiration. I wasn't asking for my soul back, whole and unblemished. That could never be. But to know that part of me would always hurt, always mourn, always grieve and yet to know that I would live and love and feel joy again seemed like heaven. And here I am,  two years, seven months and seventeen days with a small patch of my soul, rubbed raw.