Three.

My baby loss remembrance ribbon pinned to my coat, breakfast with a friend, quiet snuggles with Emma's little brother, a bouquet of deepest red from us and pink roses from her grandparents arranged around her headstone, a butterfly cake with lashings of vanilla butter cream and silver sparkles. So many cards and well wishes, tears and laughter and reminiscences and moments of "what if ..." and a night at a cottage by the sea, with lashings of white wine, her candle and a roaring fire.

It was a good day, really it was. Still missing her, still missing my Emma.

The day before.

I want to write "I miss my baby" and copy it billions of time, press publish and crash the internet with my desperate longing for what can never be. I miss her, I miss the weight of her in my arms, the feel of ticklish sucking as she nurses, the damp, flushed hugs of a toddler bewildered by bad dreams. I never had any of it but I miss it. Oh, I miss it.

This time three years ago I was deep in labour, so close to meeting my baby. I think this day might just be worse than tomorrow. On the fourteenth, by the time most people grumbled their way out of bed, D. and I had been wondering where life went and what happens now for several hours. We had our baby in our arms and she was beautiful and time was meaningless. We tend to celebrate on the fourteenth - celebrate love and beauty. Celebrate with tears, maybe but with cake and laughter too. But the day before is a day of grief - grief for what could have been and what can never be. I miss my baby, I miss my baby, I miss my baby, I miss my baby ....

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

 From my favourite Keats poem, To Autumn.

I have always loved Autumn - I love the cosiness and the crunchiness, the chance to light fires and wear thick, woolen tights.  There is a relief at arriving here after the heat of summer, which does not suit my temperament. I love searching for conkers on the village green and going on crunchy leaf walks with toddlers in froggy wellingtons.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness ...fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

 I still love the season but I stand, broken and grieving with my dead child in my heart, resenting nature's fecundity.  I stand a moment, of an evening, watching the sky turn glorious shades of crimson and orange before I draw the curtains and turn inwards. I call those skies our "Emma sunsets" and I welcome them, even as they break my heart.

I dread and long for her birthday in equal measure too. I don't need a single day to cherish Emma or to celebrate and love her but it is good to have a day that is hers, truly hers. But, the heaviness ... oh the heaviness. I am slow and sluggish now, crabbed and sharp, constantly tired with the anticipation of what is coming.

She will be three. My older children separated (just a little) from me when they were three; attending pre-school for two hours each morning. It was a happy and healthy parting for us with joyful reunions over junk modelling and finger-painted self portraits. I should be anticipating the same for Emma.  But our parting took place many years ago, just hours after she was born, and there is no possibility of a reunion in this life. And I hate that. I can see my breath on the air in the mornings but I can't see my child.

Yesterday, I held a newborn baby girl ...

My sister-in-law gave birth yesterday. Her first child - a daughter. A baby who evens up the number of boys and girls on Emma's daddy's side of the family. Of course, outside of the family, it looks like we have more boys than girls ... sigh ...

We went to the hospital to visit with them. She is a beautiful, beautiful baby girl and I got to hold her and watch her frown and dribble and dream sweet baby dreams. It isn't the first time I've held a tiny baby girl since I had to let Emma leave my arms. My other niece was born a few weeks before Emma (I think I might  have mentioned this fact a few [hundred] times.) The first time I held her was blissful. I scooped her up over the enormous swell of my 37 week Emma belly and enjoyed breathing her sweet newborn baby scent.

The next time I held her was at my daughter's funeral wake. I, honestly, can't remember how I found the strength or desire to do that. It's one of my few clear memories of Emma's burial day. Maybe because it's the last time I ever held that little girl in my arms and she'll be 3 next week. Things are a little easier now but, when the film of denial and numb disbelief wore off, I found my other little niece virtually impossible to be around. We tried, the Christmas afterwards, when she was three months old and Emma would've, should've been 2. I wasn't ready - I see that now. I wasn't ready to do family Christmas. It's the nearest I ever came in my grief to having a breakdown. Every time, my sister in law came into a room holding her baby, I had to get up and leave. I spent a lot if time crying in bathrooms and being horrifically difficult to be around.

So, yesterday wasn't the first time I have held a baby girl since Emma died but it was the first time it didn't almost kill me and I am so pleased she is here - safe and sound and whole and glorious.

So ....

We should talk about the goodbye that wasn't. I feel a little like the boomerang blogger or the comeback queen minor royal. I find there is an ebb and flow to my grief that compels me to read and to write and to come back here. But it also, at times, compels me to walk away, to take a break from dwelling amongst baby death and sadness.

The first time I took a break, I always intended to come back (but got some lovely, warm fuzzy inducing comments nonetheless) . The last time really was meant to be an end - a tidying up of loose ends and a step away. There was a dissonance between my "real" life and my online presence. In real life, my grief had receded a lot. My focus was on the three children that I am privileged to be raising and on my marriage to my lovely Emma's daddy. Here, I didn't quite know where to go with this blog. It was always Emma's space and I've never quite decided how much of the rest of my life fits here. I didn't want it to become a straightforward mummy blog - there are lots of better ones out there! And, besides, this is where I parent Emma. It didn't seem right that the focus wasn't her anymore and yet, I didn't always have very much to say about her or about life without her. So, I decided to stop and it felt like the right decision at the time.

But, I hadn't quite appreciated how much I relied on this place for my connection to my daughter or to my grief at having to live without her. For a couple of months after I stopped writing,  I felt very distant from anything to do with baby loss. It was as if Emma's death happened to someone else or in another lifetime. I felt "normal" - not just "new normal" but almost like I did before October 2008. And yet, there was an imperceptible tension. I only became aware of it when I started reading through the "Where I am"  posts. Suddenly, all the sadness and frustration at not having my daughter came back to the fore. That sounds negative but it wasn't. I needed to stop and take stock. I found my connection to my little girl all over again and I realised that I might not need to be here as frequently as I did in the early, raw days but I do need to be here sometimes. And I'm so very grateful for all the people who still leave lovely, lovely comments and graciously accommodate my long silences and clumsy au revoirs. Thank you for walking the path with me.

At the Kitchen Table - Time (Glow in the Woods)

1. How much time has passed since the death of your child(ren)? Do you mark grief in months, weeks or years? Does it seem to be going fast or slow?

It's nearly three years now and I mark it in years, although it surprises me to be doing that. When I was doing the "Right Where I am" project, it took me a while to work out how many months I needed to append to the two year mark and last month, I actually missed the significance of the fourteenth for the first time ever. Fast or slow is relative really - it's seems like a lifetime since Emma died, as though this has been my life forever but then I look at my living children (especially rainbow Toby) and I seem to have blinked and got from October 14th 2008 to here instantaneously.

2. Do you have an end goal to your grief? How much time do you think that will take? How much time did you think you'd need to get there right after your loss? How much time do you think you need now?

No, I don't. At the very beginning, I believed something good HAD to come out of her death and a sort of unsaid end goal was that my grief would make me a veritable Mother Teresa - calm, compassionate, charitable. I thought a couple of years down the line, I'd be such an amazing person!! Pretty quickly, I realised that it wasn't going to work like that and I'm actually less of those things when the grief is sharpest. Nothing "good" is good enough to justify my baby's death. From then on, I lived very much in the moment. I decided to embrace whatever I was feeling - even if it was horrible or negative. So, no end goal just the ongoing plan to embrace whatever grief hurls at me and deal with it.

3. Rather than a clear end goal, is there a milestone or marker to indicate that you are feeling grief less acutely, i.e. going to a baby shower, listening to a song that made you cry early in grief, driving past the hospital? How long did it take to get there?

My sister-in-law is pregnant (actually all 3 of my SILs are pregnant!) She's the mother of Emma's shadow companion - her daughter was born alive five weeks before Emma was born dead. The baby she's expecting is her third - I don't find thirds easy at the best of times. As much as I love her, I've been having a hard time with her news. Yesterday, they found out they are having a baby boy - I was able to say "congratulations" and genuinely mean it. I didn't need to excuse myself to go and have a little cry somewhere. That was a revelation (and I doubt I'd have managed it, if little one had been a girl but, hey, it's a baby step).

4. How do you view the time you had with your child, either alive (within or outside) or already deceased? Before you all answer "Too short! Not enough!", did you have time to "bond" or develop a future imagination about what this child would be like? Perhaps depending on whether yours was cut short, how do you now feel about the nine-month period of gestation -- too long or not long enough?

I adored my pregnancy with Emma - I love being pregnant, I feel happy and beautiful and utterly bonded with my babies for the 40 or so weeks I carry them. Emma's pregnancy was, if anything, the most special. I was pregnant after a miscarriage and determined to suck the joy out of being pregnant again. I also believed she would be my last baby so I journalled and photographed and belly painted - moments that are beyond precious to me now. The time after her birth/death was so surreal. We only found out she was dead after she was born so we had had no time to think about how to handle the time afterwards. We had to simply go with our instincts and, looking back, I think our instincts were good. What we did was right for us, for our older children and for Emma.

5. One grief book suggested that it took 2-5 years to incorporate your grief into your life. Where are you on this timeline, and you do you find that to be true?

I'm just past the beginning of that "milestone" and I think it is true. I have written here about feeling acceptance and integration. Grief is a sly beastie and I don't stay integrated or accepting but the times when I do are getting longer in duration. I would imagine that over the next 2 or 3 years (although I've not thought about it), that will continue to be true.

6. There's a familiar saying, "Time Heals all wounds." Do you think this is true? Or do you subscribe to Edna St. Vincent Milay: "Time does not bring relief, you all have lied"?

I can't remember if I've used this analogy here before. One of the most useful things that our wonderful bereavement midwife said to us was that our grief is like a heavy, black ball that is handed to us when our babies die. We can't put it down, we can't see round it. Gradually, our arms get stronger and we feel more able to carry the ball and we find things to wrap around the ball, to cover the ugliness. Crucially, the ball never gets smaller, we just get used to its shape and weight. That's how I think of time - it doesn't heal the wounds, it just allows us to build up the stamina to carry the grief and the ability to expand around it.

7. Has your relationship with the future (immediate and far) changed since the death of your child(ren)? How about your relationship with the past?

I feel nostalgic for the past - I miss the person I was back then. Of course, there's an element of rose tinting because the person I was back then had some undoubtedly annoying quirks but I liked her, you know? Her confidence and naivety. I'm still not sure I like the "new" me.

The future - I struggle hugely with anxiety and I have major trust issues. I find it best not to look too far ahead, it makes me nervous to try especially with regards to my living children.

8. How long did it take to answer these questions?

 About 40 minutes but I was watching TV at the same time!!

Meditations

I am standing in church - not always an easy place to stand. For once, I am alone. The eldest are in Sunday school, little one is at the creche with daddy. But, it's more than that. In a crowd of maybe 150 people, I am alone. I wonder how many of them remember my daughter's name. I wonder how many even remember I had another daughter. And then it happens. I have my eyes closed and I feel arms around my neck ... the half hug, half stranglehold of a toddler and her mummy. And I know, I know it's Emma. Not Emma as I usually think of her - a newborn baby, my forever baby - never changing, never growing. This is Emma as she would be now - 2 and some. Flying hair and energy. I keep my eyes closed. I don't want to open them and see her absence. I treasure this tiny taste of my longing - I have never sensed her this strongly before. And then it fades. I am standing alone in church.

***

I take a bag containing old rags and a bottle of water with me and we stop on the way to school to choose some flowers. I leave the older ones at school and continue, littlest boy tied firmly to my back, to the graveyard. I stand by my daughter, but not my daughter - her body but not her being - and chatter whilst T. tries to wriggle his way to freedom. I don't let him and he settles as I lean over her gravestone, pour water over it and start to rub away the evidence of a wet and muddy couple of weeks. I suddenly become aware that I am singing - that's why T. has stilled. He recognises the song from my occasional bath times - a tuneless little ditty about splish splashing. I'm the crazy lady unconsciously humming bath-time tunes as I clean my daughter's headstone. And I have an epiphany. I suddenly understand what we all mean when we talk about parenting a dead child. I have never really been sure how you do that. Now, I do. I pack up my rags and my empty bottle and set off for home, still singing silly songs to the one on my back and the one in my heart.

***

I am hanging out washing and little toddler boy is doing what, in this family, is called hooning. He's marching round and round the garden, completely in love with his still-new mobility. No place to get too but it's purposeful movement nonetheless. "What I am doing is important", his sturdy little body proclaims. I turn away to pick up some more washing and I can't move. I look down and two chubby arms completely encircle my legs and my son hugs me hard and wholeheartedly. I lift my face to the delicious, warm sun and think, "I am happy, so very, very happy."