Some things will always hurt ...

... like:

The family who followed my son and I into his trampolining class, last week. Daddy, little boy, little girl and mummy - proudly pushing 10 day old baby girl. Baby girls will always give me a pang. It was the briefest of pangs because she was gorgeous and sweet and DIFFERENT. Not my baby. That makes a difference these days. What hurt for longer - what still hurts - was the hungry look in my son's eyes. He's seven. It's not fair.

...like:

Coming across her name as I'm marking exam papers - or your baby's name. Because, even though the exam scripts I'm marking are from 11 year olds - giving them first dibs on the names really, I still consider those names OUR names, chosen with care for the babies we love so profoundly. I have to be careful not to overmark all the Emmas I encounter - not to give them extra marks for simply giving me the pleasure of seeing her name written in girlish scrawl.

... like:

Taking Toby "swimming" (dandling him in slightly warm water for all of five minutes, whilst he ponders it all very seriously - as is his wont - before he considers my skimpier than normal attire an open invitation for a snack and attempts to dive bomb my breasts!)

I take him out of the pool, wrap him in a towel and feed him. Milked up and exhausted, he falls asleep in my arms and I'm BACK, back in the hospital room when the midwives handed her to us. She was wrapped in a towel, her hair was still curly-wet fuzz from amniotic fluid and her sweet little mouth was a little slack - not from milkdrunkeness - but from death. I don't see her in him so often these days. He is almost 18 pounds with the cheeks and the thighs to match. He is so alive and so substantial and so very much himself but, in that moment, she was there too. Which is good and painful and confusing, all at once.

Exam pressures, Alien invasion and other reasons not to blog.

Perhaps this is how it'll be here - no formal goodbye just, well, less of a presence. I made a conscious decision to walk away a couple of months ago but I knew I'd wander back. I like this place and I like the virtual friends I have made here. So, there will be no final post here. Like others before me, I'll meander back to say "Hi. How you doing?" I'll still try to read EVERYTHING that comes through my reader, fail miserably and feel guilty. I ponder posts, like the darned good one I thought about which was an extended metaphor of grief as a forest (don'tcha wish I'd been around for that scintillating piece of writing) and then reject them. I agree with Jess - I still have things to say but they aren't always about sinking in a morass of grief or even specifically about Emma any more - although all my observations of my world and my life are threaded with her and my love for her and my longing for her and the space that is not her, but not always consciously now.

So, I will still be writing and definitely still trying to read your blog too if I know of it. It's just got harder. I've just embarked into my annual foray in the world of work-at-home motherdom. Our dining room is currently home to several hundred exam papers to be graded and returned by the end of June. I do this most years and I always forget the slightly panicked feeling I get as friendly postmen unhunch themselves on my doorstep as they divest themselves of heavy looking parcels for me to pour over. I manage it all by chanting "Think of the money, think of the money" under my breath and drinking too much tea.

Besides which, I no longer have internet access during the day. Our ancient old PC has been re-sited into Ben's room, which does not have anywhere for the modem and there seems no way of asking it nicely to connect wirelessly. So, I am constrained to visiting here, via the laptop, in the evenings only when, frankly, my brain has seen better days. The PC has been moved to accommodate a cot in our room for the gorgeous and exceptionally chubby Tobias, who has now outgrown his Moses basket. I always feel slightly envious of co-sleeping mums and dads - it seems so lovely and snuggly to me but it's a no go here. My lovely husband has what I have boldly - and with no medical training at all - designated a mild sleep disorder. It's not at all bad but occasionally he acts out his dreams. I was woken a few months ago when the duvet was unceremoniously ripped off my legs and my (completely asleep) husband started slapping my legs (not hard, I want to stress!) Upon further questioning of said sleepy other half, it turns out he was "getting the aliens off [me]"! So, no little baby in the bed for us (although he does sneak in for his night-time feeds) and no more computer in our bedroom. But at least I can rest easy that I'm sorted in the event of alien invasion.

Little Ewok.

When we realised that I was pregnant for the third time, your daddy and I (well, mainly daddy in all honesty) were thrilled to realise your due date was Sta.r Wa.rs day (May the fourth/"May the force" - groan). Hence your bump name - Little Ewok. I say bump, you never really got to be that. You slipped away from us so quickly and so soon, just six weeks after coming into being and just two weeks after we'd learned of your existence. I know we don't speak of you often. What happened to you - the worst thing ever to have happened to me up to that point in my life - got overshadowed by the death of your little sister. I think you were a little boy and, in my head, your name is Asher. I dreamed of you once - holding hands with a little girl I know was Emma. You were tall, like Ben and blonde, like Lucy. Today, which might have been your second birthday, I have been remembering you and here seemed the right place to do that.

35

Today is my birthday. I am 35. This weekend I have eaten too much cake, drunk some wine (between feeds), watched the DVDs I was given (this, since you ask!) and wondered why this birthday felt significant. It's not 18, 21, 40 - you know, those milestone ages.

And then it dawned on me. I have spent the last nine years of my life absorbed in the world of fertility, pregnancy, birthing and parenting. In that area, 35 IS a significant number. I'm not going to discuss whether or not it should be. It just sort of amused me that I've been so entrenched in getting pregnant, staying pregnant, parenting and grieving that, subconsciously, I invested this age with more significance than it warrants. I won't be pregnant again (not intentionally anyway) so it doesn't matter than I would now qualify as a mother-to-be of "advanced maternal age". I'm okay with being done. I've done some grieving for the end of my childbearing years but essentially I feel like I finished on a high - a living child - and I do not, not for one second of one minute, take that fact for granted. I know that I am one of the "lucky unlucky" to borrow a truthful phrase from Sally.

So, I've had a lovely birthday - and today marks the start of the next bit of my life, getting to watch my family grow. And that is a very good thing to celebrate.

Acceptance?

I think it's fair to say that I'm doing okay. "Acceptance", "Integration" ... whatever the correct turn of phrase might be, I see it happening in my life. Not always - the black can still get me in a stranglehold sometimes - but mostly. I am happy. I can count my blessings. I laugh. I am able to enjoy my life again. A friend shared recently how, two years on, she is able to think of her son not only with love (which was there from the start) but with affection too. That's how I feel about Emma too. I don't always cry when I think about her - sometimes I smile with pleasure at the simple idea of her having been. Now, after a little while on this lifelong journey, I can separate her from her death and just enjoy the knowledge that she's my little girl eternally.

Sometimes, I even pull myself up, "Did I really have a baby who died before she was born?". Even after the hard evidence of the trauma and the pain and the hardship of the past eighteen months, I still can't quite believe it. It feels like a hazy, half-remembered nightmare. But then I pick up Toby and hold him in front of the photographs on the mantelpiece and point to Emma and tell him, "That's your big sister." and it feels very real all over again.

Eighteen Months

The daffodils we planted on Emma's birthday are blooming now. I stood by her grave today, in the peace and the sunshine, and wondered at the passing of time. It's been long enough for us to plant bulbs and for those bulbs to grow and flower. Sometimes it feels like forever. I can't remember the person I was on 13th October 2008. Other times, like today, it's still so close. I can be back in the hospital room, her tiny body lifted onto my chest. Triumph - followed by devastation. I remember removing the clothes the midwives had dressed her in and holding her bare body inside my nightdress in some parody of kangaroo care. I was so warm, she was so cold. My heart was beating hard enough for both of us - but it wasn't enough. I was waiting for my miracle that day - I was going to make headlines. "Baby presumed dead suddenly breathes." I didn't (of course). She remained dead and I remain bereft of my daughter and my miracle.

Eighteen months, sweetheart. We love you and we miss you.

The Ruined Temple

Last year I participated in the 7x7 meme from "glow in the woods" about body image. My answers are here. I talk about being "defiantly self confident" pre-loss.

Defiant because, well, I was under no illusions that I had a future career as a supermodel. As a teenager I was a little shorter than average, a whole lot plumper than average, just a smidgeon plainer and more bookish than average. But, hey, who wants to be average? I was happy with who I was. I would observe with bewilderment as friends, far slimmer then me, launched themselves into the latest fad diets. "Why on earth would anyone choose to exist on a diet solely consisting of grapefruit?" I would wonder (I still wonder). Perhaps some of my body confidence came from my faith. I was taught in church that I was created with purpose. My existence was no accident and I was loved unconditionally for who I was - so why strive to change? Why worry about those extra pounds when my body, seemingly, worked just fine.

That confidence lasted through my twenties. I met my wonderful husband when I was twenty and married at 23. Three years later we decided to start a family and, hey, my clever body knew how to make babies. I took the easy conception of my first child completely for granted. I didn't know, then, how lucky I was. As I have posted before, my belief in the essential strength, functionality, accomplishment of my body was a little dented by the difficult births of my first two children but it was balanced by the awe I felt at the idea that such amazing little beings had grown inside me.

But then Emma died inside me. She grew beautifully for nine months but, at the end, before she ever emerged from my body, she was dead. And it doesn't matter how many times other people tell me it wasn't my fault, my relationship with my body changed forever that day. Because it failed. It failed my innocent, gorgeous, precious child - catastrophically.

Since then it has conceived, with ease, twice more and managed to remain pregnant on one of those occasions. Once again, I am in awe of the beautiful little being who has emerged from me. He is stunning.

But, I feel repulsive. Two pregnancies in two years have taken their toll on my body. I feel old, weak, fat. I am tired from grieving and I can't muster the energy to be defiantly self confident any more. I have a living daughter and I don't want the legacy of disordered eating and body issues from my family to pass down to her. I owe it to all my children, but particularly my girl I think, to be fit and well and healthy. I just cannot seem to find the impetus to change the things that need to be changed.