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.

Today's ramblings are brought to you by the letter "D"

I have no idea if this will be sad, self pitying, whiny or not. It might. It certainly started out that way but it has taken me a while to get it up. My mood has shifted and I'm reflecting, I think, rather than complaining. If you think otherwise, feel free to give me a kick in the virtual pants.

D is for ....

Depression
I am frightened of depression - not, I stress, people with depression but of the illness. Of finding myself wrapped in anguish. I have relatives who have faced that particular demon and it's not one I want. (Yeah, like I have a choice).

I read and I read when Emma was first born - looking for the perfect formula for grieving so I could do it, do it right and make it not hurt anymore ... mmmm, so that was going to work.

Of course, I was introduced to the grief cycle, with it's generous promise of acceptance at the end of neatly demarcated set of emotions, but uh-oh, one was depression. Well that's not going to fly.

But, I was pretty well already stuck into numb disbelief and denial so it seemed like my path was already set out, I just needed to step out there and get on with it. Except I procrastinated. I made it to anger, okay. More than okay actually - I arrived there blazing, screaming and kicking and HATING that my baby was dead. Every post I ever read from a dbm, every blog I ever encountered was more fuel to the anger. I HATED that your babies died too. I was not an angry person before Emma died and the strength of the emotion really, really took my breath away.

Sometimes, I would literally feel winded by all the pent up rage that churned my belly and made my head hurt. It was directed at God (see multiple posts where I skirt round the issues of religion and faith), at me - especially my crappy, failed reproductive system that didn't keep 2 of my 5 babies alive and failed to eject the other three in the normal manner, at women who dared to be pregnant with living children or who had living babies when I did not. I must have been an attractive person to be around.

And yet, I credit my anger with the fact that I don't think I became depressed in the first year after Emma died. I know distinctions are difficult, diagnoses imprecise and the line between grief and depression a nebulous, shadowy one. But, on the whole, I'm sure I stayed grief-side-up.

Fifteen months out, I got my rainbow. And people who don't know breathed a sigh of relief but my husband, bless him, made sure he knew the signs of incipient post natal depression. Because we suspected (we didn't want to, but we couldn't help ourselves) that bringing home a real life, bona fide, breathing little person might stir up more emotions than simple joy. We were right. Oh, there is joy, joy in such an abundance I feel wanton with the excess of it. But, there is sleeplessness and anxiety and heartsickness for our precious girl right there amongst the lovin' too.

I still don't know if I have experienced depression. Maybe that's the definition - if it wasn't bad enough for me to label is such, then it wasn't. Maybe the power of the thing is in the naming of it. I do know that Emma's second birthday came and slapped me upside my head. I know that for a little while there, between her birthday and Christmas, I was hanging by my fingernails, tiptoes on that ledge above the pit. I don't know how I got out but I feel like I'm back on firmer ground once more, skirting the edge of the pit and picking my path.

***
D is for ...

Disgust/Disorder/Desperation
I hate New Year's resolutions. Probably because mine only ever last until ... ooh ...12.02am before being broken. So, I don't make any. But, my son is one in a few days. I think claiming my flab is unshifted baby weight is no longer an option. In truth, I'm not really carrying baby weight, I'm carrying grief weight - an equally stubborn and difficult to remove type of poundage. I may not have used anti-depressants but, by golly, I self medicated with wine and chocolate. This period of ridiculous excess was book-ended by two full pregnancies. The end result - I disgust myself. I weigh more than I have ever weighed, unpregnant (And I have a worrying suspicion that I may even weigh more than I did pregnant. My refusal to step on scales during gestating at least spares me the indignity of knowing if this is true.)

I have an eating disorder - I've been coming to a realisation of this for a while. Not anorexia or bulimia but simply that - my eating is disordered, completely divorced from any real feelings of hunger. Our family meals are healthy, nutritious, well balanced. I take pleasure in trying to feed those I love good things. But I don't love me so there's no impetus to nurture my body. I am sure that the opposite is true - somewhere inside, I'm eating to excess to punish my body for being a failure. I eat to encase difficult emotions in a pie crust of feather-light pastry (served with a generous dollop of cream). I'm not sure what the next step is but there has to be one - I'm desperate. Desperate to be here for my living children - they have grieved a sister too soon, I don't want them to do the same for their mother, not if I can prevent it.

***
D is for ...

Disappointment
A couple I care about very much told me they'd had a positive pregnancy test this week.

I still, even two years out and after-baby here, categorise pregnancies. Some I can celebrate whole-heartedly, without reserve - any BLM falls into this category or anyone who has waited a long time for their parenthood. Others are more of the "pleased for you, sad for me" variety. Still others I dread hearing about (people expecting third babies, people who have a living child the same age as Emma, especially if they have a daughter). This couple is one I am truly, unalloyedly happy for. They will make fabulous parents. I hope, hope, hope it will work out for them.

It was only after we had talked that I realised how unusual it was - the way they told us. They didn't say, "We're having a baby" or "We're pregnant". They said they'd had a positive test. I know some of that was sensitivity for us - they're kind and thoughtful and compassionate people. But some of it was because they know, in a way that most first time parents-to-be don't, that pregnancy does not always equal a live child to raise. And I feel profound disappointment for them. I enjoyed almost every last second of my first pregnancy. I felt alive and excited and it never occurred to me that it would end any other way than happily. They don't have that. It might be a good thing - if it ensures that they are more vigilant and more informed about potential problems but it is a shame that, because of me, they have lost some of their blissful innocence.

On the flip side of this, is the fact that they are just beginning their journey towards parenthood. They don't know how their pregnancy will unfold or how their baby will arrive here or what their little one will be like. A beginning. For me, all that is at an end. I am content for it to end here, I truly am. I have spent the last few years creating a family, always hoping for another pregnancy, another child. My family feels ... complete ... sort of. I have four beautiful children. I'd like to be raising all of them but I'm not. But I love raising the three I do have here with me and I hold Emma in my heart. The twinge of disappointment I feel is silly really - to do with the ways in which my children came into the world. I understand fully that a good birth begins and ends with a living child but I will also feel a small degree of sadness that my only experience of "normal" birth was the birth that ended my daughter's life, making it anything but normal. In the scheme of things, it doesn't matter. My grief over Emma overshadows it but it is something that will always sting just a little.

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.
.
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.

Ten Months - A Toby post.

Double figures!

So, what to say about you little man? You are gorgeous - that probably doesn't need saying. You're still as chubby as ever with ringlets of sweet baby podge on your arms and your legs. You are crawling (of sorts).You remind me of a caterpillar as you still use your stomach to manoeuvre yourself to wherever it is you want to get to, (usually towards the nearest wire. You are yet another man in my life with an absolute fascination with technology). It's amazingly efficient - nothing chewable stands a chance against you.

You're a chatterbox. Yes, you're right - you have to be to get a word in edge ways around here. No definite words yet (we did wonder if you tried to say Ben the other day - maybe) but lots of emphatic sounds. I do love our nonsense conversations.

And I remain ridiculously, naively, hopeful that sometime soon, you'll decide to sleep! I'm not reckless - all night wouldn't be completely necessary but three ... maybe even four... hours at a stretch unpunctuated by you expressing your view that sleep is for lesser beings, that would be the icing on the cake little one. Until then ...

You have brought such a lot of light and love and giggles into our life. Thank you for living.

Ghosts and Rituals - Glow in the Woods.

I decided to do this because it is probably the part of life after Emma's death with which I struggle the most. Faith, beliefs, rituals and the solace they provide.

 

1 | Do you believe you can communicate with people in the afterlife, or they with you?  Do you believe you can do this with your child?

Just after Emma died, I had a couple of dreams about her. I don't know if they were a communication from her but they were very comforting nonetheless. I've not had anything like that for a very long time now. I kept a journal in the early days where I'd write directly to her - and when I visit her grave I talk to her. It's a monologue - and I don't expect a reply really. I DO (despite many, many other doubts) believe that Emma is in heaven and I believe she is happy and safe there even if she has never told me that herself.

 
2 | Do you believe in ghosts?  Has this changed since the loss of your child?

 No. I don't. I never have and I can't imagine I ever will. I agree with those who said that they can't think of anything worse than someone precious and special to them being trapped between this world and the next. I don't want that for Emma; it would horrify me. As above, I believe she is safe and happy elsewhere.

3 | Have your feelings changed about Halloween?  How do you respond to Halloween humor such as zombie and ghost costumes or macabre gravestones as decorations?

I am (I think!) a Christian and was brought up in a Christian household. Halloween has never been a part of my celebrations. My church used to organise a "Light party" for the evening so the church children had somewhere to go other than trick or treating. My own children have never participated in Halloween. As a commercial ploy it means absolutely nothing to me and because I see it as such - another opportunity for companies to sell us tat in the slow patch between Easter Eggs and Tinsel - the decorations just don't bother me. They're just junk. It's all separate from my authentic experience of grieving and death.


4 | Does your religious or cultural background have a day or holiday where the focus is honoring the dead? How do you use this experience to honor your own child(ren)? 

No - it doesn't. I suppose the words of the funeral service are quite ritualised - although I don't think we had them for Emma. Isn't that awful? There is much of that day that is burned on my mind but it's like a silent movie. One or two things stand out but not the words we said.

When I read the question, I also thought of Easter. It's not exactly the same but the focus is on Jesus' death and resurrection. And, inevitably, it's also about my daughter's death for me now.
 
5 | Do you ever reach outside of your spiritual/religious framework for comfort from other practices/religions?

Not really. I am moved by the things that I see other mothers doing for "Day of the Dead" and also Samhain. I can feel the ...sacredness ... of these occasions but I haven't integrated any of the rituals into my own grieving.

6 | Is there a season or holiday, other than your child(ren)’s birthday, that inspires you to perform a ritual in memory of your child(ren)?

Christmas. Our first Christmas without Emma was only 2 months after she died. If it hadn't been for our elder children, we wouldn't have bothered celebrating. We asked people not to buy us gifts but to buy for a child who was Emma's age instead and donate it to one of the charities collecting for less privileged children. We continued it last year with gifts for a one year old. This year, it'll be gifts appropriate for a two year old. 

7 | Is there a ritual you perform everyday? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly?

I light a candle when I need to feel close to her. I work on her cross-stitch on the same ad hoc basis. The only "regular" ritual is during the week before her birthday, I light Emma's candle on 10th October to remember Josie who also died in labour in 2008. I keep lighting it to remember Gideon who was born on the 12th and died on the 13th (also in 2008) and, of course, it is lit on the 14th for her birthday and stays lit for the "Wave of Light" on 15th.

On Emma's birthday, we all unwrap a small gift and I make a cake. We take flowers to her grave. We try to make it a day of celebration for the fact that she was rather than mourning the fact that we don't have her here.

8 | Do you perform any public rituals (in real life or online) on October 15? How do your friends, family, or community respond to your acknowledgment of loss?

As above - October 15th is a sort of appendage in this house to Emma's birthday on the 14th. It's usually a rough day - the come down from her birthday. I do participate in "Wave of Light" at 7pm. Our friends and family are very supportive. Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles all sent cards and flowers (or donations in lieu) for Emma's birthday. They also participate in buying gifts for charity at Christmas. We know that we are very fortunate in this.

Day 30

I was completely blown away reading Angie's post today. I don't know if I can come up with anything quite that good :)

As I said yesterday, I'd love to write ... something ...? Not sure what. I did start a Mills & Boon once - I'm not sure I should really admit to that. It's still knocking around our computer somewhere!

Aside from that, I'd like to grow old gracefully with my faculties intact and be the sort of grandmother that my grandma was.