5 months ...

... since I held our long awaited third child in my arms. She was so, so beautiful - the image of her big sister. Sometimes it feels as though I blinked and woke up here. Other times it feels as though I've lived 5 lifetimes in these 5 months.

The hours leading to her birth seem dreamlike now - labouring at home in the birth pool, deciding to transfer because I was tired (but baby was fine); the registrar preparing the ventouse, my midwife laughing and saying "You don't need it clever girl, baby has turned. You can do it yourself"; the most triumphant moment of my life when I pushed our baby out and lifted it to my tummy, the shock and elation of finding out "Bobby" was a girl after all ... and then. Baby girl isn't breathing. She's taken from my chest to the resuscitaire, I can't see her because she's surrounded by doctors (I'm grateful. My husband could see and finds it hard to talk about even now). We agree her name is Emma (suggested by daddy just hours before) and I add Faith - trying to affirm I believe she'll be fine. I know she won't be. How? How do I know this? I just do. Her soul is already elsewhere.

Those words ... "I'm so sorry" and then she is back with us, warm and safe and perfect in my arms. We have photographs from these first moments - such precious treasures now. The first photograph we have is almost identical to the ones we have when our son and first daughter were born. Tiny baby wrapped in a towel, nestled in mama's arms. Daddy's arms around us both. We're smiling, tired but proud parents. I'm glad - glad the shock allowed us that moment of normality before we awoke to the fact that "normal" for us now is so very different from what it was before.

Normal, today, is allowing my 6 year old son to choose the flowers we will take to his sister's grave (yellow roses - he has excellent taste). It's hoping that I'll manage to avoid the 5 other mothers who gave birth to baby girls (not a single boy) between September & December 08 when I collect my daughter from nursery - and averting my eyes if I don't. It's feeling perpetual anger simmering beneath the surface. I was always so calm, so placid before - this rage frightens me. It's aimed at God mostly, as I wrestle with the tenets of a Christian faith I have cherished almost my whole life. I still believe, I want to find comfort but I cannot blindly accept this and the answers to the questions don't make sense to me yet - I'm uncertain whether they ever will. But I want them too. I am finding it hard enough to grieve my daughter. I don't want to grieve a loss of faith too. I call it "faith by my fingertips". Is it worth the effort? I have to believe so, most days. But that doesn't stop the anger or the anguish.

When I held my daughter in the quiet and stillness after her birth, I told my husband that I needed her death to mean something. I still do ... I know her death from a probable cord accident is senseless and horrific but I NEED good things to come from it. But I'm learning that I can't force those good things - they are aspirations right now, not reality. Some of the women walking this path ahead of me talk about the compassion they have now, the ability to appreciate life. I find it hard to accept that my child needed to die for me to become more compassionate. Current evidence suggests that I am less compassionate, less patient. My internal response to hearing bad news is almost always, "well, that's hardly as bad as a baby dying is it?" Some of my relationships have deepened and blossomed, many more are dying or have died. My joy in pregnant bellies and newborns is gone, perhaps for good. My daughter's 6 month old girl cousin, her shadow companion & bump mate, is a virtual stranger to me. I can look at pictures of dead babies and admire how perfect and beautiful they are. I can't be in the same room as a living one.

Perhaps for now, I shall hold on to the fact that my living children are the beneficiaries of my desire to find glimmers of hope in this morass of horror. I cherish them with a love that is strong and fierce and potent. Five months on, I get out of bed each day for them - and maybe that is enough for now.