Wilderness

I have said it before and I'll say it again - I'm never going to win any awards for the world's most prolific blogger. Even in the very early days of this blog, there were large gaps between posts. I think it's because I didn't begin blogging until Emma had been dead for 6 months. I read endlessly before then but something stopped me from writing - the amazing talent of the many mothers who poured out their pain and left me breathless with the raw ugly-beauty of their prose. The fact, too, that I posted on a loss forum back then. I wrote long, prosy replies which may have contained nuggets of comfort and wisdom (or may not) to threads started by other mothers and started endless howling threads of pain and rage and grief. That's the place where my words burned and I left footprints of blood and tears. By the time I was writing here, there was still blood and tears and bitter bile but they were tempered by gentle sadness and reflective pauses too. I don't post on the forum much these days either ... and Face.book. Oh Facebook - a place I regarded with utter bewilderment before Emma died and then loathing after she did. Then hope, when I established a profile where my friends were purely other babylost parents - no civvies on my street. But I'm wordless there too - I have no status, no timeline to share. I'm the ghost who pops up to like your status before vanishing for weeks on end.

I am comfortable with the ebb and flow of my need to be in this place, to need to write, to need to find the silent centre where my daughter abides. It marks, for me, the progress of my grief. I still need to come back here periodically but the need is different - a dawning recognition that whispers at the back of my mind for a few days rather a choking, desperate sensation. But, this last pause has been different. Before, even when I felt no need to write - when daily life left me fulfilled and happy-sad and mute - I visited this page daily. I'd check my blog roll and I'd read. I'd try to keep up with everyone else's writing and I'd try to take some time to comment, to bear witness to the hurt and the pain and the hope and the joy that binds us all together, even when we are strangers on opposites sides of the globe. I haven't even been managing that. I am aware of lots of mothers for whom April brings everything that October brings for me - birthday and death and bittersweetness. I am sorry I have not been truly present to honour Freddie and William and Austin and Simon and Alexander and Freja and Levi in a way I would like.

 Partly it is time. I am where I hoped I'd be - parenting living children with all the  wonderment and business that goes with it. They are too precious not to live in their moment and bask in their amazing livingness. They are growing apace and I have (mostly) made peace with the idea of no more pregnancies, no more babies here. I still get broody and I still have to make myself understand that the feeling of incompleteness arises not out of another baby as yet unmade but a baby who was conceived and carried and loved and lost. Another pregnancy would not be a cure for that and nobody's sanity here is up for another trip into that kind of crazy. I am 37 in three weeks. I had my first baby when I was 27 - ten seems a nice round number of years at which to call the babymaking quits. Besides, I am living in hope of actually sleeping through the night again sometime before I turn forty (if Toby might be prepared to consider that). He is currently taking it under advisement and we have brief, warm conversations about it at 2am and 4am and 6am when I visit him in his new, special bed and he imperiously demands "big nuggles" before clambering on top of me and pinning me to the bed like an affectionate starfish and I struggle to breathe from the sheer joy of it all.

But it isn't just time - I sometimes hover over this blog's name in the drop down menu of bookmarks before clicking on rav.elry or pin.terest instead - places which can become just as compulsive as here but are lighter and fluffier and feel like good hiding places. Hiding from grief and the hard, hard work of a lifetime's mourning. I don't think it's wrong to want to do that sometimes.

Except it doesn't quite work. I don't quite fit anywhere any more. I can look and act and pretend to be a "normal" mum when I take Tobes to playgroup but I'm not. A two hour session each week exhausts me more than it tires my toddler. I have become introvert to the point of being anti social and I am frightened of it having an effect on my children. I have to force myself to establish play dates or invite friends over for tea.  The days I am happiest are the ones when the kids and I have breakfast, we laugh and chat on the way to school and then it is Toby and I pottering around here, just the two of us. But he's two and he's full of energy and he needs more. So I try, I put myself out there and I try to ensure his world is happy and full and busy. I know it is because he is a warm, affectionate, well adjusted little boy but it doesn't come naturally to me anymore and I feel like I just don't fit.

But I'm not sure I fit here anymore either - with a head more full, most days, of big boy beds and homework and lost ballet shoes and complicated Le.go models and a house for sale than my precious, tiny daughter. I sometimes feel as though I'm a grief fraud but I'm not. I still miss her and I'm still trying to work out how to balance that with not missing the rest of my life.