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.

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.

And the world turns ...

In a couple of hours it will be a milestone date again - fourteen months on the fourteenth. In a couple of weeks it will be Christmas again. Things move on apace and I wonder if I have too. I suppose I have in some ways. Crying is no longer a daily occurrence and the anger is all but gone (sweet relief). I am fumbling my way towards some sort of reconciliation in my faith - tentatively and in a piecemeal fashion - but it feels like progress.

But, I still wake up some days and it hurts. I couldn't explain why yesterday was so much harder than the days preceding it - there was no obvious trigger but there it was. Grief - sharp, bitter, uncomfortable and draining. Sometimes it's a relief to know the tears can still come - they remind me of how much I love my baby. How much I miss her. How much I still want her back.

Emma

Happy Birthday, sweetheart. We love you and we miss you.

October

So here it is - with a twist of the calender we've got here. THE month. It's an absolutely perfect, beautiful, crisp autumn day here. It won't be long before the kids and I can stop on the village green on our way home from school and fill our pockets with conkers - we didn't do that last year. Firstly, because at 39ish weeks pregnant simply waddling home was pretty much enough excitement in my day and then - well, a lot of "normality" went by the wayside through October and November and beyond.

I read Jay's beautiful meditation as she approaches Josie's first birthday too. I've known and followed Josie's story since the beginning. She and Emma were born and died just four days apart so our paths have coincided many times. Jay's musings on grief and acceptance resonate very strongly with me right now. It's true for me too - although I am sliding into a quiet melancholy, I don't feel the same rawness now as I did at the beginning and I don't feel compelled to try and recreate it for her birthday. There is a gentleness about my grief now that I'm content to live with.

Unlike many babylost parents, I'm not dreading Emma's one year day. I almost feel a sense of relief that I'm reaching that point, that I made it, that I have survived a whole twelve months without her sweet babyness here on earth. Last October I couldn't have told you I would. I don't feel as though I am passing through some portal that will separate us because I know that nothing could. I carry the essence of her with me into this second year and forever more.

Almost eleven months ago, I had an idea for a piece of art. It has remained unexecuted because I'm afraid that I lack the necessary skills to execute the fabulous idea in my head! I wanted to draw a mother's face and upper body with an outsized tear falling from her eye and an outsized heart bursting from her chest. I wanted to draw a tiny baby nestled in her tear and one in her heart and inscribe it with the words "In my tears and my ever pregnant heart" because she is. She is there, always and eternally, whether it be one year or eleven or one hundred and one. Maybe I'll screw up every tiny ounce of my limited artistic ability and actually make it one day soon. Watch this space.

Intact

Several months ago I was reading a post I came across in a grief and loss forum. A mother, six months out from the death of her toddler, talked about the difficulty in trying to reconnect with friends from the time before. "I can't just pretend," she wrote (I'm paraphrasing slightly as I can no longer remember the exact words), "that I don't hate their intact lives."

It was one of those "Whoa" moments. I understood exactly what she meant. That sentence clarified exactly what I had been feeling. I have written here before about being introvert, about needing solitude and preferring to avoid anything requiring a degree a sociability. Deep down I had a sense of what this mama was saying but I hadn't managed to articulate it, even to myself. I planned to write a blog entry about it, back then, several months ago. But then other things came up, other topics to consider and I would remember it as various times but never got round to writing about it.

I've been thinking about it a lot over the summer and the post I write now is very different from the one I would have written three months ago. I have had a LOT of company these past few weeks. My husband and both my older children have been on holiday for six weeks and we've crammed such a lot of things into a month and a half. Most profoundly for me, we have visited with family and I held my thirteen week old nephew for the first time and spent time in the company of my little niece - 5 weeks older than Emma would be. What struck me was the lack of resentment. I braced myself for these visits, expected to survive them and sink into a deeper grief afterwards. It wasn't like that at all. Of course I thought about my daughter and looked for her features in these cousins of hers. Of course I longed for it to be different - to be passing my nephew back to his daddy because I needed to stop my 11 month old making a beeline for the staircase. But there was more too. I enjoyed snuggling a wonderfully warm and cuddly three month old and seeing him smile. I realise that somewhere in the last three months I have stopped hating people for their intact lives.

I know, of course, that some of this is down to Jurgen and the hope that he/she engenders in us. If I weren't pregnant again I doubt I would have had the same capacity for graciousness. But, there's more to it than that. After all, my husband and I have both considered how best to tell people about this pregnancy (it is still for the most part a secret to anyone except family and blog readers). We want people to be pleased but not to assume that this baby replaces Emma or somehow makes us "intact" again. He/She doesn't. If this baby lives and thrives, I will still be a bereaved mother - something everyone here gets but not everyone in real life.

I think mainly it is the passing of time. My grief, in the early stages, was of necessity selfish. How I felt, how I handled things, what I needed to do to survive and get through the day - these were my main considerations. They had to be. As I'm slowly emerging from the deepest level of this pit I am able, once again, to consider other people more objectively. Whilst very few of the people I know in real life have experienced tragedy at a level I have, I can now recognise that life is not perfect for anyone and I do not need to hate their "intactness". Also, I'm in a better position to appreciate the joys and good things that still exist in my own life - my truly amazing son and daughters and their wonderful daddy and other smaller daily gifts.

If this sounds insufferable, I apologise. I do not intend it to come across that way. This is a season I'm in at the moment - a breathing space for which I am grateful. Emma's first birthday is approaching - I know. This fact nudges at me through everything else. I have other milestones to face - my 20 week scan on Friday, my son's seventh birthday, my daughter's fifth birthday. For now, all my concentration is on these things but when October comes around there are no more distractions and I don't quite know how I will be. It's too big and momentous a time. For now, I'm just trying to enjoy a period of respite.

6 months

... and I have NO words at all for this pain. I think I'll let my darling husband's beautiful words say it for me.

Wistful & listless.

I was expecting to feel the grief more this week. We all know there's no free pass out of babyloss - the good days have to be paid for. So, I've been relieved that after the wonderful high of our anniversary, what has followed has been wistful sadness and listlessness. Although it doesn't seem much, I was expecting to be plunged back into the very depths of the rawness again. That's how the "good day, bad day" pattern has gone in the past.

This week though I've felt the lack of my Emma all over again but in a subtle way. In the earliest days I felt physically fractured by her death but these last few days it's been a weariness right down to the bone marrow. Daylight saving has brought lighter nights, spring is bringing buds and blossoms. Out in the garden yesterday, I realised that, to an untrained eye, we probably looked pretty good - I was mowing the lawn whilst B. & L. alternatively "helped" or threw grass cuttings at each other whilst we waited for daddy to get back from work. Nobody else would have been able to see the hole. The lighter, brighter days mean too that the sweet little babes born last Autumn are no longer amorphous blobs swaddled in pink. Suddenly they have personalities, they're holding their heads up, dressed oh so beautifully, charming the world around them. I find it even harder to reconcile myself to these perfect little people than I did to the anonymous bundles of blankets in strollers. I want to smile at them and stroke their soft cheeks but I also don't, because they're not Emma.

Daylight saving has also resulted in very tired children who don't fall asleep easily. Their tiredness seems to be exacerbating their longing for their sister too. Our nighttime lullaby (a somewhat tuneless number composed by me during 4am breastfeeds with our firstborn) includes the line "mummy loves you very much, daddy loves you very much, *insert sibling* loves you very much, *insert cuddly toy* loves you too" (I did warn you it was composed at 4 am). At B.'s behest, the cuddly toy has been relegated to the second line of the song and Emma is now included. I love that he asked for this but amsad that this is how it is.

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.