Four years on: A ritual complete.

August 2008: I was 34 weeks pregnant and we were on holiday in a cottage in Northumberland. In the peace and the quiet, I started a birth sampler for our baby.

Then she died being born.

And I knew I would finish the birth sampler. For her. I could do so little. But I could do this.

Except I couldn't. Not for months and month and months. Not until I was pregnant with Toby. My pregnancy was physically so easy but mentally the craziest nine months ever. My cross stitch became my grief project - my way of staying close to Emma when my focus was elsewhere so much of the time.

I said on still life 365 once that it was a ritual - each cross a kiss I never got to give her. There are a lot of stitches in it but not enough for all the kisses I would have loved to have given her. That I should have been able to give her.

 I didn't finish it before I finished growing Tobias Matthew Scrumptious-bum and life with a newborn is not conducive to sewing much (Not that I'm complaining - no way, not ever. He saved my sanity in a way that fabric and embroidery floss never could!)

But I did it. Finally. Pretty much bang on four years since I started it. And it feels good to have done it. For her. For a baby who was stillborn but still born. For Emma.

Right Where I am: Three Years, Seven Months and Thirteen Days.

I was so excited to see that Angie had set this up again and excited to participate. And yet, now I come to write, I'm not sure where I am or how I'm feeling right now.

Busy - I have been an at-home mum for ten years now. I am not oblivious to the privilege of having the choice to be out of paid employment for so many years. One of the things I do to facilitate this is to grade exam papers every May/June. So, right now, I'm a stay at home mother surrounded by institutional grey sacks filled with the work of some of England's 11 years old. I mark them during Toby's (increasingly fleeting) nap times and at night - leaving very little time to crack open the laptop and read blogs. So, it may take me a while to read all the other contributions; I managed to read every single one last year. I don't know if I will get that opportunity this year - I will try.

And, perhaps, that's as good a place to start as any. I still love this part of the internet and I still wish I didn't know about it but my decision to read and write is less compulsive now. I choose to be here. I choose to take a break and being away doesn't leave me bereft in quite the same way it used to.

I think that this past year - this fourth year - has been a year of integration and renewal. We talk about "new normal" enough for it almost to be a cliche. This year has felt a lot more like "old" normal. I will never be the 2007 version of myself again but some of the better parts of her have resurfaced again and I have enjoyed rediscovering them. I don't feel crippled by my grief anymore. My love for Emma has soaked into my bones and my organs - it infuses me. The missing and the longing are simply there - I don't need to summon them up, they twist and twirl around all the other joys and sadnesses and irritations and richnesses of this life.

I am enjoying watching my family grow. This is the year when I truly knew that my family is complete ... and I can use that word, although it means something different to me now than it would have done at the start of my reproductive years. I have been astonished to find there is relief in that - as well as the grief of no more babies. I recognise that I have been very fortunate in the midst of misfortune. Ben, Lucy and Toby make my world sing and I am relishing each age and stage. In September, my eldest child will be in double figures and I am looking forward (with suitable trepidation!) to navigating his journey into young adulthood with him. That sounds presumptuous - even typing it, I had to resist the urge to add an "if" or something conditional in there. I am far enough along in my grief to think that he will be okay. I'm still close enough to it, to wish to avoid any mention of the future that sounds as though I have expectations. I still want to appease fate, in case it decides to kick me hard just to teach me not to plan or hope or expect. But, assuming no disaster or tragedy, then I confess to feeling excitement about what my family is becoming. And I am hopeful that our marriage has withstood the worst ravages of our (mostly) shared grieving and intensive (over)parenting after loss. No complacency but contentment at where we are right now, together.

This past year has seen a transformation in some of the hardest, most calloused corners of my grief. I sometimes feel as though I go on and on and on about my religious beliefs on this blog but, actually looking back over it, I think the opposite is true. I think my struggles with my faith have been monumental since Emma died and I think I have avoided writing about them because I don't know what to say, because I'm concerned about looking foolish, because I don't want people who read here to be offended - all silly reasons to avoid confronting it, really. I can't pinpoint what has changed but something has these past months. My anger, which was incandescent in the early stages of my grief, has burned itself out and in the ashes I have found peace. I still don't claim to understand why Emma died or to pretend that I can completely reconcile so much suffering in the world with what I believe to be true of God but today I am okay with balancing the doubt and the certainty.

I have begun to renew friendships. It's slow work but, this past week, I have met up with two friends I have barely seen since October 2008 - and it was fun and it was fine.

And pregnant people and new babies don't cause breathlessness and a twist of the guts as once they did. I mainly feel joy at each safe birth. There will forever be a part of me that wonders why my births turned out the way they did, why my "best", most straight-forward labour should have been a death sentence on one of my children but I don't dwell there. I can't - there lies madness and I've been close enough to that edge to want to take a big step back.

Having re-read this, I'm a bit worried that I sound like the Mary Poppins of the babylost world. A spoonful sugar making the bitter medicine of infant death go down. Ah well. I can't help that - my life is mostly good now. There is much joy in it and so much to be thankful for. It's where I am right now. It's not where I am every second of every day - it's not where I would have been had I written this last week when I had one child off school with an ear infection and the other off with a sickness bug. When I had a trip to the hospital with one child for a review of a broken arm and a trip to the hospital with another for an x-ray on injured fingers (not broken, thankfully). All the while, womanfully wrestling with a toddler who is completely delightful and completely imperious and thinks that repeatedly hitting anyone who stands in his egocentric way is an acceptable form of self-expression! But, these are the stresses and strains of normal family life and, even as I want to shout with frustration, I am aware of how lucky I am to experience them.

Building bridges.

Angie's recent post on self-compassion gave me a lot of food for thought. It's an incredibly rich piece - deep and meaty as Angie's writing is and I've only really scratched the surface of what she is saying but it has made me think. As has the renaissance of new and fragile faith in me. I have missed it, I'm simply not cut out to be an atheist or even an agnostic but it has been a slow and painful journey to this place. A place where I sit with the doubts and my certainties and it's okay, it works and I find peace there. The two together have left me reflecting on the relationships I destroyed when my baby died.

 I cut myself off after Emma died. I wrote about wanting to be alone, about being an introvert, about simply wanting to wrap myself in my family and never interact with the outside world again. It was me. I think, perhaps, that is unusual in our circle. Too many times, bereaved parents have posted about the stupid/the wrong/the insensitive things others have said to them - some forgivable, others not - others hurtful and cruel beyond imagining. Or, as often, the silence and the failure of words.

It hasn't been that way for me ... well, not much. The odd sentiment has been expressed badly or clumsily. The odd remark has shown me that someone really doesn't understand. But really, the friendships that have fallen by the wayside have done so because I  willed it so. I closed those doors and blew up those bridges. I did it quite consciously in the early days. With a few exceptions, if you hadn't lost a baby then you were too hard to be around. And these were good and compassionate people (my bridesmaids among them) - people who could have helped me carry the burden if I had let them. But I wouldn't. They came to visit and they supported me with love and I closed the door behind them on the way out and never rang again. I hated using the phone - but that was just an excuse. In these newfangled, modern times where I spent hours communicating with dbms on the other side of the world, I could have connected easily enough but I chose not too. I don't know if I feel bad or guilty about it exactly. It was what it was - I can't change it and I think, for me, it was how I needed to grieve. I remember holding Emma in my arms and thinking (in the midst of a maelstrom of incoherent thoughts) that I would feel this however I wanted to feel it and I would not apologise for emotions that made people uncomfortable. But, in making that decision, I ignored the fact that, at some point, they might miss me - miss my support. I suppose I thought that nothing as bad as a baby dying would ever happen to them so they would NEVER be the one needing support again. The friendships would always be unequal with me as the keening mother without a baby and them holding me up. I refused to acknowledge that divorce or ill health or money worries or unemployment could cause heartache in the way that infant death does. But where is the compassion in that? Where is the opportunity to connect to someone with love, to be a friend?

And so, recently, I have been attempting to rebuild some of these friendships. It is a slow process - building takes longer than destroying always. I still hate using the phone. I still find it easier to interact virtually than to deal with real people but I have started to reach out to friends I haven't seen for 3 years, to ask them, "What's been happening in your life?" and to listen - to really listen (without the gentle background hiss of my inner demons who chant "Not as bad as baby death, not as bad as baby death").

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.

At the Kitchen Table: All in the Family

I always find the "Kitchen Table" meme-type posts over at Glow really thought provoking. So, here are my responses to the current one:

1. What was  your relationship with your immediate family (mother, father, sisters and/or brothers) like before your child died? How have those relationships changed?

I have a close relationship with my family. They only live 20 minutes away from me and we see each other most weeks and chat on the phone in between times. I don't see my sister as often as I'd like (given how close we are geographically) but I'd still say we're close - it's the sort of relationship where we get together and it doesn't seem like it's been a while.

I'm still close - they were amazing when Emma died. They really did enfold us in love and practical help. There are occasions now when I'm aware that they, perhaps, don't "get" something about my grief but at least they have never tried to persuade me that my way of grieving is "wrong", even if they don't understand it. It would be easy for a rift to form in those circumstances so it's good that they trust and respect me as my daughter's parent.

2. Has your family been a refuge or safe haven, or a place where your grief is unaccepted?

I'd say a safe haven, mostly. Certainly, I've never felt that my grief for Emma was unacceptable.

3. How has your partner's family, if you have one, been there for you? For your partner?

They've been brilliant, for the most part, too. My husband is close with his parents and all his siblings and I know how much we have valued their support. It has been complicated on his side because so many more pregnancies and babies have happened there. Our rainbow baby is the only subsequent grandchild for my parents. On my husband's side of the family there are four new little people since Emma so far, one more due to arrive imminently and almost certainly more to come. In the early days, when I found pregnant people and newborns excruciatingly difficult, my husband's family (and my husband) had to tread an incredibly delicate line between celebrating the new lives that were growing and exploding onto their family tree and managing my very tender feelings on the matter.  Looking back, I can see how well they did that - even if I didn't always feel it at the time.

4. Have your immediate and extended family accepted your child(ren) as part of the family? Do they talk about your baby(ies)? Do they mourn?

Very much so. We set the tone very early on, always talking about Emma to them and making it clear that that was how we wanted it to be. Our families respected that and took their cue from us. They have definitely mourned - although, as others have said, I think at least some of their grief was for us, their children, as much as it was for our child.

5. What kind of support did your immediate family offer? Did they lose themselves in action, like cooking and cleaning? Or were they emotionally supportive?

Both. My parents had the heartbreaking news of telling our older children that their baby sister had died during labour and then bringing them to the hospital to see us. They were stalwarts for DS1 and DD1 during those early weeks. My husband's parents and brother dropped everything to drive up to us - they live a hundred miles away. Emma was born at 2.25am ... they were at the hospital by 5.30am. They went back to our house and cleaned up (I was had been planning a home water birth, so there was a birth pool to be emptied and put away) and cooked a meal for our return. That sort of practical help has continued through the years, according to our needs.

But, all our family have proved to be good at "abiding" with our grief too. They were able to let us talk over and over and over again and have always seemed to cope with our need to revisit Emma's brief life. And now, three years out, when we have the ability and desire to have other conversations we can - we aren't always cast in the role of "poor victims of a tragic event". It's a relief to know that our families adapted with us to the different stages of grief.

6. What was it like to bear witness to your family's grief? In what ways could you be present for them? In what ways could you not be present?

This is a hard one - I'm not sure I did, really. Thinking about it now, I was/am very selfish in my grief. She is my daughter, my husband's daughter, my children's sibling and, as such, my grief was all about me and those for whom I felt I had responsibility. I never felt I had responsibility to help my wider family grieve - I sort of just expected that they did. We've never cried much in front of each other - I tend to reserve my crying, even now, for alone moments. I suppose we bore witness in storytelling, even if that is probably the most difficult aspect of having a baby who is stillborn - the story is short and repetitive. Still, I would talk (to my mum and my mother-in-law and my sister, mainly) about my pregnancy, about what she looked like, about the things I miss. In that sense, we bore witness together to a whole life that is lost to us.

7. When you reflect on deaths in your extended family, how did the treatment of your child's (or children's) death differ from, say, the death of a grandparent?

My mother-in-law told me that Emma's death was the worst thing she has ever experienced (and both her parents and her older sister have died). I was surprised to hear her say that (not because I didn't think she didn't grieve just because I hadn't thought of it in those hierarchical terms) but I was touched too. 

There is a sense of deliberately creating rituals too, which I'm not sure we have with deaths that came after long (longer than Emma's, anyways) lives. Perhaps because we have memories instead of rituals in those instances. We don't buy gifts for elderly people at Christmas, we do all buy one for a child who would be Emma's age to give to charity. It seems more important somehow that our grief is more ...active ... I suppose.