Little Ewok.

When we realised that I was pregnant for the third time, your daddy and I (well, mainly daddy in all honesty) were thrilled to realise your due date was Sta.r Wa.rs day (May the fourth/"May the force" - groan). Hence your bump name - Little Ewok. I say bump, you never really got to be that. You slipped away from us so quickly and so soon, just six weeks after coming into being and just two weeks after we'd learned of your existence. I know we don't speak of you often. What happened to you - the worst thing ever to have happened to me up to that point in my life - got overshadowed by the death of your little sister. I think you were a little boy and, in my head, your name is Asher. I dreamed of you once - holding hands with a little girl I know was Emma. You were tall, like Ben and blonde, like Lucy. Today, which might have been your second birthday, I have been remembering you and here seemed the right place to do that.

Acceptance?

I think it's fair to say that I'm doing okay. "Acceptance", "Integration" ... whatever the correct turn of phrase might be, I see it happening in my life. Not always - the black can still get me in a stranglehold sometimes - but mostly. I am happy. I can count my blessings. I laugh. I am able to enjoy my life again. A friend shared recently how, two years on, she is able to think of her son not only with love (which was there from the start) but with affection too. That's how I feel about Emma too. I don't always cry when I think about her - sometimes I smile with pleasure at the simple idea of her having been. Now, after a little while on this lifelong journey, I can separate her from her death and just enjoy the knowledge that she's my little girl eternally.

Sometimes, I even pull myself up, "Did I really have a baby who died before she was born?". Even after the hard evidence of the trauma and the pain and the hardship of the past eighteen months, I still can't quite believe it. It feels like a hazy, half-remembered nightmare. But then I pick up Toby and hold him in front of the photographs on the mantelpiece and point to Emma and tell him, "That's your big sister." and it feels very real all over again.

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.

Funeral

A year ago today, our family all gathered in the parish church near our house to say our formal goodbyes to Emma. Not our final goodbyes because, to me, that's what grief is - a lifetime of saying "I love you and I miss you and I'm trying to say goodbye".

I still find that thinking about her funeral triggers the disbelief. I still can't believe that I am someone who had to organise MY CHILD's funeral. It still makes me shake my head in sad wonderment - especially when I remember that most of us plan and order such things so soon after our babies leave us. When I think back to the state I was in this time last year I honestly cannot remember how we managed to make the plans we did - I suppose the numbness serves a useful practical purpose.

We don't have photographs of Emma's funeral - this is not something I regret. It never crossed our mind that it might be a day we wanted to document to be honest. Moments of the day are burned into my mind anyway - the moment my dad carried her tiny, tiny casket into the foyer of the church, the moment Dave's dad carried her out of the church. I close my eyes and I can be back there in a moment.

I honestly don't know what to do with this anniversary. Are we "supposed" to mark it in some way? Do we want to? We're away from home today so even a visit to her graveside is not practical. We visiting family, surrounded by noise and chaos and small people - it's very different from a year ago ... maybe that's for the best?

Emma

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

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.

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.

It was Mother's Day yesterday

I have said that if I ever write a memoir about Emma, I'd have to call it "Life in the Conditional Tense" because it is so hard not to spend so much time with the shoulds and the woulds and the what ifs. Yesterday should have been my most perfect mother's day. I should have been celebrating the fact that my family is complete and I get to watch them grow. But it isn't like that. I didn't get woken up in the wee small hours by a hungry, chubby 5 month old.

But ... it wasn't so bad. Bittersweet ... as is much of life now. I was allowed a lovely long lie in and I was woken by 2 very excited little people and their daddy with a tray full of breakfast goodies. I got 3 gorgeous cards - two my lovely son & daughter had made a nursery and school. One bought by daddy and decorated by the kids. They worked very hard on it yesterday (I guessed what they were up to ... 4 year olds are not discreet) and their daddy announced it was a card to celebrate life, a card full of exuberance. And, you know, the card from my stillborn daughter was indeed full of life - the children had coloured it with bright colours, stuck wobbly eyes and felt poms poms wherever there was a gap and daddy had written the verse:

Dear mummy,

I am your forever baby,
forever your princess,
forever in your heart.
I love you,
my forever mummy.

Emma xxx

As sad & as incomplete as I felt yesterday, I also felt deeply, deeply blessed for what I do have. I just miss my smallest girl.

"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." (Khalil Gibran)