Strange but true - Denial.

I wondered, when I wrote the post entitled "Acceptance?", whether I was just setting myself up for a fall, hence the question mark. The question mark was supposed to show I wasn't taking it for granted at all, that I wasn't trying to push my luck.

I don't think I ever "did" denial - I sort of skipped over that little bit of the grief cycle. Emma's death was unexpected - I laboured, I birthed her, we rejoiced and then we were handed our dead baby. I don't suppose labouring, knowing is any easier. I doubt it. But, even in the absence of any time to process what this was going to mean for us, we held her and I think we both realised that denial wasn't an option. We both felt that we needed to face the grief, the hardship, the horror face on. I was definitely numb for the first couple of months but I never sunk into any sort of denial. I have told people that I have four children - and omitted to mention that one is dead but I don't omit that information because I can't face it or because I forget or because I try to fool myself. Usually I omit that information for the benefit of the other person or simply for privacy for me.

And yet, since Toby, I have struggled to hold onto her. Immediately after his birth, I lived in the land of gratitude and joy. I had a baby WHO LIVED. I cried a lot more often for Emma, I felt so close to her all over again because I could see her in him. And then, I hit a bit of a slump. Tiredness, hormones resetting ... who knows. But recently, I've found myself resenting the fact that I'm a mother whose child died. I'm tired of grieving and I just want to pretend that I'm not. I've never needed to visit Emma's grave with regularity but it's close and it's a very beautiful and peaceful place. I've never found it hard to go and just be still there - until now. Recently, I've felt like I ought to go and I've been unable to. Something in me has resisted. And I feel so guilty - as though Emma is drifting away from me - and I'm pushing her away. I still love her so much but I haven't quite worked out how to parent my living children the way I want to, how to be the sort of mother I want to be and not deny my precious, precious third child in the process.

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.

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.

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.

Gideon

Rachele, when we were using the same due date club, neither of us could have envisioned that our paths would deviate so completely from everyone else on the same forum. My heart aches that anyone should have to live through this but I have been so grateful for your love and support on this journey.

Today I remember you and Garrin and, of course, Gideon. Happy birthday, sweet little boy.

Josie

On 10th October 2008, Jay and her family prepared to welcome a beautiful baby girl. Instead, they found themselves saying goodbye. Jay, I wish it could be otherwise. I will be remembering Josie tomorrow and wish you and H. and A. and D. much peace.

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.

Birthday Boy / Birthday Girl

It has been a busy weekend here. On Friday we celebrated the fact that our beautiful boy, our Ben, was 7. I am so very, very proud of my little man. He is sensitive and articulate and loving. Parenting after the loss of a child can be so difficult. Those of us who are blessed to have living children at home with us recognise deeply how precious these little lives are. I know I feel an immense burden of responsibility to try to protect them from the aftermath of this tragedy whilst recognising that, really, I can't. They need to be free to feel it too. But I doubt my two eldest will ever know how much they have helped Dave and I through this past year.

But, to more frivolous matters. Friday was a day to celebrate the long awaited arrival of a much wanted Nin.ten.do D.S. and to eat pizza. It was an excuse to overindulge in yummy sticky chocolate cake, artistically decorated with Le.go by yours truly!!


On Saturday, the whole shebang started over as we celebrated that our lovely Lucy was 5. Her name means bright/light and it has always suited her but, over this past year, I have been so glad of her company - of the way her larger than life firecracker personality has lit up my days. This time it was a Bar.bie scooter (complete with a lip gloss so Lucy need never be caught scooting bare lipped again!!) and a pink princess cake. (I know there's probably a debate to be had about gender stereotyping here but lets save it for another day!) and four 4/5 year old girls arguing over whose turn it was to wear the mermaid outfit.

Happy, precious days.

And now, we are two weeks away from another birthday. One which, sadly and inevitably, will be different again. I hope we can make Emma's day a celebration too. I honestly have no idea how I want it to be right now. But I want her to know that I am immeasurably proud of all my children and I delight in them all - the ones I am privileged to raise and the one who soars.

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.

A pregnancy post.

Where to start ... in a little over an hour, I will be 17 weeks pregnant. I have been feeling small amounts of fluttering from Jurgen for several weeks now and this past week they have turned into definite movements - not regular yet but there.

I am completely in love. Any idea I had that I might remain detached was a falsehood. I adore this little one, just as I adored each of his or her brother and sisters. I have survived (am surviving - I don't know when it gets to be past tense) babyloss once, I don't know how I would do it again. I am just hoping and hoping that I don't have to.

I have never had a distressing ultrasound. Emma died 7 minutes (7 stupid, tiny minutes) before I pushed her into this world so the first we knew of our descent into hell was the paediatrician turning away from her and saying "I'm sorry". Those sickening words. So, I shouldn't fear ultrasounds, right? Except losing Emma has brought me into a world where babies die at every possible gestation - and beyond. And losing one child does not exempt you from the possibility of losing another to completely random and different circumstances. So, as my "big" scan approaches I can feel myself tensing. I try to shrug it off. I try to focus on now. I cannot change anything that is happening within me. I simply have to surrender to it happening and love my baby with everything I have ... and I do. Sometimes I dare to hope. As one of my fellow posters on MDC said of her own new pregnancy, "Being hopeful is brave. Be brave."


I do manage sometimes. I dreamed I was holding a little dark haired newborn boy with startlingly blue eyes. I try to hold onto that dream. I bought a pair of maternity jeans today and a journal with enough space to include not only my diary of the pregnancy but of milestones beyond. I looked at the newborn clothes too but didn't buy - I'm not there yet. We've discussed names - since D. is the one who christened Jurgen, you can see why we might need to start the conversation for "real" names somewhat early. We've debated whether to find out Jurgen's gender or have a surprise (still undecided). Yet, it all feels a little bit surreal and "naughty" as if I shouldn't be doing those things.

At 14 weeks, my Obstetrician asked me if I was feeling anymore reassured yet after three "good" first trimester scans. He seemed surprised when I said that I wasn't. I was surprised he expected me to feel reassurance at any point in this pregnancy. I will never reach a safe milestone. Emma died at 40 weeks, this baby will come at 38 weeks. He or she will need to be in my arms before I can tell my OB I feel reassured and even then ...

All I can do is love and hope and be brave.

The Great British Art of Understatement.

D. (Finding me, daydreaming in our room): Are you okay? Are you feeling sad about Emma?

Me: Well, yes a bit. But, really, I was thinking about the fact that the little one we miscarried would be turning one right around now. His due date was May 4th last year. I'm just feeling really fed up because we've been trying to bring a third baby home for over 2 years now and we haven't managed.

D: Yeah. We haven't been terribly successful at that have we?

Me: No. Not terribly.

Cue slightly manic laughter from both of us.

P.S Have I mentioned how much I love this man?