I just read of a mum who lost her baby girl in her womb at 36 weeks 4 days. My heart is bleeding for this young woman who I'll never lay eyes on and my eyes are crying tears I don't want to share with her.
I recall my heart being soooooooo, so, so heavy it physically hurt. If I had ONE wish, and I mean this, it would be that no mother, no father, would ever have to experience that sheer unbelievable tragedy - incomprehensible grief.
She wrote so beautifully, so honestly, and her words echoed how I have felt.... A mother-daughter relationship cut short. A life beginning and all the preparations you make within yourself to save a place in your home and in your heart for your little girl. Everything I started to open myself up to - I've never been particularly girly. I was a kick-around kind of kid, not delicate or fragile either in spirit or physique. But I softened. I softened so, so much. I started wearing pink even when I was carrying Ellanor (unheard of for me) because I found it comforted me and I felt so nurtured. I felt like I was already nurturing her. I wanted to continue developing my newfound softness - I always had it, I've always been gentle, but hid it so far down for fear of being hurt or pointed and laughed at or considered weak.... Ella catalysed the awakening of those innate feelings.
And then I couldn't grow them. Because she was suddenly not here. And I was left wiiiide open, newly soft and gracious and gentle. And so bereft.
This girl's story has really affected me. I've seen her thread sitting there and to be honest, I haven't been able to go in and read it. I have said before and will say here again: mothers who deliver their children born still have lived my nightmare. It leaves me cold. And they are left to tread with their arms empty and their hearts in shreds. Slowly as everything shifts and lifts, some lucky ones find focus and meaning and reason - I am one of the very lucky ones, my daughter not only had a purpose but she almost went so far as to leave written instructions, literally (I mean, have any of you read the Earth Angel story on her website? That's no accident, that story).... cheeky little angel - but I wonder how the others cope. The ones who for years are desperate for peace, just searching. But nothing, NOTHING, anything anyone says will ever give them that. Especially not in the beginning.
So I sit here with a contented little new life doing Richard Simmons exercises in my belly. I think of that mother who recently had the worst realisation of her life: in one swift moment, her life was forever changed, she was forever changed - even when she's happy in months and years to come, there's not anything, not another child, not all the material riches in the world, can quite fill the void. A mother who had borne a stillborn baby boy at 39 weeks told me, the day Ella died (she was my midwife and I was shocked to discover this person I had been drawn to all along since Ella's birth and in the month before she died, had been carrying this secret, and why would she divulge it of course... and she worked with babies for a calling, no less), that I was never going to be the same again. It stuck in my gut like I'd been knifed with a dagger. Along with everything else we had just lost, we had also lost ourselves as we knew "us". The grieving for who you were is something no one really realises is also happening for the parents, as it is overshadowed by the overwhelming impact of the baby's death.
It goes without saying, then, that even when things settle and the first months/years are lived through and coping goes back to being second nature rather than the thing that gets you through hour by hour til you can just sleep again and make it all go away, it astounds me that there are still some people who are of the belief that new life dissolves what has gone before. That the baby I grieved for and the me I grieved for are now "behind me". I vehemently refute this projected assumption, it is such a crime of compassion (can you tell this is a current hot topic in our house due to recent circumstances?).
And now I look forward while constantly casting a despairing glance back. At opportunities lost, at experiences I had to leave behind two years ago, but that are all converging in one big heap now; the closer we get to happiness in this never-ending quest to nurture our healthy, growing family, the alternately further I get from her. My girl.
She's not lost. But sometimes I am.
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