Feedback invited

I had a thought in the shower this morning. And then another. And another. Had to go and write ONE sentence, which I thought would be enough to help me retain and remember for later. I really didn't have time to keep writing.

But ummmm..... my single sentence turned into the following, and I'm assuming it's also for this book I'm toying with. I'm finding that I am tending to write and put aside, write more and put aside. Obviously, it's all unedited and as it was a pretty steady stream of thought, it is bound to jump around a bit which I'll have to fix. But for now, any thoughts or questions would be mucho appreciated (as I don't really remember what I actually wrote and I just can't go through it again now).:

Her birth was indescribably uplifting, peaceful, quiet. A truly positive experience. Despite the urgency after her birth - the whisking away to the warming bed, the gastric tube, the EEG stickies on her chest, being wrapped in plastic to retain body heat, splinting of her arm to keep the drip secure – I felt nothing but humbled and completely awestruck by her, by my body, by my brand new emotions. There was a huge amount of fear at the alienation put upon us and our unnatural meeting, due to the intervention that would keep her here long enough for us to properly make introductions and which ultimately forced her to succumb. And yet, even with the presence of this enormous fear and the tiny part of myself that wanted to keep at a distance “just in case”, I couldn’t deny the immense maternal pull and it was this that pushed through in the first hours and ignored all the goings on around us in the NICU. To me, there were only the two of us (and three, when Steve was in) in the whole world.

It took several months for that feeling of lightheaded euphoria to dull. Ellanor died during this time. And yet, I still retained the feeling of “coming back down to earth” like some giddy thrill ride. Only, I was actually hurtling down and landed with a thud, met by the rising feelings of despair and body-numbing grief that will forever remain familiar to me. I still feel like I can’t shake them totally and wonder now if I ever will.

I was still finding my way as a childless mother. I wrote and wrote and wrote. My writing, seeing my words, became a Healer of sorts to me. After 12 months of diary-keeping, I came across a support website where I could not only chat about this further with kindred people, I found some sense of profound, perhaps bizarre, comfort at seeing others’ words of grief and in them, so many touches of my own feelings. It was a huge turning point for my healing.

But what also occurred was, little by little as my sadness gave way to anger, a growing cynicism I had never had before. This new me, on the other side of my specific rite of passage surrounding motherhood, was someone I had never known before having Ellanor. It was unfamiliar for me to not find joy in things, mostly the little things, to not wish people well always, to not care about them and what was happening in their lives. I was completely self-focused and didn’t notice.

As the anger then subsided and acceptance came over me, sometime in 2005, I remained somewhat more spiteful and harder than I had ever previously been in my life. I wanted to prove (pretend) I was the same person, that I was unchanged by all that had happened to me. But all the while, a little voice deep inside kept struggling to be heard and accounted for. My soul, I now believe it was, was telling me to get real – get a grip, basically – and it is only through writing now and being aware and accountable that I am giving the real, new and improved version of the old Me her voice and stripping away some of the defensive barriers that were inherently present, protecting me at my most sensitive time.

I had Lauryn in 2006 just as I was getting used to this new person I was finding. It sent me reeling backwards and I was depressed (if not sleep deprived) during the first months. Much like any new parent, I know, and yet so totally different to most new parents. Suddenly not given the enabling free time, alone with my thoughts which had become my solace and my lifeline to process whatever came up virtually straight away, I was thrust into a new world yet again where the very reason why we had struggled so hard was alternately filling empty voids in me with rapture and also making me want to scream “You’re stifling me!” as I literally had no time to think.

But it wasn’t just the time and space that any parent craves. I had not realised how much my survival had come to depend on the moments of solitary I had instinctively surrounded myself with. To suddenly not have that space whenever my thoughts took me there, I felt like a wedge was being pushed in between me and my firstborn. A wedge I had also given birth to, with her very own set of needs and an agenda that was totally alien to me, my life and that of my “understanding” with Ella. I am most relieved I did not notice this until just recently, where a more satisfactory balance has been reached for now.

If I had analysed it too much, things might have been very different for me and my little girl. I have often felt very guilty since Lauryn was born, wondering why I couldn’t look at her and “just be happy and thankful”. Of course, I was extremely thankful and spent almost every night shedding a silent tear looking down at this baby with the uncanny resemblance to her older sister. Thinking a steady stream of wild thoughts as I slowly succumbed and fell into feeling love again – “she’s so peacefully unaware of what she’s brought to us”, “will she ever know how much she has helped?” “I am amazed by her” And then, “Is Ellanor watching us right now, is she a 2 ½ year old peeking around the corner quietly instead of being in bed?” “If she was here, would she be a handful, God imagine all the operations she would have had to go through by now already, would she be frail, sick…” And then I would start to feel guilty about thinking things that had never actually come to fruition, like being thankful in a way that we had not had to endure all the operations and all that time and energy, of how difficult and different it would have been to manage a new baby if Ella had been in and out of hospital with her heart condition.

Some might say that I should not bother myself with these things, but by doing so, by wondering all the what if’s and could-have-been’s, I keep a glimmer of familiarity and connection alive in me with Ella. People might do well to remember that for some, and of course maintaining a healthy balance so that fantasty does not overtake day to day realities, it is most important to give that space of allowing the questioning and wondering because it is one of the only tangible ways to ensure that the baby or child actually “grows up” with the rest of the family. Ellanor will forever be oldest. Big sister. The first. She will also always be a baby, asleep in a photo, never coming home to introduce herself (in the usual sense) to her sibling/s. And we feel most strongly that one way to bring her into the fold, however big it grows, is to consider her and what age she would be at any given time, thereby somehow normalising her death and at the same time releasing the event from the shroud of taboo.