journal

I'm trying to brace myself for the summer's coming grief. But it's hard to do -- and probably fruitless, really -- since I have no idea what it's going to look like this time around. So maybe I will try instead to simply let go of any kind of expectations I find myself developing, and just take the days as they come.

I know I'm stronger now. I've also had time to settle into my new environment. I miss my family still; but I've gotten used to not seeing them every day. It doesn't hurt so much anymore. And I guess with every year that goes by, in the same way, I get used to not seeing my kids every day, too. The ache will always be there; I'm not ever going to forget. And I will always think of them as my babies... But I also know that they are so much more than just my babies.

They are more than their tiny, unfinished bodies ever were. They are themselves. And while the flesh that housed them for so short a time is gone, and they could not stay here without it, they were always more than that, and what is essential about them still exists. I really do believe that. They are a part of my story, and a part of my heart. They have shaped me as a person, and will continue to shape me as a mother.

I'm so sorry you never got to meet them.
They were impossibly lovely.

I will always be sorry that their siblings won't get to know them, too. That my third child will have all the trials and priveleges and common personality traits of a first. Firstborn, though not first borne. But I hope I can do a decent job of integrating Ailis and Noah into our lives, and that their names will be associated with joy and inclusiveness, familiar and sweet, instead of pain or sadness or separation.

I am beginning to subscribe more and more to the idea of neutrality; the idea that things and events simply Are, and it's what we do with and during and after them that matters.

And so I think I'll not say again that Ailis "should" be here or Noah "should" be here. It is too strong a word, and it hurts too much. And I think, perhaps, it takes away a little from the honor and the rights of the child who comes next.

(The one reason I can think of to be grateful not to have had a subsequent pregnancy immediately after my losses is that I do not have the confusion of bearing a child that "would not exist had the other not died." I'm not sure that I believe in that line of reasoning at all, and I hope it wouldn't have troubled me... but it is good to have the clarity that time and distance can bring.)

I choose to believe that everything that was ever essential about my children is now a part of everything I see. That they are reunited with the universe, and so are not really gone, as nothing that was ever here can ever really be completely gone. Stardust. We are all stardust. We are all made of the same stuff, and always were, and always will be.

So in the future, I will look at my children -- the ones who stay inside the fragile tents of their human bodies, the ones who grow and change and speak and reveal to me, little by little, their specific intricacies; and I will smile and I will love and I will drink them in. But I will also look at the sunshine and the dustmotes and the green growing things and the ocean and the stars... and I will smile at them, too. I will fling my arms wide, and embrace what I may of the vastness of the universe, and all that I love that dwells within it, until I am reunited as well.

For what is to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Kahlil Gibran

alone with my thoughts in a coffee shop

Another day, another Star*bucks... same issues.

I don't miss my actual "mother." I miss the idea of having a mother. And I am staggered by the enormity of my loss, the sheer depth and breadth of what has been missing from my life, and no matter what happens next, no matter how lovely things might (someday) get, I can never go back and fill in that blank. Sometimes we never get back the things we lose.

I know it will be driven home all the more, when I finally watch a child of my own grow, encompassed completely by my love, true mother-love; the kind of love I've never experienced for myself.

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Reaching for more words; but they're not very interested in making an appearance tonight, I'm afraid. Or... perhaps that's just it: I am still afraid.

I desperately need someone to cheer me on; to notice when I'm doing well, and tell me so. (Because really, I am doing remarkably well.) But all I can hear is the echo off of 27 years of silence.

journal entry

Oh my goodness! That has got to be one of the most amazing stories I have ever read. My heartrate is up now, I was so into it. It was exciting and lovely and terrifying, all at once. And oh, does it make my mind race! Such ideas! Such things to fill my head and my dreams. Such possibilities.

But combined with my jetlag, I feel marginally insane. I remember this feeling, thankfully, so I can tell myself that it's really okay, that I'm not crazy and I'll feel better soon. But the paranoia is overwhelming. The sense of wrongness, from being awake when everyone else is asleep. Messing with circadian rythms is not for the faint of heart, I tell you what.

I cannot get over the story though, the convoluted genius of it. Incorporating dreams and magic and tea and ballgowns and life and death and love and family and time. All the things that I like best. Amazing. Just amazing. I am literally in awe. I am in awe, and I am paranoid and feverish and my head is filled with dreams and possibility. And hope. And fear. And the future.

Also phlegm.

And I think I will remember this, now, this night. Feeling so full, after finishing that book. The pain in my back and the heat in my face and the inumerable irrational fears that I feel -- feel in my arms, of all places. And some sensible part of my brain telling me I should stop this silly gushing and go to sleep, and most of the rest of me coming to the slow realization that I kind of hate that sensible part, and wish it would just shut up for awhile, and relax, and let me be.

digressions

It's 2:00 in the morning and I'm tired and my eyes are burning but I want to keep reading and reading and not have to come up out of the story at all. I wish I could fall asleep reading and wake up there, instead, into a world where my babies didn't die and my parents loved me and no one, none, dared lay a finger upon me to do me harm. Or, even if bad things did happen, it could somehow be undone, or such great good could come afterward that it would hardly matter anymore; and I could be half-mad with happiness, instead of grief.

I've been told, by more than one person, that I will have my happiness. That the things I've dreamed of will be attained, even if a little later than I'd hoped, even if not in the order that I'd planned. Sometimes a hopeful, undamaged fragment of my soul believes it. Mostly I just feel wistful at these words. Mostly I think: Ah! That is kind. But you do not know. None of us can know.

None of us can know.

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My knicks and scrapes of the day are stinging, my feet are very cold, and I cut my left big toenail too short. It is sensitive there. My back is full of twists and knots again already, though I spent over an hour in the afternoon lying flat on my yoga mat with soft music playing, thanking as many parts of my body as I could think of by name, one by one by one. By the time I had finished, I was so relaxed I could hardly stand, nor remember why I ought to.

I am calm, I am relaxed, I am calm...

I am sore, and I am weary, and I crave rest in the most profound sense of the word. I long for protection and for comfort. And yet it occurs to me, and I must mention, amidst all this -- I still feel pretty. Simply, unabashedly. Can't escape the feeling, these last fews days, incongruous as it seems. Ever since that little girl, with her selfless declaration. She has eclipsed every other voice that ever spoke those words to me. Hers is the one that has mattered most. Perhaps because she caught me unawares, in a moment when I was feeling anything but lovely. And perhaps because she was so wonderfully, strikingly, vitally present in that moment, it leant her an authority that no one else has thus far had. "You are really beautiful." Full stop. Fact. Straight to my heart. And I'll never see her again. She'll never know she changed my life that day.

Her mother and brother were embarrassed, would not meet my eyes. I wonder how she got to be in that family. I wonder how any of us got to be in the families we are in.

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"Perhaps I was born different. Or made different by the parents who raised me," said George honestly. Did anyone ever know why he was the person that he was, animal magic or no? "Perhaps I also made myself different, because I wished to be," George added after a moment. --Mette Ivie Harrison, The Princess and the Hound

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You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife.