When the whole world is expecting a baby

Francheshca from Small Bird Studios knows exactly how it feels to lose a baby. She lost her little baby too, due to a gene malformation. She has managed to use her grief in a positive way, to help her create beautiful things and to create a community of women who have suffered similar losses. As well as providing blog and web designs, predominantly for other 'baby loss' mothers (as we are called), she has also developed the outstanding range of sympathy and remembrance cards I mentioned in a previous post. There seems to be nothing this woman can't do, and I find reading her updates and looking around her beautiful website to be really inspiring.

She recently posted about what happens to your daily life when you lose a baby. I was particularly struck by her descriptions of the daily occurrences that you have to face or fight - the unexpected baby-related mail or online newsletters that continue to be delivered; the daily walk past your baby's empty room filled with his little toys and clothes and carefully-chosen furniture; the pregnant women that are suddenly everywhere you turn. "It seems like the whole world is expecting a baby," she writes. Doesn't it just.

I can't escape the gestating or the recently gestated, and the sight of every one of them is like a serrated knife stuck straight through my gut. Only yesterday, yet another friend of mine announced her new pregnancy to me. This will be her second child. She has been a great support for me over the last couple of months. As we work together, she has also been a really helpful conduit between work and home, especially when Max first died. She refrained from telling anyone else before she had the chance to tell me about the pregnancy in person, which was extremely kind and thoughtful. She also expected, and understood my tears after she shared her news. She did not make me feel selfish or strange that her good fortune caused me so much distress. Even so, I still wish she were not having a baby. Where I used to fear news of death, I now fear news of birth for it is far more painful - indescribably so.

I've managed to block the updates of most of the people I know who are expecting babies from my Facebook news feed, but that doesn't protect me from what may come in the near future, and it doesn't stop me torturing myself by deliberately visiting their profile pages like some sort of self-flagellating sicko. I have a 'no junk mail' sticker to stop the tides of Big W and Babies 'R' Us catalogues from ending up on my doorstep but I can't stop the mummy joggers/power walkers who come past my house every morning with their brand new prams. Short of locking myself away I cannot avoid the reminder that everyone else has something that I do not; or rather something I did have but that was cruelly stolen away.

My boss saw me crying and gave me a hug. 'You'll have your turn again' she said. What was meant to comfort, though, yet again caused pain. I don't want a fresh start. I want the baby I began with; that I went through so much sickness and suffering for, the little baby who was conceived in such a happy and joyful time of our lives, with hope and anticipation. I want that baby back. I want that baby back so desperately.

Read Francesca's article and know that her sentiments are exactly my own. I only hope that I can use her example to create something of beauty out of the despair of my loss.