Max's Room

Over the weekend I spent a lot of time in what would have been Max's room due to the arrival of our little kitty. He is currently quarantined in there whilst he and Peppy get used to each other's scents. Until this weekend I had been avoiding that room like the plague. All of Max's things are in there. His pram, his clothes, all the baby things I had prepared for him. Everything is there except for him. The walls are still bare. The brand new cot is still in its box. The pram, which I'd been practicing with around the house, has been folded up, returned to its box and stuffed in the wardrobe. It's just a room. A shell. An echo of what it should have been.

I had so many ideas of how I wanted to decorate Max's room. I'd been researching colours and patterns and themes before I was even pregnant. I'd so loved little Sasha's room, and helping Anika prepare it when she was expecting Sasha that I longed to be able to do the same one day. When we bought this house it finally became possible! I could paint if I want to! Attach things to the walls with great abandon!

I have a bookmarks folder in my web browser called Max's Room. It's got links to all the pretty things I wanted to buy for him. I'd already chosen his cot blanket. I'd planned to buy it the very week that he was born, and even then I thought I was getting organised pretty early on. I was going to post the link to it but it's not active anymore, it was a one-off and has clearly been sold. Someone else's baby is sleeping under Max's quilt just as, when his due date passes, someone else's baby will be born and someone else's baby will start achieving what should be Max's milestones.

From my list of links I had planned to buy many prints for his wall. I'd chosen more prints than could possibly have fitted in the room, but I wanted him to be surrounded by beautiful and unique things, like the prints from That Shoe on The Wall and PetitCollage. I would have bought him Story Bear  and Purrfect Cat for the wall near his bedroom door. I also wanted to get him this wall chart. I was very fond of this and the idea of a cityscape for his room. He was to be an urban boy through and through. I quite imagined him growing up to be an architect. When I look at it now I see all the inches that Max will not grow, and through my tears I wonder how tall he would have been and what things he would have noticed about the city around him.

The thing I was most excited about getting him was a Storybook Rabbit plate. I have loved these for so long and I think it would have made a lovely keepsake for him when he got older. 

Max's room would have been beautiful, I would have made sure of that. There wouldn't be a cheap or nasty decoration in sight, only things so carefully chosen with him in mind. In my imaginings of how his room would be there was certainly not a cremation urn or a bunch of static photos of his lifeless little body. The room is all wrong now. I do not know how to ever make it right.

It's made me wonder, if we're fortunate enough to have another baby, how I can ever turn Max's room into a new baby's room knowing that he should still be in it. It's made me aware of how scared I will be next time to even think about planning something as previously harmless as decorating because I know I will be waiting for my baby to die again. To think that I will never enjoy such simple pleasures; that I've been robbed of them not only this time but forever into the future makes me feel so very, very sad; so very, very tired. 

Being in Max's room for the best part of the weekend really threw me. I was at once joyous to be playing with our gorgeous little kitty but terribly sorrowful to know that if Max was here, kitty most probably wouldn't be. He certainly would not be in that room at this time. I would be in there stocking up nappies and baby wipes, putting the finishing touches to his bed and his bookshelves in preparation for his impending arrival. There'd be only 17 days left before I was expected to have him. Instead, it's already been three months, one week and two days since he left us, and there has not been a minute of that time that I have not thought about my baby boy and felt the tiny weight of him in my arms. 

I can't wait until little kitty is introduce to the rest of the house tonight so I can go back to pretending Max's room does not exist. It is the emptiest, loneliest, saddest place in our house.