Protecting his memory

‎It's been said that when a baby is born, it's a mother's instinct to protect their baby, but when a baby dies, it's the mother's instinct to protect their memory. That's all we have left, only a trace of what once was, a snippet of a dream.

This is the week, long awaited, that my baby was to be born. The march of time has brought it forth despite my whimpering protests that I am not ready to say goodbye to the dream of my baby returned. Though I know my baby is dead - we held him as his heart beat its last and we felt the cooling touch of his skin - in my heart I cling to a stubborn belief in the magic of resurrection.

Perhaps that day was a figment of my imagination and I will open my eyes to find it only the anxious nightmare of a woman who's actually in labour, and I won't be able to believe the nasty tortures my brain has inflicted upon me in my sleep. In another scenario, I turn up to the hospital this Thursday - Max's due date - to find him there waiting for me. 'He is ready now,' they tell me, revealing that they've  been keeping him in secret until he was fully grown - from that day to this - as the biggest surprise ever successfully kept.

Over the past few months I've had many dreams that I've found Max in all manner of unlikely places, each time grabbing him greedily with relief that I've finally found him after carelessly losing track of his whereabouts. Is that what happened to my darling? Was I too careless to mind whether he lived or died - careless enough to let him disappear without warning? Did I leave him behind during a moment of overwhelming tiredness? Did I wish him away through my early ambivalent thoughts about pregnancy?

The passing of this week will see the end of my fantasies of Max's return - at least an end in the belief that they might miraculously come true. The 22nd of March, though an arbitrary due date that gave no promise it would actually be the day of my baby's birth, represents in my mind the end of my pregnancy, though my body knows that the pregnancy ended a long while ago.

This disparity between the knowledge of the mind and of the body is something very strange to experience. I've been caught between these two different consciousnesses oftentimes since I pregnant one moment and a bereaved mother the next. My arms have ached, physically, for a baby I know no longer exists. For long after his birth I felt phantom kicks and flutters where none could possibly be. Sometimes I still feel like a pregnant person, and am surprised to later have to acknowledge that I am not one, especially when others visibly are. I struggle with the fact that no one can tell, physically, that I've had a baby, that I'm someone's mother.

Max is not coming back. I know this, and yet, because I've realised how little I really know of the world, I convince myself that his return is a possibility - a remote possibility, yes, but then so was his death. Somehow this seems to justify my desperate belief.

Leslie and I are planning to pass the day of the 22nd together, doing something special and nice. We have a list of things to choose from, but I don't know, none of them seem quite right or quite fitting enough. I guess nothing we could do on a given day would ever feel significant enough to honour Max's life, so perhaps we'll have to be content doing something that we ourselves enjoy, and that might bring us some small comfort or joy.

We will mark the passing of Max's special day on Saturday with an informal ceremony at Darling Gardens in East Melbourne, near where we used to live. Then, afterwards, I don't know what we'll do - that day or the rest to come. I just don't know.