A belated Mother's Day post

This Mothers Day I counted myself as an extremely fortunate woman. I was able to share it with my own mother, who was visiting from Hobart.

I was able to share it with my living, breathing daughter (I still can't believe I get to say those words).

On this day last year I was a mother too, but one without a child - hardly a mother at all in some people's eyes. I felt keenly Max's absence that day and I think it was one of the first times I really realised that I had not just lost Max, my little boy, but that I had lost the entire life I had planned to lead with him. I felt invisible. I didn't look like a mother. I didn't feel like a mother. I felt robbed of my baby and of the recognition that I'd ever birthed him, tended to him, loved him, just like any of the other mothers waking up to breakfast in bed that morning. It was a hard day. One in a long line of hard days.

It is true that Alice's birth has helped the hard days seem easier to bear. At the moment she is a tiny, squirming vessel into which I pour an abundance of love and affection, and when you love someone so deeply it is actually quite hard to feel sad in their presence. Alice brings me such light. She brings me such hope. She brings me so much happiness. I spent this Mother's Day in Alice's joyful company, but it was still a profoundly uncomfortable day for me - rejoicing in the presence of one child and mourning  yet again the foreverness of another's absence.

We had had high tea at the Abbotsford Convent to mark the occasion but it did not feel like a celebration despite my efforts to dress up and to look on the bright side of life with a beautiful baby in my arms. In fact it felt lonely. It was perhaps one of the loneliest days I've had in a very long time. Here I was pushing this tiny, delightful baby around, who was the subject of so many smiles and comments and so much attention, but following by my side was my ghost child - the one who feels ever-present to me but can't be seen by those well-wishers who assumed that Alice was my first and only baby. It stung my heart to know, as if I had just realised it for the first time, that Max would never be seen or acknowledged by the outside world and because of this I felt this really acute disconnect from everyone else there. I couldn't help but wonder if that is what motherhood is like after you've lost a child. Is there always a sense of not-really-belonging? Or even of not wanting to belong? I sometimes think that I get confused between the two - wanting to be a part of 'normal' life and then wanting to set myself apart from it in protest that life will never be 'normal' for me again.

This disconnect became even more apparent as the afternoon wore on. I'd been gifted tickets to the event by a foundation supporting families of premature infants after I responded to an article in their latest newsletter. As the mother of two premature babies I felt that maybe I would find some of my 'tribe' through this organisation. I guess, like I am all the time at the moment, I was looking for somewhere to belong.

Three other families sat at our table, each of whom was also affiliated with the foundation. At first I think they all wondered what the hell we were doing there with our full-term-looking, healthy newborn baby. It felt silly telling them that Alice was a 35-weeker, as a 35-weeker is not really a premmie at all in the eyes of those whose babies had been born much earlier. I was well aware of that. I could not be part of their conversations on corrected ages, chronic lung disease, or stories of months spent in hospital or of carting oxygen tanks around for the first few years of a child's life. But I wasn't there in recognition of Alice's struggle. I was there in honour of Max. But he was not there. And because of that I felt so alone, so separate from the 'normal' mums in attendance, and now, feeling like I did not even belong in a group of mums who had also known the heartache of prematurity.

God knows I tried my best to feel a part of things. Trying to make conversation with the woman sitting beside us with two small children, I asked what her connection to the group was. She told me her three-year-old son, who was sitting on her lap, had been born at 23 weeks. Here he was, a robust, normal little boy, scoffing scones and tartlets, running about and getting his face painted.

23 weeks. 23 weeks. The words took my breathe away, especially as she said it so nonchalantly, as if having a surviving, thriving ex-23-weeker was one of the most normal things in the world. I couldn't bring myself to tell her that I had a 23-weeker too. She was probably already all too aware that her son had beaten a death that was almost a certainty for most babies of his gestation. It seemed too cruel to tell her. But hell, it was cruel for me to have to sit there after that, fighting tears, unable to look at that little boy without wanting to scream and wail 'why not my little boy? Why not mine?'

Could that be Max sitting there, if only we'd demanded the doctors resuscitate him? Could he have been the baby who not only survived, but survived with no debilitating long-term consequences? That spiral of thoughts, long since put to rest (or so I thought) started up again almost immediately. I had to stop myself from falling into a panic of 'WHAT HAVE I DONE?' as if I had just realised that Max was dead all over again. Had I killed my baby? Had I taken the chance of becoming like this little boy away from my own son? Why didn't I fight for my baby as this woman had clearly fought for hers? In that moment I wanted another chance. I wanted to walk for a while in her shoes to know what it would feel like if you only had a close call with tragedy. I wanted to know what that kind of relief felt like. I wanted to know what it felt like to dodge that bullet.

And so, for another day, I made polite conversation and swallowed my terrible sadness. I took that sadness home and I shaped it into whispers of love for my newborn daughter's ears, wondering how on earth I would ever learn to manage the complicated spectrum of feeling that having one child alive and another dead would continue to bring.