On more than one occasion lately I've found myself saying to Les 'I'm just so happy'. I say it in a slightly bemused tone, as if feeling happy is the strangest thing that's ever happened to me. Locked in a beaming competition with my baby, or watching her have little conversations with her daddy, the feeling hits me with unexpected intensity, almost like I have never experienced 'happy' before. Of course I have, but it's been a while. It has been a long, long, while.
Until the last couple of weeks, having settled into everyday life with Alice in my arms, I didn't realise just how much fear, how much anxiety, how much helplessness, and how much grief I've been carrying around with me for the best part of eighteen months. I guess that is because those feelings became my 'new normal'. I struggle to remember life before the storm of neonatal death hit us. Was there ever a time when I didn't know this pain? It's so much a part of my heart, even when I'm otherwise joyous, that I can't comprehend what was previously in its place. What got pushed out when grief moved in? Probably a lot of things. Innocence. Any sense of belief in destiny. The ability to give a shit about pretty much anything most 'normal' people talk about.
While it's true that happiness is ever-after more complicated once you've been touched by such sorrow, always tempered by the tragedy of what came before, since Alice was born I've come to allow myself new ways of feeling it and savouring it that don't diminish the pain of a wounded heart, but that honour it. It has been hard. I have to consciously remind myself that each moment I share with Alice, enjoying every amazing thing about her, does not entail a forgetting about her big brother or the enormity of his loss, but is in fact a conscious practice of the lessons his precious life left with me: that the most significant moments of our lives are fleeting and we must do our best with what we've got, no matter the nature of those moments, to capture them.
Alice has brought me a lightness that in the aftermath of Max's death I expected never to feel again. At first I resisted it. I didn't want all those people who offered me platitudes in the wake of his death - 'it won't always feel like this', 'time heals', 'this too shall pass' and countless variations on the theme - to be right. Those platitudes were, and still are, an affront to my searing pain. I've never wanted the pain to pass, because this grief is the only expression of love I can give my little boy.
Moreso, I'm wary of becoming the poster girl to restore people's faith in 'happily ever after' now that I have a living child. In the weeks and months after Max died someone always seemed to have a story of a neighbour's second cousin's wife who also 'lost' a baby but who then went on to have another, and perhaps another after that. I know that those stories were told to encourage hope but I did not see hope up ahead when I heard them. I saw attempts to deny the magnitude of my loss and to treat Max as a commodity that could eventually be replaced. Did no one understand that I didn't want a baby. I wanted my baby. The very one specific little soul I had grown and nurtured for five months.
Such stories only served to confirm what I already thought - that most people can't bear to think of a 'lost' baby as anything other than a blip on the radar, a false start if you like, on the road to motherhood. They don't seem to realise that a 'lost' pregnancy doesn't just dissipate into the air, like you're pregnant one minute and just un-pregnant the next. They can't acknowledge that there is a body involved - a very human body. There's blood and guts and searing physical pain and there's an actual baby in your arms. A still one. A cold, dead, poor little baby, as precious, as perfect and as loved as any other being born in the hospital that night.
To deny a baby personhood like that is a way that people protect themselves from a truth that is troubling to confront - that life is painful, that the pain won't spare you, that the things you love most in the world can, and might, be taken from you, that terrible things happen to good people. I don't want to be that woman in the story who lived happily ever after, becoming a beacon to mitigate another's searing pain, a reason to restore people's faith that everything eventually works out for the best because I know for a fact that it damn well doesn't. Not only is 'happy ever after' never a possible outcome after your child has been torn from you, but you know what? It was never a possibility. I became a lot less angry about Max's death after I realised that a happy ending was not my right, that the happily ever after I thought I deserved was just an illusion that I'd swallowed from an early age, hook, line and sinker.
From where I stand now, in the priveleged position of being a mum to a healthy baby girl, I can say that I know happiness, in some way, shape or form, is possible in the wake of even a horror as great as this. However, the birth of a subsequent baby, called a 'rainbow baby' in the baby-loss community, in recognition that the beauty of a rainbow does not negate the ravages of the storm than raged before it, is not a panacea for healing. Rather, a rainbow baby, my rainbow baby, is a gift of beauty and light that has appeared in the midst of my darkness, not instead of it Alice's birth has not broken the storm but it has given me shelter so that I no longer have to bear the full force of it. She is my break in the weather. She is my sunshine.
My grief for Max has not abated since Alice's birth. Indeed at times it has intensified. In the days after her birth I was a wreck, the trauma of Max's birth re-surfacing in vivid detail. I feel it especially when I hold her baby weight in my arms and remember how much my arms physically ached to hold Max in the weeks and months after his death. I'm constantly looking at her face for the tiny resemblances that connect my two babies. I kiss her little lips often just to feel the sheer surprise of their warmth. The last baby lips I kissed were cold, and dry, and still. Alice's lips are perhaps, as a consequence, one of my most cherished things about her. The way she moves them, especially when she sleeps, melts my heart. I love those little lips and can barely believe they'll one day say things to me and soon call me 'mummy'.
I marvel at Alice's aliveness each and every day. That she survived despite all of the accidents that could have befallen her along the way - accidents that I know have befallen other babies, other mothers, who wanted their babies as much as I wanted Alice. There was a real risk she would be born before she was strong enough for them to save her. We were going week by week and sometimes day by day for a lot of my pregnancy. This time we were lucky. She wasn't born too soon, though she gave us a fair few scares along the way. At 26 weeks I had steroids administered because of signs that labour could be impending but it didn't eventuate until 9 weeks later. When each day makes a difference to a baby's development during the crucial second trimester, 9 weeks, I'm sure you'll agree, is an incredible feat. To put it simply, I cannot believe our luck. I keep waiting for it to end. I'm sure, on some level, I'll always be looking over my shoulder for the 'catch'. What do I have to give up in return for keeping this one? In my dark moments I wonder that a lot.
In the middle of the night when I'm up feeding Alice, enjoying all of her milk-monstering grunts and sighs, I try to figure out what I now think about life. How will I explain the meaning of it all to her as she grows? I cannot give her the idea of heaven as a reward for suffering. I cannot teach her that if you are a good person then you enjoy some level of benevelence against misfortune. I cannot tell her that she can make her future whatever she wishes it to be. I cannot protect her from the things that will hurt her. I want her to know the truths that I now know, as there is great freedom in those truths, but at the same time I want to shield her from ever having to know them. I want her to think of the world as a wonderous and hopeful place but I also want to make sure she's better prepared to face adversity than I was. I want her to have her cake and eat it too. Surely that is a little girl's perogative.
What do I think about life? Well, my understanding of the world at this moment in time (it's always changing, always being re-assessed) is that it's just a game of chance. You're allocated a pack of cards, someone throws them up in the air, and they land in a certain configuration, depending on the way the wind blows. If you shuffle the pack, take one step to the right, touch your nose or spin around in a circle and the cards land differently there'll likely be a whole other set of outcomes for you.
I do find this understanding problematic at times. I struggle with the aspect of accepting that I've got no control over the accidents that befall me. I still don't really believe that there is nothing I could have done to change what happened to our darling baby boy. But I want to. I want to really believe that we could not have seen it coming. I want release from the constant second-guessing, self-doubt, guilt and regret. But it's complicated. If I could have seen this fate coming would I have laid down in front of that hurtling fate train and offered myself up for slaughter instead? Absolutely. In a second. Am I glad I did not have the chance to do such a thing? Well, yes, I'm that too. I have to be, as I know if I'd done so there'd have been no Alice.
Though it was not her job to bring respite, and I am very conscious of never expecting that of her, Alice has brought it, unknowingly, anyway. She's the calmest baby I've ever encountered. Surely a calm presence is the most wonderful gift you can give to a mother who has faced so much anxiety. She makes me laugh a lot. By far her most common expression is one of bemusement. She has a smirk that makes you think she's quietly entertaining herself in her little imagination and that the joke's clearly on you. I feel like she'll have a real sense of humour. God knows her mum and dad could use some giggles.
And it's not just us, her mum and dad, that Alice has touched in the weeks since her birth. Expressions of love for her, and for us, have poured in from near and far in ways that themselves make you feel really good to be alive. The reconnection of old friendships, the delight in sharing her with those who helped me count down the weeks until she would be considered 'viable'. The absolutely engaged and compassionate carers who took some of the worry from my shoulders, gave me continuity of care, and who safely delivered Alice to me. They all visited. Some of them cried. All of them were genuinely as delighted and relieved as we were that we made it to somewhere resembling the finish line.
My support crew during that eight month pregnancy, and indeed in the months leading up to the pregnancy, were hands on, available day or night, patient enough to sit with me through the uncertainty week after week after long, exhausting week. 35 of them all up. 12 more than I ever expected. One living, breathing baby who I was convinced would die too. For once in my life I've never been more relieved to have been proven wrong.
