Transitions

I tentatively approach this place for the first time in almost a month. I wish it hadn't been so long, because what it looks like now is a space where I return only to attempt to record the wonderful advances with which my living child grows. I've written little from the heart since Alice was born. I haven't had time. That's the most obvious difference between parenting a living child and one that is dead. After I came home from the hospital, leaving Max behind, I had hours upon hours stretching ahead of me that I had no idea how I would survive, let alone fill. So I wrote. I wrote my way into the midst of my grief for him. I turned it over every which way and looked at it as deeply and as fearlessly as I could. Grief felt like love and all I wanted to do was to love my little boy in every way I knew how.

After Alice was born I was swept very quickly into the 'now'. The constant care and attention needed to look after a newborn baby leaves little time for projecting into the future. I guess everyone knows that. What I didn't anticipate was that being a parent of a living child distances you further and further away from the past. I can barely remember life before Alice. I know I cannot remember any of the details of my pregnancy with any accuracy as I've since contemplated doing it again one day, seemingly oblivious to the fact that at times I did not think I would survive the pregnancy myself, let alone to bring it to its expected conclusion where a healthy baby is born. 

Some people would say it is for the best that they can't remember much of life before baby. That way they don't mourn so much the freedom, sleep, and pleasant selfishness of their childless days. But not me, not us, not the bereaved parents, who cling desperately to the days that came before where they better remembered their lost child's face, or the way his little hand felt rested in their palm. Passing days fade the trauma, yes, but they also dim the memories. When memories are all you have of your baby that must surely be your worst possible nightmare. Forgetting is to experience the loss afresh. Your baby is gone, but now he is further away from you in time and space than ever before. As I embrace the 'now' with Alice, grateful for every single day spent with her, I have also become aware that all of the tomorrows we share take me further away from her brother. To Alice, Max's story will be but a fairy tale, something that happened 'once upon a time, long ago'. I don't know how I feel about that.

My recent 6-week stint at 'new parents' group has given me reason to reflect on how successful my transition to the world of parenting a living child has been. I'd like to say that I think I've managed better than I expected I would, but that the challenges I anticipated in trying to join a group of new mums who don't know me, or my story, have definitely surfaced. I'm doing remarkably well in the everyday matters of childcare and its associated domesticity, but I don't think I'm really fitting in well with the other local mothers I've met who have babies around the same age as Alice. I know it definitely feels uncomfortable, but I'm not sure how much of that unease I bring with me, feeling separate and different as I always tend to do, and how much of it is a real, but unfortunate result of me having shared my story in the first week. 

Everyone was encouraged to share their birth story with the group, which I thought was a pretty intense activity in a room full of people you've never met before, but what do I know, I suppose. Each person reeled off a bunch of facts mostly: natural or surgical delivery, epidural or no epidural, two-day public hospital stay or a close to a week in a luxury hotel suite. The stories shared were certainly varied. There were those whose pregnancies and births had been textbook normal, and a fair number who had experienced complications of some sort (breech presentation, placental problems, gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia). One woman delivered her baby at 32 weeks due to pre-eclampsia, and had watched her baby struggle through a bunch of frightening illnesses as a result. There's one friend for me, I thought. She looked teary. I sensed a fellow wounded soldier. I'm drawn to the suffering these days. I can spot it a mile away.

I had given a lot of thought as to how to share my story before the group meetings began. I was never not going to talk about Max, but I also didn't want the kind of awkward attention I knew that the telling of my story would bring. I don't know how common a feeling this is, and I'm not quite sure even how to describe it, but every time I tell someone that I had a baby who died I feel embarrassed, like the person thinks I am one of those woe-stricken attention seekers who you always end up sitting next to at a bus stop - the person who wants to tell you their whole, sorry life story, when really you just wish they'd keep their problems to themselves. Or, worse still, that irritating person who always has to top your story of ill-fortune with one detailing how much worse their lot has been. I imagined the woman next to me in the circle bravely recounting the story of her baby's birth that had been traumatic, close to tears as she tells it, and being offered sympathetic nods of understanding - a silent, unspoken acknowledgement that the business of birth does not really occur in the lavender-scented, dimly lit paradise that your birth plan had prescribed. And then, I'd chime in with my dead baby story, and make the woman feel like the biggest bitch on earth for her comparatively pedestrian complaints.

I tried to avoid that situation, but despite my best efforts I'm afraid to say that it pretty much played out exactly like that. I couched it in gentle terms, beginning by saying that although I was attending this new mother's group I was not, in fact, a new mother, but that Alice was my second child, adding that I had a son who died at birth as a result of the consequences of extreme prematurity. That's all I sad but it was enough to make those I nervously glanced around at look at the floor, at the wall, at anyone other than me. I should have left it there, but when the facilitator immediately began to try and fill the awkward silence with reassurances that babies very rarely die here in Australia in the twenty-first century, I couldn't let it go. 'Oh yes they do!' I interrupted. 'Babies die all the time, most of the time for no bloody reason, it's just that no one wants to talk about that, so you never hear about it until it happens to you'. I could see what the facilitator was trying to do - to reassure these anxious new mothers that their baby could not just drop dead - but all I could think about was rectifying her glaring error. I think I was the only one in the room who believed their lives would be genuinely improved if everyone present knew how easily their beloved child could be taken from them.

Do I need to add the part about how I felt distinctly out of the loop in the social conversations held after the session had officially ended, or are you guys right there with me? The thing is, the other women in the group seemed like lovely people, it's just that I felt as if they didn't know what to say to me after that. And who could blame them? I just wish that my desire to acknowledge Max, and my genuine interest in connecting with other people by sharing my story, was not always thwarted by how uncomfortable the mention of his short life makes people. I don't know how to make friends anymore. I certainly don't know how to belong in the group in which I've unbelievably, miraculously, found myself - parents of a living child.

Whether I like it or not, the way I navigate my journey as a mother to Alice is different than it would have been had I not known loss and grief. Max, and his life and death, are part of the fabric of who I am now, and though this brings new complications for me as I move through new phases in my life without him, amongst people who do not know he existed, I wouldn't change that for anything. I also won't apologise for it, though I often feel as if I'm meant to. I think this must be one of the hardest aspects of having lost your first child - feeling as if you have to convince the rest of the world that you are not a 'new' mother at all, but rather one who has already trodden a long and winding path. 

I really hope I begin to find my place among the world of the living, for Alice's sake more than anything. I have hope that the group of women I've met will, as they get to know me, feel comfortable to broach the subject of the many and varied journeys we have all taken to get to where we are, for I'm surely not naive enough anymore to think that there aren't some hidden stories of struggle amongst the 13 or 14 of us. Alice loves being around the other little babies so much. I'd love her to have a bunch of local friends to play with, and that they all might go off to school together one day, and that we might build the little community of people we have felt sorely in need of in the many times we have felt isolated and alone since Max died. That's what I hope for.  

I am thinking about what I want this blog - my special space for Max - to be, now that Alice is here. I still want it to be that, undoubtedly. I still want it to be a place where I can remember him, and love him, and share him with those I trust enough to honour his story. Sometimes I think of making the blog more public, of sharing it with everyone I know instead of just you select few, so that they can see how Max is still a big part of our lives, and how we manage to include him in our family, even though he is no longer here. On the one hand I want everyone to know how the experience of parenting Alice is different, deeper, than it might have otherwise been. On the other is this continuing sense of wanting to protect myself, and now my daughter, from those who might wilfully misunderstand, or judge, or gossip, or otherwise hurt our hearts. 

I'd like this to be a joyful, funny, light place where I can celebrate both of my children - my beautiful family - with others....but would that mean that I might censor what I have to say for fear of offending or upsetting others? And how will Alice feel, one day, having had her early life recorded on the internet? Will she be glad that I have documented it or resentful that I did not respect her privacy more? Am I over-thinking all of this? Probably. But these things are on my mind. The question of how best to go forward on this blog is perhaps really a question of how best to go forward, now, in life. To move into this new chapter but not to leave the important parts of the past behind. 

I would like to give the blog a new look, too. I'd like someone to illustrate a header/banner (I have some ideas in mind) and an overall design for it that makes it a bit less cluttered. Perhaps I'd like a few sections. I want to review some of the information I have up here and update it. And if I'm honest, there are some posts I've written that I'd like to take down. Ones that I am not proud of having written. Ones that I don't really want to see again. But that defeats what my aim was when I began here - to let it all out. And I can't really bear to go back and read any of my previous posts, so if only for that reason I guess everything will stay as it is, content-wise. Here it all is. Warts and all. The story of my babies. The stories of their lives.