Like AF

Well, I should make an appearance at least once a month, shouldn't I? I am transitioning away from much online stuff. That's okay, but I miss it. Mostly, I think about yarn and dirt. Knitting and gardening. And sticky fingers.

He talks to me now. In little half sentences that only someone trained in the art of code-breaking could possibly decipher. He remembers things from a week or a month ago and brings them up, totally out of context. I feel like superwoman when I figure our what the hell he is talking about.

He loves me passionately. He wants to be independent and he wants me to do everything for him. He has figured out how to make his body as stiff as a rod or as limp as a noodle, depending on the variety of tantrum he is aiming for. The tantrums are rare; his temperament is mild. He loves his father and wants to fix things with him.

He loves trucks and playing the harmonica.

When he helps me push the shopping cart, he has started hanging off of it like a monkey bar and whizzing along with his feet a few inches off the ground. His laugh is the most perfect sound in the world.

His hair is as blond as his parents' when they were children. He looks exactly like me and exactly like his father. The eyes are bluer than endless prairie sky. His kisses are wet and many.

He likes to go visit Brother. It is an incentive to get him in the car. "Get in and we'll go visit Brother." On Mother's Day we flew kites, got to watch a train lumber by and saw a crop duster fly by. I imagine that is the reason why.

When his friends come to play, he runs around in a circle and screams with joy, like a dog chasing his tail. He doesn't know what to do with all that love and excitement. He wants his friends to come to his house so he can host them, but then he is almost more content to sit and watch them play. His personality is so like mine and so like his father's.

I have decided that I no longer scream at him in anger. It was as easy as that. I have to resist all natural urges to scream when he isn't listening; that was how I was raised, after all. I just tell myself that I am zen, I am patience personified. Life moves more slowly and more quietly now. It's good. I am done with screaming. Our house has been quiet for two weeks. I have no fears of returning to that habit. I quit while the quitting was easy.

I am so full of my little boy these days that I don't know how C. fits anymore. It all still hurts, but I have to consciously turn my thoughts to him. I worry that I don't mourn him as a person, but more as a loss of my idealism, my youth, my dreams. He flits around the edges like a ghostly idea, never firming up and taking shape. He was a hope unfulfilled. What's a person to do with that? So intangible.

I continue to deeply desire another child. My husband does not. I pray that some satisfactory resolution will present itself to us in a way that respects both of our needs.

And that's June.

Good News

I am very pleased that our province has passed the new vital statistics act, allowing the issuance of Certificates of Stillbirth.  I have no official paper in my possession with C's name on it.  I want it.

I am grateful that I did not have to lobby to make this happen.  I imagined myself lobbying politicians, firing off righteous missives to the media, fighting the good fight;  I didn't have it in me.  I am so damned glad that others did it for me.   Thank you, those who have tread this path before me.

I am not particularly pleased that the act has passed, but they will need at least a year at the paper-pusher end of things to actually be able to produce the documents.  Or so says the rep I spoke to today.  Sigh.  Like this came out of the blue or something.... um, this bill has been before the legislature for 3 years and is dated 2008.  Perhaps you all might have thought to prepare in advance for the eventual adoption as law.

Ah, the speed of government astounds even me.

Nonetheless, I am thankful today.  A small token has been dangled before me and isn't that far away.

My boy would have been five years old by then.

Procreation woes

I have been writing posts. Not just mentally, but in Blogger, too. But they are all I-want-to-have-another-baby posts and this is a contentious issue in our house. For very legitimate reasons, we disagree.

I don't know what to do with all the crazy in my head. I have a lot of crazy in my head again. But blasting it all across the internets without prior approval of the person who means the most in my life would be a silly thing to do. Been there, done that, never again.

Just send me Not Crazy vibes, would you?

A little angst

I have to admit that when I hear of someone who has experienced multiple losses, I just don't know what to do.  When the losses are the babies of my cousin and his wife, I know even less.

In the past two + years, my cousin's wife has miscarried three times that I know of.  I put it that way, because who knows if these things make their way through the family grapevine.  Now she is halfway through another pregnancy and further along than she's ever been.  She is working with a specialist, taking hormones; all those things so many of my blog friends have done.   All seems to be going well.

Before I heard of this pregnancy, I had already bought some lovely merino superwash yarn in celery green and chosen a sweet little cardigan pattern in case they ever had a successful pregnancy.  I don't usually put that kind of energy into knitting something to give away; you have to be special to me to garner anything over and above a quick little hat.  But I felt like this new little life would be one to celebrate, if it ever arrived.

Fast forward 8 months; now she is pregnant and due in October.  At first I was so happy for her.  But then I started to feel weird about the whole thing, as her Facebook status began to focus on this new baby.  It wasn't that I was no longer happy; it was that I was starting to feel....  incredulous, maybe?

I feel a little bit stunned that, on Facebook and in every face-to-face conversation I have had with her, she assumes that the danger is over now that she is past a certain point.  Now, I realize that we all deal with this postdeadbabytrauma in our own way.   She maybe subscribes to the notion that if you believe in things hard enough it will make them come true.  But it makes me feel uncomfortable.

I think there are two reasons for my discomfort.  Firstly, I know how stupendously wrong it can go at any point.  I can't imagine how she would cope if the worst happened.  Secondly, it makes me feel (yet again) like some sort of pariah or freak.  Because everybody knows that once you get past the first trimester, its all sunshine and rainbows and nothing can go wrong.

I get so frustrated with that prevailing notion of our culture.  It makes me feel that I must have done something wrong - either physically, that damaged C. in some way, or in some karmic sense that I deserved to face this heartache.  While my brain tells me all of that is entirely ridiculous, that how my cousin's wife reacts in this subsequent pregnancy is in no way personally related to my loss of C., it is very difficult for me to separate those ideas.

No doubt about it, though.  I still hurt to the very core when I see a pregnant women, even someone that I like/respect/admire.  That sensation was minimal when I had my own little baby in my arms; but now my baby says things like "what's in there?" and "play cars, Mommy?"

I don't know if we will ever have another kid; that is a decision we are struggling with.  So all this may have more to do with me having more grief to deal with, and less to do with Facebook belly pictures.

Well, I don't really feel like doing the cardigan anymore.  Maybe a quick little hat.  I am planning a super-awesome-vest-for-me with the celery superwash.  

Don't you just wish this grieving thing had an end point?

With a humourless laugh

So. I started to feel like I was inured to all that babydom could throw at me.

But today I am forced to say nice things to my colleague who's week old baby is crying in the next room. All I feel is anguish, despair, jealousy, and desire. Those aren't nice things.

The joke's on me.

Like a freight train from nowhere

We went to college together.  He gave me rides to my summer job and I tutored him for his summer session recap.  We both survived college in the same tiny class, not the best of friends, but the closest that good acquaintances could be.

Last weekend, his wife gave birth to two boys, 28 weeks gestation.  Two days later, they said goodbye to their oldest boy.  Their youngest grows stronger daily in his incubator, his mother keeping constant vigil while his father plans a funeral elsewhere.

I felt horrible the moment I learned.  There was nothing I could do.  So this is how this feels.  This is how all of those people felt, 4 years ago.

Today I intended to go to the funeral.  Then I read on their blog about the slideshow he had prepared and I knew I couldn't do it.  I couldn't watch those photos, so full of love, trying to capture a lifetime in a few clicks, scroll past my eyes with beautiful strains of music floating in the air all the while.  I couldn't see two people wracked with the soul numbing grief of saying goodbye.  I could not go to the funeral for the baby of a man I have known for 11 years.

I might have gone - I could have sat there, nearly sick with the grief of it.  I could have cried and hurt, watched that little casket (would it be fuzzy white?) move down the aisle.  I could have endured the outpouring of love for this sweet little boy, all the while ripping in two with the agony of it all.   But....

The tears would have been for another boy.  The grief and hurt would have been for my boy, not the boy who today deserved the love and the tears.  I have survived that tortuous, hellish day.  I can't relive it and I won't.  I need to not think about that day, so that tomorrow I can get out of bed and live my life.

I'm sorry.  But I know that he will understand; if not today, then four years from now.

Not exactly random

For Thomas: