But what if we thought of both responsibility and resilience as collective, rather than individual?
What if we walked away from the individual memoir of the one sad woman, all alone in her shame?
What if we began to walk together, forming a collective chorus, louder and louder until our voices can’t be ignored?
I wish you knew my grief, all the years without her being mentioned,
without even a single thought until July rolls around each year.
The guilt of smiling, of forgetting for even a moment.
The anger at a world that keeps turning while mine has come to a halt.
she is long gone,
and much of the carbon in her little body
has already moved on to someplace else.
and with that revelation, a relief --
You may have noticed it’s been quiet around here the last few weeks.
But in the depths of this despair,
I find a flicker, a light, a flare.
For though you linger, dark and grim,
Love's eternal flame will never dim.
i always think you’re dying.
isn’t that the silliest thing?
you have long been dead
and in the ground
I understand why those doctors, sisters, friends, thought I needed therapy. I was filling out those questionnaires at every postpartum appointment.. “How many times in the last two weeks have you felt down, depressed or hopeless…Little interest or pleasure in doing things…” According to these forms, something was wrong with me. It was quantifiably pathological how sad I was, how I sat for days on end crying and staring at the wall.
I recognize that heartbreak and could not wish it on anyone, and yet somehow, I find myself thinking, at least you can hear him talk whenever you want. I talk to my daughter all the time, but what I can’t do is hear her voice…
it’s not productive to think about
but sometimes it’s important to go over it all again,
like a perverted reassurance
that she died and it’s not my fault or her fault or their fault
We were in shock, and we had no obvious religious or cultural traditions to follow in this situation. What was offered to us was either a religion we didn’t believe in, or nothing at all. We didn’t have the energy or creativity in that moment to invent our own tradition, so it was nothing. No one around us stepped in, maybe because our entire community lacks a clear set of rituals or guidelines for how to respond to serious illness or death.
What if we didn’t celebrate her birthday this year?
This is the treacherous, traitorous thought that runs through my head this early January, as the rain falls ceaselessly and the gleam and glitter of Christmas fade into the background.
In this year’s kitchen table, we’re focusing on how to balance participating in holiday festivities and taking moments for personal reflection, balancing the busy-ness with our own need to sit with our feelings and grief.
Pull up a chair. Let us fill your mug, and you can warm your feet by the fire, while we talk holidays around the Glow In The Woods kitchen table.
my body knows
it quivers into december,
as warm wreaths brighten up lampposts
set against skies rich with winter coming
“Dear Felix,” I start my journal entries now, channeling my son through his two sweet syllables. I feed and water our relationship with words, not wanting to miss what blooms in darkness. I beckon him close, close, closer still.
I have a recurring daydream. The details and logistics vary but the core fantasy is the same: time travel exists. Sometimes it’s a new scientific discovery like a time machine that people can opt to use within set parameters. Sometimes it’s a secret ability that only I access for some mysterious reason like in Back to the Future. Always my goal is to prevent my daughter’s death.
Kitchen table posts are ones where each of the regular writers at Glow in the Woods answers a series of questions on a particular topic. The topic of grief and partners pops up a lot in our brainstorming for these posts but feels underrepresented to us in babyloss-focused spaces. In this post, we reflect on our own experiences grieving with or alongside partners and in relationships.
a backpack is full of hope and adventure
and discovery of who that precious child will become
in this strange formidable world that all children are called to conquer
I used to worry about the days somewhere far in the future when I might not think of her every hour, or even every day. I used to think that when those days arrived it would mean I had failed her, had forgotten her, had left her trapped in some kind of terrible limbo, neglected, lost for real. It’s not like that, though, and I wish I could’ve known that all those years ago. Someone probably told me. I know I didn’t believe them.
In whispered winds, a sorrow's breath,
A cherished soul embraced by death.
A heartbeat stilled, a lullaby unsung,
In the icy grip of July's cruel tongue.
I choke on the combination of tears and diesel and smoke. Kara notices and asks me if I am okay. I gesture at the grass beside us, at the empty strip of green between the McDonald's and the TA, and she understands. There is nothing where I am gesturing. Like me, she sees what is not there. I am gesturing at the space where our other daughter should be playing, having already finished what would very likely not be her first Happy Meal.
I sit down at Zoey’s grave, with M. sitting at Gus’s, and we clean. I wipe the dirt off Zoey’s gravestone. I scrub the grit out of the engraved letters of her name. It is Father’s Day, and this is how I talk to my children: in solvent and cotton swabs.
no one wants to say anything about the missing babies
like we’re not thinking of them every day, especially this day
all mothers need to be acknowledged and celebrated
And anyway, those of you reading here will know: it’s not the numbers that matter anymore. Now that it’s been you, you know it’s always someone, that there’s a person behind those numbers, and hey, why shouldn’t it be you? I feel like I was trained, somehow, to imagine that it would always be someone else, that there was no reason it would be me. I think in 2023 we call that toxic positivity.
This week’s post is ‘from the archives.’ Julia writes about positive thinking, something I’ve been thinking a lot about, again, since going through breast cancer treatments this fall. This post is angry, smart, so funny and just the kind of thing I needed to read. You can find the original post and comments here.