Ten
/
Ten is a big one. Double digits, your big sister always used to say. Ten once seemed impossibly far in the future. It was quite simply inconceivable that we could ever arrive at this day.
Oh, those early, early days. Every one of them was so long, waiting for the relief of making it to bedtime, of no longer having to hold it together, play dollhouse, sing happy songs, make food and eat it, tell stories, reassure and soothe, and then crashing into my own despair, a seething, roiling, bottomless pit of fury, anguish, and utter bewilderment. Every day was an immensity. Every day was counted. One day since we left your cold body in an empty hospital room. Two days since I held your slight weight in my arms, so carefully. Three days since I screamed my way through labour, wanting you out, wanting you in.
In those long days ten years simply couldn’t be imagined.
Double digits. A bona fide big kid birthday.
I write the number out, and in shaping the two digits - the long straight one, the infinite loop of the zero, so different from each other – I consider all the different girls you might have been, none of whom we got to know.
When I was pregnant with you, I imagined you blonde and giggling like your sister, with rosy apple cheeks and bright blue eyes, and still more mischievous than E. I felt sure you were going to be a little instigator, whispering possibilities into E’s ears, the two of you, sisters up late at night in a shared room, plotting, dreaming.
When I knew you’d died, you changed. You grew thinner, paler, darker. A small, quiet girl, with a dark mane of hair falling over your white face, your big dark eyes, your shy smile. A girl with a story she kept close to her heart. I could picture you holding out a small hand, an offering to sit quietly together, but when I’d reach out, you’d slip off so swiftly and silently…my little gone girl.
I’m reading I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell and the title strikes me as funny this month when you are not, you are not, you are not. There’s a chapter where she writes about miscarriage and I nod along through the whole thing. One part makes my breath catch in recognition of something I’ve never been able to put into words. She writes: “Why don’t we talk about it more? Because it’s too visceral, too private, too interior.” It’s not that part that makes me gasp, but the next: “These are people,” she goes on, “spirits, wraiths, who never breathed air, never saw light. So invisible, so evanescent are they that our language doesn’t even have a word for them.”
Yes! Yes, I think. We need different words – a new language – to say what or who you were. You never breathed air. You were never that kind of baby. When I’ve pictured you, you’ve never been a baby, in fact; you are always a girl, but because I never got to know what girl you’d become, the shape of you just slips away, again and again. There’s a kind of slyness about it I’ve always thought, and I’m reminded of the way I’d imagined in you a streak of mischief: you can’t catch me, you laugh; you can’t find me, you tease; and you’re gone, running through the trees, the eyes whose colour I’ve never known laughing away from me, your small, white hand covering the dark red lips I did once kiss.
It sounds like a fairy tale, this evanescent girl, this spirit, this wraith, this dark daughter who never saw light.
It sounds like a fairly tale, but you were real. The world we lived in together, just the two of us, was real. “When I was pregnant with you,” I’ve written above, and it is true: we were with each other. Both our bodies changing in tune with the other’s, we created that world that was only ours until you died and there was only me left, empty and quiet.
You were real. The pain of pushing you into the world was real, knowing that only getting you out would end it but knowing also that once you were out you would truly be gone. Every breath an effort not to push. Every breath an effort to keep you. Please don’t die, please don’t die. You were already gone and I knew it and my body betrayed you, betrayed us, as it pushed and pushed while my heart rebelled and I screamed in frustration.
You were real. Your slender wrists, your perfect fingers, your dark red lips, pursed up just so. The weight of you in my arms for those hours was real. I didn’t take off your cap to see if you had hair. I didn’t see your body under the blankets you were wrapped in. I was too scared to hurt you. I didn’t know what I was allowed to do, because even though you were mine and I was your mother, you were not that kind of baby. Also, I just wanted to hold you. To be still with you. To not ever let you go.
When we left you in that room I experienced an emptiness that I hope to never know again. My whole body ached for you, and as they wheeled me down the hall and into the elevator and through the hospital to another room where I would spend the night, I felt deep, deep in my muscles, my tissues, how the distance between us was growing. I knew you were real and my mind could neither fathom that I had left your still body lying alone on a table nor imagine what they would do to you, where you would go next, and so I went into shock, shivering and shaking with a cold that would not stop no matter how many warmed blankets the nurses piled on.
You were gone.
Who knows where you went. Who knows who you were or who you would have been. My-daughter-who-never-breathed-air, my daughter in the beyond, always just slipping out of sight, a whispering sigh, the faintest thrum of the tiny heart that once beat inside my own body, of the breath that breathed with me, of the hope for an endless array of futures.
Happy birthday, sweet girl, whoever you were and might have been. I whisper into the snow-filled sky, Double digits. It’s a big one, baby. It is, you whisper back, and dark eyes laughing in your pale face, wisp away back into the night.
Who were you expecting? Who do you imagine? Can you see your baby at different ages?