I didn’t win the parenthood game in the conventional sense. Yes, it feels like the confetti is falling in great abundance on everyone else, while the hurt in my life grows deeper and deeper. It stings, burns, and rattles me on a daily basis. With child loss, there’s no stopping that confetti, no delaying it, no pretending it’s not coming.
Read MoreI used to think our lives were a series of stories; everyone talks about them as such. It's evident as people frantically search their minds for a spiritual explanation when something horrible happens; it's difficult to let something just exist as it is without reigning it in. We're a people obsessed with redemption in the face of adversity and great loss, but our life stories do not have a beginning, middle, and end.
Read MoreTen years later, I still feel an excess of unspent love—there is no place to put it, aside from into the air around me, along with the wishing, the longing, the dream of him. I still play with the active designing of my own afterlife: I die an old woman and revert to my 34 year-old self. I enter into a room and see Liam waking up clammy, whole, and gurgling in a crib. This is my daydream, my most divine and deepest regret spun into active language, a positive state. It’s different now. I can love him, forgive myself, and breathe.
Read MoreAn obscurus wreaks havoc. It is the manifestation of the repressed pain and abuse of a magical child. This energy manifested as a separate entity that erupted in violent, destructive fury. As a bereaved parent, perhaps I've got my own obscurus. A force that can either destroy, lashing out—or, given acceptance and the support of caring people, result in achievement.
Read MoreMy friend shifted his weight and looked around the room. “Oh gosh, okay, wow. I’m so sorry. Oh, man. Yikes.” For days I thought about the exchange, and how badly I yearned to speak from the vantage point of a mother with a live child. No one had ever innocently asked me about my baby. Until I told this friend that Cora died, the dialogue was unfolding the way a typical one with a new mother should. It felt weird, wrong, wonderfully make-believe.
Read MoreThere are two of you in my mind. One is the girl you had some chance to be: bedbound, uncommunicative, unable to thrive as you grew. But there is another other girl as well. The one you would have been without that single letter randomly altered in your DNA: perfect. All of your potential preserved, ready to unfold.
Read MoreBereaved parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion, and the other side of getting through this mess called grief.
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Parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion we learn for others, having been through this mess — and see it reflected back at you, acknowledged and understood.
Thanks to photographer Xin Li and to artist Stephanie Sicore for their respective illustrations and photos.
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