the 'are you there, god? it's me, medusa' blogolympics

Maybe, for you, it’s God with a capital G. Or perhaps it’s the Universe. Or Allah or Buddha or Shakti or Jesus or Gitche Manitou. Or the random spark of nature, of dust and regrowth free of myth. Or nothing.

For many of us, growing a headful of snakes through the experience of babyloss drums up a host of unanswerable questions: Why? Is there really anybody Out There? What’s the point of all this, and where do I go from here?

We thrash and cry and stomp feet and we may leave, answering what feels like abandonment with abandonment. Then we may find quietness, and we may find our way back to faith, or perhaps faith with a modified floorplan. Or perhaps not. Perhaps we are comforted with randomness, subscribing to no particular being who may or may not be responsible for who stays and who doesn't.

For the next while, babylost parents of varied faiths—Christian, Hindu, Atheist, Jewish, Buddhist, Islamic, Naturalist/Wiccan and more—will keep house here at Glow in the Woods. As guest authors, they’ll share with us how their beliefs have coloured their re-entry into the ordinary world and affected their path towards healing.

We'll be publishing them on the site through the month of October, and at any point we invite you to share your own story on your blog using the same meditations given to our guest authors:

• How has your religion or belief system helped you to contemplate the universal questions that babyloss props up so vividly in front of the heart?
• How did the institutions surrounding your faith (church, synogogue, temple, spiritual mentors) acknowledge your loss—or did they? If your beliefs are more freeform than institutional, what other sources of acknowledgement or comfort did you discover for yourself?
• Have you had episodes of startling clarity, or of being neck-deep in theological mud? Where did those episodes lead you, and for what purpose? How did they affect the kind of spirit-baby mother you are today?
• Trauma and loss can inspire moments of doubt and lapses in faith. What conviction, experience or encounter propelled you through that moment and brought you back into the fold—or helped you be okay with staying lapsed?

We're fascinated to see what comes to the surface for you. Don't feel you must explain why you believe what you believe. Just choose one moment, one idea, one teaching or mantra or sentiment that rang a bell in your heart—or simply tell us where you stand at this moment. The above are simply prompts from which you can explore as you wish.

how to participate

We’d love to see you all join in this conversation. Please share your reflections on your own blog by including your link in the comments of any are you there, god? post—either in response to a story written by an author who shares your spiritual background, or to explore new angles thanks to an author with a different perspective. Or, simply comment as you normally do, adding your voice to this space.

If you’re inspired to participate by posting your own story on your blog, the only rules of this exercise are word count—a maximum of 1000—and a few other points of commonsense.

• Be naked. Your writing need not be a religious hallmark card. The more authentic you are about what you know and what you don’t know, the more provocative and valuable this will be for everyone. Be open to talking about doubt, and uncomfortable lines of questioning, and episodes of therapeutic vice (we kid, but you get the idea).
• Please write in the context of your own experience, and refrain from using your beliefs as a basis to explain the spiritual fate of the loved ones of others.
• You’re all such clever mamas and papas we feel it’s almost unneccesary to qualify this, but we should: no proselytizing, please. Your intent is not to convince anyone of anything, nor to serve as an invitation to your faith. It is only to tell your story in the context of your beliefs.

The same groundrules will apply to all participants, contributors and readers/commenters alike. Please respect the sacred convictions and learning of everyone here by adding to dialogue rather than countering it with theologic generalizations or debate.

+++++++++

Let’s all subscribe to a Buddhist principle as we share: that of gentle speech. We are here to create a conversation that is non-divisive, encouraging, thoughtful, and reckoned and measured in accordance with solidarity and healing.

We’re curious to prove our hunch—that this gathering will serve to illustrate the oneness of parenthood, of love for children, of a need for light and hope that crosses all boundaries. That no matter what semantics we subscribe to and what shapes our beliefs take, we all share the same unanswerable questions and walk this path together.

The memory of birth and the expectation of death always lurk within the human being, making him separate from his fellows and consequently capable of intercourse with them. Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

From E.M. Forster’s Two Cheers for Democracy: What I Believe

no dominion

Just for a second, I saw them, as if in a child's picture book or one of those Anne Geddes baby-as-cauliflower-type photo montages.  Legion, the lot of them.  Some in crisp black and white, Rogers and Nancys with white, salt-crusted headstones, all little lambs and angels.  Others were more Technicolour, like the garish, blurry snapshots of my own childhood...a Jason, a Robin, a "beloved baby boy".  One, much newer, I recognized; the newborn girl with the hole in her heart, the first baby I ever knew who died.  Across the sweeping hill in the older part of the cemetery I could see their compatriots...almost too many to count, dim and sepia, names obscured or hopelessly ancient, buried with young mothers or the siblings who followed in a series like stepping stones of sorrow.  For a second in the peace of the cemetery, I could see them all, each one a story, a whole life anticipated, condensed to a few dates and letters on a stone.  Each one a silent, plaintive testament to thethreshold we living things must traverse...into life, some way or another, and out.  For too many, the challenge insurmountable, the dates identical, cut short.

I do not go to the cemetery very often.  My own child is not there...we cremated him, still hoard the ashes in our bedroom with ambivalence, unsure of how to stage a letting go.  But I have known this place since my earliest years, when the grandmother whose bones lie here was alive and the guardian of the family stones, and I her charge, her companion in the regular pilgrimages of caregiving.  I fetched water from the old pump and dragged it to black, faded headstones of people even she barely remembered, fetched again and helped water the graves of her husband and brother and parents, all gone before I'd been born.  I listened and learned my family history in this place. 

While she weeded, though, I ran wild...and it was the childrens' graves that fascinated me.  I spun stories to myself about the children they represented, these names on the small stones.  I knew them, could have led a tour around the cemetery from Douglas to "wee Elmer" - though I was agog at the idea that an infant had ever been named Elmer - through the ones whose names were already crumbled away.  Rapt with the morbidity of childhood, I wondered about them all, spoke to them, flitted amongst them w eekly through years of summer afternoons while my grandmother tended the geraniums of people I'd never meet.

I drove through the cemetery on a whim, Friday, nearby and suddenly guilty because my grandmother has no geraniums to mark her place, now.  I stopped, and stood by her grave, staring at her name on the headstone, assessing...her name will be one of my daughter's names when this child crosses the threshold into whatever awaits.  I spoke to her, then, my grandmother, though I do not believe she's really there...spoke with love and awkwardness mixed, like a shy suitor.  I speak to Finn the same way, self-conscious; I do better listening for the dead than trying to hold up my end of the conversation.  Then I sat down by my grandmother's grave and drifted for a minute, feeling closer to her in calling up memories of her hands in the soil beside me.

That's when I saw them, all the babies.  My eyes caught on the first stone, three rows back and a few over, where it always was. It is a baby's stone, one where the dates, like Finn's, are only a day apart.   Nearly sixty years old now, that story, that loss.  I realized that the parents of that child are probably long dead themselves now, gone beyond whatever remained of their sorrow to the same side of the threshold as the baby they marked with a sandstone lamb.  And I looked to the left, where I knew the next stone would be, and suddenly for that one moment I felt like I could see them all, every one of them laid here, too small or too sick or just gone for no reason anyone will ever know.  They were neither beautiful angels nor objects of sorrow, of absence...just babies and children, real for a moment.  And time, finally, seemed to have made peace with them.

I wonder if, sixty years from now, when we here are mostly just memory, if the sting of our stories will go with us...if the words we leave here will bear witness only to love, to moments lived?

I long for that.

where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
oh, where have you been, my darlin' young one?

- A hard rain's a-gonna fall
Bob Dylan

I used to daydream, in the dark early days, that i could see him in the faces of little boys i saw in stores, or playing in the park.  I'd never paid much attention to little boys, before...but suddenly the veil of my disinterest lifted and they seemed to be legion, be everywhere, all knees and ears and motion swirling on the periphery of my world.  Other people's boys.  They brought me up short, made me catch my breath with wonder and longing.  Would he have tilted his head like that, held his arms just so?  Would the dark fuzz of his baby hair have grown into cowlicks, like that one's?  Would he have had a husky laugh?  Would he have come running into my arms pell-mell like the little fellow who nearly knocked me off my feet one day at the mall, racing towards his mother, squealing?  Would he have liked my stories, my tune-challenged guitar-playing?  Would he have had a crooked smile?

Every boy I saw, I wondered, and I ached.  Too late, I had discovered the beauty of boyhood for the first time, and I could not tear my eyes away.

That was a long time ago.  It's rare now.  Occasionally, if I meet a boy of a certain age, or if I catch my younger son and his cousins with their heads bent over a sandbox or a train table, three boys together, the shadow of a dark-haired fourth looms before me, almost waving.  It's bittersweet, now, this presence in absence...it is the closest I get to the sense of him being with me.  But that shadow is still - and forever - painfully indistinct, compared to those could-have-beens, those other boys.  They are technicolour...and he?  He is only ashes. 

What I believe, I suppose, is that we will all be ash and dust someday.  That he has gone ahead, though quite possibly into nothing.  I do not believe in angels.  Am ambivalent about souls, hopeful but ultimately unsure.  Thus his potential nothingness, his erasure, is the hardest aspect of grief for me to reconcile.  He was my child.  I believe that he mattered, that he was someone, a boy all his own, even if the world never got to unwrap what he carried latent in that small self, that tiny body broken by birth.  I believe this, but I do not know how to believe the rest...the what he is now, the where he might be.  My unbelief wounds me.  I fear that I long for something that is utterly gone.  And I fear that he is not utterly gone but out there alone, somehow, needing his mother.  I fear that I am failing to mother him, and I fear that I am trying to mother something that is only a memory, not even a spectre.

And yet I knew him, though I will never lay eyes on the boy he might have become.  I knew him, knew the kick of his feet inside, the wild, soaring leap of him when I placed headphones on my belly.  I knew, when he was born, the shape of his brow as my own, his small feet as the twins of his father's.  And I knew from the fierce grip of his tiny hand on my finger, reflex though it well may have been, that he knew me, smelled me, sensed my presence.  If he is only shadow now, he was not, not then. 

All those other boys out there who wove in and out of my peripheral vision for so long, taunting me with what might have been, what I had lost...they have faded with time, become the shadows, blurred.  They were never mine, only other people's boys.  Whereas that little body that housed my son and the boy he might have been, ashes though it is, is burned on me brighter and deeper than all their myriad of laughing faces.

Wherever he may be, I hope he knows.