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.

Letters of Significance

We thought we were having a boy.  I like surprises, and thought the birth of a child was quite possibly the best one out there (nailed that, eh?).  So we did the obligatory lists of boy names and girl names.  Which over time grew shorter.  Until we were down to one boy name (really, days before birth this was agreed upon) and two girl names.  I'm not going to say we phoned in the girl names because they were both lovely, but I never really took them seriously.  Because I was having a boy.

Until I had a girl.

And we stared in her face, and pondered, and said them both out loud, and then they took her away for observation.

And then the wheels came off the bus.

And not quite 48 hours later, not long after a doctor informed us we were at the point of palliative care, we named her.  I will confess that the thought flitted across my brain that I was using this name up -- that I was wasting this name -- that it could never be used again, that it would be turned to ash along with her.  Perhaps I should use the name that by now was a distant #2?  But #2 name didn't fit.  I looked at her, and it just didn't fit.  It didn't sound right with her nose and closed eyes and delicate lips.  And even though I thought when I added her name (the one I ultimately chose) to the girl list a few months earlier that I would use the nickname "Lena," it now seemed completely inappropriate.  I looked at her lying in her cot, a perfect little 6lb girl plugged into a sea of tubes, and "Maddy" (or "Peanut") just flew out of my mouth as I reached for her still limbs.

I picked up the NICU form that they wanted us to fill out regarding visitors, and across the top, in a ballpoint pen, finally set it down for the first time:  Maddalena.

When a small part of my imagination tries to -- forcibly or unconsciously -- wonder if I could ever dare to be pregnant again, one tiny pebble in a series of roadblocks that inevitably springs to mind is the name.  What if I had a girl?  What on earth would I ever name her?  I could never now use the other name, the one that might have been destined for her.  (I'm not even sure I could use our top boy name any more if I were to have a boy, it's so close to this whole series of events now.)  And I feel as though I used the best one.  On a dead baby.  On someone who's not even here to hate it or enjoy it, to curse us or bless us, to go through a life of misspellings and mispronunciations.

Since wandering into and through the blogs of parents who lost children, I have run across numerous stories of naming:  As Niobe wrote here on GITW, she didn't want, couldn't bear to name her twin daughter.  But was forced to record something on paper.  Some of you didn't want to use a certain name, with the small ember of hope that someday it might be used on a live child.  Some of you, knowing your baby was dead already, turned to family lineage, or nicknames from your pregnancy.  Some, I'm sure, grasped at the air and understood that name would never be that of a supreme court justice or a punk rock singer, but simply letters on a death certificate.  

I know Niobe's story, but how did you settle on your dead child's name? Or did you decide not to name him/her? (Were you given that choice?  Did you WANT that choice?) Was it a family name or one you simply liked? Did you decide what your child would be named before you found out s/he wouldn't live? How do you feel about the name now? Or the art of naming in general? If you use nicknames or initials in cyberspace, please don't feel pressured to spell the name in order to talk about the significance.

call for entries: glow in the woods awards august 2008

A quick reminder: let's spread some kindred love to other lostbaby mamas. Nominate a blog post that moved you this month for a Glow in the Woods Award.

Go here to nominate by no later than the 14th of this month, and here to review the winners so far. On the 15th, we'll announce the winner along with a complete list of the nominees.

from a distance

The raspberries are almost over, but tomatoes are still green and it seems quite possible that the beginning of January will never get here. Our surrogate, Kyrie, is 18 weeks pregnant. I didn't really think we'd get to this point and it's hard to imagine that we'll ever get beyond it. 

There's a certain air of unreality about the whole thing. At least physically, it's nothing like last time at all. There's no morning sickness, no paneled and pouched maternity clothes, no flickering quivers against my stomach, no dull leaden slug lodged under my ribs. I don't turn sideways in front of mirrors, pulling up my shirt to let my hands play up and down the pale convexity of a belly become a gibbous moon. Right now, I'm sitting on the back porch, and the only thing I'm considering is whether I should pour myself a second glass of cheap white wine. 

It doesn't seem to count. It doesn't seem like it's really happening. Unlike last time at this point, I haven't told anyone -- not my coworkers, not my family, not my friends. I've been to the appointments, but I don't look at the ultrasound screen and I never talk to the doctor. It's like it's happening to someone else. It is happening to someone else. 

I don't really have any negative feelings about the concept of surrogacy --maybe because, long ago, I had a successful pregnancy or maybe because I know that the odds are overwhelming that any future pregnancy of mine would end the same way the last one did. And probably that's why I sometimes forget that surrogacy is, for a whole variety of reasons, fairly unusual and quite controversial.

But I've been wondering what you all think. Comment honestly (and anonymously, if you'd prefer). You're not going to upset me or hurt my feelings and I realize that there are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides. What's your view on surrogacy? What limitations (if any) do you think should be placed on it? Should it be available to someone like me who, theoretically, could carry a baby to term, but runs a high risk of another death or a catastrophically premature baby? Would you consider working with a surrogate? Could you imagine being a surrogate? Why or why not?

Time and again

Last time I was this pregnant was the day my baby died. It was a busy, crazy day that turned into the evening our after started. Our son was born the next day. That was exactly eighteen months ago.

I want to say something profound. Dates, numbers, coincidences. I also want to say that it's just a day, it holds no power. (Right? Right?) The boy who is still alive in me is no more or less likely to die today than any other day. But today I am unmistakably more anxious than yesterday. 

He looks like his brother. We know that from the ultrasounds. It started with the nose. I saw it on the anatomical scan, and almost gasped. A had this weird nose that nobody else in the family has. Of all things, I didn't expect the nose. Since then we have seen the cheeks, which are not surprising-- they are my dad's, mine, Monkey's, and A's. Other features are less clear, but the time before last the ultrasound tech pointed out his big hands (A had long fingers) and that he had some hair. A's hair was curly. 

Is it just that were he to be born today, I would know what to expect? What he would look like, what his weight would feel like in my arms? He is smaller than A was, but not by much-- half a pound or so, likely. That was the thought I was working on this weekend, as the doctors worked to stop my preterm labor-- that I may, in a matter of hours, again hold my son in my arms, that were that to happen, I would need to let myself be in both places at once, simply because I don't think I could stop myself from going back.

The birthing rooms in my hospital are pretty similar, though the beds in some face one way, and in some-- the other. The rooms where I had given birth to my two children so far happen to frame one side of the same wall of rooms-- Monkey's right up by the ORs, and A's down the other end of the hall, where there would be minimal interaction with the world of live babies being born, where they could then walk us out through the back door, so we wouldn't have to run into any happy people. The room where I was this weekend, fittingly, I guess, was half way down the hall between the rooms where Monkey and A were born. This room was set up the same way as Monkey's, with the bed in the room facing the bed in A's birth room. If I peered really hard through the walls, and through time, I could see us in that other room. Monkey's birth was behind me, has been for over six years now. A's, in some way, was, and still is, in front of me. 

So tell me, please, if you have had a subsequent birth already, how did it feel? How did it go? If you are still hoping for one, what goes through your mind as you think of it? Or do you give that part any thought at all? If you are not going to get one, what does that do to you?