for one and all

Since Glow's beginning a lively conversation has simmered around the kitchen table -- within the discussion board. Recently we had divided it into sub-topics, but the multiple rooms were less welcoming to navigate. And so we consolidated once again (here). Visit to share contemplations, questions and advice on everything from c-section scars and relative woes to trying, redefining, forgiving and loving again.

Talk amongst yourselves. That's why we're here.

call for nominations: glow in the woods awards winter 2008-09

It's time again for the much-loved Glow in the Woods Awards -- or better put, it's long past time! You may have noticed silence on the awards front for the past couple of months, but it's because we've decided to shake things up in the interest of finding and sharing more new voices in bulk.

From now on, we'll be recognizing and sharing the writing of babylost mothers and fathers four times a year -- once for each season. For Winter 2008-09, send us posts from December, January and February -- go here to nominate by no later than Friday, February 27th, and here to review the winners so far. On  March 1st, we'll announce the winner along with a list of all the nominees.

Please take a few moments to share with us what's moved you through the holiday and new year season -- through these months so full of such glittering hope and heart-of-winter darkness. Introduce us to voices we don't yet know, and remind us what we love about those we do.

leavetaking

The little green box sits in a drawer now, a fine layer of dust collecting from god knows where. I do not open it anymore. I know he is not in there.

I thought I'd said goodbye long before I really did. The first time I held him, he was dying. And though I whispered, it's okay, it's alright little one, you can go, mama loves you, it's okay...I was only trying to ease the passage, make him feel safe since I could not keep him safe, since I could not keep him. But that was not goodbye...in my heart, I was still saying hello.

The last time I held him he had been dead twelve hours, lividity darkening one side of his small face. I waited for them to bring him to me, shy and eager as if before a date. I remember most the adrenalin taste of my anticipation, the leap in my heart even though I am a sane-ish sort and the joy I felt awaiting him feels ridiculous, even macabre in the recounting. But I did not believe he was alive: more that life and death were irrelevant, for a minute. It seemed enough that he was himself, and would be with me again. I think I thought that I wanted to say goodbye, though I couldn't have said those words aloud then...too maudlin. I think now that I was wrong, that goodbye was nowhere on my radar. I just wanted my baby. And I would want him with a keening ache for a long time after.

Our culture tells us that goodbye comes with death, or at the very latest with the last leavetaking of the body of the departed. The dead leave visible holes in the fabric of our lives, and we know them gone by the gaps.

But with babies, especially those who never came home at all, the thresholds are blurred. Waiting for a baby, a parent's life and selfhood shift to accommodate the coming addition...but the changes are private, woven in secret thread, invisible. When the baby dies, the leavetaking comes hand in hand with - or before, or in place of - that first magical hello, and all the anticipation and identity shifts of the parent-to-be are left hanging, shredded, irreconcilable with the fabric visible to the outside world. The usual rules of goodbye suggest that the absence of someone who was barely, in fact, present should be a simple thing.

But if it were, this corner of the internet would be a lonely place.

Pieces of goodbye crept up on me, crowded in. Each time I called him into being aloud, spoke the reality of his death, he slipped a little further from me. Each time realization fell and the obvious clicked: that I would never see what he would have looked like as a five year old, that I that there would never be a photo of all my children - if I eventually had other children - together. Each one tore at me, ripped open again the wound where all the futures I'd woven for us had been. Each one was invisible to the outside world, unremarkable to anyone who did not realize that my heart still held him whole long after his body had been relinquished to the fire. I knew he was gone, knew it in every part of me...my spread hips, my leaking breasts, my empty, searching hands. But it was the rituals of living without him that forced me to acknowledge what I knew, internalize it. Each time I moved forward without him, I let go a little. And I hated that. We had had so little time, he and I.

Then one day I opened the little green box to finger his small hat and when I held it to my face to breathe him in all I smelled was dust. No trace. And I sat, alert, surprised, as if suddenly realizing that he'd been gone a long time. I felt...odd, caught out...as if someone might be watching, as if I'd been discovered mothering a box.

are you there, little one? I whispered.

No answer. And it all clicked into place.

I felt the shift deep inside me, just as I'd felt it all those months before as I waited for motherhood...the quiet sea change where what was once incomprehensible becomes, simply, who you are. Still a mother. To a child I'd never see again. There it was: goodbye.

And yet I felt him, too, closer then than I had in a long time, that brightness and sweetness of the moments holding him in my arms. you're gone, I said quietly. I miss you.

Did you say goodbye? All at once, or in pieces? What does goodbye mean, to you?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

this is my own goodbye, of a sort...my last post as a regular contributor here at Glow.

i will be reading, still, walking alongside, but almost four years out from Finn's death i feel another shift taking place in me and the urgency i long felt to write it all out has waned.  i still miss him, but that missing has become something i want to sit quietly with for awhile, and let other voices rise here to continue weaving our song of Medusa-hood, of love and grief.

thank you, all of you, for making this place a community.

Winceables

I'm not talking about the obvious:

"I'm pregnant!"

"How many children do you have?"

No.

I'm not referring to the time when the contractor said all business-like while planning our kitchen island and mudroom, "Are you thinking of having any more kids?"

Those are predictable. They are horrible, they stop me cold every time, and leave me breathless and gasping, but they follow a certain pattern. Sure, they might drop like a meteor from the sky on a clear day, but let's face it: we knew going in they'd hurt, right?

"Is she your only child?"

"Isn't this [=fill in with any season or holiday that strikes you cold] a wonderful time of year?"

"They grow up so fast!"

No.

I'm talking about the stuff out of left field that you had no idea would hurt until it was lobbed and sat there lingering in the air over your head like a toxic cloud. The words that cut to the core, and knock the wind out of you when you absolutely least expect it. The innocuous sentences that take on an entirely different meaning now that you're on this side of the divide. The lines that make you wince.

:::

We were at a school meeting where a person was explaining why children learn languages so well at an early age, and why it's harder to do so later on. It was somewhat interesting, the stuff about hearing development and how aurally accepting children are, and then from her lips as a rhetorical example that was never answered: "What do you hear when I say the word 'chop?'"

I'll tell you what I hear, and it's not a cookbook instruction. It's the acronym for Children's Hospital. It's where Maddy died. It's a shrine, it's a ring of Dante's Inferno. God, how fucked up is it that their motto is "This is Where Hope Lives" when my hope died there? Right there? I can point to the place on a map. Why did she pick that word for an example? Of all the words in the English language, why that one? I wonder if anyone else in this room heard that. I'm screaming, aren't I. No, wait, I'm quiet. But now I'm lost and I have no idea what on earth she's talking about . . . .

:::

The adorable boy who lives across the street came by one afternoon to deliver a birthday party invitation to Bella. He came with his babysitter, a lovely looking teenager. Bella is positively smitten to receive this, and I'm making small talk now because usually this boy is so shy, and here he is personally bringing this by! And his sitter is standing there, kinda proudly I think, and once he's involved in some conversation with Bella, she turns to me, sticks out her hand and says, "I'm Maddy by the way."

Maddy?! Did she say Maddy? Maybe it's Maddie? Or with some t's, Matty? In a normal universe I could just come out and tell her I have a daughter named that, and ask about the spelling and have an everyday conversation, but . . . well, it would probably fry her gourd to know she shares a name with my dead daughter. Wonder what it's short for. I'm flushed, I hope she doesn't notice. Did Bella hear that? I guess not, she's still talking. Crap, have I said "Pleased to meet you," or did I just shake her hand?

:::

Flipping through a catalog and seeing the name "Maddy" on stationary, a wall, on a towel. Closing it, chucking it in the recycle bin.

:::

Then there's the line that cuts me off at the knees.

When Bella was born, it was quickly noted that she resembled, quite eerily, her father. Pictures of both, a few days old in each case, were compared and there was no doubt that we had taken the correct child home from the hospital. As she grows, the likeness becomes even more apparent. I used to take a great amount of pride in this fact.

When Maddy was born and they handed her to me, I immediately searched her face for recognizable signs -- the telltale dimples and curve in the nose and ruddy complexion -- and oddly, she looked a bit like me. And then they took her away, and the rest is horrible, and she is frozen forever in pictures between two and six days old (I have yet to look at the pictures from the delivery room when we thought she was ok. Those were the last moments of my old life, and the fact that that limbo is caught on film is kinda disturbing to me yet.)

A few months later, the tape-reel of her life still too fresh in my head, and after turning the pictures this way and that, I came to the conclusion that she probably would've resembled me. But this fact, and it's significance, really didn't hit home until one day we were at a neighbor's house and Bella said something coy and turned and ran away, and my neighbor said, very sweetly,

"She looks more and more like her father every day."

And my other daughter? Looked just like me. Would she have looked more like me every day? This is what it was supposed to be like, having someone tell me this. And no one will ever know. I'll never have the pride of her looking like me, or hell -- her looking like ANYONE for that matter. That was my silly material proof that I was involved somehow in this childmaking business. My validation that a few of my genes went someplace beautiful. And instead, they got blown to shit. I should take out her picture and show her. I can't believe I feel like crying over this incredibly superficial point. Maybe that's not my nose after all, I should probably look at the picture again when I get home . . . Look, she's gone and changed the subject, my eyes must be welling up.

And yet, every time from that point forward when someone tells me that about Bella, it's as if someone put the knife in my sternum and turned it, slowly.

What makes you wince?

What dreams may come

I don't tend to remember dreams. I used to say I don't dream, and then I learned that we all dream, but unless we wake up at the right time in the sleep cycle, we don't remember what it was we were dreaming about. So now I use scientifically correct terminology-- I don't tend to remember dreams.

The times I have dreamt of A? That I remember? I don't even need one hand to count. And never have I seen him as an infant, either the way he looked when he was born or as an alive one. Since I am by nature not an easily guilt-ridden parent, this does not usually cause me angst. I don't even know if I ever felt envious of the bloggers who have had these vivid live baby dreams-- the practical side of me kicks in right away with the "how hard it must be to wake up from a dream like that."

The times I have seen A in a dream? Well, a number of times before he was born. When I owned up last year to knowing he wouldn't be staying I left one thing out-- the dreams. I saw him in my dreams, a couple of times, while I was pregnant with him. Never as an infant. Always as a little boy, always in a distance, with a full head of curly hair, never looking at me, always running away. If this was a part of a storyline in a book or a movie, I would roll my eyes. Too much, too thick, too manipulative. But, as Mark Twain famously noted, fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth-- not so much.

A was born with curly hair. Tiny little waves of hair, perfect little squiggles, all wet from the birth, all over his perfect little head. And in one of the only dreams I remember from the weeks after, he was still running away, but this time he stopped and turned his head to look back.

My boys are different people, I am sure of it. Was sure of it the whole time, from before I was ever pregnant with the Cub. (Though who can really say how much of this surety is a pushback against the idea that a living baby fixes the grief and the griever-- one of my absolute favorites, that.) And even if I wasn't convinced of A being distinct from any future baby just on general principle, there would still be the part where he was running away from me in the dreams. That's not to say that I think that bereaved parents who believe that the souls of their children who are gone come back to them are wrong. I am, as with so many things in this grief world, agnostic on this. For other people. Not for myself. My boys are distinct.

And actually, since I was so sure that if we were to have a living baby it would have to be a girl, I considered the whole question, as it relates to me, purely theoretical. I think I was even a bit smug about that in the privacy of my own mind. Obviously that is not how it went. Though now that it went, now that I am getting to know the Cub, I am ready to attest with even more conviction-- they are different.

Except... Except that once in a while I think back to this other dream I remember from the early weeks. Well, "remember" is a bit strong there. The dream that was capital W Weird. Spontaneous human cloning-- oh yeah, baby! I dreamt, as far as I can remember, because it became hazy within minutes of waking up, that there were some cells left of A's placenta, and that at some point one of them went all pluripotent and created another, genetically identical pregnancy. This is both bizarre and absurd. So much so that I think I knew even in the dream that I was, in fact, dreaming. I certainly knew it the very moment I woke up (behold the power of years and years of my not entirely wasted edumucation). In the end, though, after I dismissed the literal scenario of the dream, in the end I had this unmistakable feeling that there was something tangible, something physical left. Even if I couldn't touch it.

Curiously, this dream happened only days before one of the handful of dead baby bloggers I was reading at the time posted about the research that showed that fetal cells can enter mother's bloodstream and remain there for at least 27 years. Physical indeed.

So what about you? Do you remember your dreams? How much attention do you pay to them? Do you dream about your dead baby? Do you want to?