the mother, the spectre and the bargaining crone.

This post is a reflection on my sense of self before baby loss and after and the effect that Freddie's death has had on that. I was a stay at home parent of young children before I had him and my life therefore revolved around the trappings of that life. There is some mention of how I was shaped by ordinary pregnancy and birth as well as infant loss. Please bear that in mind before reading if you are in a sensitive phase of loss.

Once it defined me, my knowledge, my experience, my hoard of stories, grim and detailed.

Once I huddled in gaggles of mothers and gossiped  - heartless midwives, empty threats of dead babies. I thrashed through birth trauma, postnatal depression, botched, unsatisfactory deliveries. My ill-used body, caught in the nets of a harried medical system that sucked me in, processed my heaving body, signed me out alive, with scant regard for my soul or sanity.

Those things, the worst that could happen, consumed the centre of my wounded being. All encompassing, damaging, poisoned.

All talked out, gradually growing around and through the pain, I became something new.

****

Once it defined me, my knowledge, my experience, my hoard of stories, gritted teeth and battles won.

Once I huddled in flocks of mothers engrossed in motherhood - failed breastfeeding, sleepless nights, babies born with challenges (I will not call them small, not even now) to be overcome. We loaded laundry and knew not the value of the little people in our care. The minutae of the tedium was our currency of connection.

I had no idea how lucky I was. I do not hold myself responsible for that.

And, all talked out, we grew, moved on. Stories rolled and rubbed and took on the sheen of a well fumbled pebble, soft, smooth, snag-less.

****

I became something new; lacking nonchalant patter, I formed an armoury of parenthood, my tales the scales of my skin. A persona grew, I became the mother people love or hate, who fought the battles, won and lost and emerged confident, skilled and with all the answers I needed. I believed in me.

I do not begrudge myself that confidence. It was good while it lasted.

****

And it all came tumbling down. In the screaming silence of the birthing room without a cry, I lost every opinion I had ever had about birth and babies. In the humming heat of SCBU, I lost everything I knew about parenting. I couldn't help him. I didn't know the language, couldn't do the procedures, couldn't choose when to hold him, might hurt him if I did.

No time to learn.

My outer shell smashed and washed away, all my conversation, all my wrath and passion, all my innocence and ignorance. I didn't know I had that.

****

When I lost my son, when I crumbled him to dust, consigned him to a memory, I also lost myself, my role, my place in society. A core was left, naked and bruised.

****

No one wants the baby lost mother. We are not welcome. We are the spectre - festering and infectious. Who would want my knowledge? It is tainted by Freddie's death, despite the four before him. I would run a mile from me. Who would chat to me about birth and babies, fearing to see me cry,  hoping that "please god, she doesn't mention HIM again!"? Who would believe my nappy choice might be right when I let my baby die? Who would believe I had knowledge about breastfeeding when I couldn't even tell he was sick before he lived.

I see the recoil even if it never comes. I see the blank weariness as they wait for me to find a reason to mention him. I see myself, hovering in their joy and deserved naivety, spoiling the thrill of the moment. I imagine myself tainting their hope, excitement. I imagine them making the opposite choice to mine, hoping to ward off the devil.

I cannot ever re-enter that world. I will distance myself even from my daughters when their time comes, hoping - irrationally - to not remind them of the brother who died.

****

So, crone like, my gift is to the girl I once was, to all mothers who never walk a harder path than tired out drudgery.

I will try not curl my lip at those with no reason to know better. I will not belittle them because their path has not been strewn with ashes and they know not that ashes can arrive in a tiny box with an etched brass plate. I will not deride them for a merry life with smaller hurts and smaller mountains to climb.

I envy them. I'm glad for them. With gritted teeth I will smile for them and the rose-tinted life they lead. I do not want them to know this pain. And I will barter my forgiveness of their lack of understanding for the gift of no future grief in this family.

If I could. If only I could.

How do you feel about the person you were before loss arrived in your life? Do you miss that person? Would you have that person back? How do you feel about people who have not experienced loss and their world view? Has it changed over time, have you become  more or less tolerant about ignorance of loss?

the other extinguished flame

Mrittika, or, as she often identifies herself, AahiRaahi's mom, is mother to Aahir and Raahi. Mrittika writes with a blunt honesty about the loss of her daughter Raahi two days before she would turn three months old, and the ways it has affected her relationships, both with others and with herself. Her writing is often winding and lyrical, inviting us in deep to experience her story. I am incredibly honored to welcome Mrittika as a regular contributor to Glow in the Woods. —Burning Eye

There’s another unnamed word document opened on my computer, along with this one. It contains the idea for a paper my advisor had sent me in winter. It should have been written in the past few months. It has not. Even the file containing the idea has not been saved.

That’s how my career is. Unsaved, undeveloped, unwritten.

How can there be anything else, I wonder every day. How can there be anything else, apart from missing Raahi and taking care of Aahir and Som, that my mind can occupy itself with? How can I miss, feel sad and have regrets for, anything else? How can anything else matter, and cause me pain?

There was a flame. The only one that burned. The flame that kept me alive, gave me purpose, offered me flight. The flame to be exceptionally trained, hardworking, and skilled, and make a difference somewhere, soon, and then forever. As a teenager, I was never interested in romance or a family. I was fierce, and almost destined to be a hardhitting corporate dragon or academic eagle someday. My friends already teased me with the jobs I would have to get them and the research projects I would have to acknowledge their encouragement on. My male friends sympathized with any man who ever eyed me ‘that way,’ and my female friends wondered what this hankering for my ‘own identity’ at fourteen was all about.

Then I met a man for whom sacrifices seemed possible. We made joint decisions about our careers, which somehow always seemed poised in head-on collision with one another, and I saw my career in media and publishing gradually taking the backburner in order to accommodate his more successful one in technology. Still, I had a career, and much to look forward to, and every time a byline appeared, or someone praised my ‘keen editorial eye,’ I warmed a finger in that flame, now dimmed, but not extinguished.

Then we started wanting to make babies.

A surgery to remove a cyst, followed by an unexpected pregnancy, followed by a heartbreaking miscarriage. Then, a year and half later, another one. This time, the doctor advising me to give up my job.When my husband’s employer decided to transfer him to the US, I finally wanted to go back to graduate school, even though all I really wanted at this point was a family. The flame was going strong, except that it had changed color. I often could not recognize myself. But I was getting to like this new me, the one who wanted to be a mom.

Suffering from undiagnosed infertility, I focused all my energy into applying to a second Master’s, and instead, was offered positions in four prestigious PhD programs. Every admissions committee wondered why I wouldn’t accept these better offers. The truth is, I wanted it too, but I wanted to be a mom a lot more. I was not ready to commit to five years, and accepted a Master’s admission, moving to the Midwest, leaving my husband, and all chances of being a mother soon, in the northeast.

Aahir came to us in the end of the first year. By now, my first and foremost mission of a family accomplished, I wanted that PhD after all. My husband wanted a graduate degree too, a plan he had shelved as someone needed to have a stable job amidst all the instability and uncertainty of not being able to get pregnant. We started applying to graduate schools together, and chose ten pairs of schools in the same city. We got admission in two each, none in the same city.

So, with my son in my arms, I moved to Chicago, while my husband quit his job, but stayed in Columbus, to go to school there. He would commute on a bus for ten hours on Thursday nights to spend three days being a father. On Sunday nights, he made the same trip back, this time, to be a student. That summer, after the first year, we were together as a family after a whole year. We were still staring at another year of being apart, but we were so happy that we made a little girl!

Now pregnant, and taking care of a toddler, my professional flame burned the brightest for the first time since those young days of dogged determination. After putting Aahir to sleep, I would drag my pregnant body to the dining table, where I would eat dinner and write papers, grade exams and read a hundred pages before I dropped on the pile. Som now arrived on Thursday mornings, and after whirling like a windmill taking care of Aahir and me, he would work until dawn on papers, projects and coursework. Then he would take the train to downtown Chicago on Sunday night, and from there a bus at midnight to reach Columbus in the morning, heading straight to class.

Raahi was born three days before Som would be done with his program. As he packed his life in Columbus, the birthplace of our Aahir, and the battleground for my warrior husband, Raahi began to fight her battle in NICU. She came home in time for us to move for Som’s hard-earned job on the east coast. I had to give up my workplace again, in order to be with my husband, and raise our kids. Our family was complete, my reproductive aspirations had been hard-earned, and it was time to focus on my productive ambitions.

Raahi left the day after Som started his job.

Along with Raahi, I also lost the structure in my professional life. Left without a campus, an office, meetings, events, and colleagues to occupy my life, it has been impossible to feel productive or purposeful. In the absence of a swinging infant in the house, the desk, chair and bookcase suddenly seem too wooden, too pointless. The eleven unpacked boxes of useful and useless papers and books in the office are a few feet away from unpacked boxes of diapers and baby clothes in the closet. There is a computer whose battery has slowed from the months it was not turned on. Because it houses still and moving images of my daughter’s tiny life. I could not see them, and I also could not open the dozens of papers and projects also contained there.

The burning flame, a desire. As a girl, it was to make a mark, a difference. Then another one started to flicker.  As a woman, I wanted for the flame of my motherhood to warm my home, and the fire of my intellect to signal my place in the greater world. For the most productive years of my life, I have struggled to be reproductive. Now I am neither. After ten years of trying to have a family, and of giving up everything else for it, the two flames burned together for a little while, and then died down together, forever.  

How can there be anything else, I wonder every day. And yet when I read about someone not having time because of a job, or struggling with their job, even if it is a bereaved mother, I wish I had something to show for my fourteen years out of college. For my thirty-seven years of life.

Other than a desk and a bookcase and eleven unpacked boxes of useful, and useless, papers and books.

What other kinds of loss have you been dealing with along with grieving your baby(ies)? How has your loss affected your views of your career and your intellect? Have you returned to work since your loss? Do you take refuge in working, or does it add more stress to your life? 

Double edged

"There it is"-- I surprised myself with how excited that came out. 

"I see it."

I let the credits roll to the end, then rewound to pause with our son's name just crossing the sea-sky horizon line. Over a year ago, on his 6th anniversary in fact, we contributed to the Kickstarter campaign for a movie called Return to Zero. They had a crazy-good cast and a babylost dad for a writer-director. I hoped they'd get it right. 

Turns out, a lot happens for a movie between the end editing and when the general public gets to see it. For this movie, that included being pitched to various film festivals, and eventually being selected for two. And even more eventually, a deal for TV distribution, on Lifetime.

We couldn't watch the movie the night that it premiered-- we had a friend staying the weekend, and this was something we had to watch just by ourselves. So we recorded it and watched it on a weeknight. And I've been trying to figure out how to talk about it ever since.

A few days before we watched the movie, I read online someone talking about how her family is split into readers and not-so-much-with-the-reading individuals. People in the latter category, she said, believe that if a book is any good, eventually someone will make a movie of it. The first thought that popped into my head was "but what if the book is your life?" Not in the way that some books inspire entire fandoms, but in the very literal sense of key event in this movie is also a key event in your life, and the movie is about that?

People have serious, long, branching arguments about how much liberty filmmakers are allowed to take with source material, and about how changing this one thing here completely destroys the narrative from the book. I've witnessed a fair share of these discussions, heck-- participated in more than a few myself. But what if there is no canonical narrative? What if the world is splintered into a million versions of the story? I so wanted them to get it right. And suddenly, just on the precipice of watching the movie, I realized that "getting it right" was a lot to ask. Because what I was actually asking for was for them to have gotten it right for me, for how I see the world, for how I experienced my son's death. There's a lot of us out there. And while there are the bits of living with your child(ren)'s death(s) that I'd describe as classic hits, there are also parts that are far less universal. 

I realized that I both wanted the movie to be good and needed it to be good-- after all, my son's name is literally attached to it.  That is a combustible mixture, and sitting on it was making me apprehensive. Because what if it isn't good? What if going forward I wouldn't be able to refer an asshat to that movie for clarification? What if, instead, an asshat would be able to use it as ammunition? 

Knowing that we were going to watch the movie, Monkey asked me to pause the screen at the end with her brother's name on it. The next morning I turned the TV on for her to see. As she studied the screen, she asked whether the movie was good. I skipped a beat, unsure how to answer. 

Because here's the thing. Minnie Driver is impossibly great. She had perfect pitch, hitting the exact right note with her face and her body every millisecond she was on screen. Bewilderment, anger, frustration, indignation, determination, indifference, shock, and-- and I have no words for how deeply I appreciate that she could play this so exactly right-- the hollowing grief. Twice during the movie I made JD chuckle by yelling out "Fuck you, lady!" a beat before Minnie's character delivered a more dignified and more appropriate retort. The plot of the movie doesn't exactly match our story, relationships in the movie are not exactly like the ones in our extended family. But the cast is great and they get at the emotional truths of the life after so well that the context in which they operate doesn't much matter.

Except for this one thing, one scene really. The scene that goes straight to the million fractured versions of the story issue. See, one of the foundational views of my life after is that for me there is absolutely nothing in the plus column of A's death. I was already a pretty kick ass mother, and I certainly didn't get to be "more available" to my living children, either the one who was already here when A died or the two who came after, because he died.

If I was to name one good thing that I found in the after-space that I wouldn't have had if A lived, without a doubt I would name the community of babylost parents. The people I met online and in person in those first desperate months, and who are still my friends now, seven years on. This community at large. It sucks that we are here, AND I am glad to know you. But that's me. And I didn't make the movie, writer-director Sean Hannish did. And I get that the scene represents a true and important understanding in his narrative.

I told Monkey that the movie was good, that I only had one real issue with it, and for a movie on this sensitive a subject only having one issue is not bad at all. Fortunately for me, I don't see the character who articulates this view as central to the narrative, and I certainly don't think the scene is. When my DVD arrives, I will skip over that scene. Julia's cut, if you will.

Had you heard about the movie before it aired? Did you see it? What did you think? 

More generally, have you ever had to render judgement on a project that hit close to home, whether in the babylost realm or not? How did you feel going in? How did it turn out? 

hard hearted

I am grown hard hearted you might say.

Grief - which might have softened me and uncovered my humanity - turned my core to stone, you might say.

If you did not know.

Sometimes I do not know.

I think of him, wait for grief to rise up and bubble to the surface, tears to come, grief to reassemble, manifest in the centre of my soul - but nothing comes. I wait to be strangled by the loss of him, for my arms to lift themselves up, shocked and empty from the lack of the weight of him. Nothing comes.

I try to write, show the world that still I miss him, that my whole self is changed and nothing will ever be the same without him but the words seem bland and empty now.

I miss that pain. I hanker for it. I ache, in a way I never thought I would for a bottle of grief to take out and tip up on my sleeve to sniff the scent of loss and feel it fill my nostrils, freeze my brain. I want to huddle, struck to stone by the loss of him, the utter total disappearance of my boy. I want to stare at photos and feel tears stream down my face, flicking away from them as child or husband strays to my side. I want to remember when there was no way to make it through a day without saying his name. I want to be back in the supermarket, telling a horror struck assistant over frozen peas that my baby died and so I can't cook a proper meal just now. I want to be folding baby clothes and finding places to hide them, cramming crates into a cupboard and forcing coats and blankets over them, tears of rage and hollow pain pouring down my face. I want to be in sunlight, the world dark around me, furious the world is spinning, wind is blowing, sea crashes and days continue. I want to hear his loss in every song on the radio, pick up every book to read and find a Freddie in the pages. I want to flinch away from baby aisle and pushchair, avert my eyes from bump and newborn, shut the computer in despair as another pregnancy is announced, another baby born.

But time has moved on. The days that sparkled with over bright reality, harsh and glaring and scraping the surface of my skin till I was raw and broken are gone. I felt everything then - and I hated it. Longed for it to end.

My life has grown to hold this pain, pushed it small, forced the grief and disbelief to a tiny molten core inside me, encased and covered by a crust I cooled and grew to cover it.

I can ignore the core. I exist around it, function, smile, talk of my children and skip a beat as I describe them, choose to keep him private. I have learned to slide my tectonic plates over the places where the fault lines are, pushing the broken, ragged places beneath a smoother surface. What was once a brutal landscape has softened, moulded, eroded away, grassed over, become old and gentle.

And if you saw me, you might think me heart hearted.

You might think I do not care. You might think I learned to live without him. You might think I had recovered.

***

I watched one night a story of savannah; the dusty landscape, parched and bare and half dead itself with bare branched trees, empty river, devoid of food or greenery. The smallest elephant in the pack gave up, lay down, stayed down. His bewildered mother, on her knees, tugging at him, lifting at him, trying to pull him back to life and her desperate moan, her grief, her utter helpless disbelief to lose him broke through all the defences I had built.

It was her moan that broke me. It could hardly have been more human. I do not think there could have been an ounce more pain contained in it, not if she had had words to say to us.

I cried for her. Gasping, wrenching, sobbing tears.

That's how recovered I am.

In the early days I had a million triggers; it seemed as if the world was determined to bring me down at every turn. The triggers are more subtle now and often unexpected and in a strange way I welcome them at times. What triggers your grief? Do you have ways to manage them, have you learned to accommodate them in your life or have you had to change to avoid them? Do you, like me, ever welcome them?