truths
/
that first,
I was a different kind of mother
and nothing about that is self-evident
The day after mother's day
/We're all so different—from different places, and with different backstories. Different things led to this loss for me than for you. Some of us are ten days out. For others it's been ten years. Post-grief, we've picked up and let go a jumble of subsequent disappointments, joys, achievements, and gauntlets. There's a shorthand to shared experience that crosses everything that would otherwise make us strangers.
Read More17
/
Despite my consistency of ritual, my album of photos, my constant urge to collect poems and words that help me hold her close—somehow the inertia of life has swept me away and with it my desperate attempts at reasoning. How is it that a tiresome wave of deadlines, emails, forms and files could distract me from my daughter?
Read MoreMother Earth in spring
/
The same spring, irritatingly new every year. Life is back on earth. My baby is not back. She was born in spring, three years ago. Life continues. Despite death. Death continues. Despite life.
Read MoreApproaching
/
I'm past my shelter now, rejoining January, already in progress. I'm back with the whole bloody gamut of emotions. I understand that each of them is a reflection of a different facet of my love for my son, and so I own them—this is the way it goes. Though I still wish anxiety would bugger off. The anniversary, the birthday, they are just around the next bend in this road. Ready or not, here they come. But I think I'm ready.
Read MoreHappy crappy birthday
/
I am glad I was born. I am glad I made my parents happy. I am glad I met the love of my life and got to spend my life with him. I feel immensely blessed for giving birth to two beautiful children. I feel immeasurably fortunate to be able to raise one of them. And even on my birthday, and maybe more that day, I am dead for having lost the other one.
Read More