Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
By trade, editors deal with the micro details of a work. I have come to realize that I'm not naturally a big-picture person in regular life either. I try to employ my little-picture methodology to monolithic issues (raising kids well, saving for retirement, etc.). I want the reassurance of knowing the exact order of operations that go into whatever goal I'm facing down beforehand. But that's cramming a square peg into a round hole. The big picture is a vision that requires faith, hope, and improvisation at the start. For someone like me who absolutely sucks at improv -- that's a huge hill to climb, just to get started on something.
I've thought a lot about big-picture events and quests with a capital Q since reading the book, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I'm probably I'm the last middle-aged American woman to read it, but for the benefit of the three other people hiding under a rock, it is a memoir that chronicles a year of traveling and spiritual exploration after the author's soul-sapping divorce.
I'm shocked at how much I liked the book. I was cautious going in, because I heard the author was on Oprah promoting the story, and that Julia Roberts will star in a movie version. The book's press gave off the faint stench of The Secret, which really is just Social Darwinism respun in less harshly Victorian language (If your life is awesome, it's because YOU are positively special and earned every last orgasm and gold ingot! And if your life sucks, it's because You are negative and dragged those problems right to yourself like a magnet. Got that?)
But by just a few pages in, it was obvious that Gilbert wrote a memoir, not a smug how-to book. She isn't holier than thou or rigidly dogmatic. She's funny, open minded, and as enthusiastic about food in Italy as she is about meditation in India. Reading about her path from lost to found really did inspire me.
And here I am, recently awake to the fact that I am relatively at peace with my dead-baby-and-pregnancy-calamities saga. It took two and a half years, so it's not like it was an overnight change. Yet it feels so markedly different. It's like I've been staring for eons at the random dots in one of those Magic Eye books, and suddenly the big-picture just popped out at me.
For anyone newer to their grief, I would hasten to add that "at peace" doesn't mean I want to turn away from my loss, or distance myself from others out there for whom this is not as settled. I've been struggling to figure out a metaphor that explains the difference between how I felt before and how I feel now. The only one that sort of fits is that of the leg amputee.
We've all heard the death of a child being referred to as similar to amputation, right? It's permanent and impacts every step. The underlying truth is that you would always prefer to have your old leg back, where that an option. And in the beginning, even as you make progress at adapting to being one-legged, the lost leg is always keenly on your mind.
Being at peace is not getting your old leg back. Instead, it's akin to receiving a high-tech prosthetic. After being in a wheel chair and then on crutches, it feels pretty magnificent to bound around as a biped. So you don't think about the fact that all things being equal, you'd still like that real leg back, please. You just enjoy the breeze in your hair, and maybe look to the road ahead.
For me, anyway, that's what peace feels like. For others who have got here (in any matter, grief-related or not) what does it feel like for you?
I've thought a lot about big-picture events and quests with a capital Q since reading the book, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I'm probably I'm the last middle-aged American woman to read it, but for the benefit of the three other people hiding under a rock, it is a memoir that chronicles a year of traveling and spiritual exploration after the author's soul-sapping divorce.
I'm shocked at how much I liked the book. I was cautious going in, because I heard the author was on Oprah promoting the story, and that Julia Roberts will star in a movie version. The book's press gave off the faint stench of The Secret, which really is just Social Darwinism respun in less harshly Victorian language (If your life is awesome, it's because YOU are positively special and earned every last orgasm and gold ingot! And if your life sucks, it's because You are negative and dragged those problems right to yourself like a magnet. Got that?)
But by just a few pages in, it was obvious that Gilbert wrote a memoir, not a smug how-to book. She isn't holier than thou or rigidly dogmatic. She's funny, open minded, and as enthusiastic about food in Italy as she is about meditation in India. Reading about her path from lost to found really did inspire me.
And here I am, recently awake to the fact that I am relatively at peace with my dead-baby-and-pregnancy-calamities saga. It took two and a half years, so it's not like it was an overnight change. Yet it feels so markedly different. It's like I've been staring for eons at the random dots in one of those Magic Eye books, and suddenly the big-picture just popped out at me.
For anyone newer to their grief, I would hasten to add that "at peace" doesn't mean I want to turn away from my loss, or distance myself from others out there for whom this is not as settled. I've been struggling to figure out a metaphor that explains the difference between how I felt before and how I feel now. The only one that sort of fits is that of the leg amputee.
We've all heard the death of a child being referred to as similar to amputation, right? It's permanent and impacts every step. The underlying truth is that you would always prefer to have your old leg back, where that an option. And in the beginning, even as you make progress at adapting to being one-legged, the lost leg is always keenly on your mind.
Being at peace is not getting your old leg back. Instead, it's akin to receiving a high-tech prosthetic. After being in a wheel chair and then on crutches, it feels pretty magnificent to bound around as a biped. So you don't think about the fact that all things being equal, you'd still like that real leg back, please. You just enjoy the breeze in your hair, and maybe look to the road ahead.
For me, anyway, that's what peace feels like. For others who have got here (in any matter, grief-related or not) what does it feel like for you?
Friday, June 13, 2008
EDD
"Waiting is Painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering." -- Paulo Coelho
This week is the two-year anniversary of my estimated due date for my angel baby. In a different world, I would be ordering a birthday cake and planning for my second daughter's official entry into the terrible twos.
The most interesting thing to me about the anniversary this year is that I forgot it. It was only when I logged into an online support group discussion board I'm a member of and saw my name listed under the "Special Days to Remember" thread that the significance of the date hit me.
Maybe part of the reason I forgot is that my healthier pregnancies ended no where near their due dates. Big A was supposed to make her debut a week before Halloween but stubbornly refused to come out until after Election Day. And Little A arrived in a whole different calendar year than her EDD. For me, due dates have not held true.
And of course, there are no real memories to associate with this. Unlike my angel day, which is burned into memory, the EDD was a guess of an assumption that never came to pass. It is ephermeal as a spiderweb made out of clouds and cricket songs. It casts no shadow. It floats away.
In years past I would have felt guilty for not holding on to my phantom baby bundle tightly on this day. So much of new grief involves fighting the disappearance of your child. We wait for these key anniversaries not only to get past the pain they bring, but to experience the jolt. Sometimes the white-hot memory is less disconcerting than the feeling of the fire going out.
But once you cross the line between forgetting and forgot, it's different. I have no guilt. It's ok. I'm glad to be set free in certain ways. To no longer be waiting, and to finally let the baby be lost.
This week is the two-year anniversary of my estimated due date for my angel baby. In a different world, I would be ordering a birthday cake and planning for my second daughter's official entry into the terrible twos.
The most interesting thing to me about the anniversary this year is that I forgot it. It was only when I logged into an online support group discussion board I'm a member of and saw my name listed under the "Special Days to Remember" thread that the significance of the date hit me.
Maybe part of the reason I forgot is that my healthier pregnancies ended no where near their due dates. Big A was supposed to make her debut a week before Halloween but stubbornly refused to come out until after Election Day. And Little A arrived in a whole different calendar year than her EDD. For me, due dates have not held true.
And of course, there are no real memories to associate with this. Unlike my angel day, which is burned into memory, the EDD was a guess of an assumption that never came to pass. It is ephermeal as a spiderweb made out of clouds and cricket songs. It casts no shadow. It floats away.
In years past I would have felt guilty for not holding on to my phantom baby bundle tightly on this day. So much of new grief involves fighting the disappearance of your child. We wait for these key anniversaries not only to get past the pain they bring, but to experience the jolt. Sometimes the white-hot memory is less disconcerting than the feeling of the fire going out.
But once you cross the line between forgetting and forgot, it's different. I have no guilt. It's ok. I'm glad to be set free in certain ways. To no longer be waiting, and to finally let the baby be lost.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Whoever You Are, I Wanna Thank You
The Wabi family vacation equation is that time spent away will be less than or equal to the amount of days spent packing and unpacking. [ :) ≦ %$*#!! ] So even though we only camped last Thursday through Sunday, this Thursday I am still sitting in a house crammed full of sleeping bags, flash lights, coolers, and deflated swim floats. Curiously, I am also still wiping the red clay dirt of the campground out of the children's nooks and crannies. I'm starting to wonder if that stuff is the base for tattoo ink.
And so it was not particularly surprising that being off my routine this week, I forgot to put the garbage cans out to the curb last night. It is a little more surprising and pathetic that I failed to notice all the cans of the neighbors out at the curb this morning when DH wrestled the kids into the car to take them to daycare. I only realized it was garbage day when the truck was roaring away directly outside my house. I ran downstairs through the garage in a halfhearted attempt to chase after the driver, knowing that once they get past your house, all you can really do is cram extra garbage into your over-full can for yet another week. Garbage trucks do not go back in Oakland. Since the hot summer weather has finally arrived here, I knew that it was going to be a smelly and possibly maggoty endeavor for the next week. Yech.
But the cans were not in their corral behind the row of cannas. At first I thought, "Wuh ... who would steal cans full of garbage?" Then the garbage man came around the side of the truck, carrying one large empty can in each of his huge hands.
"I got it," he said congenially.
"You got my cans out of the corral?" I stared at him like he was an alien.
"Sure," he said, shrugging.
So I'm having a Geggy Tah morning, folks. Whoever you are, I wanna thank you, garbage man. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
And so it was not particularly surprising that being off my routine this week, I forgot to put the garbage cans out to the curb last night. It is a little more surprising and pathetic that I failed to notice all the cans of the neighbors out at the curb this morning when DH wrestled the kids into the car to take them to daycare. I only realized it was garbage day when the truck was roaring away directly outside my house. I ran downstairs through the garage in a halfhearted attempt to chase after the driver, knowing that once they get past your house, all you can really do is cram extra garbage into your over-full can for yet another week. Garbage trucks do not go back in Oakland. Since the hot summer weather has finally arrived here, I knew that it was going to be a smelly and possibly maggoty endeavor for the next week. Yech.
But the cans were not in their corral behind the row of cannas. At first I thought, "Wuh ... who would steal cans full of garbage?" Then the garbage man came around the side of the truck, carrying one large empty can in each of his huge hands.
"I got it," he said congenially.
"You got my cans out of the corral?" I stared at him like he was an alien.
"Sure," he said, shrugging.
So I'm having a Geggy Tah morning, folks. Whoever you are, I wanna thank you, garbage man. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
World Through the Lens of a Four Year Old
When my camera refused to turn on, I counted back and realized it was eight years old. Digital cameras age quicker than big dogs, so that's not a bad run. Time for a zippy new model. I laid the old one to rest in the junk drawer and when Big A found it a few months later, there seemed no harm in letting her play with it. Surprisingly, it revved back to life when she hit the power button. So now it is Big A's camera (at least until she drops it on the sidewalk and kills it permanently).
Big A is not interested in learning how to frame a shot or work the flash. She just clicks away excitedly at whatever she likes. I find her photographs fascinating. Somehow they remind me of the smallness of her body in a way that the bigness of her personality sometimes makes me forget.
Do you remember the time when the world of your hallway and bedroom and pillows and sidewalk and street seemed so wide open and so huge?
Big A is not interested in learning how to frame a shot or work the flash. She just clicks away excitedly at whatever she likes. I find her photographs fascinating. Somehow they remind me of the smallness of her body in a way that the bigness of her personality sometimes makes me forget.
Do you remember the time when the world of your hallway and bedroom and pillows and sidewalk and street seemed so wide open and so huge?
Friday, May 30, 2008
Decision or Retreat?
I haven't posted nearly as much this year as I did last, and the main reason for that is illness. Most families I know complain this has been an especially harsh cold/flu season. Even so, we've been harder hit than most in 2008. I rang in the New Year sitting next to Little A's hospital bed and that's been the theme of life ever since. January had two hospitalizations for Little A, and since then things have been less life threatening, yet serious enough to interrupt daily life. Pneumonia, the common cold, lingering fevers, conjuntivitis, earaches, asthma, etc. have kept us visiting the pediatrician's office well over a dozen times in five months. Both kids were Xrayed to assess pneumonias, both have needed antibiotics. Additionally, Little A has semi-regular pulminologist appointments and has been on at least seven different respiratory treatments as we search for the right drug combination to keep her asthma at bay.
There has been another casualty to all this illness: my job. I was working part time after my maternity leave ended when Little A was six months old. As a freelance editor, I'm pretty flexible with the schedule. I felt like I'd finally hit the right work/life balance after struggling with it for years in those first few months after I returned to work last year. But then we became the House of Plague.
At first the problem was mostly financial: daycare is expensive, and I pay for unscheduled absences due to sickness even when I am not billing anyone due to caring for sick kids. And while the occasional fever or case of pink eye isn't serious, it does keep the kids out of daycare or school for a day. With the run of luck we've had, those days rapidly added up. For many months, I was actually running in the red, financially speaking.
But I was still keeping up with the actual work load and enjoyed it, so I wanted to soldier on and get past what I kept thinking of as a bad patch. It would go back to normal soon, I kept telling myself. But one messed-up month turned into two, then three and four, five and six, etc. Here we are at the end of May and the kids are both home sick with chest colds and fevers for the umpteenth time. And I have to conclude that this -- being home sick with the girls, juggling doctor appointments and weighing treatment options -- this has truly become more of a job than my regular job is. Long ago I slipped into constant catch-up mode with work. It is no longer very enjoyable, because I just feel so frantic and under the gun all the time. And feeling that way only makes concentrating during those rare days where I actually get a full work day in all the more difficult.
So of course I've been mulling over quitting my job. But it seemed impossible at first. We needed my salary to pay for Big A's kindergarten tuition starting in September. DH's work was looking like it might dry up in the next few months, too. How would we get by?
But a long-term freelance project I've had is concluding, and I suddenly found myself with the prospect of having no work at all this summer. This is the first time I've been completely unemployed in years. Even when I was on maternity leave, I had work lined up for afterwards. I don't know if the folks I usually work with are just at a point in their projects where they aren't hiring for new jobs, or if people have decided they don't like my chaotic schedule due to the sick children. (Maybe a little bit of both?)
At any rate, I was half-heartedly updating my resume and trying to scrounge up job leads for the summer when DH suddenly got a raise that would (if I cut our household budget carefully) pay for that pesky kindergarten tuition I was worried about. So, that's it. I can wrap up current projects and just ... stop. Quit.
Part of me is incredibly relieved that by sometime in July, I'll be out of work. I'm burned out from the struggle to keep up. I'm also more out of shape physically than I've been in years, and looking about five years older than I did five months ago. I need to take better care of myself, and suspect that until things stabilize more on the health front with Little A, my job, which sucks up most time not spent with the kids, makes that impossible. We are lucky to be able to eke it out for awhile without my salary, and so I should probably take advantage of that.
And yet another part of me is scared shitless to give up work, even if only for six months or a year. I'm afraid my life is retracting and that I won't be able to easily get back into the swing of balancing a career and family again later on. I feel like I've failed in numerous, hazy ways. I also don't know if staying home with the kids full time will drive me stark raving mad, either. What if I'm not wired to be a SAHM? Will I feel stifled or isolated?
I'm veering off the road I know and plowing into uncharted territories. Here's hoping it all works out.
There has been another casualty to all this illness: my job. I was working part time after my maternity leave ended when Little A was six months old. As a freelance editor, I'm pretty flexible with the schedule. I felt like I'd finally hit the right work/life balance after struggling with it for years in those first few months after I returned to work last year. But then we became the House of Plague.
At first the problem was mostly financial: daycare is expensive, and I pay for unscheduled absences due to sickness even when I am not billing anyone due to caring for sick kids. And while the occasional fever or case of pink eye isn't serious, it does keep the kids out of daycare or school for a day. With the run of luck we've had, those days rapidly added up. For many months, I was actually running in the red, financially speaking.
But I was still keeping up with the actual work load and enjoyed it, so I wanted to soldier on and get past what I kept thinking of as a bad patch. It would go back to normal soon, I kept telling myself. But one messed-up month turned into two, then three and four, five and six, etc. Here we are at the end of May and the kids are both home sick with chest colds and fevers for the umpteenth time. And I have to conclude that this -- being home sick with the girls, juggling doctor appointments and weighing treatment options -- this has truly become more of a job than my regular job is. Long ago I slipped into constant catch-up mode with work. It is no longer very enjoyable, because I just feel so frantic and under the gun all the time. And feeling that way only makes concentrating during those rare days where I actually get a full work day in all the more difficult.
So of course I've been mulling over quitting my job. But it seemed impossible at first. We needed my salary to pay for Big A's kindergarten tuition starting in September. DH's work was looking like it might dry up in the next few months, too. How would we get by?
But a long-term freelance project I've had is concluding, and I suddenly found myself with the prospect of having no work at all this summer. This is the first time I've been completely unemployed in years. Even when I was on maternity leave, I had work lined up for afterwards. I don't know if the folks I usually work with are just at a point in their projects where they aren't hiring for new jobs, or if people have decided they don't like my chaotic schedule due to the sick children. (Maybe a little bit of both?)
At any rate, I was half-heartedly updating my resume and trying to scrounge up job leads for the summer when DH suddenly got a raise that would (if I cut our household budget carefully) pay for that pesky kindergarten tuition I was worried about. So, that's it. I can wrap up current projects and just ... stop. Quit.
Part of me is incredibly relieved that by sometime in July, I'll be out of work. I'm burned out from the struggle to keep up. I'm also more out of shape physically than I've been in years, and looking about five years older than I did five months ago. I need to take better care of myself, and suspect that until things stabilize more on the health front with Little A, my job, which sucks up most time not spent with the kids, makes that impossible. We are lucky to be able to eke it out for awhile without my salary, and so I should probably take advantage of that.
And yet another part of me is scared shitless to give up work, even if only for six months or a year. I'm afraid my life is retracting and that I won't be able to easily get back into the swing of balancing a career and family again later on. I feel like I've failed in numerous, hazy ways. I also don't know if staying home with the kids full time will drive me stark raving mad, either. What if I'm not wired to be a SAHM? Will I feel stifled or isolated?
I'm veering off the road I know and plowing into uncharted territories. Here's hoping it all works out.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
6 X 6
The lovely ladies over at Glow in the Woods have posted 6 X 6, a self-serve meme for deadbaby-related questions and topics. I thought I'd opt in:
1) In a word, how would you characterize yourself before your loss, and then after?
Before: Lucky. After: Cracked.
2) How do you feel around pregnant women?
It's been over two years since my loss. I feel pretty ok around pregnant ladies most of the time now. Having living children undeniably helps me on that front because they are the band aids that cover my old wounds when I go out in public. Socially speaking, they buffer me from a lot of questions and interactions that previously hurt. For instance, nobody asks a lady who is nearing age forty who has two small kids if she plans to have more children. People assume the baby making went ok for you, and that you are now done by design rather than because of medical mishaps. And most of the time, these assumptions are exactly what I prefer. It's very relaxing, to pass as "normal" and not wear my gored heart on my sleeve. That feeling of naked emotional exposure that comes with early grief was terribly disconcerting for me. I'm glad it's mostly gone.
Occasionally a naive, lucky pregnant lady yammers on a little too long about hating stretch marks or about how their 27-page birth plan is going to ensure a drug-free birth, and at those times I still feel exasperated at the inequities of the universe. But the anger I used to feel for the actual women has gone away. I think it's because I know it could all turn on a dime for them. It did for me.
3) How do you answer the 'how many children' question?
I only tell about the kids who were born alive in 95 percent of the situations where that question gets asked. That's no disrespect to others who count differently. It's just how I happen to do it.
4) How did you explain what happened to your lost baby to your living children?
Big A had just turned two when we found out her in-utero sibling had Trisomy 18. Big A was young enough to not understand the reason for Mommy's growing belly, and we hadn't told her she was going to be a big sister before I terminated the pregnancy. We continued avoiding all dead baby discussions with her in the immediate aftermath.
Some might say this was good for Big A because of X reasons, while others might counter that it was bad for her for Y reasons. But why I chose that path had nothing to do with Big A, pathetic as that may sound. I just wasn't up for explaining how babies were made in the same conversation where I explained death to a 25 month old girl. Big A's age allowed me to punt, and so I did.
That said, I've always viewed Big A not knowing about her lost sister as a temporary situation. Some day both Big A and Little A will know about their other sister. I think I'll tell them about her existence first, and then when the girls are older and more sophisticated, I can explain about the termination part.
5) What would another pregnancy mean to you, and how would you get through it—or are you done with babymaking?
Little A is my "happy ending" -- a pregnancy after the loss that resulted in a live baby. Unfortunately her pregnancy was a complicated nightmare that ended with my uterus being so damaged from the rupture that I can't ever carry another child. I'm lucky to be alive now, and Little A is even luckier on that front.
If I'd known in advance how dangerous another pregnancy would be, I never would have attempted it. My parenting of Big A suffered greatly when I was so ill during pregnancy, and the idea that I also nearly orphaned the girl just because I had the urge to have more kids seems utterly ridiculous.
Yet I got away with it -- somehow, I got my Little A even though it all went so wrong. That contradiction is the duct tape that holds my life together today, actually. Because I don't feel like the world owed me this child. I don't think she is any sort of cosmic payback for what came before. But she's here, she's awesome, and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of being her mommy for as many days as I am lucky enough to have her. I own my relationship to the world in a different way because of her existence.
6) Imagine being able to step back in time and whisper into the ear of your past self the day after your baby died. What would you say?
I would tell myself, "Today is Christmas Eve. By this day next year, there will be a healthy baby in the bassinet by your bed. This era of waiting and wondering and worrying about these particular issues will be over. You will hang a lantern in your window to remember your dead, and hang two stockings on the mantle to celebrate the living."
But I do not think I would have believed myself. I probably would have thought I was one big, fat, equivocating jerk!
1) In a word, how would you characterize yourself before your loss, and then after?
Before: Lucky. After: Cracked.
2) How do you feel around pregnant women?
It's been over two years since my loss. I feel pretty ok around pregnant ladies most of the time now. Having living children undeniably helps me on that front because they are the band aids that cover my old wounds when I go out in public. Socially speaking, they buffer me from a lot of questions and interactions that previously hurt. For instance, nobody asks a lady who is nearing age forty who has two small kids if she plans to have more children. People assume the baby making went ok for you, and that you are now done by design rather than because of medical mishaps. And most of the time, these assumptions are exactly what I prefer. It's very relaxing, to pass as "normal" and not wear my gored heart on my sleeve. That feeling of naked emotional exposure that comes with early grief was terribly disconcerting for me. I'm glad it's mostly gone.
Occasionally a naive, lucky pregnant lady yammers on a little too long about hating stretch marks or about how their 27-page birth plan is going to ensure a drug-free birth, and at those times I still feel exasperated at the inequities of the universe. But the anger I used to feel for the actual women has gone away. I think it's because I know it could all turn on a dime for them. It did for me.
3) How do you answer the 'how many children' question?
I only tell about the kids who were born alive in 95 percent of the situations where that question gets asked. That's no disrespect to others who count differently. It's just how I happen to do it.
4) How did you explain what happened to your lost baby to your living children?
Big A had just turned two when we found out her in-utero sibling had Trisomy 18. Big A was young enough to not understand the reason for Mommy's growing belly, and we hadn't told her she was going to be a big sister before I terminated the pregnancy. We continued avoiding all dead baby discussions with her in the immediate aftermath.
Some might say this was good for Big A because of X reasons, while others might counter that it was bad for her for Y reasons. But why I chose that path had nothing to do with Big A, pathetic as that may sound. I just wasn't up for explaining how babies were made in the same conversation where I explained death to a 25 month old girl. Big A's age allowed me to punt, and so I did.
That said, I've always viewed Big A not knowing about her lost sister as a temporary situation. Some day both Big A and Little A will know about their other sister. I think I'll tell them about her existence first, and then when the girls are older and more sophisticated, I can explain about the termination part.
5) What would another pregnancy mean to you, and how would you get through it—or are you done with babymaking?
Little A is my "happy ending" -- a pregnancy after the loss that resulted in a live baby. Unfortunately her pregnancy was a complicated nightmare that ended with my uterus being so damaged from the rupture that I can't ever carry another child. I'm lucky to be alive now, and Little A is even luckier on that front.
If I'd known in advance how dangerous another pregnancy would be, I never would have attempted it. My parenting of Big A suffered greatly when I was so ill during pregnancy, and the idea that I also nearly orphaned the girl just because I had the urge to have more kids seems utterly ridiculous.
Yet I got away with it -- somehow, I got my Little A even though it all went so wrong. That contradiction is the duct tape that holds my life together today, actually. Because I don't feel like the world owed me this child. I don't think she is any sort of cosmic payback for what came before. But she's here, she's awesome, and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of being her mommy for as many days as I am lucky enough to have her. I own my relationship to the world in a different way because of her existence.
6) Imagine being able to step back in time and whisper into the ear of your past self the day after your baby died. What would you say?
I would tell myself, "Today is Christmas Eve. By this day next year, there will be a healthy baby in the bassinet by your bed. This era of waiting and wondering and worrying about these particular issues will be over. You will hang a lantern in your window to remember your dead, and hang two stockings on the mantle to celebrate the living."
But I do not think I would have believed myself. I probably would have thought I was one big, fat, equivocating jerk!
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