Now

I am 6 months pregnant.  Today.  With the next baby.  Not with Jack.  The baby that comes after Jack.

In this 6 months I have felt all those emotions that one has come to expect from a 'BLM'.   Mostly, I am happy and in love with this new life growing, in love with Jack, in love with their father.  I can't tell you of all that now, of the trying to conceive this baby, of the story of the day we found out, of the roller-coaster of the last 6 months.  I only came here to write about today, now.

Last night, dreaming.
I and my Love, building a house.
A tower in fact.  Of scaffolding enveloping the building that will be.  Me, sitting high up there on a new wooden floor open on all sides to the wide blue sky with the green forested hills surrounding us.

Fresh and New, and awaiting us to finish the walls, to move in, to inhabit this home we're building.
Early morning, dawn.  My husband asleep on the makeshift bed, hidden in a nest of blankets.  People arrive, friends, construction workers.  They want to look at my husband.  Some make their way over to the bed and stand there looking down at him.  I try to stop them because that's weird, isn't it?!  People looking at my sleeping Love?

Now, I am floating outside the building, up high.  In my hands I hold my Love's hands.  Hands that are silky soft.  The feel of these hands in mine fills me with indescribable love and warmth and softness.  Hands that belong in mine.
Then one of the hands slips out of my grasp.  I can not see it, it just falls away.  To where I do not know.
I reach and search for it.  It feels wrong, so wrong, for this hand to not be in mine.
I feel the other hand slipping away also.
Then I am falling.  Falling away from the builidng, just falling through air, nothing to hold onto without those soft silky hands of love to grasp.

I awake sad.  I don't know why.
Then I remember the dream.  I know it's not my husband in that dream.  It's Jack, my little bear.
It's the world we thought we would be living in, the house we built for Jack to live in with us.  The tower of high expectations and big dreams that we thought would come true.
It's Jack asleep dead, in his hospital bassinet as the Dr's and nurses and family troop in to look over him.

It's Jack's impossibly perfect and soft baby hands in mine.
Even though he was dead his hand grasped my finger, like a living baby would.
It's the last moment with him.  My little bears hand slipping away from mine as I lay him in his coffin.

I don't want this sadness to come.  I try to fight it off.  I drive to the local pool, determined to do the swim exercise my physio ordered me to do today.  The pool carpark is full of school buses, the pool full of small squealing children.  I sit in my car and stare.  I can't go in there, not today.  I drive home.

I give in, crawl into the spare bed where Jack's teddy bear sits.  Clasp the teddy bear to my chest and let it come.  The Missing.  The Tears.  These days are rare now, but when they come they are no less intense.
Teddy bear clutched to aching and already milky bosom, sitting on top of my swollen fecund belly that the new little boy is sleeping in.
It feels like parenting two spirit babies that aren't quite here; one gone, one yet to fully arrive, but both always so completely present in my life.

That is today, now.  Crying and loving both my little babies and aching to hold either of them.