The last three nights I have dreamt of Jackson, the themes becoming more morbid.   A variation of the usual theme: he is missing; he is a corpse; my baby is just a dismembered head that I'm carrying around; I am breast feeding a corpse.  You know- the usual dreams one has of their still-born baby. (or, oh no, is it just me?!)

In last nights dream, a dear friend of mine was babysitting Jack.  Except I don't remember asking her to, she'd just taken him, and I thought he was meant to be returned the next day.  Next day, he was still not home.  I sent her many texts saying "please bring Jack home",  "Where are you???",  "Jack needs special care, you must bring him home immediately", my friend did not responsd which ratcheted up my panic.  I knew in the dream that Jack was actually dead.  I worried that she wouldn't know how to handle him properly, that she may have left him laying somewhere too warm and he would decompose too quickly, that she would be letting too many people hold him, moving him around too much so that he would be leaking blood from his nose.   

I believe this latest dream series has been triggered by thoughts like "I only ever held my son as a corpse, all that rocking and holding and cooing, I was parenting a corpse".

All day I have been sitting with the grief.   It is not jagged and raw grief full of horror; it is soft and accepting.  It feels gentle, the holding of this grief is like carefully and gently cradling a baby while a little sigh escapes my lips.  This gentleness allowing me to look at the thoughts that used to scare me, that used to make me turn away with shame.

I realised, or more honestly, I am able to acknowledge now that often when I looked at photo's of Jack that my initial gut reaction was anger.  Anger directed at that little body in the photo.   How could I be angry at my son?  It felt so wrong and unfair and unloving of me, and I hated myself for those feelings.  Yes, there is the usual anger that comes with grief, but this was anger at my son, or at those photo's.  I have come to see that what I'm angry with is not my son as such, but the bruised and cold little body that seemingly replaced that wonderful womb baby.  Hear me out..I think this gentleness of my grief of today is because I'm identifying my son as the warm, alive and kicking bundle of joy that was growing inside me, not the bruised and bloody lifeless body that came after, and I'm not judging myself for that.   That bundle of warm kicks that I spent days humming to and falling in love with was traumatically replaced with a cold body with skin maceration that horrified me, and a constantly bleeding nose.

It's about the fact that the only time I had to hold my son in my arms, was when he was a corpse.  A bloody and bruised dead body.  I have not been comfortable with referring to my son as..a corpse.  It feels somehow like I am not being a loving doting mother to bring this up, to speak of him this way.  But I don't think there's anything fluffy or pretty or nice about having a stillborn baby.  We try to pretty it up sometimes.  Pretty memorials, sparkly butterflies and fluffy teddybears, we speak of  the love, speak of our baby's playing in heaven (even if we don't believe in heaven).   But then there is the cold, hard, brutal reality:  I birthed a child who had been dead inside of me for at least 12 hours (possibly 24 hours): 12 hours of labour where contractions squeezed his body every 2 minutes, a body without a blood supply to keep the skin..alive, and his 9pound body squeezed down a tight muscular birth canal.

 He was not 'born sleeping'; he was born dead.

Actual sleeping babies smell nice.  My son did not smell of milk.  He smelt like...a corpse.  We had him with us for 30 hours.  From 7am when he was born, till midday the next day, a few hours sleep snatched overnight the only time he wasn't in our arms.  By the next day, he smelt like a corpse.  I've spent my adult life living on farms, in the wilds sometimes.  I've smelt plenty of dead animals, freshly dead, old putrid dead; it's not an unfamiliar smell.  My baby smelt like the freshly dead.  A sickly sweet smell, slightly reminiscent of the rotting mulch of a forest floor, the heady smell of thick rainforest; an incense of leaf, animal, manure and moisture in a state of breakdown, of change.  A smell that I tried not to think about too much at the time, but a smell that now haunts and triggers me.

The common baby-loss narrative seems to use language to protect us..(who- the parents?  The rest of the world?) from the very ugly truth;  'Stillborn', 'born sleeping', 'angels', 'grew their wings', 'baby loss'.
But, the secret words that come to me, words that I have felt unable to share for fear of others thinking of me as a less-than-loving mother, words that make me feel like I don't love my child, are nothing like these gentle descriptions..

I am haunted by the smell of my baby, and taunted by a sentence that comes to me unbidden in unguarded moments:   '..and then death slithered from between my legs', which is the prettied up poetic version of the true gut-wrenching sentence that wacks me over the head; "..a dead thing slithered from my vagina".

I once read a BLM's  descriptive phrase- "vagina o' death", and I felt a recognition and a liberation that a mother was able to say that out loud.  

Because when I remember the sensation of birthing my son, that's the words that come to me; 'vagina o' death'.   

That final push, after the crowning, while the midwives told me to wait as they tried to unravel his compressed 4x nuchal cords, while they tried to pull out his arm that was up by his head so he didn't tear me too much..but I didn't know what they were doing; I was just poised there on the precipice waiting and feeling everything and terrified and crying out 'tell me what to do!";  then them yelling 'PUSH'...and I felt that great slithering, falling from me, expulsed.  

A dead thing slithering from me.   

I don't know what it feels like to birth a living baby- I don't know if you feel your baby wriggle, an independent being with movements of their own.  All I know is what I felt, that final letting go, releasing into the world the reality that had stayed hidden inside me while I laboured, consumed by contractions and pushing, no time to face death, until that moment- that slithering from me sensation which told me, now, now you will have to hold your dead son and you will not be able to hope that it is all some huge mistake..

With the acceptance of thinking that I was parenting a corpse, has come the counter-balancing understanding that the son I remember with love, is the son that lived inside me.  I don't have to look at the images of my son's bruised body and only feel love- I can feel anger and horror, because that's not really my son- that is his body- my son was the warm being kicking and growing inside me. My son is the little bundle that I would rub through my belly, the squirming reactive baby.

Somewhere in the last year I came across a study into what effect holding still-born babies had on mothers.  I really wish I could find this study and quote it properly, in case, you know, my mind has completely made this up.  The study I'm thinking of is different to the study that showed a slight increase of Ptsd symptoms in subsequent pregnancies.  The study I'm referring to showed that mothers who held their dead babies had an increase in ptsd sypmtoms in the immediate year or so after, compared to mothers who didn't hold their babies.   But at 6 years out the mums-who-did-hold had Mental Health scores that were remarkably better than mothers who didn't.  

I wonder if the studies continue to 10 years and beyond for ptsd scores.