It's been awhile

I'm laying next to my sleeping 14 month old boy.  Listening to his deep breaths, hoping he'll sleep for longer, just a little longer..

I'm wiping tears for his big brother, my first born, the baby I didnt bring home.  Jack.
I'm aching in all kinds of ways.  I have been so tired, so sleep deprived, so afraid of letting any big emotions out, that I think I've not let myself feel grief for awhile.

But today, today I'm screaming silently into the void.
That void where I have an almost 4 year old boy.  The missing, a long tunnel...I feel like if I could just stretch my arms far enough, run fast enough, scream loud enough, that I could reach him.  Clasp him to me with the fierceness of my longing.

It's been building for the last couple of weeks.  Perhaps it's the night weaning- I have more space to feel.  I spent a couple weeks sleeping in the spare bed, away from S, while his father took care of him at night.  On my last night alone, I woke to the sensation of  my pillow being pushed down, like another head had layed down next to mine.  I awoke startled, with the clear impression that someone was there.

I thought of my father.  My father died of cancer, earlier this year.  I wonder if I've grieved at all for that loss.
 The stress, the unrelenting nature of being bedside in his last weeks whilst also parenting my 9 month old: walking the hospital corridors wearing my child bouncing him to sleep and ducking out of the way of re-sus teams running the hallway; breastfeeding with no discretion in  hospital cafe, foyer, palliative care waiting room, bed-side while listening to teams of Dr's, holding my father up with one arm as he tried to leave his bed disorientated, and the dealing with all the family crazy that occurs in that time, the arranging his funeral, dealing with the estate, all the while holding holding.

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.

Living on the flip side.

I attended a 'Meduimship Seminar' last weekend.  

You know, just like John Edward's 'Crossing Over' shows.  Yep, a dude in a suit talking to dead people.

This is a difficult post to write.  I'm confronted by all my beliefs, and the Unbelieving  that happened when grief took over my life.  I did not think that Jack went on to exist as a spiritual energy in some other world, I did not believe in an Afterlife.  

I thought dead was dead, done and gone.  I was ok with that, with there being no afterlife, no continuation.  I just wasn't ok with the fact that my son had died.   

Maybe it's that I hated the thought of him having a consciousness elsewhere, instead of being here with me, living this life.  I didn't want a baby that was 'with me in spirit'- I wanted his presence known through shitty nappies and cracked nipples not through ethereal questionable 'signs'. 

 I know many people will question the truth of what I experienced.   I know of parents that have sought out Mediums or Psychics in their attempts to communicate with their dead babies, to be reassured that their babies are ok.  I could not relate.  I never thought I would seek out a medium.  I was faintly horrified at the idea.  I've only seen one psychic before, one that a friend dragged me along to see with her, and I didn't think she came up with anything real.

I didn't intentionally start out looking for a medium- I was just looking for a meditation class.  Following a string of web links I ended up on Anthony Grzelka's web page.  I'd never heard of him, but turns out he's a well known Australian Medium.  As I read about him I learnt how renowned he is, that he is invited by the police to help in cases and I found myself interested.  He seemed 'down to earth' and unpretentious- not sprouting a whole lot of glitter laden airy-fairy Unicorn flap.  He seemed to have a focus and understanding of grief.  Then I saw that he was doing a 'mediumship seminar' that very weekend in my city.  

It's been a long time since I've done anything spontaneous.  But before my critical-cynical-sceptical thinking kicked in, I realised that I wanted to go.  Just to see, you know?   The Bloke didn't want to go but was keen for me to attend, and even offered to pay for a friend of mine to go with me.  So tickets were bought, and I spent the next few days in a state of strange excitement.

On Anthony's webpage he notes that before a reading you can do some things in order to assist the connection with loved ones.  Things like bringing a photo of them (but not for him to see), creating energy by talking about them, and asking them to come and talk to him.  

So for the first time, I found myself trying to talk to Jack.  It's not been something I was comfortable with before, or it hurt too much.  But I spent the day before the seminar in Jack's room.  I read through all the labour notes, autopsy report, and the calendar I kept when I was pregnant.  I looked through his photo albums, held his hand prints.  I curled up on the little bed surrounded by all his teddies, and held his ashes and cried.  I sat in the rocking chair, cuddling his one special bear that he was given in hospital, and spoke out loud to him.  I told him about Anthony, and that if Jack wanted to, he could speak to him.  I even watched some you-tube clips of Anthony and found myself crying and saying to Jack, 'See, that man there, he's nice, don't be afraid to go see him, you're allowed to if you want to.'

I also spent some time thinking about my Grandmother, who died while I was in-utero.  

There have been some remarkable co-incidences involving her in my life.  One of them is that I have ended up living just around the corner from the house she was born in, which is now the local historical society.  I visited there often while I was pregnant and took my father there for his first time, just three days before Jack was born.  I took Grandma's photo to the seminar as well, and silently asked her to show up.  I had this little chant going in my head 'Grandma, Jack, Grandma, Jack, Grandma, Jack.' 
I actually found all of that process very comforting. 

The day of the seminar I was a bundle of nerves and turned up early to be amongst the first in line.  

There were 150 hopeful people there.  As Anthony said at the beginning.  "The reason I'm pacing now, is that I'm trying to get used to you all.  There's 150 people staring at me intently, all thinking 'C'mon Mum!'.  That's a lotta expectation on a guy!"

Anthony noted that if you hear him saying things to someone else, but it's ringing all your bells, to put your hand up, as sometimes he's just in the wrong part of the room.  

After about an hour I heard a string of things that the people he was talking to weren't 'getting', but I certainly was.  

Three things- military medals that some-one was trying to find, a particular and uncommon name (which is my DH's grandfather's name who said medals belong to, and that we have been trying to sort out recently) and had someone lost a small child or baby?  Upon my friends insistance I stuck my hand up and Anthony made his way over and asked me about the medals.  I told him that we were recently given military medals for that name, but that someone elses medals were amongst them and we can't find who they belong to.  He said, ok, this is a spirit saying 'me too', but it's not it.   He went back to the other people and did some more connections for them.  

When he finished he made his way over to me.

Everything happened very quickly and intensely at this point.    

I had been determined to answer questions straight-faced, to give nothing away.  

That plan fell apart pretty quickly as things were validated in  quick succession and I experienced intense emotions that had to be released in a scrumpled up face of tears.  It wasn't recorded unfortunately, so I'm relying on my friend's scribbled notes and my shocked memory.  
AG is obviously, the Medium.  When I say 'confers', I mean he's taking some time to listen to a spirit. 

AG: "Who died of the stroke, something to do with the brain?" 

Me: "Aneurism, my grandmother.." 

AG: "Yes.  Is that your father's side?"

Me: "Yes"

AG: confers.."You're having problems with your father"

I can't speak.

AG: confers more with Grandma:  "..a relationship breakdown"

Me: (I squeak this out) "Estranged"

AG: "she says you've done all you can, you've kept trying, there's only so much you can do.   At some point you have to move on with your  life".

 I break down in tears at this point (I told you the straight face didn't last long).  I won't go into the background, but I haven't been on speaking terms with my father for 5 months now, after many years of attempts to heal some major crap and it has caused me much grief.   This is the validation I needed to know that AG is actually talking to my Grandma.
 AG gives me a moment, then it rolls on.

AG: "Who is David and Danny?"

Me: "David is my partner and Danny is my Aunty"  
My Aunty passed a few years ago.  I later remember that David is also my Great-Uncle, and my Aunty and I used to take turns wearing his military medals on Anzac Day.  So that's my grandma, her brother, and her daughter.  Turns out, as you'll see later, that 'David' was a big name for the day.

AG: "Who is J?  I'm seeing a big J"
  He keeps drawing J in the air.  I don't know what he's talking about for a moment.  Time stops.  

  He keeps saying and drawing J, until my shock clears and time speeds up again.

Me:  "My son....Jackson..."

AG:  "Feels more like Jack."

Me:  "It's Jackson on his birth cert, but we call him Jack now."

AG nods:  "and David is Jack's father."

Me: "yes".

AG:  "Jack's passed?  Your grandmother is showing him, she's got him with her."

AG:  noting that my tears have started again he asks.."Do you want me to keep going with what I'm hearing?"
Me:  Nods determinedly.

AG:  "He must have passed very young, as he can't speak to me properly, which is what happens when babies die before they learn verbal language.  He's showing me things rather than talking."

Me: "He died in-utero."

AG: "Hmm, but it must have been very late in pregnancy?  He's very substantial, it's more like he was born, almost born."

Me "He died on his due date, when I was in early labour."  (cue Audience gasping)

AG paces and confers some more with J, saying to him "what are you trying to show me?"
 AG:  "Where was he born?"

Me:  "Hospital."

AG pacing and looking confused "But, was there, did they, was there some kind of delay?  He's waiting and waiting.."
Me (freaking losing it at this point, my face has fallen into my lap) "He died at home,  I didn't know.. then we went to hospital where I birthed him."

There is a 24 hour period where we can't pinpoint when Jack died- we heard his heartbeat one day, then  24 hours later when I was in early labour and my midwife visited me at home to see how I was, there was no heartbeat.  He may have been in distress overnight, waiting for help for many hours without me knowing.  Or, he may have been slowly deprived of oxygen for a few days, but his distress didn't show up on the doppler for that last pre-natal check.   I've since read that babies can adjust to increments of oxygen deprivation so it won't show up, but if it keeps happening they die.  The word 'delay' goes to the heart of my guilt.

AG:  "I feel him surrounded by fluid.  Did something....he couldn't breathe."

AG is holding his hands around his throat, like he's being choked.

My friend says "cord wrap", as I say "symptoms of acute asphyxiation".

Jack was born with a 4 x nuchal compressed cord wrap.  

His father says that when Jack came out, his neck looked like one of the African women who wear many gold hoops around their neck.  The cord was so tight and compressed his neck looked elongated and the midwife couldn't get her finger under the cord to slip it over his head- she had to roll him down the bed to unravel the cord. 

Autopsy showed 'intrathoracic petechiae in keeping with an acute asphyxiation mode of death'.

AG:  "Is David, or someone, disconnected? Not communicating with him or..?"
I shake my head as David is a good communicator, and I don't have time to connect that he could be referring to me and my refusal to connect with anything spiritual in the last 2 years.

 Now, things get strange.  The woman sitting right next to me, whom I have never met until I sat next to her today, puts her hand up and says "I really have to say something now".  I'll refer to her as 'N'.

N:  "My husband's name is also David, and we also had a still-born baby".

Just before my reading began I saw that the notebook N had in her lap had the logo of the school I live opposite from.

Me to N:  "Do you work at X college" N: "Yes."
Me to AG:  "..and I live opposite where she works."   

AG:  "Wow, ok, this is just...miraculous."

AG to N: "Well, this little girl that's here must be yours.  Your baby was a girl?"
N:  "Yes"

Both N and I are seriously crying now.  I won't repeat the validating connections that came through for her .  It gets quite confusing because AG had to figure out what messages are for whom, and some are for both of us.
After relating some details to N about their funeral he turns to me and says..

AG:  "But you.. (referring to funeral arrangements) .there was some indecision.  You couldn't..didn't know..some issue..but you made the right decisions."

Me:  "We waited quite awhile for the funeral.  I couldn't do it.  I wanted to wait.   We had a friend make the coffin".

AG:  "He wants you to know that you  made the right decision.  He was surprised by how many people were there for a baby.  He felt a massive outpouring of love."

Me:  "We were surpised by how many people were there!  People we weren't expecting and hadn't seen in years had come from all over!"

The comments after the funeral were full of  'the love for him really shone through', 'the most loving ceremony I've ever been to' etc.   At one point we did a 'web of love' meditation.  With Jack's coffin in the middle, his father and I touching it, and then everyone spanning out from us reaching out to touch the person next to them, so that everyone was connected through to Jack.  We focussed on sending love through to Jack to send him on his way.  I have a photo of this moment that I love looking at, and I know now that Jack felt all that love.

Some less intense, but intensely cute messages also came through.
AG:  "Did you get a tattoo for Jack?"
Me:  "We've designed one, but haven't known if it's the right thing to do."
AG:  "He's giving me a thumbs up, he thinks it's cool."

AG:  "He's showing me his hands, holding his hands up alot, his palms, seems to be significant."
Me:  "I have his handprints all over the place, and a big photo of his hand holding my thumb on the mantlepiece, with a candle I light, it's my favourite photo.  It's the last thing of him I held, his hand."

AG:  "He's showing me listening to music in the car.  My music in the car."

Me:  "Um..?  I often break down in tears when in the car listening to music by myself?  I've also started singing out loud and head-banging to music in the car.  I'm that weird chick you see at the lights shouting lyrics and waving their arms about..the only time I feel his 'presence' sometimes, is when I'm in the car..like I expect him to be in the backseat."

AG:  "He's with you then and likes the music."
  Of course I'm weirded out when I get in the car the next day, and the song playing is The Police "Every Breathe you take, I'll be watching you.."   I also think it's funny that my son likes bad 80's power rock ballads, which is what I generally find myself rocking out to in the car, where no-one can hear me..

Anthony finished the reading by telling me that Jack is showing him the many people who are with him.  He also tells N that Jack had brought her daughter through, that it was no mistake we were sitting together.  I think "well of course; where else would another woman whose husband's name is the same as mine- a name that came up in the reading, and has a stillborn baby, and lives around the corner from me sit?"
He thanks us and offers sincere empathy for our loss, saying "I'm so sorry, I know it's the worst thing that can happen to a parent".  His wife brings us flowers.
He moves on to the next reading, and we sit, shocked, with both of us taking turns crying again and handing each other tissues.  After the seminar we swap numbers and I'm looking forward to catching up with N later in the week.

It's been a lot to process.  I do not share this experience to convince anyone else of an Afterlife.  I questioned if I should share this so publicly- but hey, I was in a room with 150 strangers staring at me as I cried, and all gasping at the accuracy of what Anthony said for me, so why not share it with other parents who may also be struggling with the same issues.   It feels very precious and personal to me.  I don't need anyone to question me, to give me their scepticism- I've lived as a disbelieving sceptic and I know the arguments.  I understand that unless you were in that room experiencing what I and others heard and felt, that you may question the validity.  That's ok.  I just know what I know, after a long struggle.

I have cried a small river in the last few days.  I have also felt energised and uplifted, freed from a certain bleakness.  Then I crash back down to the tears.  I have found myself cuddling Jack's teddy bear, carrying it around on my hip, sleeping with it.  I feel closer to Jack, and also so sorry that I shut him out for so long.  I feel the need to parent him.  To speak softly, to caress and soothe.  During one very emotional hour of despair and tears I 'imagined' my grandmother and aunty watching me.  I 'imagined' them saying 'poor girl. Jack, mummy needs a cuddle'.  I felt an intense heat flow through my back and fill me with warmth.

I will always grieve the loss of my son, but I will also know he's forever close to me.
Never truly lost, he is surrounded by love. 

Web of Love Meditation for Jack's farewell.

After being on the wait list for over a month, Carly Marie drew this butterfly for Jack the day after the seminar. 

Holy Exploding Cathedrals Batman! It's an Atheist!

I've been grappling with 'belief' for a lot of my life.  I've never been religious, but always had a deep sense of the sacredness of life.  I've considered myself  'spiritual', but now, I don't even know what that means. I've always been a questioner.     
  
Instead my thoughts seems to have surfaced in this dream, which just rocked me awake:

I am looking out across my city's skyline.  On the foreshore of the river are three cathedrals. 
  I hear, and feel deep in my gut, a series of booming explosions.  Resonant of a heavy church bell, and also of a cracking in the earth that pulses up from deep, an earthquake.  But what it is, is a bomb.  I see the first church pulsate outwards, shift.  Then I zoom in, and enter the church.  The church is full of people, all dead.  It is gruesome.  Blood is splattered upon the walls, merging with the religious artwork.  The people, dead, still, are all knelt in prayer.   More people, like me, have entered the church since the explosion, clergy people amongst them.  The blood has formed words, below the words that were already writ, prayers.  The blood spells 'Don't move'.   So everyone else that is entering the church, post explosion, kneels with the dead, does not move, prays blindly.  I see a flitter in the corner of my eye, running up the stairs.  I think it is a terrorist.  No-one is questioning what has happened, or seeking survivors, just blindly obeying the bloody writing on the wall.  I want to shout 'watch out, this is a terrorist attack, why are you obeying what they have written in the blood of the people they have killed?!'.   I leave.

I enter the second church.  Less people are dead.  People are walking around.  There is a table of artifacts, from other cultures or religions.  Time pieces, some kind of calender.  They are dusty and have not been kept in working condition.  I sense frustration, people are still praying, not looking after the living.  I do not feel safe, feel something treacherous lurking, just out of sight again that no-one is addressing.  I move on to the third church.

This church, I don't see dead people.  But there is a sense of hurt, of tragedy.  I see the same altar of artefacts.  I see an archaic timepiece/calender thing again.  It's kinda steam-punk.  It tells the ages through the stars, the time in the universe or something.  I seem to have some knowledge of it.  (As you do in these dreams). I check to see that it is up to date, and it is.  A woman approaches, she seems to be the Priestess, the head of this church.  She sees me checking this esoteric-steam-punk- universal-astronomy-clock and says "Yes, we keep this working, otherwise what is the point of it?"   I ask about the explosion.  She says "It's not so bad".  I say  "It was in the first church, that's a house full of dead worshippers now".

That's it, I wake up.  My head hurts, my eyes sting.  I don't know what this means.  I add it the pile of stuff to analyse, my pondering of atheism.  If you're the dream analyst type feel free to have a crack at an interpretation.

 I'm Australian, our Prime Minister is a self-confessed Atheist.  It's not such a big deal here as it may be in other parts of the world.  We don't (yet) have a government run by any fanatical right wing religion.  We can say publicly that we're non-believers without vilification.

In the on-line babyloss world I hear a lot of mama's talking about God, about their babies in heaven.   Sometimes I don't know if people are truly religious, or if it's just the expected way to talk.  I don't mind other's religion, I'm not here to challenge anyone's belief.  I don't find comfort thinking my baby is in God's hand in heaven, that I will join my baby one day, but if it brings someone else comfort then I'm all for it.  If it's your deep heart felt belief, I'm not here to challenge it.  We're free to believe in what we choose, aren't we?  Just don't insist that I believe it too.

I saw an image on a baby-loss site, of some old man's hand reaching out from the clouds, in his hand he held a little baby.  I find that image creepy.  'Kidnapper! Pedophile!' is what that image screamed at me. 

While I respect other's beliefs, all the God talk still jars me sometimes.  It's a little lonely out there in baby-loss world when you don't talk about God, when you don't believe.   I'm confronted all the time by other baby-loss mums talk of God and heaven.  Early in the grief, I was on a baby-loss forum, and said something about being a 'non-believer', that I found no comfort in it, that I didn't think my son's death was part of 'God's plan', and didn't like it when other people said that to me.  Bunch of mums chose to say that regardless of my own belief, they knew my son was in heaven and they would pray for me, quoted a bunch of biblical verses, did a bit of evangelism on me.  Meh, really, it shat me at the time, I felt unsupported and offended.

It's not just the outright evangelising that I feel isolated by.  It's the casual presumption that I think my baby is in heaven.  The presumption that I believe in God.   It's not a given that we are all Christian.  It's not a given that if I'm not Christian, then surely I must be..some other religion?  Buddhist at least then?
 Faith?  Hm, what is that?   Faith in the human ability to traverse the tragedy of life, based on a moral compass that does not rely upon a supernatural deity to guide me in my thoughts and actions?   That in fact, humans are capable of having a moral compass without believing in a Deity, without a deity to tell them that 'hey there people! murder is wrong! (and you can't be trusted just to be good, so I shall threaten you with a burning hell damnation to keep you good).   

The Mr and I, early on, wanted a t-shirt that said:
 "My son died.  It was God's plan.  God must be an evil motherfucker".

I've never been 'angry' at God since my son died.  I did not feel punished by 'God',  I did not turn my back on 'God'.  I just don't believe in an Interventionist God, so not really anyone to be angry at.
I just had the average my-baby-died-the-world-is-a-shitty-place rage.  No-one to blame it on, no-one to take the pain away.   Just my good old resilient self to salve the pain.
 I've been heard to say 'nature's a bitch'.  My son dieing was what happens in nature.  Umbilical Cord Accidents.  Nature is chaos.  You can't control it.  Shit happens.
You deal, or you don't. 

My comfort comes in knowing that my son is part of the Big Cycle.  

The Big Universe. 

 Re-absorbed into the evolutionary chain, his dust becoming the air, the soil, the water, elemental, entering the life cyle again.   

In his blood was me, in my blood is him.  

In our blood is an atom of water from a dinosaur.   Right there is my comfort, my sense of the big picture.  

I don't need a God or Heaven.   I have it all here on earth.

I don't want my son to be in 'heavens nursery', waiting for me, when there is no good reason why he shouldn't be here with me.  

He's just dead now.  If he has a soul, it's free, to do whatever souls do..no waiting around for me to die.   

Maybe,  just free to join the life-cycle again.  It won't be as Jackson Bear anymore though; Jack is no more.  It hurts, it stretches into the distance, this acceptance: Jack is no more.

I find it a little selfish thinking the notion that he should be in heaven waiting for me.  

Sure, maybe on the surface it doesn't seem as comforting this not believing that I will see him again, but that's what I believe.  That's the enormity of his death, why death of a child can be so devastating.   

Is that what religion is for?  A human construct to make us feel better about the finality of death?  Except that bit about Jesus I suppose.

All this questioning of my beliefs in the last few months.  I've delved beyond my initial 'don't believe in an Interventionist Supernatural Deity who created the universe and keeps a watch on us, listen to prayers, punishing and forgiving as He sees fit' to 

'well then, do I believe in a soul?' 

 I used to.  Used to believe in re-incarnation.  That we went beyond our bodies.  Soul everlasting etcetera.  I don't know now.  Jury is still out on the soul question.  I don't know that my dream addresses any of that.  It's just left me pondering in this dawn light.

I've linked below to a very special song video that I'd like to share.  It is the song we were going to play at Jack's funeral.  'Into Your Arms', by Nick Cave.  It speaks to my and my partner's beliefs, and is a song that we listened to constantly in the weeks after Jack died.  It still brings me undone, when I need to be undone, to sit with the grief, and with the love.   The video is simple, beautiful and haunting with it's portrayal of the faces of loss, and I hope it gives something to you.
Here it is: Into My Arms

Right Where I am 2012: One Year 8 Months 3 Days.

I'm new to the blogging world, a late bloomer if you will.  It's taken me well over a year to blog about the grief, to write anything anywhere about it actually.   I've lurked in the blogoshpere of stillbirth blogs for a while, and came across last years Right Where I Am  project .  I'm trying to be brave and participate this year.   Writing this has been confronting, making me look at where I am right now, because right now is not somewhere that I'm proud of, or somewhere that I'm particularly comfortable with sharing.  I'm no light on the hill saying 'it gets better'.. The grief is harder on me today than it was 4 months ago.. Still, writing this has made me tell myself that wherever I am is ok for me, so thankyou Angie for getting this project together.

Today I weeded and pruned a garden bed, in the early winter sunshine.  A garden that has lain neglected for 1 year 8 months and 3 days.  It was the garden I planted when I was pregnant with Jack.

I spent my pregnancy on my hands and knees planting my favourite blue flowers in a border around the bed.  Masses of lobelia, and between the roses, brilliant blue cornflowers.  Blue for my baby boy, growing fast inside me.  I loved that my due date was in spring, and knew this garden I was planting would be in bloom for when he arrived in the sunshine time.

We never brought Jack home to that garden.  He died and was born on his due date, spring equinox.  The blue flowers blossomed right on time too.  We picked the flowers and put them in the coffin with Jack, our little bird nestled amongst the flowers.  Bittersweet.

That garden has taunted me all through my grief.  I ignored it.  Let the weeds grow back, let the roses grow wild, dead rose heads turning to rose hips.  It nagged at me, I sneered at it.  I didn't want to know.   It hurt to look at it.  It hurt to think about growing flowers when my baby is dead.

Finally today, that sunshine demanding that I spend some time in it before the depths of winter arrive, I gave in.  I didn't go out there with a rush of energy, enthusiasm, or with the old delight that I used to find in gardening.  It was just something that had to be done.  So I did.  That's where I'm at with the grief- I'm able to do the things that need to be done now, but it often starts out empty, I force myself.  I cut those roses right back.  I pulled up weeds, the sun warmed me, and I found myself thinking about new flowers I'd like to plant.  I tried not to see Jack, my 20 month old ghost of a boy digging through the soil looking for worms. 

Because I see him sometimes now.  Not really see him, not all Ghost Whisperer style.  Not even a presence, I don't see signs; white feathers and rainbows are just from my white budgie and uh, sunshine refracting through rain.   I just have these moments now, where I get up from the couch and walk to the kitchen and think 'where is he?'.   I walk in through the back door, and think 'where is he?'    He's always just around the corner.  Just out of reach.  Toddling down the hallway, I can almost see him, almost hear him.  Those moments, those absurd thoughts of  'where is he, what's he doing, he should be drawing on the wall with crayons and why isn't the house toddler proofed' set up a quiver in me.  Like a ping in my gut, that reverberates through my body turning it into jelly, till it reaches my eyeballs and stings them.  All in a millisecond.  So I'll be walking to the bin, put something in it, and bang, tears.  Just for a second.  I'll be mid-conversation with someone and ping, it's there.  No-one knows it's happening but me.  I'm wondering where my boy is, and why he isn't playing with my friends little boy, and the world keeps turning.  I can picture Jack, what he'd be doing at the age of 20 months, more clearly than I could picture him at 6 months, so in a way, it hurts more.  The rawness of his death has been taken over by the sadness that he is just not here, living.

The grief isn't jagged like it used to be.  I get through days without crying.  It's been ages since I smashed any crockery.  I laugh.  I crack (bad) jokes, and have whole conversations that don't include Jack.  I don't have urges to tell the lady at the shop that my baby died.  Much.  Ok, so I wanted to tell the new receptionist at our Property Manager's office the other day, but I didn't.

 But lately the grief has turned dark.  There's a new edge to it.  It's come on the heels of acceptance.  A total misery.  I don't cry all night or day, but I cry in a moment and it fills me with a despair that didn't used to be there.  There's no new rainbow baby.  There's no other older child.  I have a depressive disorder, or is it p.t.s.d?   Whatever, I'll let the phsychologist ponder the label while I live it.  It's episodic, this epsiode I'm in right now triggered by major family stress.  So here it is, the grief walking along with the black dog.  What a party pair.  It's hard.  I have not found peace.  My Grief is not linear.  It's not 20 months down the track, and here are the increments of my acceptance, the stages of grief ticked off, not going back to that one, moving down some linear road to peace.  No. 

Sometimes it's raw again, with even more hopelessness, because he's still dead, will always be dead, and the road stretching out in front of me is empty without him.

 Acceptance is not what I waxed lyrical about at Jack's funeral, because I was determined to only feel love, to let my love for my son be the dominant sense at the funeral, not tears and anger and bitterness, because I didn't want the world to see me rocking on my knees like a crazy woman, because I was gonna be GOOD at grief.
I was gonna kick griefs ass with my zen-like acceptance.  But now acceptance is kicking my ass.

 Oh yeah, acceptance is a bitch.  Acceptance is the knowing that he is never ever going to be here.  That the grief and loss always will be instead.   That if I have another child, Jack will still be dead, and I will still grieve for him.  A new baby will have a different mother to the one that Jack would've had.  A new baby, his younger sibling, will have a mother that is a little bit broken and always wondering where her first born is.






    

Real Woman.

"You're not a real woman till you've pushed a dead baby out of your vagina."

I have no idea, and the Mr can't recall, if I actually managed to say that out loud post-birth.  But I tried to gurgle it out, slipping into a laughing/crying wail as I thought it, like a silent hilarious delirious scream.

I was sucking on gas as my torn vagina was being stitched up, while looking at my dead baby being held by his father, skin to skin.  I could see my baby's skin torn around his neck and cheek, where his umbilical cord had choked the life from him.  My baby's mouth was open in a silent wail, pushed up against his fathers chest, as his father wailed out loud for him.  They were both smeared with my blood.

With that sight in front of me, after 12 hours of labour during which I knew the whole time my baby had died, and now with a crowd of Dr's and nurses between my stirrupped legs dealing with a post-partum hemorrhage and a torn perineum, what was I thinking of?
A woman that pissed me off years ago.  A woman who turned to me once and said "You're not a real woman till you've given birth to a baby".

Forget feminism and women getting out of the kitchen and into the boardroom or wherever they damn well pleased, yada yada.  Forget that she said this to me when I was in my 30's with no children, just a horrible miscarriage up my sleeve.  Forget that she said it to be mean because she knew I didn't like her current boyfriend. 
Forget that I drove home bawling my eyes out thinking of how I almost died when I miscarried just the year before, but apparently, I was still not a woman.  Not a real woman anyway.  None of the achievements of my life counted.  I was faking womanhood.

I just think it was a highly dumb ass (ok, and hurtful) thing for her to say.
Pushing babies out of your vagina, (or having a c-section for that matter), makes you a mother.  Not a woman.
Most women I know became women before they became mothers. 

But oh, that internal scream, possibly gargled out loud statement; please, let me scream it here-
"YOU'RE NOT A REAL WOMAN TILL YOU'VE PUSHED A DEAD BABY OUT OF YOUR VAGINA".  Those words, words that my macabre and sarcastic humour found inappropriately hilarious, words that I channelled rage into, became a tiny thread of sanity for me. Or at least a distraction, something else to think about during that nightmarish reality distorting half hour of stitching and hemorrhaging and seeing my dead baby in my true love's arms.

So thanks..uh..woman, for giving me something to rage about in that moment.  It helped get me through.  I've never seen you since I birthed my son.  Maybe if I do one day, I'll take great delight in telling you all about it.  I probably won't bother though, because really, who can bother saying these things out loud.  But thanks.

Normal Abnormal

Normal Abnormal.  That's how my physiotherapist described me today.  Well, my bio-mechanic issues anyway.  As I lay on the massage table, face squished into that little hole, staring at the carpet, while she pressed down into my tender and wretched sacral illiac joint and tried to bounce it loose.  While I grunted and tried not to drool and tried to hack the pain.  "Hunh wah?" was all I managed to say.  It's real hard to carry on an intelligent conversation in that position, yet she's always rabbitting on with profound informative tidbits that I want to latch onto and ask more about.  And I always say "Hunhwahooh?"  You know, between the trying not to drool, the pain of my skeleton being manipulated, the protesting bruised muscles, the maintenance of dignity;  I think I make that 'hunwooshoo' sound pretty damn intelligent and engaged.  Well read even.  Did I mention that my butt is usually exposed too?  Yet I persist.  I want to know more about this embryology business that she's relating to my dermatitis and irritable bowel syndrome.  But mostly; what's this Normal Abnormal category she's labelled me with?  Luckily, over the year of regular visits my wonderful physio has learnt that 'whahugah' means 'tell me more' and 'yes, I read about that in a research abstract.'

Normal Abnormal, my physio tells me, is how she describes a case like mine where what is going on with my pelvis and, well, most of my bits, is abnormal for the normal human structure, but has become normal for me.  Or something.  I've grown abnormally, so that it is now normal.  I had an osteopath tell me something similar years ago when treating me for whiplash from a car accident.  He believed I had a pre-existing neck injury from early childhood that had caused me to grow twisted.  Oh, how I chuckled.  Me, grown twisted?  Ha, yes, of course.  Just like I chuckled/drooled/grunted/hunwahseesed today when the physio said I was a Normal Abnormal.

Post-dead-baby, I think a lot of things become Normal, when for everyone outside, out there in the non-dead-baby world, it's straight up Abnormal.

I see a sleeping baby and think 'dead baby, looks like a dead baby'.  All sleeping babies now look like dead babies to me.  Sleeping babies..freak..me..out.  I want to wake them up and make them cry.. Normal?  Abnormal?

My bloke walks into the bathroom of the resort we went to post-funeral, and I had left a tiny puddle of water on the floor from climbing out of the pool.  I race back to the room, heart leaping out of my chest, absolutely convinced that he has slipped over on that puddle and is now laying dead on the cold marble floor, head split open, pool of blood.  All this takes place in my mind in a millisecond in extreme gory detail.  I am convinced.  He's fine of course, but I can't let him out of my sight.  I need to know where he is in the house at all times.  He could die at any moment.  This carries on for weeks. It still happens 18 months later.  It becomes normal.

Waking up and wondering why I am still alive, wishing I wasn't, wondering how the hell I will survive another day, wondering why I should get up- there is no baby, no other living children to get up and feed.  Every day.  Hell at first.  Now it's just how I wake up.  The pre-conscious thoughts that drift me into consciousness.  Then I make tea.  It's a normal start of the day for me.

It's normal to have abnormal reactions to an abnormal, or traumatic event.   It would be abnormal to be carrying on normally.  Sometimes I try to be normal.  To carry on normally, to visit friends with babies and go to social events and not talk about my dead baby; to not say to the inevitable question of  'do you have children'-  'yes I have children, one dead son'; just to say 'no', just to pretend for a moment that I'm normal and not make the person's skin crawl with uncomfortableness.   But those expeditions into normalcy, normally end with an abnormally large crying fit.  Which I guess is pretty normal for a grieving mother.

It's just been bouncing around my head all day.  Normal Abnormal.  Like I've found a term for me as I am now.  My new Normal.  It's abnormal, but it's me, and it's what I have to live with.   Perhaps, just as my physio has been teaching me core stabilising and strengthening exercises to help keep my pelvis in place, I need to find a practise that can keep my Core, my sense of self in place, in this new abnormal world I inhabit.