Mothering grief

It is hard to talk about my live child around dead baby mamas, and it is hard to talk about my dead baby around live baby mamas. It is so complicated, the emotions around having one living daughter and one dead one.

I have been feeling so alone these days, so different from everyone and everything. I feel like a Vulcan in the last stages of life. (Hello, nerds, time to shine.) I have reached out to some babylost women who parent living children to talk about what it is like to grieve and parent, and my emails seems to never get mentioned again. Lost amidst my other whining, I suppose.

Catherine wrote a beautiful post about her twins. And it resonated with me a great deal. I have read women talk about how much easier this journey is when you have a living child. I won't presume to know the other way, or pretend that my experience is harder. The prize for that competition is not pleasant. I have absolutely no desire to compare griefs. It all hurts. It is all complicated and sad and achingly tough. That is all I do know. I will talk, however, about my experience grieving and parenting.

In my experience, I do appreciate my living daughter in a way I didn't before. I look at her some days and think, "How did you make it here? How is it that you lived so easily?" I look around at a lot of children and think that. All they have to do is eat and breath, poop and giggle. But I appreciate that, yes, I get to hold a child every day, but not the child who died. I mother a child that looks exactly like the child who died, and is passing milestones my dead baby will never pass. I take care of a beautiful girl, yes, who has no idea that I am so sad I want to turn into a thousand pieces of ash, let the wind carry me in all the directions closer to oblivion. I have a daughter that needs me to get up and get her milk whether I am sobbing or not. And sometimes she points at me and laughs when I am crying. She laughs and says, "Mooooommmmmmy," as though I am doing some ridiculously silly thing. She just wants to play fairy princess, or baby dolls. Watching your child play baby doll after your daughter was stillborn is remarkably difficult.

When I read first time mothers who have lost babies question whether or not they are a mother, my heart breaks. And I want to explain to them how I know they are mothers. I know they are because I know what it is like to mother a living child and a dead one. Don't mistake it. I actively mother both Beatrice and Lucy. That love I have for Lucy is as present and deep as if she were here. And I ache that she is not here. That feeling of panic I have when I see Beatrice about to get a scraped knee, that is the feeling I carry with me everyday. That feeling of not being able to catch a falling child. That pain, I absolutely know, is something only a mother feels.

Maybe what others might not understand is how present Lucy is in our home. She demands, like a living child. “Pay attention to me, Mommy. Pay attention. Watch me not grow up.” And I sometimes spend the day in bed sobbing, giving in to her demands. The Lucy-sized hole in our lives sucks our smiles into it some days. When I ask Beatrice who Lucy is, her reply remains, “Lucy is Mommy crying.” Her sister is my grief.

Today, I am exhausted.