kindness

My friend Jess  wrote these lines over three years ago:


I’ve spent a year re-telling the same sad story. It’s so short too. How many ways can I write ‘My baby died, I never knew her, I wish I did.'

I think about those lines often, when I write, when I talk of her...Lucia died. I never knew her, I wish I did. It's true, you know. That is what all my work boils down to. Jess has a gift for cutting through the bullshit and writing the line that sums it all up.

I never knew her, I wish I did. So instead of not-knowing her and wishing I did, I write and paint and do other yummy, delicious stuff. I wear raven feathers and dance barefoot in my studio to pagan music. I meditate in suffering until it fills my chest. I breathe it in like unwelcome water. Searing pain and dull ache and the feeling of death. My lungs burst, a flood pocked with drowned moths and buzzards erupts from the hole left behind. I light wooden-wicked candles that smell of campfires and crackle like a language. I eat hundreds of life savers, but I am still lost.

There are people all over the world whose babies just died. They feel completely alone, like I did. I remember. I remember thinking, "I will always be that woman whose baby died." Because it used to matter to me which woman I was. I told a friend that, and she thought I was lying. Who would think that? It sounds like literary license, but it isn't. It is what went through my head. This will define me. I knew that this thing that just happened--being told my baby was dead in me--rewired my pathway. That I would have to tell this story over and over again just to make sense of it.


I bemoaned and wailed and called and keened and prayed and clucked and sighed. And then I conjured a community. They were conjuring me. Leaning over cauldrons. Adding eye of nice and aroma of clever. Chanting, "Let these people be babylost and not overly angel-y and maybe a little punk rock too. Let them be artists and magicians and conjurers. Buddhists and pagans and Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians. And full of compassion and patience and support."

There is a community of people whose babies died. Sometimes I write here for them. Sometimes I write here for me. But I am here. Over and over again. I have asked myself if it is healthy. If it is okay. If it is weird.  I asked psychics too and tarot readers and mediums and women that talk to angels. I asked them if it is healthy, but in me I know that I have to give back to this community who saved my life. I know that I need to keep writing here, painting here, talking about grief and daughter-death. I counted on someone three years out, ten years out, seven years out to tell me that what I was feeling was normal and that I was going to be okay. Not back to the way it was before, but something better even. Those people showed me a way to integrate this storyline into my life. Jess happened to write about this today at Glow. Even though I was writing a little bit about it too over here a quarter of the world away. I take writing about Lucia and telling this sad story seriously, because my story has changed. I can say with confidence and love that my daughter Lucia gave me the most amazing gifts. She taught me so many truths, so much beauty, so much compassion. She taught me about my weaknesses and strengths, and I have allowed her death to become the way to connect to thousands of people, because at first, I only allowed her death to cut me off from everyone.

We all grieve. If we don't now, we will one day. If you can find nothing to like about someone, nothing to feel empathetic about, use that as a starting point to grow compassion. Every person has lost someone. Every person will lose someone. Every person will be someone's grief.

Last Friday was the MISS Foundation's International Kindness Day project. For it, I offered to paint mizuko jizo for parents, friends, family, anyone who wanted one. I meant to do it in silence, but after an hour and a half of sitting through the massive tonglen session, then one painting group, it felt too isolating. Plus, the kids popped in, and I talked without thinking. I am human, and besides, it is enough to do thirty-five paintings. I wanted to listen to my music, the rain, sing, dance. I need to also be kind to me. Here is a video I made after Kindness Day. It explains about me and why I do this.

kindness day

The yoga was amazing in its ordinariness. I didn't cry. I didn't fall on the floor in a puddle, or talk about Lucia incessantly, or lash out in anger at all of yoginis. I just took the effin' class and it was lovely. It was very gentle, so I also felt fit enough for it, which was a bonus. The instructor never said the word grief, which felt odd for a class with the title Grief and Healing through Yoga, but you know, I liked what she had to say. She said we live in the negative programming of the story line. If we can be curious and feel it, it will change the grief. I liked that. It reminded me of that discussion on self-compassion I heard a few months ago.

She said the word heal and I didn't cringe or grow hot with anger. Heal. It feels okay to sit cross-legged with the concept of healing. I went back to another class on Wednesday. I didn't want to break the momentum and it was lovely. Grateful to this community for the love and support, and just the general acceptance at anything that troubles us. You are just there abiding, supporting, encouraging. Thank you.

Tomorrow is the MISS Foundation's Kindness Project Day. The idea of the day is to do something kind for someone in your baby's name as a way to carry his or her legacy. (Go visit the website to print out cards to leave at the scene of the kindness, and also RSVP on Facebook, if you can. These kindnesses are beautiful to read about.) Last year, I painted 4" x 6" mizuko jizo altar paintings for anyone who asked for one.

I think I did about 28. I am doing that again this year. You can comment on this post to request one, or on my Etsy shop's FB page (you can just become a fan), or on my personal FB page, or just shoot me an email at uberangie(at)gmail(dot)com. Just make sure you say something like, "I would like a painting in honor of my baby."* If you leave the baby's name, I am doing a crystal blessing grid in honor of all the babies I am painting for this year. Kicking off the day with a ritual in honor of grieving parents, then a tonglen meditation during which I will paint in silent meditation. I am also cutting off all email, phone and technology for the day. I am going to try to do a day of silent meditation and fasting this year. This is an exercise I have never tried and I am going to be in my house, so with babies and husband, it might not succeed. I think it is important, though. I will be painting on Saturday, July 28, in case you are trying to reach me, or trying to play Draw Something.

I have an idea of how many paintings I can handle, so I might close down these comments if it is too overwhelming. But for now, you can request one. You also need to send me your address, obviously, if I do not have it already.

Here is the listing  for a mizuko jizo painting from my Etsy site. I usually sell them for $25/painting, so I am including shipping, and a description of mizuko jizo. The first time I wrote about mizuko jizo was 2009 when I began painting them as part of my daily remembrance ritual for Lucia. It now comes up on the third listing for mizuko jizo on Google. That is amazing to me. I connected with so many women and men with my mizuko kuyo. It is humbling and amazing. I know that this life I live now, surrounded by meditation and healing is the life I was meant to live. Beyond giving me a place to direct my grief energy, painting mizuko jizo has become a way for me to honor all the suffering in this community and all the babies I now mourn.

I will probably write a bunch of overwrought posts about my experience, but until then, much love to you all. xo

*If you have one, you can still request another. Just know that.

grief yoga

I don't think you understand how much you can hate your body until a child dies inside of it. I thought I understood self-loathing and cellulite-focused anger in my twenties. Then she died, and everything I thought I had come to accept about this body was destroyed with her. Burned in a fire. I raise my four arms like Kali. One holds my daughter. One holds my body. One holds peace. One holds forgiveness, and I turn them into the flames. I didn't get the ashes from that one. I didn't want them. They were a dark energy.


It is strange for me, someone once so aware of her body. I used to love these knotty old muscles, lifting babies over my head, challenging my body further than I thought possible, throwing softballs, and tumbling across my college green after a few drinks. I felt betrayed by this mass of cells. I held nothing like who I felt inside anymore. The betrayal kept coming. She died. I developed thyroid disease. It caused depression and anxiety. I had a hard pregnancy with Thor. Addiction. Miscarriage. Biopsies. Aches. Pains. Extra weight that won't come off with liquid diets and bike riding, and I stopped thinking of myself as strong, but someone diseased and frumpy. The goddess of destruction, my cells like little blue goddesses, tongues extended. "You are old, Mama," they taunt. "You are nothing like the athlete, mother, friends, lover, citizen, yogi you once thought. You are just black energy."


My last yoga class was a prenatal class with Lucia in my belly. I felt amazing doing yoga pregnant. And it was our time--Lulu and Mama's time. I talked to her as I rode my bike there. I said prayers to her. I saw her--gypsy curls of black and barefeet. She runs like a fairy through the backyard and wears long skirts and I tuck her into my arm and kiss her. This is what I saw when I stretched and meditated and lied in shavasana. I felt grounded and earthy. I felt beautiful. Truly beautiful. I was about to lose all of that, and had no idea. I would have grasped onto the grass, dug my toes into the soil and sprouted roots. I would have kept swaying, back and forth, in the wind. My grief might have sat less in anger and more in forgiveness if I stayed with yoga. If I could have been more of something that ineffable spiritual quality that I wanted yoga to be. But I couldn't.

I had bought it all. The balance and love and surrounded by golden light. I bought the yoga environment and the teachers acting like gurus and mentors and people interested in my pregnancy and baby. I believed they had a piece of wisdom that I wanted. And then she died, and the teacher and my prenatal massage therapist said nothing. No sorries. No condolences. And then I confronted them, they said what everyone else said, "I didn't know what to say. I wanted to give you the space to grieve." It was like seeing the man behind in the curtain in Oz.

Why, these are just normal people!

It seemed so impossible. I felt so angry against this hypocritical institution of yoga. One that spoke in words that sounded like spirituality and acceptance, but couldn't face the possibility that babies died, and that mine died.  And that love and wholeness I felt about yoga died with her. I resented yoga and all those lithe bodies that stretched and bowed in namaste. I read once that namaste means "I honor the sacred in you." Death was in me. I felt dishonored by that silence, as though no one was bowing to me anymore. Death is the most sacred of acts. We all do it. We don't know where or when. We don't know how, but we will die. It connects us to all the worlds. And yet I felt shunned by yoga. It was a self-shunning. I exiled myself out of the new age community, because I couldn't see myself fitting anywhere other than a cautionary tale.

There is a local yoga studio where Beezus is taking little kid yoga now. It is lovely. It is not the same place I went to practice with Lucia, so maybe it feels different because of that. I keep thinking that I will go back to yoga. Every year I think I have come to a place of acceptance and readiness to face that first class and then it seems too much. I'm too fat, I think. Too damaged.

I am fairly positive that I will cry through my first yoga class, remembering her, honoring her and our connection there. It has been a long time since I cried. And it has been three plus years now since I practiced yoga in a studio. I have been using these two unaware people as an excuse. I have forgiven them. I have forgiven myself for reacting so judgmentally towards them. Just because you practice something beautiful, or strive for that balance, doesn't mean you achieve that in every moment of every day. And we aren't even supposed to be holy every moment of every day. We strive for grace, and forgive ourselves for not coming close to it.

Forgiveness is not something I do easily. Forgiveness has been a journey for me, not a suddenly landing. These women are just people. Young people. I might have been the first grieving mother they encountered, I don't know. Clearly, they had no idea what to say when something so foreign to their world experience happened. They meant well, I know now. They just didn't know. I'm not sure anyone quite knows how much a condolence means unless you have lost someone close. Three simple words--I am sorry. It means the world. It is an acknowledgement that she lived and I lost. I forgive myself for lashing out at them, because I did end up lashing out at both of them. It was not my best self either. I blamed them for a long time for destroying my love of yoga. I blamed them. My response was much worse than their action, I think now. But I still forgive myself for that, even as a cringe at my grief. I was Kali, goddess of destruction. I destroyed everything I cared about after she died. And it didn't bring her back.

Anyway, this yoga studio is having a workshop today and next week called Grief and Yoga, and it is a way to release grief through movement. I already paid for the class so I feel obligated to go. I want to go. I am ready to move past this. I am ready to have my body back, reclaim it from the dead. I thought maybe this would be a good way to cry through a class. To come to a place of peace with yoga. Combining the thing that took me out with the thing I once loved. Facing that fear, though, maybe that is the most important thing to do right now. My old body needs the truce. And so does my soul.

amazing grace

Having a two year old is exhausting and wonderful. It is sad to admit that I have almost no recollection of Beatrice's two. I was four months into grief when we celebrated two with sushi and pizzi. I remember delighting in her, asking her how she lived so easily. I remember cuddling with her for hours, watching movies. I remember painting with her. I remember having long conversations with her, and reading her long, intricate folktales of Inuit peoples and Mexican Indians.

I have no recollection if she was interested in using the potty. I don't remember how many words she had, or if her molars came in (they must have, they are here.) I don't know when she said "I love you" for the first time, or if she sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star as much as Thor does. I missed Lucia and appreciated Beezus with every ounce of me, but I couldn't commit either of them to memory. They were like sand. Every moment gone before it came.

Thor is severely speech delayed. I had no idea he was delayed, because I had no idea what to expect. I don't remember how many words Beezus had. I only realized because when I hung out with other two year olds, he didn't speak and they did.

He is slowly learning words, and talking. The speech therapist tells me that he is incredibly smart, above or at all his milestones, perhaps just a little lazy with his mouth movements. He'd rather say every word with a D. It is a very common speech delay for little bros. He gets so excited when his teacher is coming over, and he sits in front of her playing games with her. I hear him say Chicken perfectly. Pig. Cow. Boy. He raises his hand like he is in school, even though she is always calling on him and he is the only one answering. I like his teacher, she is kind and smiles at his little flirts and idiosyncrasies.

I feel like we are just starting summer. Guests and trips, then appointments and dentists and biopsies and food shopping and maybe we will never sit still again, wondering what to do. I think about making a schedule for us, but with what time? Every day is another appointment. Beezus keeps asking me, "Do you have my schedule yet?" She is a child run by routine. I am a mother run by routine, but I still can't construct anything schedule-y.

The yard is dry and our tomatoes seem to have some strange scorched disease. This summer has been brutal, and we spend more time inside than out right now. I hung my spider plant on the deck with my wind chimes that play the first notes of Amazing Grace. When the wind blows, it sometimes sounds like a song I once heard, and other times, divinely, I hear the beginning of Amazing Grace. Just a few notes, but like a prayer I whisper the words.

Amazing Grace. 
How sweet the sound,
 that saved a wretch like me. 
I once was lost, but now, I'm found.

I still feel lost some days. The psychic told me that someone cursed me, and I feel like that was the curse. Wandering the halls of my brain, slamming doors and blowing out candles, haunting myself, pushing my own hand up to drop the groceries I just bought. Someone tells me to lay my necklaces and crystals outside to soak up the sun and the moon energy, and they will shine brighter. Protect me more. I keep buying protection jewelry. Big golden shields to wear over my heart. Angel wings with turquoise. Black tourmaline and labradorite and clear crystals. I feel exposed and vulnerable. Drained by something.  I washed my home with protection oils while wearing all white. I walked around chanting with sage and cedar and incense and I don't feel the least bit self-conscious telling you that I am buying stones to grid my home. 


I don't even know what I believe anymore. All of those things seem ridiculous to some part of me. I have these dreams that I am battling against horned men. Their horns curl around their ears and my only defense is sending someone else in there against them. I don't even believe in the devil, and yet he appears to me. And I always win, but I don't know what the metaphor is anymore. I sit with it and seek answers from oracles and psychics and astrologers and they always tell me that my heart knows what the answer is. 


I have everything I ever dreamed. My daughter died, and I still say that. I appreciate that she was here at all, teaching me about the depths of my darkness and grief. I was a broken person, but I was not smashed. I was able to be found. I am back together. I easily remember all those days


I meditate on the blessings of these days--two year old Thor, five year old Beezus. They play together, and cling to each other, and tell me stories and bark like puppies and ask me questions about the moons and spells and sisters dying and butterflies. I love watching them draw people, and stories. I love learning about which books are their favorite, and not one moment in the day that I don't find something absolutely charming about them. I remember this time, like Beezus will too. That is the grace I walk into every morning. It is easy to imagine I am in control of something like curses and removals and my fate, but I control nothing. I never did. Clinging to that illusion is what is the curse, I think. My heart is telling me that. I must walk through each bloody hot wretched day and grid myself with their love. I am these people's mother. My job is to teach them what it is to be human. That is the sacred place of definitely-not-cursed. 

sober

I haven't had a drink in eighteen months.

Last night, someone reminded me that I had eighteen months sober. It is funny to be reminded. I wrote on TracyOC's blog that in the past, my periods of sobriety I marked off my calendar with a big black sharpie, like I was in prison. I counted days like I was dying of sober. So to be reminded tonight of how long I haven't drank tasted delicious.


It seems like yesterday that I was wondering if I had a problem with drinking while simultaneously trying to figure out how to stop drinking, (which should have been an answer to the first question) and then later, if I should write about all these shameful revelations here. Being an alcoholic is not shameful to me anymore. I protect myself in my daily life from earth people finding out about sobriety, because many many people still believe that alcoholism is a moral failing. I happen to believe it is a disease, and don't blame myself anymore than I would blame someone for their asthma. 


On a day-to-day basis, sobriety is the most important aspect of my life. More than anything. It is ironic how little I write about recovery here, considering I am constantly speaking about it, talking in front of groups of people about my drinking, writing about it in other places. Oh, it is hidden in the words, woven into my narratives constantly. But I don't frequently write about sobriety as a way of life.


Last week, I visited my mother's house and found pictures of my sister and I as children. In every picture of my dad, we played spot the beer and cigarette. It made us laugh, and then I thought about that later in the night, and it wasn't so funny. I don't remember a day of my childhood in which my father did not drink. I no longer think of his drinking as a moral issue, or act like he had much choice in the matter. It just reminded me how important it is to not drink. If I can remain sober, my children won't know what it is like to live with a drunk. That keeps me going some days.

Someone said to me that I would never have gotten sober if Lucy hadn't died. I believe that. Lucy's death was the storyline of my drinking. Before that, my father's drinking and subsequent disease was the storyline, and in between there, cheating boyfriends and work and good times and bad times and there was always a storyline that had nothing to do with me liking the feeling of having all my emotions completely obliterated.

I said a prayer today. It was the most simple, most beautiful prayer.

Help me please. Thank you.

pluto

There is no flower bush worth a grudge. Still, away for a week, I could easily call up the memory of my anger. As I pulled up to our house, war bubbled beneath the still, brackish surface of me--all tears and green muck. I was away from my husband for a week, not because of the flowers, but just because.

I am easily stirred up, prone to hurt, but I let it go today. It was easier than I thought it would be. I crawl on nature like a lifeboat. Cling to it. Attach myself to things dead by the next season even as I practice non-attachment to people. Nature reminds me of impermanence, and because of it, I attach and mourn and attach again. All the nature I coax into wilderness reminds me of somewhere else. And that is what I feel like--Of Somewhere Else. A wildling, or a wild thing, or prey of wild things. Something with w-ings.

I trust language as far as I can throw it. I hurl it across the table, and it lands where it is supposed to. No one wants anything to do with that kind of communication. And I don't understand how something loving in my head comes out as venom. Unintentional and naive as I am. Clearly, I am not Earth People. I mean your people no harm. I am of somewhere else, like I said.

I was away for a week visiting my mother and stepfather. My sister was there too. I felt otherworldly, at the same time, in my tribe. While I was there, I saw the psychic that my mother and my grandmother consulted. She is 93 and told me that the spirits think I should eat before I drive home, and that a small nasal polyp that has plagued me on and off for the last decade or so was caused by a practitioner of voodoo who visited my home. She cast the polyp just to annoy me. It is representative of all the little things that annoy me. All the little curses cast by this person. And apparently, she just likes to annoy me. I thought it was because I did cocaine in the nineties, so that seemed like a positive part of the reading. She told me to take a pine oil bath and light some brown candles. That should take care of it, she said.


When I went to buy some brown candles, an astrologer at the shop told me I am pure Plutonian. I am attracting otherworldly people and readings right now, and so he drafted my astrological chart. I sat comfortably next to a turkey feather and a statue of Kali. The astrologer looked to be about thirty, but told me he is almost fifty. He sketched out all my troublesome aspects. "Your Pluto is personalized," he said. "Mine is too. I understand how hard it is for you, but you will look as young as me when you are almost fifty."


He went on, staring deeply into my eyes. "It is difficult for you. This life, this place, the relationships. For this lifetime, you chose a path of accelerated spiritual growth. It is so accelerated; in fact, it is almost all pain, struggle, drama, and anger. Your Mars and your Aries make love and fight and make love again. You will have many rebirths, many different phases of your life with different people and places."


That is true," I tell him.


"With your Venus where it is, you are fun in bed," he winks. "But it is a struggle for you to have any emotional connection in sex. Everything is a struggle. Embrace that, and  you will be content. You should be proud of all the growth you have accomplished with all that Pluto energy. You will never quite fit in, except with your husband. Cling to that connection, don't let it sour. And that you don't fit in is okay, if you are okay with it. It is allowing that abusive voice to have power that will hurt you. You are prone to self-hatred. Remember that the voices of self-hatred will never tell you the truth."


"But those voices always know so much about me."


"They are lies. A Plutonian's journey is a cyclical journey to the underworld and back again. The dark and the light. Don't believe the self-hatred part. That was not put there by Pluto, that was put there in your childhood and it is a lie. Find a career where you embrace the dark. I think it is something with healing. You would be a gifted healer."

"Like write about grief and anger and resentment and drunkness and lose friends because of it, but keep writing?"

"Exactly. That is the perfect way to use your Plutonian nature. It is for the greater good that you embrace your darkness."

"I don't seem to have a choice."


"I must tell you this about embracing the darkness and losing friends and being who you are with your Mars and your Aries fucking all the time."


"Yes."


"No one can hurt you unless you give them permission."

I laugh. That quote is written on a small piece of paper in my wallet. I show it to him. Someone gave it to me at a meeting, I tell him. My friend gave it to me totally at random while someone else was speaking, and then he left the room.


"Nothing is at random."


Hmmmm.


"The interesting thing about Capricorn Plutonians is that they are born old souls, they work hard. They grow up too fast, but as they age, their burdens lessen. You get more childlike, more light, less burdened. It will get easier. That is what I can promise."


I burned the brown candles tonight with Frankincense while scalding myself in the pine oil bath. It felt satisfying to know that, astrologically, I am not supposed to feel at ease around earth people. It felt good to hear that I am someone who connects people even when I feel disconnected. That perhaps there is a reason that I start out from a place of love and somehow it all goes to shit and that is how it is for Plutonian people like me. Like the Plutonian tribe has the large medallion of a foot in the mouth. I meditate in the heat, sweating and breathing the deep musk of the herbs and smells of purgation and ritual. I remember the sweat lodges of Tucson and the vision quests I have been on. It smells pungent and earthy and sacred, and nothing like healing. I am okay not being healed. I refuse to become a seeker of cures.


+++


Sources.
by Adrienne Rich



II.


I refuse to become a seeker for cures. 
Everything that has ever 
helped me has come through what already 
lay stored in me. Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong 
across my heart. 
This is from where 
my strength comes, even when I miss my strength, 
even when it turns on me 
like a violent master.

to all and everything

My husband invited a rather large green bush-eating monster who despised all things wild and untamed into our yard. The beast ate our wildflower beds, and our butterfly bush. The monster snorted and huffed up in a slightly savage British accent, "All the wild things in the world make me terribly sick." He chomped the bottom first, then pulled up the gladiola. Lavender caught in its front teeth and caterpillars hung from its lips. The brute stomped through our yard muttering about radicals. He waddled off, farting and muttering about chaos and the proletariat. 

There was almost nothing left of the butterfly bush after the monster left. It was in full bloom with flowers just a few minutes before the monster came, a ton of butterflies visiting and circling. My husband stood proudly by. "Now we look like everyone else. Let us rejoice!" The bush is a weed to most people, but not to me. I see universes in its branches, her arms stretched wide beckoning all the flying creatures to come forth and live together in harmony. "Workers of the yard, UNITE!" Their signs read. Fairies and hummingbird and butterflies and moth create unions and collectives in her branches. Now it it looks like an amateur bonsai hackjob, sad and withered, forced into a subdivision of barely anything resembling bush. My wildflower garden is digesting in the belly of the brute, the leftovers put into yard sacks to sit on the curb until next Thursday. I cried, deep guttural moans, an incessant wave of mourning all day. "My nature, they killed my nature," I tell my sad story to anyone who will listen. It is unlike me to weep, but I raged and ranted, keened and screamed Mayakovsky from our front step.

An eye for an eye!

Kill me,

bury me -

I’ll dig myself out,

the knives of my teeth by stone —

no wonder!-

made sharper,

A snarling dog, under

the plank-beds of barracks I’ll crawl,

sneaking out to bite feet that smell

of sweat and of market stalls and eat the flowerbeds of writers!

I vow to replant. I give speeches in the streets.

WE ARE PAGANS!
WE VOW TO WORSHIP UNSANCTIONED GROWTH AND NATIVE TENACITY!
LET YOUR YARD GO WILD, HUMANS! LET IT BE NATURAL, STINKY AND MUSKY AND FULL OF SEX AND HEAT AND DEATH!
RISE UP WEEDS!
EMBRACE THE REVOLUTION!

I am a wild thing. My nest is gone. My sanctuary ripped out for order. The absence of those beds makes me feel misunderstood. I should be woven into a daisy chain and worn as a crown, rather than cut down with a gas-powered mower, the last bits of me grasping for earth as I am pulled out of the ground. There is nothing left for me here. Summer is oppressive and solitary. Without nature, it is empty. All my places are lost to suburban pressures. Grass is cut once a week. The neighbors wear khakis and eat Hamburger Helper. I feel weak for weeping, but suburbia is stronger than me.


I feel like I will never forgive my husband. It is stupid to be upset and sad about some plants, but I scream the Russian's words anyway and play pretend revolution, but I am just heartbroken and telling tall tales about monsters and Russian poets who cry for better working conditions for the people. The bush is gone and my flowers are gone. I screamed at the children today, because they were screaming at each other, then I wept about breaking that boundary in me. I don't have the strength to stay quiet. I am an coyote. A crow calling his friends, annoying the neighbors. No, I am a cicada whose deep hard shell is stuck to a lawn chair, broken open so delicately that it is hardly noticeable. In fact, I don't think my husband noticed I wasn't in there anymore. I almost looked alive, but I was not there. When the bush left, so did I. I will never understand flower beds and weeding and suburban ethics and I need to stop trying. 


When I am like this, I sit in church basements and drink shitty coffee and pray constantly. 

God, show me your path and grant me the strength to take it. God, help me accept. God, help me grieve. God, save me from myself. 

It is the opposite of grief season here. The wind is hot and wet, my hair sticks to my neck and I beg for a breeze. It is a prayer tucked between strength and guidance. The dog knocks the wind chime when he bounds down the stairs, and I mistake it for wind, then I stand, open armed, waiting for the shell of me to be carried to a garden full of foxglove and butterfly bushes far away from green monsters, fibs about grief, and the bourgeoisie.

Guest Post: Right where I am - 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days

Veronica sent me a beautiful email describing the birth of her first son and about what her life has been like since Alexander was stillborn February 27, 2012. She was 41 weeks and two days pregnant. So much rang true to me in her words, helped me connect with Lucia's birth, again. That is what is so beautiful about this community--someone else's story helps you grieve your own story. I was so humbled and honored to bear witness to her experience. (Kind of keeping my fingers crossed that Veronica starts her own blog.) She also included a guest post for Right Where I Am. She describes herself this way, "I'm Veronica. I turned 28 this past December while I was pregnant.  I was thrilled to be having a baby before my big 3-0.  I live in southern Ontario, Canada, and have worked meaningless, well paying jobs for the majority of my adulthood.  I own a home with my ..boyfriend, or no…partner, or ahhum… MAN who I spend my life with who I’ve been with since...forever..." 

Wherever it is, I am exactly there.  And with every day that has passed and with every day that will come, I will be right where I am.  I have often mulled over where I could be or should be, but in looking at this process, I with all my heart accept myself right where I am, all the time. 

I think about him – my son who died – every day, every second of every minute.  I feel like he exists alongside me in exactly where he is supposed to be and where he actually is – sometimes in life, and sometimes in death.  He is here, as the growing infant he was supposed to be and simultaneously he is here, always dead and only almost born alive.  Sometimes I feel him nowhere, as my missing him takes his place.  If I let it, the missing lives heavily in my heart, and throughout my day.

My emotions on a page seem microscopic in comparison to what they really are.  They are enormous and uncontainable.  I have wicked day dreams of jarring them all up, and sorting them all out, and placing them in the proper place in my life… one day I’ll label them when I figure out what they’re all called.  But instead, they whirl around me, sometimes causing havoc, and other times letting me sleep soundly.

Today, three months, three weeks and three days after he died – it doesn’t seem too heavy.  Today, it seems more a part of me than something that was done to me.  My observant self can attest that this feeling is fleeting.  But myself that sits here in front of this computer tells me it is how I feel today.  I’ve never known of someone who has the ability to take part in my every waking thought – but he does.  I didn't know someone was able to be the life behind every emotion, every smile and every tear – but he is.

We just picked up his ashes last weekend.  Horrible, I know.  Three months to pick out an infant urn.  I’d say if I had to do it again… but then I stop and hope that I won’t.  So three months to pick out my first born dead child’s urn is exactly right.

We got the full autopsy results back the week before the urn was ready.  Seemed fitting how the timing worked out.  From the outside looking in, it could seem comforting to have his remains knowing why he died.  Closure if you will.  Nah, still just shitty “to-do” aftermath.

A love note slips out of my subconscious…


My heart belongs to you.  You have it without my will.  You have me in true love with you.  I long for the time where we’re together at last, but I’ll try to enjoy this in between.  I’ll love you to my death, as I loved you to yours, and forever and ever after that.


I’ll meet you on the other side.  I promise I’ll be there, but we’ll both have to wait patiently.  I love your mid night visits in my dreams, as you rest on my chest.  I’ll see you soon my baby boy.


Love Mommy

I am light-as-a-feather… floating … floating … curling in the light wind.  I am a speck of something mixed with nothing all wrapped up in mystery and clarity for all except everyone to see.  My extensions are followed by glowing dust… I didn’t know I was so magical.  If I touch it, it will sparkle … so go on, turn the moss into emerald green.  Do anything you want.  He must be here with me now, because I could not be doing this on my own.  I didn’t posses this power before.  I thought, one day maybe I would, maybe I could, but now I truly can, and I truly am.  I had magic in my belly, all that time.  Why should I be sad?  It was only the human expectation that got let down.  But not me, not now… now, I can finally fly.

Who was that?  My spirit talking?  Or just a childlike emotion bubbling to the surface who wants out?  I don’t know.  But who ever that is, she is right where I am too.

I know how simultaneously liberating and captive losing a child can make you feel.  I walk along side both all the time.  Right where I am now is looking to have this inactive state transform.  Looking to have all of my everything finally channeled into something that means something to me, and maybe to someone else.

I am sad.  I am sad he is not here.  But everything that’s been said about the feeling getting lighter, and softer… I can concur.  I do face plant every now and again into really hard emotions, and sometimes the turnaround feels harder than it did in the early days.  But when the turnaround comes, it feels less foreign.  And staying in the turnaround feels, dare I say, normal.   It’s ok to DO things I like, and not just go through the motions.  My creative side is budding up again.  I don’t know when it was originally planted (at my conception I assume), but I haven’t seen it in bloom since long before I was even pregnant.  Even if my release these days is ignited by grief, and my will to create is steamed in losing a child, I’ll take it.  Because I love her blossom, and I haven’t seen her in a while.  And it’s been a real shitty road to get to her again, but right where I am, I’m glad to have her back.

I’ve made a promise to myself to not do the things I know are not worth my while.  When you know better, you do better, right?  I’ve always known that – but it’s time for me to start acting like it.  I know what kind of work makes me happy – so I’ll do that.  I know what kind of social life is empty and pointless, so I’m not going to take part anymore.  I know what kind of emotions are not healthy to dwell on, so I’m just going to feel from now on… no more dwelling.

I don’t look ahead these days, right where I am.  I don’t plan.  I let go of timing things in my life according to the way I’m supposed to live.  I’m not going to live recklessly!! (Even though sometimes the urge is there) But it seems exhausting to plan out what I’m going to be doing in the years to come after my baby died.  My plans got pretty turned around a few months ago, and I didn’t have a back up.  So maybe it’s better to just NOT HAVE A PLAN at all.  Today is Wednesday, in the month of June, the year is 2012, and I’ll probably have dinner later, and would like to do some more writing tomorrow, and I’d like to see D when he comes home tonight, and maybe I’ll go back to school one day, and I look forward to when I’ll be spending more time with kids when they’re at a cool interactive age telling me about what they like about school and baseball games, and man wouldn’t I love to have Alexander here while I think all these things… but right where I am right now, that’s about it – and I don’t consider any of it a plan.

I didn’t plan to become pregnant, and there I was.  I didn’t plan to have a baby boy named Alexander, and there he was.  I didn’t plan to have him die while I was 41 weeks and two days pregnant, but there it all was.  And I didn’t have the slightest plan as to how the hell I’m going to come out of all this, but here I am, right where I am at that.

summer solstice

Summer solstice passes without a mention. For I am the keeper of time, the marker of the passing seasons. I am the one starting bonfires, and lighting candles, and creating altars. I am the shaman of myself, for I am the only one in need of medicine.

Lucia is dead another half year. Another blazing hot day. I still want a fire to honor the closeness of the sun, the farness of the daughter. My family is sick of solstices and rituals and candles. We lived through her death, they seem to remind me. Let us carry on. Let us eat ice cream with whipped cream. Let us go to carnivals and parades. Let us go to the community pool with our suits and gummy bears. Let us wrap ourselves in joys instead of sitting still in grief. But I am a sentient stationary being--thinking, constantly thinking, perpetual motion thinking, about all we lost and gained and how to make it different by telling a different story.

I still miss her, though. The missing changed, but it is missing nonetheless. Last night, I carried the baby to bed, though he is no longer a baby and the bed can scarcely be called a place where we sleep.

We roll. We kick each other. We read novels and children's books about fairies and queens and big bad wolves. We dream. I met the devil in my dream last night. I called the angels to protect me. They banished him, but I woke panicked anyway.

I carried the baby and whispered, "It is summer solstice, Thor. It seems like yesterday, but it has been three and a half years since she died. Lulu died. Lulu was your sister."

"Sis." He whispered back.

We cuddled in bed and watched the extended twilight sky. The longest day passed without a notice of its length. It was night, then, and I told her story to myself. It is terribly sad, this story. It is about losing. And gaining. And reinventing. It is about sobriety and drunkenness. It is about family and grief and friends and not friends. It is about our good fortune. We are fortunate. We gained so much after her death. Those things may have come anyway, but they came this way, so we are grateful to Lucia.

I don't have a long post in me. I am worn out and sad, exhausted from the week behind me with a house guest and staring at another in front, but she died, and I feel like I have to say it again here where solstice and remembrance is welcome. Every two seasons I remember that one solstice where ravens perched outside our home. The coldness cut into our faces, scarring them into long streaks of grief. We left without our girl. Sat in a car with an empty newborn car seat. It was winter, then. The cold felt hot and oppressive. Everything did. The hardest thing I have ever done was leave that hospital knowing she was in there. That night felt like every day we ever lived rolled into one extremely long and lonely night. It was a year in a blink. I light a fire to remember. 

+++

I appreciate all the guest posts rolling in for Right Where I Am 2012, as I hope my readers have. I had intended on providing the space for regular readers without blogs, but the call went out on b*bycentre UK, which generated many more guest posts than I thought would come in. The pieces that came in are so moving and beautiful. Thank you for sending them. I will have a few more coming up. Since this project has been going on for a month, I decided to close that offer to the public. If you are a regular reader and still want to publish, please email me. (I'm not a heartless bitch.)

Guest Post: Right Where I Am - 4 months, 2 weeks

Fliss and her husband found out following the 20 week scan that their daughter had Edwards syndrome and was destined not to stay with us. "It felt like it was presumed we would go down the alternative route, which for some is the right option, but my husband and I could not be the ones to stop her heart and we both felt we had to give her a chance. The rest of the pregnancy was hard to say the least but I don't regret it," shares Fliss. Ayla Hope was born 40+6 on 1st February 2012. As she goes on to say, "We were able to spend time with her and bring her home, she took her last breath in my arms on 4th February at 9:10pm. My heart broke never to be mended. We have a son who is 2 1/2 and he is the only reason I have managed to get up every morning, him and my husband, my rock. "

Where am I now? I don’t know, to be honest.  A state of confusion, loneliness and fear, occasionally hope and positivism.  Desperately trying to maintain the positive persona that I often feel I am.  The person who has energy, wants to make a difference in the world because of our beautiful daughter, who can play with my son without a wedge of unhappiness stopping me from connecting with him completely.  Does he know I’m not completely there when we play? Can he sense that Mummy’s heart is not completely in it? I don’t know, I hope not.  I feel like I’m a worse mother because of my loss, not a better one.  A more grateful, less naïve mother but my patience isn’t what it was, my energy levels shocking and my ability to cry at the drop of a hat quite immense.  My boy wipes my tears away for me now and fetches a tissue, he’s so used to Mummy crying he knows what to do, normally a little dance or something that will make me smile or laugh again.  My heart bursts with love when I think of him and screams in agony when I think of my girl. She should be here with us.

People have told me how ‘brave’ I am, what an ‘inspiration’, so ‘strong’.  Like I’ve chosen to walk this path, suffer this pain and forever have a hole in our family where Ayla should be.  I’m not any of these things, I have no intention of inspiring others, I often hide from the world; that’s not brave or strong.  I am simply a Mummy.  A Mummy who loves her children more than words can ever describe.  I remember when I was pregnant and we knew our daughter was destined to leave us I had to go into hospital with a suspected blood clot (I knew it wasn’t, funny how carrying a baby destined to die but not knowing when can leave you a little breathless at times) a paediatrician saying to me what a brave thing I was doing, I simply looked at her and said ‘I don’t really have a choice do I?’ and she replied ‘There’s always a choice’.  How was there? A choice on how soon she leaves us or how she leaves us, maybe, but the outcome would be the same.  For me, giving her a chance was all I could do; we have memories, photographs and videos of her, mementoes that have to last us forever now, they are all we have.

I feel like a kite, attached to the world by a string. I float above everyone, watching them carrying on with their lives, moving forward and I’m there, watching, I’ll sometimes swoop forward, looking like I’m going somewhere and then a gust of wind grabs me and pushes me back, sometimes I let it, sometimes I try and fight it and I can push against it for so long and it may ease or it can slam me down so hard, so fast I can barely catch my breath.  Then I have to get back up again but I’m not allowed to find my feet, I’m back up into the air to watch and continue my slow, painful, spiralling journey.  What of the people on the ground? Some are desperately clinging to my string so I don’t go too far, keeping me as lifted as they can, calling messages of love and support, but not truly understanding.  Others scuttle by, their heads bowed low so they can’t see me, they don’t want to look up, face the pain, it’s too much for them.  There are other kites too.  Some just bob past, on their own journeys, others become entangled with me and we are bonded through our tragedy, our heartache, our children.  All of them bring comfort for just being there, as much as I hate that any of us are here it is always a comfort knowing we are not alone.  The strength, understanding and support gained from baby loss Mummies is a force so truly immense I often find myself in awe of it all.  How can so much love, friendship, understanding and support come from such pain? How? Our children, that’s how.  Their love for us is all consuming, just as much as if they were in our arms like they should be. As is our love for them.  That love has to continue somehow and we humans have to do something practical, so we extend our love for our babies, our children into other baby loss parents, to reassure they are not alone, what they are feeling is ok and that we are there to support each other whenever that wind of grief slams us so hard we struggle to get back up.  My daughter has taught me so much and brought so many wonderful people into my life, it is an honour to be her Mummy, I just wish she were here with me.