Life's Leverage

It's a banner day at the new contributors page for Glow, and one that's been a very long time coming. It now features our first regular contributor who is a father -- please welcome Chris of Elm City Dad.

Chris, daddy to Silas Orion and husband to Lani, has a way of stating simply and beautifully how the world looks after babyloss. In doing so, he makes us all exhale a little and say Yes, yes. That's just how it is. And when we do that, we all feel a little more sane, a little more on-the-right-path. Which is exactly why we're all here. Please welcome Glow's first dad -- Chris, we're so honoured to have you here.

 

These days are brutal. They are less vividly awful than the first days and weeks and months after Silas Orion was born, but these days have a subtle ache and desperation that is deeper and more pervasive than the raw shock of his death. That experience was nearly impossible to comprehend and now, day by day, the specific truths of his absence are revealed in life-sized cascades of loss.

I don't just wake up anymore. I have to pry myself out of bed. I have to slit my eyes open with razors of truth and face the empty day as the pain bleeds away into the active motions of living. I manage to forget that I am wounded to my core sometimes. Sometimes I even have fun. Sometimes I just fake it real good.

Because that's what we do, right? We of this Terrible Tribe. We know things about the World that no one else understands. The depth of our pain is beyond fathoms or miles. Beyond lightyears. Our ache resonates in a space that is the size of an entire Universe.

It is the Universe that would have lived in each of our children's minds if they were here and we could hold them in our arms. If we could watch them grow and teach them about the beauty of the World, they, in turn, would show us everything we had forgotten about this amazing place.

There is a big difference between forgetting and learning, though. How do we hold on to the good that remains all around us while our guts trail behind us like a nauseous shadow? How did we come to this? This limbo? This World where everything is dangerous and uncertain and somehow still stunning? And how, while in this World, do we get up every fucking day and just go do shit that needs to get done?

I guess it's just more interesting to try to be strong and powerful than to just give in. At least it is for us, for now. We freak out and get pissed and cry and rage and then sometimes we laugh our asses off. An example would be sledding down the icy hill in New Hampshire this weekend where we zoomed into laughter and then nearly into the trees. Danger loomed, I felt it. At least we ran towards it knowing.

I see people all the time who don't believe that life can be terrible and I just want to shake them until they see. But that doesn't help anything. The only way to know this is to go through it, and it is nothing I would ever wish on anyone.

My wishes don't matter, though, that's obvious. Everyone will experience loss and pain and tragedy in their lives. We just happened to get shafted early and good. That is why it is so important to celebrate every joy and happiness and beauty that we can find in our daily lives and in our dreams.

Resentment and jealousy leave a stench on my soul that I loathe. I try to push those feelings into calm acceptance. This is the only life I get to lead, and I must do better now for Silas, too. I hold him in my heart every moment of the day, and when I see his stars above at night, I feel their distant heat on my cool winter skin.

I hold Lu's hand and we walk. We push nothing but we pull each other along and somehow have some fun on another brutal night. Today it was Guinness and a snowstorm. Tomorrow, who knows.

What do you do to get by? How do you live in this limbo of pain and hope and healing and rage?  What pries you out of bed?

What dreams may come

I don't tend to remember dreams. I used to say I don't dream, and then I learned that we all dream, but unless we wake up at the right time in the sleep cycle, we don't remember what it was we were dreaming about. So now I use scientifically correct terminology-- I don't tend to remember dreams.

The times I have dreamt of A? That I remember? I don't even need one hand to count. And never have I seen him as an infant, either the way he looked when he was born or as an alive one. Since I am by nature not an easily guilt-ridden parent, this does not usually cause me angst. I don't even know if I ever felt envious of the bloggers who have had these vivid live baby dreams-- the practical side of me kicks in right away with the "how hard it must be to wake up from a dream like that."

The times I have seen A in a dream? Well, a number of times before he was born. When I owned up last year to knowing he wouldn't be staying I left one thing out-- the dreams. I saw him in my dreams, a couple of times, while I was pregnant with him. Never as an infant. Always as a little boy, always in a distance, with a full head of curly hair, never looking at me, always running away. If this was a part of a storyline in a book or a movie, I would roll my eyes. Too much, too thick, too manipulative. But, as Mark Twain famously noted, fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth-- not so much.

A was born with curly hair. Tiny little waves of hair, perfect little squiggles, all wet from the birth, all over his perfect little head. And in one of the only dreams I remember from the weeks after, he was still running away, but this time he stopped and turned his head to look back.

My boys are different people, I am sure of it. Was sure of it the whole time, from before I was ever pregnant with the Cub. (Though who can really say how much of this surety is a pushback against the idea that a living baby fixes the grief and the griever-- one of my absolute favorites, that.) And even if I wasn't convinced of A being distinct from any future baby just on general principle, there would still be the part where he was running away from me in the dreams. That's not to say that I think that bereaved parents who believe that the souls of their children who are gone come back to them are wrong. I am, as with so many things in this grief world, agnostic on this. For other people. Not for myself. My boys are distinct.

And actually, since I was so sure that if we were to have a living baby it would have to be a girl, I considered the whole question, as it relates to me, purely theoretical. I think I was even a bit smug about that in the privacy of my own mind. Obviously that is not how it went. Though now that it went, now that I am getting to know the Cub, I am ready to attest with even more conviction-- they are different.

Except... Except that once in a while I think back to this other dream I remember from the early weeks. Well, "remember" is a bit strong there. The dream that was capital W Weird. Spontaneous human cloning-- oh yeah, baby! I dreamt, as far as I can remember, because it became hazy within minutes of waking up, that there were some cells left of A's placenta, and that at some point one of them went all pluripotent and created another, genetically identical pregnancy. This is both bizarre and absurd. So much so that I think I knew even in the dream that I was, in fact, dreaming. I certainly knew it the very moment I woke up (behold the power of years and years of my not entirely wasted edumucation). In the end, though, after I dismissed the literal scenario of the dream, in the end I had this unmistakable feeling that there was something tangible, something physical left. Even if I couldn't touch it.

Curiously, this dream happened only days before one of the handful of dead baby bloggers I was reading at the time posted about the research that showed that fetal cells can enter mother's bloodstream and remain there for at least 27 years. Physical indeed.

So what about you? Do you remember your dreams? How much attention do you pay to them? Do you dream about your dead baby? Do you want to?

replacement

With our surrogate, Kyrie, just a few weeks away from what we hope will be the safe delivery of our son, I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between this possible new baby and the twins we lost a little more than two years ago. Of course, this new child can't be a literal replacement for the twins. But there's less to distinguish them than one might think.

 Part of that is simply the mechanics of IVF. One afternoon in April 2006, on the third floor of a big hospital in the Northeast, ten embryos were coaxed into being. Curled in their petri dishes, cells dividing, the embryos, from my point of view, were interchangeable. I hoped that at least one of them would grow to be my child, but I didn't care which one and I didn't give much thought to what would happen to the others.

The doctors chose two embryos -- call them A and B -- to transfer and froze the rest. A and B became the twins and we all know how that turned out. So, in April 2008, they unfroze embryo C, which is now, at least theoretically, the baby due at the beginning of January.

Although the selection of which embryos to transfer wasn't entirely random, chance clearly played the guiding role. Right now, I could just as easily be mourning the loss of embryos D and E or cautiously celebrating the impending arrival of F. And that cascade of contingencies make it that much harder to attach significance to the individual identity of any of them.

Moreover, over time, the twins themselves have become mostly an abstraction. I have almost no actual memories of them -- a positive pregnancy test, a dozen increasingly ominous ultrasounds, a month or two or flutters and kicks. What memories I do have are really about myself, my hopes, my wishes, my painting an imaginary future in pastel shades of pink and blue. And, though much more hesitantly, I find myself now thinking almost the identical thoughts, transferring the old dreams to this new child and wondering whether I can see this child -- at least in some non-literal way -- as one of the twins returned to me.

Because I tend to think in metaphors, and extended and heavy-handed ones at that, let me put it this way. Imagine you're looking into a series of lighted kitchen windows at dinnertime. In one lucky house, all the chairs at the table are filled with cheerful family members. In the house next door, there are chairs with no-one sitting in them, but you notice that they're drawn close to the table, still part of the family circle. In yet another house, the table at first seems full, but if you look in the next room, you'll find the unused chairs carefully, lovingly stored away.

And then, in the house I hope one day to live in, there's a chair that, in the manner of Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously occupied and empty.  And in it sits a little boy who is at once here and, well, absolutely elsewhere.

Your thoughts on the concept of the replacement child? A dangerous or unfair idea? An understandable rationalization? Something in between?

What does your dinner table look like?