Zoë, reimagined

The first in our series of monthly guest posts submitted by Glow readers. Robynne's daughter, Zoë, was stillborn at full-term last July. Zoë was her first child. We are so grateful for her words and perspective. --Angie

In my dreams, you are alive. It is a trick my imagination plays.  Like when I was carefully putting away your baby things, sorting what to keep and what to return.  I held a toy in one hand, and said aloud, "I think I'll save this one for Zoë."  My mind just couldn't wrap itself around a future without you, around the idea of a child that would someday play with your toys and would not be you.  It is still a future that makes no sense to me, just as the present now lacks the logical outcome of my healthy, full-term pregnancy.  I have the baby weight, and the silvery stretch marks, the insomnia, and the instincts of a new mama, but I am missing the most essential piece of this puzzle that I started long before your arrival.

I dream that I go to the hospital where I delivered my daughter, and they give me her body, wrapped in blankets. I decide to take her home because I want her with me. Suddenly, she wakes up...she is alive! I am so happy; I want to show her to everyone. I can hardly believe the miracle that has happened. She is just as I remember her - beautiful, perfect. She speaks to me, almost telepathically, telling me things I need to know. Her words touch the deepest places in me, and I wake up crying in the dark. 

Nine months.  You would be nine months old now.  How have I come this far?  The books say you would be playing with sounds, syllables, even "ma-ma," the two-syllable word I long to hear most.  You wouldn't quite be talking in full sentences as you did in my dream, but you might repeat things after me, and copy my facial expressions.  The other day, I saw a photo of my friend's little boy, born the same day you were.  He was sitting in the bathtub with a huge smile on his face.  He looks more like his mother now, and has lost the look of "newbornness" and taken on infancy.  I cannot believe you would be this size, that you would be smiling at me in pictures and growing into yourself.

I dream that Zoë has grown suddenly from a newborn to a little girl of 5 or 6. She runs around the house screaming with laughter as I pretend to chase her. It is bedtime, and she needs to put her pajamas on. It is her birthday. I catch her and tickle her feet, and then kiss them. "I love you so much!" I tell her. I never want this dream to be over. I play it over and over for days, never wanting to forget the sound of my daughter's laughter. 

I want to believe that these dreams are more than dreams. I want to believe that somehow in sleep the part of me that cannot grasp other realities falls away, and that you are alive and laughing in a place where time dances easily between childhood and infancy.  I want to believe that there is more to this world than what I can see here, in front of me.  I watch a TV show that follows a medium through her day-to-day life, giving people messages from their deceased loved ones.  She reads mothers who have lost children, and assures them that their babies are with them all the time. I want to feel such confidence, to know that you are out there, that you can hear me when I tell you how much I love you and miss you.

I dream of the grief I have over the relationship I lost with my daughter, the connection I felt with her and all it opened in me.  Emotion fills the dream, eclipses any scene or series of events.  I remember it only as a knowing, and a sense of my loss.  Then, in the dream, I am told that I still have this connection with Zoë, but that it can only be like this, in dreams. 

I do not know much of anything anymore.  I find that the ideas I had about life, about religion and spirituality, about things beyond or unseen, have all been scattered and broken open to reveal a deep sense of unknowing.  A realization of how little I have been designed to comprehend.  A sense of humility about what I am meant to know, and see, and understand.  If there is a God, I am like the blindfolded men around an elephant, trying to describe it, and thinking it is a trunk, or a tail, or a rump because that is all I can feel at the moment.  I do not know where you are now - if you are in heaven, or in my dreams, or if Nature just took you back and you became a part of everything.  But I know that you were here.  I did not imagine you.  I know that my love for you is immense, and infinite, and all-encompassing.  I know that you are my daughter, and I will always be your mama.

--Robynne

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Do you dream of your baby or babies? Do you dream of grief? What kinds of dreams do you have? 

What It Feels Like To Almost Have A Child After Losing A Child

Two weeks from today, on May 7, around 12:30pm in Los Angeles, we are scheduled to meet our third child, a boy, who if anything like his older sisters, will be long and thick and blue eyed and full of hair.

We have a name picked out for him. We have a few things ready for his arrival; an old car seat, some hand me down articles of clothing, an aqua colored swaddle blanket and a scattering of other necessities, like baby soap and a sealed bottle of whiskey. Barring any unforeseen calamity or early entrance, he will come into the world after spending thirty-eight and a half weeks inside his Mother, the same amount of time his sister spent in utero before dying.

Seventy-five weeks of pregnancy has come down to this.

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We are dancing more and more these days. My three year old and I run around the house singing wildly off key to the vibrations of Florence + The Machine, cranking the volume during the “loud parts,” as Stella refers to them, and pumping our fists and spinning in circles and group dancing with Momma, which involves an awkward three person and one belly swaying hug.

We have been doing this sort of tribal dance ever since Margot died. It was always a brief respite from the agonizing grief, a tangible way for us to contrast the sadness surrounding Stella’s life with some joy. But something feels different now. As the song ends and we throw ourselves onto the couch in exhaustion, the sadness that once lingered after the dancing is now replaced with anticipation, the light at the end of another long pregnancy tunnel, the hopeful gift of a son, out of the ashes of his sister.

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I have been growing a beard since we entered the third trimester because I don’t know what else to do for my son in utero, because it’s the only outward sign of hope I can think of, because the simple act of not shaving feels like something I have control over. It is thick and black and surprisingly vigorous after two months. And it’s mostly awful looking, something my partner says “doesn’t look bad or good.” But it’s there, growing simultaneously with my son, exuding love and hope every time I pick food out of my mustache or my daughter yanks at it in laughter or I itch it at work or gently pull at it while I’m thinking or reading.

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Thirteen months and one day ago, as my partner bled and bled with no clots in sight, we were twenty minutes away from a hysterectomy.

Thirty-six and a half weeks ago we got lucky, damn lucky, that the cells of a tiny egg and a tiny sperm entered into a union that has, up to this point, stayed the course. There is gratefulness in abundance.



Mostly though, there is this inescapable feeling like our lives are hanging in the balance, like we’re standing on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a rugged coastline, waiting to be pulled back or kicked off the ledge.

I don’t know how we could go through this again.

I really, really, don’t know how we could go through this again.  

It’s damn near impossible to keep myself from looking over the cliff, from imagining the free fall should this little boy not make it. The fear, which introduced itself early on in the pregnancy, as if on cue, has successfully set up iron gates around my hopeful heart, holding me in a perpetual state of doubt, my gaze nearly fixed on the rocky coastline below. The emergency run to labor and delivery at thirty weeks didn’t help. Nor have the poor non-stress numbers, the abnormal blood work, or the two dozen times we had to get the doppler out to see if he was still alive. The only relief from the fear and worry is that it’s persistence has become commonplace.

And then there is the hope. Hope that this baby will live, and keep living. Hope that I will hold him in my arms and look into his eyes and tell him that he is my favorite boy in all the world. Hope that I will get to introduce my three year old to her live sibling, to see the two of them together, a dream of such vivid beauty I can hardly even think about it.

Hope that in two weeks time, we will pick up what’s left of ourselves, step back from the cliff, turn around and walk back towards home.

___________

If you have had a subsequent pregnancy, what was your experience like? If you haven’t had a subsequent pregnancy, how does it feel to read about other members of the baby loss community who are pregnant? Is it hopeful? Diffiicult?

Pale Blue Dot

See the faint dot between the white lines? That's planet earth. And it makes me wonder about my dead baby.

Just before Voyager 1 ended it's primary mission and blasted off towards the outer reaches of the Solar System, it spun around and snapped a photo of earth, some three and a half billion miles away. This photo was taken in 1990 (and the Voyager, incredulously, is still going).

On the one hand, of course, the sheer insignificance of the earth, and our lives, in the grand scheme of the solar system is sobering. There appears to be a bigger story being written, cosmic and infinite in size, and one that will be downright impossible to ever understand. The notion that any of us, with such finite minds and limited understanding, could have anything figured out seems almost foolish. As astronomer Carl Sagan pointed out, “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

From this vantage point of earth, everything about our significance is lost. The pain and joy and suffering and pleasures of our earthly human existence are all invisible. From out here looking in, our spinning earth boils down to life and death. The collective species lives and dies and enters the earth. End of story.

Insert my Margot into this picture of earth and you can barely discern any difference between her and the rest of the species. She lived, she died. She suffered the same fate as everyone else, and from this far away, the difference between her life and her great, great grandmother’s life is a mere blip in time, the same beginning, the same end. There is no tragedy from this vantage point, no suffering, no feeling of loss.

I am insignificant. She is insignificant. But at least we are together, tiny specks on a tiny speck with no Horton looking out for us. And there is some peace in this reality, some science comfort.

The other side of this image, however, reveals what a crazy, far-fetched, inconceivable fucking miracle it is that we even exist at all. The notion that the universe aligned in just the precise way for the species to make their grand entrance on planet earth, and for the species to continue to evolve over the millennia, and to evolve in such a way that our brains allow us the ability to think and feel and experience this little speck on which we live, is damn well breathtaking.

It’s here where I feel the tragedy of Margot June more deeply than ever. Her own miraculous story was cut short, without ever getting to experience this cosmic mystery of life on earth.  

I used to feel so sorry for my family, for our collective broken hearts, for the life we didn’t ask for, for the loneliness of losing a child. For her mother, whose waisted milk came in and dripped aimlessly down her flesh, who carried her for thirty-nine long weeks, who felt this more than anyone; for her sister, who kissed her in utero and spoke of her constantly, who always got this euphoric look in her eye when we described what being a sister meant for her; for myself and the broken dream of raising two girls, holding them both in my arms as we navigated life together.

Now days I mostly just feel sorry for her.

For in this image, I’m reminded of the revelation that she was, and all that was waiting for her on the other side of the womb. I’m heartbroken she missed out on the complexities of life on earth, no matter how insignificant or miraculous our pale blue dot is.

How does this image of planet earth make you feel in regards to your missing children? Does it bring peace or despair or a mix of both? Does science play a role in your grief? As the time has dragged on without your children, have you felt more or less sorry for yourselves?

Daydream

It feels almost ridiculous to have such a thought. Impossible, really. My daughter isn’t going to be anything. That train has passed. It steamed and whistled and methodically toiled for almost thirty-nine weeks and then, promptly, fell off a cliff. I understand there is no future for her. The potential for choosing ice cream and friends and hobbies and a career are all out of reach for my darling M.

And yet.

Here I am, imagining her doing something with her live self. Something very particular. Something I know almost nothing about, a pursuit I have always found rather boring. And of course, what I imagine her doing could be entirely untrue, a figment of my imagination, a cruel and beautiful mind trick that connects me to her and her to me. It took me nearly seven months of thinking about it until I even told my partner.

I have something to tell you, I told her.

It’s kind of ridiculous.

No, seriously, it’s pretty crazy.

Well, I keep thinking Margot was going to be a volleyball player.

Because of her hands.

***

I unswaddled her as gently as I could, as any parent would have, protecting her head, giving careful attentiveness to each limb, making sure all of my movements were soft against her body. She appeared slowly before me, from head to toe, revealing herself in stages as I unwrapped the blanket round and round her.

Neck, shoulders, chest, arms and elbows. Each was in perfect harmony with the other.

Her hands were folded neatly together over her belly, her left hand wrapped around her right wrist. There was a solemness about the way they were together, a sacred reverence for the tragedy that befell her. They were the first part of her that took me off guard as I unwrapped her. Her hands were simply huge, almost as long as her forearms, too big for her body. Her fingers were long and thick, and seemed to run on forever. Her palms were white and deep, great pools of soft skin and little creases. Folded together, they almost covered her entire belly and chest.

Those hands make me ache for her future.

***

We were recently at the beach, my first daughter and I, on the swings near the boardwalk cafe. I pushed her from behind, counting with each push, tickling her each time she came back towards me. Kids played all around us, screaming and running, playing hide and go seek. Teenagers walked in front of us, down the wooden path towards the low tide. Behind us was a cafe full of families, eating and conversing on the sand. It was much too warm for January and everyone’s mood seemed in tune with the weather.

It wasn’t until maybe the twentieth push that I noticed them, across the sidewalk, less than a hundred steps from the swings. The University of Southern California women’s volleyball team.

There were more than a dozen of them practicing with one another, bumping, setting and spiking white volleyballs around the sand. They were taller than most women, and athletic, with big enough hands to palm a volleyball, and they moved around the sand so gracefully, as if their feet and the sand had a made a deal with one another.

For a good long minute, I forgot about counting, forgot about the kids around me, the conversations at the cafe, the charming weather. I secretly imagined myself in my late fourties, the father of a University student.

I looked for her, my M.

Tall like her father, blue eyes like her mother, great big hands.



Is there something about your child's future that you think about, whether it's about their personality, or their hobbies, career or anything else? Did you have any leanings or notions while your baby was in utero? Or after you saw them for the first time?

Vices

They squeeze me.  Thousands of them.  Millions.  Billions.  Tiny, invisible, impossible little clamps on every molecule of my body compress my form making me dense and heavy.

The twists are powered by hopes halfway and memories the other.  The leverage of those screws cannot be denied. They press me into myself and I fall into bed leaden.

How often do you feel like the only person in the World that feels like you do?

How often do you cry?

My dreams are a mystery and a refuge.  Sometimes I wake up thinking I was just where I should be, not here.  Not this.  Not again.  Nonetheless, yes.

No, not none.  Me-the-less.  This World-the-less without Silas. I'm still not sure how it is possible, that I can still be missing him.  That he needs to be missed. That cognitive dissonance disorients me every day.  It fucks with my soul, it complicates friendships, it makes family distant and uncertain.

Silas didn't do that to me, but his absence has.  And there is absolutely no way to miss him more, but I've been missing him for so long now that it feels like more.

Deeper and deeper this longing has wormed its way into my being.  Each day without him and each day without another child compresses me, packs me tighter into myself.  This pressure of reproduction is devastating.  Staying positive and letting go and having faith in love and science and sex all sounds so easy and right, but all of that is almost impossible to contain in these tightly packed cells of mine.  I have room for so little beyond survival of my psyche sometimes, but sometimes my dreams take me deeper.

In one dream I am driving and it is pitch black.  Black so black the light of my headlights that I know are on are swallowed only inches from the paired glass at the front my speeding car.  I'm certain the wipers are working, but I can't see them because the windshield is obsidian except for the brief flecks of white that must be snow.

Downhill I drive, the car faster than I want it to be but I have places I need to go down the road, just beyond this hellish storm.

My hands are white and bloodless on the steering wheel.  A deathgrip.  I'm breathing only through my nose.

And then it happens as I knew it would.  The car just goes.  Out from under me it goes.  Wheels suddenly spinning, loose and free, sliding frictionless through the snow-flecked darkness I feel the whole machine lose purpose and coherence around me.

The steering wheel is jellied spaghetti.  There's no turning back because I'm pretty sure I'm airborne, spinning and spiraling into disaster and I remember something I heard from my brother I think: That if you're in a car accident that the reason the fucking drunks are always okay is because they are so trashed they don't tense up and so they don't get as fucked up when physics take over.  All that in an instant I remember and so I go loose.  I relax as the car spins through the air, through the endless darkness, through the blizzarding, blowing snow.

And then it's over.  The car catches back onto the road.  Not airborne.  Not crashed.  Torque and control return in an instant and as I clutch and slow I see the destination up ahead.  It's a road-house of some kind.  A way station and restaurant and hotel maybe out in the middle of no where, but it's where I was going.

I get out of the car and it's really snowing now.  I find some people that live or work or play there and I asked them about Lu and everyone I was supposed to meet.

Surprised and dismissive they tell me I'm wrong.  Not the place I'm looking for.  Not where everyone else is.  Not my destination at all.

Up that way, they tell me, and point back up the road I almost died on just now.  An hour, maybe two, someone says and I feel the clamps of inevitability twist another turn on every cell of my body.  I'm sputtering, distraught.

You can't stay here, man, he says to me.  You gotta go back up that way, back out of the storm up the road.  Back exactly the way you came.  I want to tell them that I can't.  That I almost died there.  That the path I just came from is impossible for me to traverse again.  I open my mouth to speak, but they're gone, there's no one for me to talk to, no one to argue this impossibility into nonexistence.

So I do what I must, as always.  The door shuts me into the car like the vices I feel in my skin.  My mind tightens to focus on the road ahead.  My hands clamp the wheel, I accelerate into the darkness, uphill and snowy.

Lu is that way, so I've got to go.  No point staying where I'm not supposed to be.  No point in being afraid of death.  After all, when I die someday far along down this dark, snowy road, maybe Silas will be there.  And if not, maybe someone will know which way he went.  And wherever that is, anywhere in the many brutal & beautiful Universes of this World, someday I'll find him no matter what the weather, no matter how long I must be without him.

Lu will be with me I'm sure, but I've got to go get her first.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What are your dreams?  Where are you going?  How do you describe the pressure of your loss and grief?

anything is possible

This afternoon I spontaneously took Dahlia to the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. They’re having a weeklong exhibit called Bouquets to Art, and boy was it gorgeous. As if the museum wasn’t beautiful enough, this week it is adorned with flower arrangements created to depict or appreciate different works of art throughout the place. And… I’d forgotten the two traveling exhibits that are currently there: Andy Warhol and Yves St. Laurent. Talk about eye candy… and color!

Someone recommended to me a few months ago, “Go look at art. Walk in a park surrounded by flowers. Go see something beautiful.” They were right…

Today I fed my soul.

Today I refilled my leaky well.

Today I stroked my tired heart with softness and vibrancy and beauty.

Today I sat on a cushioned couch under a disco ball, watching Dahlia skip and dance and hop among the moving lights and shapes that circled the floor. As if she were a work of art herself, an ever-changing statue in motion. A dancer. A happy child simply playing. Making others around her smile. Filling me up.

We flitted about, surrounded by mannequins dressed in Yves St. Laurent gowns, and Dahlia pointed at each one and said, “Mommy, this one’s me and this one’s you. This one’s you and this one’s me. Look, Mommy… Wow! This one’s my favorite…” Delicious. The bright colors, the sparkles, the eccentricity of exaggeration, just for the sheer beauty of it.

Today I loved my daughters, the vibrant living one dancing before me, and the spirit one whom Dahlia said she saw in the mist that was watering the grass outside. “There’s Tikva!” I loved them both from a bright and full place within me.

And I thought about possibility – the word I have been swishing around in my mouth for a while. Surrounded by all that color, all that imagination, all that life – however fleeting… there’s a reason the flower exhibit only lasts a week – I was able to feel the possibility of what is ahead with greater depth than before.

Because if a person can make art so bright, so gorgeous, isn’t anything possible?

If a child can be born as vibrant as Dahlia, or as fragile as Tikva, isn’t anything possible?

If we can move halfway around the world to try with all our hearts to help our baby live, is there anything we can’t do? If Tikva chose me as her Mama, how can my life be without meaning?

Possibility is tasty.

I have always been an optimist, even in my darkest times. I have had more hard times than many in my 37 years, so my eternal optimism sometimes surprises me. I must have been born this way, it just seems to be my nature – my spirit is a positive one. Maybe I just learned early on that if it’s possible to feel really bad, it must be possible to feel really good, too. I’ve always believed that you have to go through it to get through it. Maybe it’s true that knowing deep sorrow is the only real way of glimpsing profound joy. I don’t know… Maybe it’s not important to understand why the glass is half full through my eyes, but rather to be thankful for that part of who I am.

But back to possibility…

How do I reconnect with that sensation after so much possibility has been lost? How do I trust the possibility of happiness, fulfillment, even hope… after so much has been taken away? After so much letting go? How do I hold the likely possibility that I will one day birth and hold another healthy living child, and that it will be easy and smooth and real?

How?

I just do. Every day I make that choice. Every day, even when I’m not feeling it deep inside – and I have plenty of those days, too – I am choosing possibility. I’ve learned in my later thirties that I can actually choose what I focus on, that I am capable of readjusting my lens if what it is focused on isn’t making me feel good. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but the intention is there. Not an intention to always feel good – because sometimes I just need to cry and feel like crap. But a desire to remember that possibility is always there.

Before she was born and during her very short life, Tikva became such a symbol of hope, not just for me and my family but for so many others who followed her journey. Since her journey took her to another realm of existence, I have asked myself often, “How do I hold onto hope when hope has been lost? And how do I build new hope, new promise, new possibility?”

The thing is, possibility is always there, and hope is a thing with shallow roots but a powerful desire, always seeking to be replanted, to rise back up through the soil towards the moisture and the light. Towards beauty. Towards possibility. Towards love.

I have to admit that I didn’t find possibility at the museum. I actually went there already feeling it deep inside me. My eyes were open to seeing it, and there it was. The magic I encountered there reaffirmed promise, gave me permission to hope, showed me proof that more beauty is possible. And I was reminded of the incredible beauty that exists in the very short life of my little girl. I stood before a soft all-white arrangement of flowers and loved it completely because it reminded me of Tikva.

And Dahlia pointed at a stem of orchids hanging down from it and said, “That flower. That’s Tikva.”

Even though she’s gone, she’s never really gone. For me, Tikva will forever be proof that anything is possible. Not because she overcame the greatest odds and lived a long healthy life, but because she was powerful enough to teach me hope and possibility.

And the deepest love imaginable.

.::.

How do you hold possibility? Where does it hide after the loss of your baby(ies)? Where do you find it?