special powers

In the early days of shock and tears, my husband reached his last straw in trying to comfort me: she loves us—she would want us to be happy. I couldn’t believe him. It sounded so strange and wrong. She was dead, and a baby. How could she want anything for her parents? But he believed it. He felt her with him.

I haven’t heard from her in a long time. I could tell you that we once had a long talk, or that I saw the spiritual path her soul is on. But now those communication lines seem dead, so I fall back on logic. I say I don’t believe in signs, that my baby does not have special powers, and that she can’t communicate with us.

So have I become a rational creature now? Or are my feelings just hurt by the silence?

* * * * * *

Other parents see signs. In a precious moment, they notice clouds or rainbows or lightning bugs and think, this is for me from him or her, or my child has something to do with why this is so beautiful.

I envy that belief, because it eludes me. If I could see my daughter in the trees or hear her on the wind, maybe I would not be so lonely and angry. But it doesn’t work for me anymore. My child can’t be trying to contact me, because she is a baby. Not an angel. Not a fairy. A baby.  Her little fingers can’t operate the paranormal phone system. She can’t align the stars or send me a butterfly. She’s too little.

I don’t like hearing that she wants me to go on or wants me to know she is okay; that only points to my massive maternal failure. All she should be thinking about right now is snacks, cuddles, toys, and trying to pull herself up to standing. Not how to make Mom feel better. If she were alive, she would not want the best for me. She would want me to find her damn pacifier right now. That’s how I want it too. I want me to be the mommy, and her to be the baby. Still. Even though she’s dead.

And please God, or whoever is out there, do not let my baby be a ghost, wandering between this world and the next. Please let her be someplace safe.

* * * *

On the other hand, I have had messages. And I’ve imbued her with a very special power: the power to leave me.

In the hospital I began, irrationally, to worry that she did not like me very much. Her little face was so frowny, her lips so pouty. She looked mad. (Maybe they all look that way?) Holding her in my arms, this is what popped into my heart:

She needed unconditional love. Something bad happened to her, maybe in a past life, and she needed to know that Brian and I loved her absolutely purely. She wanted love untainted by the scoldings, power struggles, and tears that come with being a human child. By leaving us so early, she was assured of our white hot love forever. It would heal her, so her soul could go on. But it would break me, and I would have to accept it.

I had one visit from her after that. A friend did a spiritual healing on me a few weeks later; the smell of strawberries wafted through my living room on a cold March morning, and we both felt it was my baby saying hello. I could envision fields of the spindly green plants heavy with fruit, and how much my girl would delight in them. Later I planted a pot of hearty alpine berries and got a strawberry tattooed on my ankle, her name hidden in the leaves.

Since then, there has been silence. She feels utterly gone to me, and I feel rejected. I may say it is not her job to comfort me, yet I sit here like a spurned lover, hoping for the phone to ring. This is my deep dark secret—that I am kind of mad at my baby for dying. That I am kind of mad she never calls.

Photo by VanCityAllie

* * * * * * *

Why did I make up this terrible story about her needing to leave us? For a while it felt like a message from her soul, or from God or the great beyond. As the days have worn on, without answers, without comfort, my faith in most things of a spiritual nature has dissipated. Now I think it was just my brain trying to make sense of an incomprehensible event.

I’m not sure this was the best story to tell myself, though. It gives her the power to choose death over life. The power to abandon her parents. The power to hurt us intentionally. All of which is insane. She was a tiny baby inside my body. A very bad thing happened to her, and we don’t know why.

Maybe that’s just too much for my heart to take. I would prefer to think that she never wanted to be here, than to think she is out there in the dark crying for her mommy. I’d rather say that we do not get clouds and hearts and stars from her, because she’d rather be free. That’s easier to face than the plastic bag of ashes upstairs.  

Most of all, I need to believe that this experience is far worse for me than it is for her, because I just can’t stomach any other option.

So some days I try hard to think of her as happy. I try to see her as part of everything, reveling in the universe, sending love to our family every day. Usually I can’t. So instead I absolve her of all responsibility—it is one way communication down that parental, paranormal phone line. If she’s anywhere, I hope she can hear that I love her.

* * * * * * * *

Have you received signs or messages that help you connect to your child(ren)? Was there a particular window of time when you felt most connected that is now closed? What are the stories you tell yourself to help make sense of your loss(es)?  

other women

The groom’s sister looks pale and smiles wanly. Her black cocktail dress fits trimly over her belly; she looks six, maybe seven, months along. In the reception hall she is seated alone across the table from me. Her place setting is adorned with a small white candle and a photo in a black felt frame— her father, who died a few years ago. 

I happen to know that hers is an IVF baby. That she is 39, single, and has decided to parent alone. Her grief is so palpable and familiar—alone with sadness at a happy event— that I find myself wondering if this is her first pregnancy attempt, or if there is a loss in her past, or if her baby has complications. She looks so ethereally sad for someone whose brother is getting married. Maybe she just misses her dad.

I should ask her. This new, compassionate me, who is supposedly unafraid of grief, should ask, How are you really doing? But I don’t. I make small talk. I am embarrassed.

I am faking this wedding. I am going to have a good time, dammit. One of my best friends is getting married, the banquet hall full of old acquaintances, and I just want to pretend I am okay. So I do. For the first time I put a huge parenthesis around my dead baby and prattle on about my beautiful stepdaughter, my great new husband, our upcoming move, and how beautiful the bride looks. This is how I get through it. This is how I have a good time.

Later I regretted this portrait of my life. Not because I hid my baby daughter—there isn’t a person in the room who meant enough for me to share her name with them. But because of the other women I might have wounded with my fakery. Because in that moment I chose to continue the cycle, chose not to break the silence.

At the wedding, I try to be cheerful with Alice, who is spending the evening at the edge of the terrace, the edge of the ballroom, the edge of the crowd. She is fidgety with an angry look on her face. Her very tall husband smiles at everyone, mingles, brings her drinks. I’ve met her only once, at a shower she threw for the bride. There she let something slip about how painful fertility testing is. I see the look on her face tonight and wonder. How many losses? How far long? How many failed cycles? How many bad test results? To me, she looks like grief.

photo by laura mary

When I approach her, she barely responds. Her husband swoops in with drinks. Conversation falters. We end up chatting about my stepdaughter and her adventures at summer camp. This is stupid, given what I know. I want to say, How is the testing going? It’s okay to talk to me. I know something about this. But I don’t. I smile and mention Lilly’s name too many times. Finally, we sidle away from one another. But I watch her all night.

Later I find Nissa, a vivacious Filipina in her late 40s with a poet for a husband. I used to pal around with her and the bride, but that was years ago. She wants to catch up and hear my news. I tell her I am a stepmama, and that I am about to move to her old stomping grounds in the west of the state. Her husband points out that they grow good weed there, not that he’s tried it. We laugh.

As I speak, she hears happiness in my voice. She doesn’t hear the parenthesis. So you like being a parent?, she asks. Oh, that is so great, oh…. She looks up at her husband, and I see the pain cross her face. They have never been able to have children. And now I am the jerk, bragging about “my child” to the childless. I could have told her then about Angel Mae. She would have been kind about it, but it would have felt like backtracking. See I am not really a jerk because my baby died and I haven’t been able to get pregnant again either…

But at that moment, I don’t know how to say it. She is wearing a bridesmaid dress and has a champagne glass in her hand.

Jane is on the dance floor. I haven’t seen her since college. She moved to Colorado, then Paris, then back to the Southwest. She is lively and nerdy and gorgeous, just as I remember her. It has always been hard to get a negative word out of her; she smiles broadly even as she tells me about rupturing her Achilles tendon a week before her wedding. The kids are doing great, she says, total opposites in personality, though. Her younger one is adopted.

I could ask why they chose to adopt. I wonder about losses and secondary infertility. I look for answers in her face, but she is still smiling and grooving as Prince’s Seven blares loudly from the speakers. Maybe she adopted simply because she was adopted herself.

She asks if I am on Facebook. I tell her I used to be but not anymore. Why not? I dodge the question.

Maybe this is just me, seeing loss everywhere. Maybe these women felt fine and could have cared less what I rambled about. Maybe I should mind my own business. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t make myself into the crazy dead baby lady at the wedding.

Maybe. But I’m pretty sure I’m right about this—that at such a happy occasion, there were sad hearts wandering the ballroom. So I’m still thinking about those women, wishing I had spoken up, wishing we could each have felt a little less alone. But silence was my survival that night. Maybe it was theirs, too.

* * * * * * * *

These days, how are you with other people’s pain and grief (hidden or revealed)? Has your own loss made you bolder about being with others who are hurting? What is it like when you say the wrong thing, or nothing? Have you ever publicly broken the “time and place” rules because you needed to talk?

i went crazy

On the day I'm to introduce our last new writer, Jenni of Demeter's Feet, I go to her blog and the first thing I see is this:

"Today is peaceful. I am writing. I am remembering. I am tending my baby's strawberries. I am sad, but I had my meltdowns earlier this week. Distractedly burned a giant batch of nachos one night, sobbed over pasta and sauteed zucchini the next. Have been by turns irritable, angry, quiet, exhausted. All the usual stuff. All the normal stuff. It doesn't worry me anymore. It's just how it goes..."

And I have all I need to in order to make the welcome. This is why we're all here, is it not? We're honoured to have Jenni's kind soul among us as a regular contributor.

~ Kate

On Route 28, a few blocks from my house, there is a drinking water dispenser. It's wedged into the corner of a shopping plaza between the Natural Food Mart and Plaster Fun Time. Its bright blue awning advertises "Pure Water," and a sign states that it has been U/V filtered seven times to remove all chlorine, bacteria, and impurities. It costs 25 cents a gallon, and you have to bring your own jugs.

After our loss, I got obsessed with this water machine. When I drove down 28 I would pull into the plaza, get out of my car, and stare at it. Was this water really pure? Was it really healthier than my tap water? Who put it there? How did I know it was really filtered seven times? What if it was dangerous?

I asked in the natural food store, but they didn't know anything about it. Google and the Plaster Fun Time people didn't know anything either. A notice tacked to the machine indicated it was regularly inspected by someone, but the last signature was dated several months earlier. In fine print was a phone number, which I called but got no answer.

Meanwhile I was drinking my tap water at home. With every glass I wondered, Am I making myself sick? Too sick to carry another baby? Is this water what killed her? Would the water machine be better? Or is it a scam, unregulated, unhealthy?

photo by calignosus

That blue awning became my Zoltar. In my mixed-up grief brain it held some answer, some clue to my fate. I wanted it to grant my wish of perfect, fertile health. But I was skeptical. I began stalking it, doing slow drive-bys, squinting at it out the car window, going out of my way to cruise past the plaza. Once, seeing a car there, I wheeled into the parking lot and flagged down the elderly couple who had just loaded up their jugs and were trying to back out.

Excuse me, I'm sorry, but do you know anything about this water?

Well, we've been drinking it for years, and it hasn't killed us yet!

What should my follow up question have been? Do you think tap water killed my baby? Do you think the Zoltar water will keep my next baby safe?

The notion that a person can go mad with grief has been around for millennia. And there are images in literature and film of mommies who go mad after losing a child. So, I knew this was a thing. I just didn’t expect it to look like this.

Weeping? Wailing? Throwing stuff? Sure, I’ve done that. But that’s sadness, not madness. It’s sadness, and helplessness, and anger, and even though it makes me feel so separated from “other” people, I know it is normal. A really normal response to my baby dying. That’s not crazy.

It’s the other stuff that worries me. Finding a bag of books in my closet and having zero recollection of who gave them to me. Looking down at my dinner plate to find I have been chewing on processed ham slices after years of being a near-vegetarian. Avoiding the gym because too much exercise can cause miscarriage or start labor (while being not at all pregnant). Stressing about a family paddle on a very small pond, because I keep picturing everyone drowning. Waylaying the elderly in parking lots. Fearing the tap water. Did I lose my mind as well as my kid?

It’s been about year since my last Zoltar drive-by—eventually I got fed up with myself and bought a Brita filter. And I’m sitting here now wondering how I’m doing. There is no babyloss measuring stick to gauge a return to sanity, a return to functional personhood. It’s been 17 months since goodbye, and this week, in a perfect world, she would have turned one. Today my mind is calmer but still thick with grief. So I have to wonder, what crazy thing am I doing now?

We still don’t know why I went into labor at 20 weeks. According to the doctors, there are ten reasons, and there are no reasons. And isn’t that enough to make a person nuts? But we do know it wasn’t something I drank.

* * * * *

What does your crazy look like? Does it scare you? Is it an ally, giving you permission to act outside the box? What do you do with other people who think you are crazy? What elements of grieving have made you feel most isolated and separate? What elements have made you feel the most normal, human, and sane?