Three years

Oh, I feel so sheepish to have been so quiet on here.  I have all kinds of good excuses - Christmas, my brother's wedding, a dose of gastro, and most of all, a hilarious baby boy whose laugh makes a room full of strangers smile. 

He is lovely.  We feel impossibly blessed.  He really is a cheery little soul and it blows my mind how much I love him.  I have to pinch myself on a regular basis to remind myself this is actually happening.  The blocks of time for writing are much harder to find, but it's not just that.  So many of the things which I relied on post-accident to make sense of our loss and to keep myself on an even keel have fallen by the way side - yoga, writing, meditation etc.  Somehow it seems so hard to keep up with all the baby / house / renovation / christmas stuff while also wanting to enjoy my time with Ali.  I'd really like to find ways to claw back a bit of time for restorative practices.  In a way I don't need them as desperately as I once did, but I really could do with a little more of the calmness and reflection they gave me.  Am I kidding myself to think that these things are compatible with caring for a small child?  Or do I just need to organise myself better?  It doesn't help that we're also renovating at the moment, so that there is a constant list of decisions to be made, bricks to be cleaned, bills to be paid, calls to be made etc. 

It feels like Z is with us enjoying Ali's babyhood.  She's here in her pomegranate tree in the front yard, in the roses I inhale as I walk up our street, in the few items of her baby clothes that Ali still sometimes wears, in her blanket I use for Ali when we travel, in the stars when I hang the washing in the summer night, in the extra tight cuddles I give Ali when I soothe him to sleep.  The grief still hits me now and then, but it is like a sneeze - I sense it coming, it shakes me, and then it moves on.  I look at Ali's face and wonder what she would have looked like at his age, or as a three-year-old. 

We spent her day and a few days either side of it down the coast, near the bush chapel where her ashes are buried.  We played her some music, we sang her a lullaby, my mum sat next to me and squeezed my hand.  A part of me feels guilty that our grief has mellowed - in some strange way I miss the clean intensity of the early days.  But this is now a grief that is woven in with our lives.