Poem-hunting

here's what I've caught and dragged home this time.

This from Catherine, a poem from her daughter Olivia's memorial service:

The End

It is time for me to go, mother; I am going.
When in the paling darkness of the lonely dawn
you stretch out your arms for your baby in the bed,
I shall say, “Baby is not there!”–mother, I am going.

I shall become a delicate draught of air and caress you;
and I shall be ripples in the water when you bathe,
and kiss you and kiss you again.

In the gusty night when the rain patters on the leaves
you will hear my whisper in your bed,
and my laughter will flash with the lightning
through the open window into your room.

If you lie awake, thinking of your baby till late into the night,
I shall sing to you from the stars, “Sleep mother, sleep.”

On the straying moonbeams I shall steal over your bed,
and lie upon your bosom while you sleep.

I shall become a dream,
and through the little opening of your eyelids
I shall slip into the depths of your sleep;
and when you wake up and look round startled,
like a twinkling firefly I shall flit out into the darkness.

When, on the great festival of puja,
the neighbours’ children come and play about the house,
I shall melt into the music of the flute and throb in your heart all day.

Dear auntie will come with puja-presents and will ask,
“Where is our baby, sister?”
Mother, you will tell her softly,
“He is in the pupils of my eyes, he is in my body and in my soul.”

~ Rabindranath Tagore

And then this, from Zan:

To Impatience

Don't wish your life away
my mother said and I saw
past her words that same day
suddenly not there
nor the days after
even the ones I remember

and though hands held back the hounds
on the way to the hunt
now the fleet deer are gone
that bounded before them
all too soon overtaken
as she knew they would be

and well as she warned me
always calling me home
to the moment around me
that was taking its good time
and willingly though I
heeded her words to me
once again waking me
to the breath that was there

you too kept whispering
up close to my ear
the secrets of hunger
for some prize not yet there
sight of face touch of skin
light in another valley
labor triumphant or
last word of a story
without which you insisted
the world would not be complete
soon soon you repeated
it cannot be too soon

yet you know it can
and you know it would be
the end of you too only
if ever it arrives
you find something else missing
and I know I must thank you
for your faithful discontent
and what it has led me to
yes yes you have guided me
but what is hard now to see
is the mortal hurry

– W.S. Merwin, from Present Company, 2005, Copper Canyon Press

I feel odd, asking a little question into the quiet space of this blog, but let me experiment. Which poems do it for you? (and what is it they do?)

Little Sister Lionheart

Two hospital rooms, twenty six years apart. In one, I learned to read. Not to spell out letters or say the words - I'd learnt how to do that at school. But to read - to breathe in a story, to weave your own dreams from its dangling threads, to leap wholeheartedly and without realising you've leapt into another person's world.

The book was The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren - it still rates as my favorite book of all time.



It didn't strike me until a few years ago that perhaps a book that starts with two little boys dying might be considered slightly morose reading for seven year-old in hospital. But it wasn't morose, not in the least, because dying was just the kicking-off point for marvellous adventures for these boys in a world where they could fight dragons, and lead revolutions, and learn that sometimes, even people you loved failed you. This wasn't "heaven" and it certainly wasn't a cushy affair with clouds, harps and eternal life. In my pink pajamas and with my seven-year old certainty, I wasn't scared of dying then, and I didn't find out until years later what a close thing it had been for a moment there. But when my grandparents died, I thought of them as there, in Nangijala, going on with their slightly more adventurous lives and sending us a dove every now and then.

I hit a snag, though, in that second hospital room twenty-six years later, when the buzz of medical people doing things to various remote parts of me had stopped at last and I was left alone and with-it enough to think for the first time since the accident. My belly was still so swollen, but not with her - so where was she? We'd just farewelled her cold little face, so where was she - my moving, hiccoughing baby? Z was too small for adventures, too small for riding horses and fighting dragons. She was still too small to be away from me and my heartbeat, or to even know how the whole communication-via-doves thing works.

All I could think of was her howling, in a rustic-looking basket on someone's stone doorstep, and her little hands reaching up searching, and rustling the swaddling clothes. Someone would come, of course - but who? Some anonymous pre-modern wet-nurse? This was why I had to invent the idea of godparents, to populate her world with people we loved, who knew us and who could tell her how much we loved her, who could sort out doves for her. It kind of works, but it still feels like an invention. I've got nothing against delusions, if they work to make things feel okay, but perhaps this one of mine needs some finetuning. Maybe it needs to rest in my palm until the rough edges wear off and it becomes smooth and true.

Darling girl, we'd hoped your amazing beginning would be here with us, but since that time was so short, I love the idea that you are having an amazing beginning somewhere else, growing and learning, just like lhasa desela.

(thanks Kate for this post)

But really, I'm sure it isn't death that is such a difficult thing (she's through it, she's there, waving at me from the other side). It's the living without that is hard. Obvious, I'm sure, but true.

Irrefutable proof that I have already turned into my grandma

In an act of pure, leafy generosity, our camellia bush has burst into flower just as things have been extra rough. When everything else in the garden is doing its best dead stick impression, the camellia is relishing the cold and lavishing us with its pinky goodness.

El Prima has been sending me photos through the day at work just to cheer me up. I couldn't resist sneaking out in the cold morning and taking some photos. I don't think this counts as showing-off as we did absolutely nothing to deserve such a display - clearly she thrives on neglect.



I know! What is this - four posts within 24 hours? Unheard of. I think, though, it is a good sign. And thank you to A for pestering me about updating more regularly. You know who you are! Enjoy it while it lasts. xxxxh

Trying to make a baby by doing paperwork and having blood tests, part the three hundred and forty-one-th

Did I mention we're leaping onto that great roundabout again? Woo (excitedly restrained and slightly worried) hoo! We're discovering that the Victorian roundabout is a much more expensive and paperwork-bound one than the NSW one we left behind.

Oh how we long for the simple times of a 7am visit to our friends the vampire bees (aka fertility unit nurses at RPA - they take my blood and pollinate such blossoms as me who need help in the pollination department, you see). The NSW process did take an awfully long time, and wasn't terribly effective in the end (Halloumi was the result of our lovely donor collaborating in a sneaky home insemination, with El Prima doing the honours, after 8 months of unsuccessful frozen insems). But it didn't cost the multiple arms and legs that the Melbourne clinic seeks to relieve us of, and didn't require:
- a police check;
- a child welfare record check;
- an application for approval to a qango (if that is indeed what VARTA is);
- blood tests for El Prima (slightly odd, given that she's not undergoing fertility treatment); and
- enough forms to make a forest weep.

In addition, despite having been through a counselling process with our lovely donor back in Syd, we had to do it again, and have him come and give his consent *in person*, because Victorian ART law doesn't recognise NSW donor consents... The counselors and medical staff we've come across are all very apologetic, but there is no get-out-of-paperwork-free card just because we've already been through the process in NSW and lost our first baby.

But we do get a fancy booklet* explaining how my reproductive system works - so that makes it all worthwhile. I was wondering what that uterus was for... Cross fingers we get to put it to good use soon.


** PS
Dear Organon Generic Fertility Drug Company,

How kind of you to make us a little booklet about IUI (intrauterine insemination)! With diagrams! I was so excited to receive it, I didn't even care that all the pictures on the front, and back are of hetero couples looking hopeful and sly at the same time.

How helpful of you to tell us "which couples benefit" - listing the main indications for IUI as unexplained infertility, anti-sperm antibodies and mild endometriosis.
But I think you are missing a key indication for IUI here - how about: partner has no sperm-shooting penis, because she is a WOMAN? Certainly, most of the people I know using IUI would fit into this category.

You don't have to make the whole booklet about us, but I'm sure we give you decent market share - how abouts we get a tiny mention in your booklet? You do have a section entitled "whose semen?" after all - it could go in there - just before you do the suggestive up-sell about how donor insemination is an "emotionally difficult procedure" and this is why it is better to go for ICSI and IVF instead.

Ta very much,

H el R

Funeral Appreciation

It's been a season of grief. Our own grief is becoming worn and supple, though it still catches at our heels, constrains the way we walk. We limp as veteran mourners into the new fresh grief of K & N and my cousin (whose husband of 22 years died suddenly two weeks ago). I'd never been to a funeral of someone younger than 60 before (how fortunate! what lucky planet was I living on?) - but we've been to two within a week now.

I now have a new appreciation for funerals - the time that goes into them, the importance of the small details, the careful, deliberate laying-down of ritual and memory. We sit on hard wooden benches, search for tissues, give much longer than usual hugs.

How precious it is to have a festival for the lost one you treasured - to put them in the centre, include them in the party one last time. At the funeral, two incompatible realities collide: "He is gone forever, we must say goodbye" and "he will always be here with us, in our hearts". Nothing can stitch those two opposites into a cohesive story, but this is the heaving, fractal reality. Instead we have to re-stitch our hearts around it - or let them break, brittle, on the floor. It hurts to stitch our hearts like this, when the needle goes in we think we cannot bear it a moment longer. We think everything our hearts are made of will shatter. Yet the laws of physics bend once again, and so do our hearts - sore and tortured by the thread - pulled painfully back into something heart-shaped.

I wished so much I could offer some sage advice to K & N on how to survive this loss, but the truth is that I'm no closer to finding "the secret" than they are. Surely, it isn't helpful to say, "If your loss is anything like ours, you will struggle to stay sane and find meaning, you will feel broken for a long time and your loss will creep its way into everything - your work, your sexlife, your friendships, and into the minutiae of what you wear and how you cook."

It is the truth - but it is also true that we have times when things feel good, when it feels like the edges are coming together and we can laugh.

And even if we did know the secret (I'm still hopeful) it would nonetheless be our secret to our loss, and would likely be helpless in the lock of their sadness.

I was so hesitant about coming back to Sydney - to look at these "before" places where the imprint of being pregnant and pre-accident is so fresh. But once we were here, things were nowhere near as raw as I had imagined. Yes, I was here before - we drove these streets in our now-dead car, my tummy rounded and living full of our now-dead baby. But things were wound-back then, and it felt good to remember that witless hopefulness and presumption that everything would be okay. We drove past our old house and parked across the road, and I thought of the last time we pulled the front door shut behind us.

We were sweaty and gritted with the dust that emerged from behind the furniture. It had been humid since I'd woken up in the summer morning dark, still filling boxes. From 8 weeks, Haloumi had been waking me early, but that morning it was my excitement as well as hers that propelled me out of bed - this was the day - the day we moved. After so many hours, our hands papered with corrugated cardboard and the sweetness of packing tape on our teeth, the truck had left - our things packed tight like tetris blocks. We'd tiptoed across the damp-mopped floors with the real estate agent to sign off on the condition report. The electricity company man had come and read the meter, and switched off the power. We'd wiped the place clean of our existence there.

The car was loaded with all our holiday things - I took it to fill up on petrol while El Prima and the girls walked to the chicken shop, and parked it across the road, its nose pointing west to the M5, and Melbourne. And we sat there - on the naturestrip across the road from our house (no longer our house) and had an impromptu picnic on the grass - relishing for a moment all the work of packing and the relief of finishing it.

I had worked so hard, and though at times my mum or El Prima or the removalists had told me to sit down and have a break, I felt strengthened by my very-pregnant state, not weakened by it. My belly was heavy, but even in my sweaty dirty state, sitting on the naturestrip eating take-away I felt like a trailer-trash goddess - beautiful and potent. Sitting in the car nearly seven months later with a saggy belly and our baby girl reduced to ashes, I could still feel the warmth of that December afternoon on the grass - gone forever, but always here.

Fierce with Love (Six Months without Haloumi Cheese)

27 June 2010
Something is different today. I woke in El Prima's arms, like last Sunday, but this time without sadness pulsating through my head to the tune of K's announcement that A had died. Today I can get up and decide what to do without tears, I can pull on my new, soft elephant t-shirt for the first time and think "maybe I can do this, maybe I can be like an mama elephant*, and be all the more fierce with love because of my loss".

So what happened to make this small welcome change? Partly the elephant t-shirt, a birthday present to myself. Partly spending Saturday night with friends, so that we could release balloons for little A, to mark his paris funeral. Partly having an hour holding our dear friend's 4 week old son, and drinking in his living baby features and living baby noises.

But a big part of it is also coming home to a parcel from sydney containing this:


I can't remember exactly when my friend Leo had started up our little stitch and bitch group - but it became a force of its own. Our formula was very simple - we'd lug sewing machines & sewing boxes over to someone's house, and spend the day eating pastries, drinking tea and talking, and eventually get around to sewing something.

Nearly every scrap of fabric in the banner I remember from a project - pajamas for Nik's son, a gift Leo was making, a dress for Cathy's daughter, the apron Belinda was making for her sister in law. And linking them all together - the green backing and the letter "O" is the fabric I found in a cupboard in a sharehouse in Brunswick over nine years ago. there was metres and metres of it, so at my last stitch and bitch before we left sydney, we cut it down the middle and I left them with half. As their little note said, Haloumi was a definite part of our stitch & bitch sessions together - both when we were wishing for her and when she was there in my belly, encouraging me towards another pastry. I wept, but my heart swelled and I felt humbled to be the recipient of so much stitched love.


* apparently a ridiculously huge proportion of first elephant pregnancies end in stillbirth, often after 22 months gestation. If you can find a reference for this then you are more dilligent than me. I promise you I read it somewhere. [<-- I would be in fits if any of my students tried to reference in this sloppy manner!]

When words failed me

and we were on opposite sides of the world, knitting seemed like the only thing I could do for K & N.



Flying home to this sad winter, with their baby boy in the luggage hold rather than bouncing in their laps, I thought a little bit of extra warmth wouldn't go astray.

Thanks P for the beautiful yarn.

Of Chickens, hatching and counting

** Thank you for your thoughts for our friends K & N and their loss of beautiful little A. We're resolving (as some of you kindly suggested) not to let this sink us further, but to hold strong for K & N and offer them all the love and help we can. **




Image from here.

El Prima got two job offers this week - very welcome news after months of searching. In my excitement I posted the news on FB before she'd received the formal offer, sending her into a spin of nervous worry that the offer would be withdrawn, that they would change their minds, that somehow, she'd have the rug pulled out from under her feet again.

It was silly of me, for we do not count chickens at our house anymore. But what do we do with good news - news that may still all go wrong, but for now, is worth celebrating? How do we celebrate it without jinxing ourselves, without inflating our hubris only for cruel-humoured deities to pop it at our expense?

We look at what we have right now, and we gently pat these warm, unhatched eggs. Not counting, just loving these little possibilities as they are right now. Who knows what will happen. Whether or not they ever peck their way out of their shells and into a chickeny future is not for us to know. But right now we have eggs, and we're going to enjoy them for their sheer eggy possibility.

F**K NO, Universe, you have to be kidding me

I've just found out that dear friends of ours living in France have just lost their little boy - he was just over 6 months old - to SIDS. He was due just a month before Z, and we were so excited when we found out that we were pregnant at the same time. He was born just before Christmas, and we saw the first photos of him on Facebook on Christmas eve at my dad's house - resting the laptop on my huge Z-filled belly.

And now he's gone - or is lying cold in a paris hospital, while K & N try and get their heads around the fact that their beloved first born son just will not wake up.

What is it about death, that it has to be so damn permanent and non-negotiable? There is no 'maybe' left, only 'never'.

So I hope his little spirit is somewhere warm, somewhere good. And that he might just bump into Z and make knowing baby eyes at her. "You too, huh?"

Poetry + Art First Aid

Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow 1 from here.

Yesterday I tried all kinds of things to quell the weeping, and this was the only one that really worked - to memorise one of my favorite poems:

WARNING TO CHILDREN, by Robert Graves

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,

Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and cut the rind off;
In the centre you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,

Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string untied!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,

But the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee,
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
He lives - he then unties the string.

It has provided comfort before, but there is something about being able to recite it in my head whenever things get too much that gives a settling feeling. I haven't yet memorised the whole thing - just the first two stanzas, but even that gives a little sense of completion.

I think I understand a link now between our loss and this terrible sense of being unable to follow anything through - it is as though my hope mechanism, my ability to imagine completing something, has been damaged. To take the hard small steps to get there, I need to be able to imagine getting there. And I'm hesitant to do that because all that we imagined for Haloumi was lost in a silly moment. I need a little splint for my broken hope bone, a poultice to lay upon it. And time for the bone to knit.

Here we are now

Most of the shock has worn off now, and we're just doing the daily grind of grief. The sadness is still huge, but we have to live with it now, work with it, breakfast with it and somehow go on.

Every now and then I think of a new part of the accident I hadn't processed before - my dad coming to the hospital, and I was so bossy telling him to go straight to El Prima (in another hospital across town) - when he must have been so shocked. He and my stepmum had been having dinner with family friends, and of course he wasn't answering his mobile during dinner when my sister was trying to call him to let him know what had happened. She had to ring around the family until she finally hit my stepsister, who knew where they were having dinner and called the landline.

Dad came to see me and then El Prima, and my stepmum went to the Children's hospital to be with the girls. She stayed there all night with them, until they were released the next day. Snazzy drew a picture of it later - of her and Snacky in their hospital beds, with our stepmama on a campbed between them, and tears on all their faces.

It still seems insane that such a tiny quick little moment of impact can send such huge ripples of loss through all our lives.

Corner - I am turning it!

It has all been so grey for the last few weeks, that I could hardly bear to inflict my sullen mood on anyone else but myself. But this week, I can not only see the corner, but am being happily dragged around it, primarily by beloved friends and family just coming and being with and sharing their sparkle.

In particular, here are some of the corner-turning things:

- Digging in the company of my dad and El Prima. The poor pomegranite is STILL not planted, but oh boy does it have a rolls royce hole to look forward to. We've just bought mushroom compost and mulch to mix in with the dirt, so planting is imminent. If I can keep up the digging, I think it can substitute completely for any SSRIs.

- Eating cake, drinking tea and extracting gardening advice with lovely new neighbours.

- This, courtesy of P. Plus, being plied with chocolate zuccini cake and home made anzac bickies!

- A farm visit with an old friend, and eyefuls of Mt Sturgeon, Mt Abrupt, wedge-tailed eagles and a ridiculously frisky three-week old foal.

- Tuesday night champagne with another old friend.

I know we might not be able to quite keep up this pace, but it does make things so much easier, being around lovely people.

This

is the kind of thing I need to get me through the pile of marking I have before me:

TODAY by Frank O'Hara


Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.


[1950]

It's better than a bottle of gin in the desk drawer, isn't it?

Tofu-induced meltdown

We’re sick of the house, sick of our own misery and sick of each other’s company. So what is the best remedy for this malcontent? Clearly, wandering around IKEA with legions of pregnant women and parents holding small children behind every Billy bookcase is a fabulous idea.

Things started badly this morning when I woke early, and read the last few chapters of an unmentionable “children’s” sci-fi book. I had thought, given the irresistibly comforting premise the book begins with – in which all humans have their own spiritually-connected talking animal companion – that I could expect a happy ending, or at the very least a Harry Potter-esque happy-and-safe-for-now ending. But no. Apparently author Phillip Pullman has other ideas, which don’t include rounding off my escapist bout of children’s sci-fi in a gentle enough way so that I can start my Sunday morning without feeling like Armageddon is around the corner.

We entered the IKEA play-house with two very simple objectives, and neither of them was to be reminded that even if we buy all this stuff, our house will never look like an Ikea showroom. I think it must be a genetic thing – either you have the tidy-decluttering-clean-lines-matching-furniture-Ikea gene or you don’t, and El Prima and I clearly don’t. I don’t want you thinking we are complete grots - we do Make An Effort, and temporarily fight back the jungle on a regular basis, but with three pets and two teenagers, as well as our own messy selves, there is quite a bit of jungle to deal with.

If you’ve been to one of those water theme parks which has a canal section where everyone floats around the same circular route on giant inflatable donuts, then you may as well have been at Ikea with us, floating along a twisting series of Ikea-ized rooms, bumping up against pregnant tummies and living babies at every turn. I’m not mortally offended by all this evidence of everyone else’s successful fecundity, but it is hard to concentrate on finding semi-essential soft furnishings while I’m constantly playing games of “Would she have been about that big by now? Or fatter?”

Eventually, the current brought us along to the cashiers, and we piled our small pieces of pleasantly-smelling wood and nordic-looking fabric into our ridiculously small reusable carry bags. By then, shopping centre fatigue had set in, and it only took one song to make me weep in the car. From there it was only a short hysterical step to melt-down-land when I got home and realised that there was no tofu in the fridge for the one meal I could imagine making – green thai curry. It is a sad thing when you feel like you are useless at everything, including feeding your stubbornly vegetarian self some kind of protein on a regular basis. (“What about those teenage girls though?” I hear you cry. What indeed? Don’t fuss, El Prima keeps them well-supplied with meat, to their great joy, so I don’t need to fear for their protein / iron levels.)

Somehow, the lack of tofu, and consequent nutritional failure was the last straw on top of the giant haystack of things I’m not managing to do very well lately, including finding decent work clothes to wear, cleaning the house, being an academic, turning all this terribly sad emotional pain into some half-decent art / writing and being a likeable stepmother. But you’ve just lost your child, only four months ago – give yourself a little break – as a beloved friend was telling me just this morning. Yes, yes. Four months. How long will it take before I can function normally? I was doing it okay two days ago, or at least creating the appearance of it. If things fall apart only every second day, is that progress?

El Prima was lovely – Ikea and shopping centres don’t seem to have quite the same enervating effect on her. She let me weep all over her in the kitchen, and suggested we order in pizza. Instead, I marched off damp-eyed into the dark to hunt and gather tofu from the supermarket just to prove to myself that I could do the adult thing and make dinner. It was a pretty ordinary green thai curry, but it did have tofu in it, so there is hope – isn’t there?

(It’s been a very rhetorical post, hasn’t it? My apologies.)

Hello again

A kindly postgrad student with a three wheeler trolley helped us take the boxes up to my new office and piled them up. A few hours later, once I'd met a few people, got lost on the way to the bathroom, and started doing some work, I could feel the boxes behind me waiting, so I took a key to the packing tape.

I think of pith-helmeted archaeologists cracking open Egyptian sarcophagi. When these boxes were sealed, it was a very different world. There's a small shock when I lift back the cardboard flaps. I inhale, as if breathing in the air I exhaled four and a half months ago could take me back. I remember packing this, but it was a different me - with a round living belly between me and the cardboard.

These are the things from my half of the laundry back at our old house in Sydney - my little make-shift office which always smelt of laundry powder and had its own toilet. I was in a hurry packing - I'd thrown in personal things with work files and books - a small stuffed lion that El Prima gave me years ago, pictures by Snazzy, hotwater bottles that really belonged to the laundry side of the room. Each object I lift out needs an explanation. Oh Lion. Something awful happened. It isn't what we expected. Not at all.

* * *

El Prima's been unpacking at home while I've been at work. Suddenly there are new spaces in our bedroom, more room to move. In the living room is something that wasn't there before. It is a small whiteboard - an IT freebie. I remember when El Prima brought it home - to that other living room in Sydney, in that other life.

It was July. I was newly pregnant and a friend of ours asked us to contribute a photo for an anti-homophobia project she was running. I tried out different messages until I came up with this one: El Prima did the text, and I added a picture.



I had my photo taken for my staff card today, and my face didn't look like that. No glow. And too much knowledge and weariness.

That same whiteboard in in my hands again, but it's got a different message on it now. I wrote this message about a month after the other one. One of El Prima's daughters was dealing with something unspeakably hard. I wished I knew a way to make things better. I came across this quote and wrote it on the whiteboard for her.

Everyone is broken by life but some of us are stronger in the broken places. (Ernest Hemmingway)

I read once that the Hagia Sophia dome in Instanbul is completely broken into hundreds of pieces, but is held together by its mosaic tiles, like a cracked eggshell. Apparently the brokenness is the only reason that it has survived various earthquakes over 1500 years.

Please let me be like that - stronger for my brokenness.

Is okay

Thank you so much for your love and concern.

Sorry to be so morose! Getting out of town and seeing a beloved old friend get married helped.

I really don't want to go onto antidepressants to get through this. I don't think there is really any dodging this sadness, I just hope that if I can look it in the eye and stare it down, it might gradually retreat to a safer distance.

Again?

This is my refrain: Again?

Just when I've worked up the energy to get up / cook dinner / go to physio / answer emails / pay bills, I wake up the next morning and it all has to be done again.

This qualifies as possibly the most whingey / obvious observation ever made, and I know I should be grateful that I have another day, and another before me, but right now it is all too hard. Now, even the art work I make, the words I write seem pointless and withering in my hands.

I know there is a tiny silver thread that leads me out of this dark place, but I can't seem to lay my hands on it at the moment.

The time has come

it seems, for nonsensical poetry (at our house at least).

I found an old book of children's poetry at my dad's house, and these were the poems which made the most sense to me, each in a different way.

THE PESSIMIST by Ben King

Nothing to do but work,
Nothing to eat but food,
Nothing to wear but clothes,
To keep one from going nude.

Nothing to breathe but air,
Quick as a flash 'tis gone,
Nowhere to fall but off,
Nowhere to stand but on.

Nothing to comb but hair,
Nowhere to sleep but in bed,
Nothing to weep but tears,
Nothing to bury but dead.

Nothing to sing but songs,
Ah, well, alas! alack!
Nowhere to go but out,
Nowhere to come but back.

Nothing to see but sights,
Nothing to quench but thirst,
Nothing to have but what we've got,
Thus thro' life we are cursed.

Nothing to strike but a gait;
Everything moves that goes.
Nothing at all but common sense
Can ever withstand these woes.

I think that is quite hopeful, in a bleak way. Kind of sums up the pragmatic compromise of living with this sadness, but also gently teasing yourself for your bleakness and self-pity.

The second is more beautiful, a reminder that this world still holds things which sparkle.

WARNING TO CHILDREN, by Robert Graves

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and cut the rind off;
In the centre you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string untied!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
But the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee,
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
He lives - he then unties the string.

This is the aim, I guess. To be able let curiosity win out enough to untie the string, knowing that you will immediately find yourself within the uncontrolled greatness, rareness, muchness that spills out.

Everything seems quite nonsensical right now, so that nonsensical verse makes perfect sense.




[we saw the new alice film. Some parts were pretty, but otherwise, an awful rendering. Why Tim Burton felt it had to be jammed into a 'quest' format, I have no idea.]

On being a terrible blogger & new things

When I returned to blogging to start this blog (a long long time ago on the other side of the abyss), I promised myself that it would be guilt-free blogging. With my previous blog, that was what had killed it - the guilt and shame of not having posted for x days, which made it all too hard to actually post again. So this time, I promised it would be just about writing when I needed / wanted to, and not out of any sense of guilt or shame.

I'm not kidding myself that I have lots of readers out there waiting for me to post something - if anyone is reading this, then you are exceedingly patient and persistent - thank you xx But guilt-free blogging doesn't mean I don't feel sorry for the few of you reading - so my apologies for being a terrible blogger.
-----

Walking the dogs, we were wind-blown and on our grumpy way home. And there in front of us on Murray Road was a café that wasn’t there before – all new pot plants and fresh paint smell. But also a toasty cheesy smell – maybe we were hungry after all. We are greeted warmly into the place by – we’re guessing – one of its new owners. He’s excited to see us, he’s read us already – two women, two dogs, and concludes rightly that we’re “family”. Just like we’ve read him, his earring, his manner of speaking and his glances towards the man in the kitchen. He fusses over us, explains that there is only a limited menu at the moment as their in the process of converting the stove. “When did you open?” I ask.
“Saturday last”, he shines with all the enthusiasm of someone starting their own dream project. He’s not tired yet.

When we go, his partner comes out of the kitchen, they introduce themselves. I explain that we’re new to the area, and so happy to find a good little café so close by. “Come by whenever you want – sit and read, or write”, he says.

I’m excited, but also sad for what I’ll eventually have to tell them, if we become friends. We will watch their faces fall, shock unrolling from them – both at the awfulness of it and also that we are here, ordering coffee, as though life goes on as normal after a child dies.

Three month letter (jumping the gun)

We’re getting close to three months since the accident, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I wanted to write a three month letter to Zainab. I'm not having a dig at those who write letters to their living children - god knows if she'd lived I would have been right on the bandwagon. It is a beautiful idea, that's why I just wanted a little taste of it, even though it isn't quite the same when your baby isn't here to record all the new amazing things they learned and you learnt about them in a month. But this is part of my task here, to accept that I don't get any more time here on earth with her.

It could go like this: (please excuse my attempt at humour - we do like to try and crack jokes in between the weeping. Ha boo hoo ha.)

My darling girl,

I’m trying to work out how big you might be, if this was your three month birthday rather than three months since you died. We saw a baby today on our way back from the market, probably a bit more on the newborn side than you would be by now. You'll be happy to know that I still haven't seen any baby that comes near you in the looks department, and we seem to be surrounded by them at the moment. They're lovely, they're sweet, but they're not you.

I’m hoping that wherever you are, in the non-denominational, vaguely agnostic Good Place where I like to think you might be “living the dream”, you are growing and learning. Those little legs would be filling out, and maybe you are giving your godparents some smiles, starting to focus on their faces and grin gummily at them. God, I wish we were there to see you and hold you, my love. I wish I could be feeding you and feeling some pride and amazement in your increasing fatness. El Prima would be making faces at you, doing her expert babymama thing, teaching you arabic.

But enough about your milestones, let’s talk about mine! I can now bend my knee well over 100 degrees. Woo hoo. And my quadricep muscle now responds when I want to move it. I can get in and out of bed without doing that weird robot-leg move I had to do before. We’re going for big walks – to and from the shops, around the park, with only one crutch – and I won’t need that for much longer. We’re sleeping through the night a lot more than last month. I think I’ll be starting my new job next month – beginning part-time and working my way up to full time by July.

Your sisters miss you. They are making friends at their new school, and have freaked them out showing them photos of our wrecked car. They were all geared to be the best babysitters ever, I hope you know that.

I won’t write you a letter every month, I hope you’ll understand. But I love you and think about you every day.

With all my love, xxxxx h