Archaelogy

There is a back corner of our garage where baby things accumulate.  It's where we hid away the little red suitcase of things we'd bought or been given for Zainab when it became clear she wasn't ever going to use them, along with the pram and carseat.  Over the last six months or so of this pregnancy it is where pre-loved baby things have washed up as dear friends have pressed them upon us.  Yesterday was a clear sunny day, impossibly warm for Autumn but a good washing day, so El Prima and I started our excavations.

We worked through boxes of baby clothes - washing and sorting them by size.  Tiny jumpsuits hung from our washing line like a cloud of white fluffy bats.  And we tried to imagine Adzuki's little feet - those little heels sliding regularly across the inside of my belly and giving El Prima well-timed kicks in the back - wearing some of these clothes.  It all feels quite unreal at this stage, but now that we've gotten past the same stage as our accident last time, some of the fear has lifted.  We're doing that crazy unbelievable thing - preparing for this baby to come home with us, and getting ready all the things we'll need to care for him as a living, breathing baby.  The part of my brain which tells me that I'm tempting fate, I'm hearing but not heeding.  Who knows what will happen, but I want to enjoy this bit of anticipation while we can.  

We started with the most recently stashed away things from friends, and then gradually dug deeper into the pile, finding the pram we'd bought second-hand for Zainab and pumping up the tyres, along with all the bits and pieces for it.  And finally we took a deep breath and turned to the little red suitcase.  I had imagined this as a little time capsule of all our hopes for Zainab - that we could open it, and while it might be sad, there might also be something bittersweet about her little brother wearing her hand-me-downs - a connection between the two.  I should have known from the weight of it that something was up, but the moment I unzipped it, we could smell what had happened - somehow water had got in and everything inside was mouldy and mildewy.  At first I just took a deep breath and started separating out the irretrievable things from the ones that might come good with a good soak, but as the extent of the damage became clear, we stopped and I wept.  That time, when we had felt Z kicking, and had bought these small things in anticipation - was well and truly gone - the new clothes we had bought then are no longer new but decaying.  The little gold sequined mardi gras shoes were still wrapped in plastic, so they smelt musty, but were mostly okay - the blue and orange overalls were so badly mildewed that the fabric fell apart as I pulled them out. The irretrievable things I packed back into the little red suitcase - it will have to go in the bin soon, but for now I needed some means of disposal that reflects the love and sadness we have for these mouldy little scraps and the baby who was supposed to wear them.

The other things, I soaked and washed and pegged out on the line - hoping that sunshine will help get rid of the smell, and that Adzuki won't mind if some of his clothes look slightly the worse for wear because they come from his sister.  Wednesday will be 36 weeks, so chances are, we'll be meeting him in the next month or so.  As scary as it is, we're putting faith in that thought. 

Slow

I'm now 26w pregnant, and it is odd to be back in this visibly, publicly pregnant state - almost as big as I was when we lost Z.  And I'm just realising that, no, I didn't imagine it - my boobs really were this big last time, my belly really was this huge.  It's almost as though, when Z died, a part of me felt that because I hadn't managed to deliver a living baby, that my pregnant and post-partum body was somehow imagined - or worse, a kind of fakery, when really - there was no baby to show for it.  As though I wasn't entitled to have all this odd bodily paraphenalia of pregnancy.  As though her death cancelled out the whole pregnancy and turned all our plans and love for her into self-delusion.  Here I was, impersonating a mother.  Back when I started this job, I thought of myself as an injured person recovering from a car accident rather than a new mother of four months.  I was so focused on getting back on track so that we could get pregnant again -  grief was an energy-sucking distraction, an indulgence.  

I look back and I'm shocked at my own cruelty to myself.  It took me quite a while, but I've now properly claimed that title of mother to Z.  While it still breaks my heart that she's not here and whole, revealing her two-year-old self to us, I'm proud of her.  And I feel like I've learned a huge amount about being a mother because of her.  That I can survive the unimaginable, that I can feel that awful and still be me - even if it is a weepier, more fragile me.  That things can be completely, irretrievably broken, and mundane or miraculous at the same time.  I'm kind of stunned that I had this depth of love within me - to love a child who isn't even here, who gives us no tangible sign of  response, and yet who makes love spill out of me in such a way that I have to lavish it upon the stars, earth, sea and air in the hope that maybe some of it will hit one of her atoms.  She has, exactly as I feared, made me into a bit of a grief-struck crazy-lady, but in a much more whole and connected way than I ever imagined.  I even have some fondness for my crazy-lady habits, because that's how I know that I'm her mama - because I'm the woman who pauses on the street to stick my nose right into the heart of the rose, and inhales, whispering, l love you, my darling girl.   

We're at the point where we are beginning to plan for all the things we'll need if Adzuki arrives safely.   It feels ridiculously foolhardy to do these things - to accept gifts of second-hand baby baths, to go to a breastfeeding preparation class, to start moving furniture so we can fit a cot in our room.  A voice in my head constantly harps, Don't you know what happened last time?  What makes you think you'll be needing these things?  And the truth is, we don't know.  Nothing can guarantee that he will come home with us, living and breathing.  But I also know now that if all the awful things conspired and he didn't come home, I would still love him and he'd still be our son.  I won't kid myself that one grief fully prepares you for another, and I am still terrified of all the possibilities for things to go wrong.  But being able to sit with those possibilities also enables me to let in the good possibilities, and to appreciate that right now things are wide open, that for now I get to feel every kick and try to be awake to it - to experience the aspects of the pregnancy that are similar to my pregnancy to Z, and also those which are completely different.

El Prima and I are getting impatient now - mid May feels so far away.  And we know from Z that it could all happen much sooner than that.  I'm trying to hold onto the realisation I had while looking at the clouds the other day - that even when it looks like nothing is moving, if you give it proper attention, you'll see the slow shift of things changing moment by moment.

Christmas Shopping for my ghost-baby

I don't know if this was torturing myself, but I got the idea in my head that I would buy some Christmas things to donate to the giving tree at work.  The instructions said to label the gifts with the age and (if appropriate) gender of the child the gift would be suitable for.  Here, let me imagine a hypothetical child who I wish I was buying a Christmas gift for.  She's about to turn two, and apart from her curly dark brown hair, that's all I know about her.  I'm not sure I can successfully combine my grief for Z, my desperate hankering for her to be here, with the altruism that Christmas giving really requires.  All the same, at least this way of remembering her, of showing my love for her, has some benefit for a child who needs it.  Yet it spikes my heart that a living child will get to use these things while Z never will.
 
The girls helped me pick out two things - a little navy and white striped summer playsuit and a fisher price pull-along telephone - ubiquitous toy of doctors waiting rooms and kinders.  I was amazed they are still making them.  Yay nostalgia.  Buying things was hard.  Leaving them there under the Christmas tree was harder.  It still shocks me that this happened to us, that I have a daughter, but she died.  I can't manage to pat this grief into any kind of shape today. 

Don't mention the bump

I'm still here, but have gone quiet for a bit.  It is so hard to capture everything going on at the moment.  I'm at that funny stage where some people will look pointedly at my middle and say, "Are you....?" and I'll have to confess, Yes, Pregnant, while others are still surprised when I tell them.  Either way, there is a lot of telling going on, because being the blathermouth that I am, I'm not likely to leave things unexplained or unelaborated.  And yet, it all feels so awkward, because so often there is a great yawning gap between their and my understandings of what all this pregnancy business means.  For me, this is not a easy topic about happy future plans and discussion of baby products, it is a hot ball of molten lava which is both an amazing, miraculous thing and a very dangerous and unpredictable substance.  I need to put on the fireman's gloves for that.  It is here, on the newsy surface of things which people feel happy talking about, whether they know me or not and yet it is chained directly to my heart, so that even just telling people I am pregnant feels like an intimate exposure. 

For people who don't know our story, this inevitably leds into variations of the question "Is this your first baby?".  I'm getting better at getting the words out.  No, our first daughter died...  car accident ... eight months pregnant.  And now that I've said it so many times, I can almost roll it out easily and move on with the conversation - out of self-preservation rather than callowness.  They usually apologise - this was not the territory they were meaning to steer us into.  So I need to sum it up so that we can move back to safe territory - "It's okay.  It just meant that getting pregnant again was a Really Big Thing.  Extra precious."  Which doesn't really even begin to sum it up, but that's the best I can do for chit chat. 

For friends and family who know the back-story, many have surprised us with the genuine intensity of their joy for us.  It feels like a gift in itself, but I can't quite meet them on that optimistic territory - I just stand there smiling nervously and saying, "Yes, fingers crossed". And I think for a second - am I actually pregnant?  Or have I just made a silly mistake?  And I have to prod my belly surrepticiously, feeling for that taut roundness of womb. 

Because, as amazing as it is to be pregnant again and to be feeling those first flutters, I have no illusions that this is a done deal.  Knowing how many things could still go wrong (and have gone wrong for other babies I know of) makes it all the more precious.  That bit is true, even if a small corny word doesn't capture the tenderness of it.  But there's still a part of me that wants to save the celebrations until this chicken is well and truly hatched.

Zainab would nearly be two by now.  Most of the babies who were belly-side with her are now speaking, playing games, running on sturdy small feet and learning to crack tantrums.  Our street is lush with roses at the moment.  I lean right in to smell them, crush the petals to my lips and talk quietly to my baby daughter.  Her star has reappeared, now in a different part of the sky.  The ritual of missing her is built into my life now - I stand at the dresser and consult her serious sleeping baby face on which brooch to wear, which earrings.  When things are hard, I sigh "Oh Khallila" for her comisserations.

So many cues are interwoven with the missing of her.  Wind in the gum tops makes me picture her as snugglepot and cuddlepie bush baby, learning to sing magpie warbles.  The startling orange-red of pomegranate flowers against grass green leaves - those are the colours I wear for her.  Poems, comic topiary, haloumi cheese, earrings - my link to her is cobbled together from so many little things.  Even the little time I hive away for writing or art - this is a part of my life she reawakened in her short path through it.  And every bit of being pregnant reminds me of her - suddenly I can recognise myself again as the mother-body who housed her.  I'm becoming familiar with this mosaic-daughter, pieced together from so many small reminders and memorial acts.  But I still hanker for her wholeness, and the thought of her dark-haired small form moving and making noise. 

Image from here.

Weary

Oh, the posts that have been floating around my head!  Sadly, I've had to direct my energy into marking two batches of 120 assignments - urk.  Meanwhile, my head is spinning with missing Z and being tentatively excited / worried for Adzuki, and alternately feeling guilty for letting doubt creep into this new pregnancy. 

Things seem to be going well.  We had another scan at 8 weeks, and there was Adzuki with a rockin' heartbeat, with the beginnings of arms and legs and measuring a few days ahead.  We've done crazy things such as book in with a midwife, and register with the hospital.  I had my ten week blood tests yesterday, and my GP had a poke around my tummy and proclaimed, "I think that's the uterus - it seems pretty big already", which was reassuring and alarming at the same time.  She's lovely though, as is our midwife, and I feel like we're in good hands whatever happens.  (*whatever happens*...  this is the kind of hesitant, tentative hope I'm holding onto at the moment.)  I'm glad I can blame my fat tummy on that old uterus, though, because I feel exceedingly lumpy already.  A student remarked on it today, and wished me luck! (Though I don't mind people wishing me well on the pregnancy so much when I actually *am* pregnant.  It was pretty awful when I wasn't.)

I've been delighting El Prima with continuing nausea.  She was very comforting but also a bit happy when I threw up my dinner the other night.  I'd forgotten the absolute desperation of pregnancy hunger, as well as the importance of eating slowly and being careful to stop eating when the nausea demands.  There is so much that feels just like my Haloumi pregnancy with Z, that it sometimes does my head in.  And yet the food I get hungry for is very different - all salty things.  So many little new bits of grief catch me by surprise - just the thought of explaining to a little child that her/his big sister died before she/he was born.  The thought that Z would in probability be talking by now, and how much that would delight my dad.  The thought of not having to explain to Z that she might soon have a little sister or brother. 

Just "gestating safely" and getting my head around the whole thing seems to take up so much energy, and yet this has been precisely when my work has stepped up and demanded more from me than I feel able to give.  I've also realised that I'm grieving the loss of my old job and workplace.  It was my choice, of course, but I miss my colleagues and a system that I knew my way around in. 

Our next scan is in two weeks at 13 weeks.  I don't want to wish that time away, because I started this pregnancy wanting to enjoy every moment of it, I know those are two important, beautiful weeks for Adzuki, but it is pretty scary too.  I'm trying to weave those two things together in my head - to know that this is the deal - this is what pregnancy after loss feels like - scary and amazing in equal measures.  I'm so grateful to be here, even if it scares the pants off me.

Dirt 101

There's a special art to running through crowded city streets.  Speed up, sideways step, watch for a gap.  My heart expands to knock at my ribs and nearly bowl over the people in my path, until I'm all heart - messy, beating, puffing and suddenly seeing all these messy human hearts around me.  A woman sees me running towards her and fear blanks across her face briefly - she looks wildly behind me, her own steps a little quicker.  I have a good reason to run - I don't want to be late for my osteo appointment, but I feel like I've just woken, as though my blood is reaching cells that have been slowly greying.

Things have been really grey lately.  Everything is a big effort.  I'm kind of embarrassed to write about it because this kind of sadness is dull.  I bore myself.  It's as though I'm stuck at the bottom of a big hole in the ground.  Poem by poem, I'm digging myself out, and I know from the voices of loved ones which way is up, but I can't really pretend to be anywhere else at the moment.  I have to make reluctant friends with this situation.

 (Image from here)

So what are you trying to tell me, deep dark hole?  To stop dreaming of the stars (and one particularly bright little star)?  That my little slow-crafted words will come to nothing?  That I am one and the same as the slippery grey-black clay on every side of me?  Come on, hole, teach me your lesson and then we can be done.  I'm not going to be bullied into silence and self-pity.  Enough of that. 

I'm not at all prejudiced against holes in the ground - in fact, my daughter lives in one, as do many of my favourite trees, earthworms and root vegetables.  If dirt is my destiny, then bring it on, dirt.  Show me your microbes, let me remember what dirt smells like, and the grit of it between my fingers.  

Time moves slowly under the earth.  Things are hidden, processes work slowly but powerfully.  Minerals are crushed, underground rivers carved, liquids percolate drip by drip, continental plates grind past one another millimeter by millimeter - all monumental changes occurring at a pace measured in centuries rather than minutes.  What else is down here?  Things unwanted or forgotten, buried and mourned - so many things lost and wasted which are slowly being turned back into the earth itself.  Nothing goes away down here, but is slowly transformed, releasing water and nutrients to feed patient tree roots, or our lawn.  This is where rivers are born.  Nothing flashy or spectacular, just cold humble earth.

Dear hole in the ground, that's what I'd like - some of that persistence - slow elemental momentum.  The ability to slowly work through this sad stuff with earthworms and use it to grow something good. 

It's not just the weather (begging for poems)

The greyness has got its hands on me, dragging on every piece of clothing, slowing my brain. And even better, when I look around and ask why thing are so low and heavy at the moment, the greyness answers back (in my own voice) - it's YOU - just boring, sad, can't get anything right old YOU. Sad little tried-to-have-a-baby-but-lost-her, who-knows-if-she'll-have-another-one, probably-won't-ever-finish-that-phd-or-publish-another-article-again YOU. No wonder you're depressed, given that you're so crap at everything.

And, gullible girl that I am, I've been believing it.

Bloody dementors.

Can ask - what are your favourite words for unslumping yourself?  Do you have a spare poem to share? All donations heartfully accepted.

Here's my usual favourite - but it's not doing the trick today unfortunately.

A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island
By Frank O'Hara

The Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying “Hey! I've been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes. Don’t be so rude, you are
only the second poet I’ve ever chosen
to speak to personally
so why
aren’t you more attentive? If I could
burn you through the window I would
to wake you up. I can't hang around
here all day.”
“Sorry, Sun, I stayed
up late last night talking to Hal.”

“When I woke up Mayakovsky he was
a lot more prompt” the Sun said
petulantly. “Most people are up
already waiting to see if I’m going
to put in an appearance.”
I tried
to apologize “I missed you yesterday.”
“That’s better” he said. “I didn’t
know you’d come out.” “You may be
wondering why I’ve come so close?”
“Yes” I said beginning to feel hot
wondering if maybe he wasn’t burning me
anyway.
“Frankly I wanted to tell you
I like your poetry. I see a lot
on my rounds and you’re okay. You may
not be the greatest thing on earth, but
you’re different. Now, I’ve heard some
say you’re crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind, and other
crazy poets think that you’re a boring
reactionary. Not me.
Just keep on
like I do and pay no attention. You’ll
find that people always will complain
about the atmosphere, either too hot
or too cold too bright or too dark, days
too short or too long.
If you don’t appear
at all one day they think you’re lazy
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don’t worry about your lineage
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on
the jungle, you know, on the tundra
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting
for you to get to work.

And now that you
are making your own days, so to speak,
even if no one reads you but me
you won’t be depressed. Not
everyone can look up, even at me. It
hurts their eyes.”
“Oh Sun, I’m so grateful to you!”

“Thanks and remember I’m watching. It’s
easier for me to speak to you out
here. I don’t have to slide down
between buildings to get your ear.
I know you love Manhattan, but
you ought to look up more often.
And
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space. That
is your inclination, known in the heavens
and you should follow it to hell, if
necessary, which I doubt.
Maybe we’ll
speak again in Africa, of which I too
am specially fond. Go back to sleep now
Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem
in that brain of yours as my farewell.”

“Sun, don’t go!” I was awake
at last. “No, go I must, they’re calling
me.”
“Who are they?”
Rising he said “Some
day you’ll know. They’re calling to you
too.” Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

Thaw cycle #2 associated melancholy

I've kind of been hiding, feeling a bit sheepish, because although the last post I wrote was very true at the time, all my own optimism and philosophising feels very hollow now. I'd weathered our BFN from our last ivf cycle reasonably well, and was just relieved that we at least got a clear answer this time. But then I got some tricky work news a week ago and suddenly the bubble burst and things feel impossible again. Just moving my limbs feels like hard work and every decision a drama.

I can read that poem, but at the moment it just makes me cry, because having a daughter who is a star, rain, the ocean, and freaking fuschia buds feels like a pretty rough consolation prize. Just the thought of another thaw cycle made me cry, not because of the procedure or anything like that, but because I'm so exhausted with hope and so sick of history repeating. I know other women have been through many more cycles, but that's what I'm afraid of - that this will just go on and on. I don't know how you (amazing ivf veterans) do it!

I'd just turned thirty the first time El Prima and I sat in a doctor's office hoping to get pregnant, and next week I'll be thirty five. Friends who started their families around that time are onto their third child. I know it's not a race, I know comparisons are odious, but I'm so weary of failing at this. 'Fail' is an awful word, I know that doesn't help things, but I'm stuck between wanting a living child and knowing that there is nothing on earth that can make that a certainty. We're doing everything we can to up the chances, but we still have to play this bloody lottery, stake our hearts again and again, betting like the baby-hungry suckers that we are.

When I was about six, and had figured out the whole where babies came from thing, and realised that I was a girl and would hopefully be eligible for the deal, I told my friends I wanted to have ONE HUNDRED BABIES. We had earnest discussions about the logistics - I was happy to have them four at a time if necessary. Ha! (ouch!)

I've revised my expectations these days. Even when I thought I was being adult and realistic I was hoping for 2 or 3, though I found it hard to imagine. Now I'd settle just for one living child. Z counts as one, of course she does. Even on the rough days, I'm so proud of her. But I'd like to try parenting a living child too.

Right Where I Am Project: One year, Five Months.

I love Angie's idea for this project - of putting a pin on our own specific grief maps and saying, "this is where I am now", "this is what the terrain looks like around here, this far away from the epicentre".

So here is my terrain: still bumpy, lots of debris, but we're making a road here, starting to clear a path. I have to be careful with this metaphor - I don't know that I want to describe Z as an earthquake or a volcano - though maybe the accident itself deserves that kind of imagery. This is part of my trouble (and I guess for many parents who lose a child before or soon after birth) - that I have two cataclysmic things to get my little brain around - being mother to Z, and the trauma of losing her. Each is so huge on its own, and then they are so intertangled.

I have a better sense now that part of my job in parenting Z is to trace where she went when she died - to resolve for myself where her little soul went so that I can keep loving her and learning about her. When you prepare for parenthood, they don't tell you that you'll need some existential philosophy. But I think that is one of my main tasks for Z. And as far as I can tell so far, she is here in this world - in fact, she is in the process of re-connecting me with the world I felt so lost in after the accident.

Something big shifted in the last couple of months so that I feel more settled with my grief. Where before, when I had heard people say that Z would "always be with us", I had nodded and vaguely agreed, now I genuinely and literally feel like she is always with me. Somehow it has become real. There's still sadness that she's not here in the fleshy, noisy way of other children, but I recognise that as my own small sense of not getting what I want, rather than any failing on her part. The sadness at losing her and the joy at having her as my daughter are getting woven in together, so that I can hardly tell which is which. It's specific to her, and my love for her, rather than being measurable as happy or sad. So, I'm still a bit of a weepy mess, but in an alive way rather than a broken or depressed way. I feel like because of loving Z I understand more about living and dying.

No More / More

After Z died, once the reality started closing in and I was able to start understanding her death distinct from all the trauma of the accident, the thing that made me choke with fear and sadness the most was this idea of no more Z. I thought, that's it. My whole relationship with my daughter was over and done with before it had hardly started. 37 photos, some inky foot and handprints, a tiny amount of ashes and a drop of her blood on a blanket made by my mum - the count-able, finite remains of my child. It wasn't enough, it would never be enough. It was such a sad, awful, unfillable hole of 'no more' that to live in this world, I felt like I had to close that drawer, to look elsewhere for the 'more' that I needed.

Specifically, the 'more' that I was looking for was to get pregnant again. I was so sure it would happen - to be honest, I don't think I had really let go of feeling pregnant. This was my pregnancy and I would finish it, even if I had to mourn Z along the way. When I lost our first ivf pregnancy in March, all those self-delusions fell away, and I was left wondering, what if Z was my only child? Just even having to think about that question made me want to leap under a train, but with the molar pregnancy scare, I had plenty of time to think about it. I was scared that if really looked hard at my grief for Z, if I opened that drawer, the big sad black hole of 'no more' would suck me in and swallow me whole. Because there was no solution to it, there was no way my logical brain could think a way around the big stark reality of no more Z. I kind of lost my shit for a while there - as explained in this post. And then, exhausted with my own drama, me and all that sadness just lay on the floor, and breathed and looked at one another.

And I thought to Z, "Well, my love. I wish you hadn't gone and died. But there's not much you can do about it now." And in the spirit of parents whose kids have been conscripted to the army, I thought, "I wish you didn't have this job (being dead / being "one with the universe" or whatever it is that baby souls do after they die) but I still love you and I wish you'd send me a postcard or call me sometimes". And then I felt silly, because there was her star, which is always there twinkling at us, and the camellia tree which burst into bloom just when my heart was breaking, and her pomegranate tree, and her roses, and leaves in the river in Cairns, and clouds, and the sea at Somers, and the bird noises in the bush chapel where her ashes are, and I realised I really was being a pretty demanding mama. And I realised, I actually know Z better now than when she was born. And if somehow my knowledge of her and love for her has expanded, then there is more Z. She is still growing, she's finding her feet in the world, even if we have to guess about what exactly she's doing, even if I don't (in the way of all parents) really understand what her job entails. It's not how I wanted my daughter to be in the world, but I know now that whatever she is doing is important, because it is important to her, and therefore to me. If I just keep demanding her to fit in with what I need (which I know she can't do anymore) then we both feel awful, and maybe I'll miss seeing what she can do. I wish we'd had more time together in the conventional sense, but I can't be churlish about it because it's not her fault. And if I want to love her exactly as she is, then I have to be open to getting her little hippy-style postcards in brightly coloured leaves and odd cloud formations. I think she's also fond of slugs. Not sure why, but if she loves slugs, then I love them too.

Just when I was starting to get my brain around all of the above, I got an email from Angie attaching a mizuko jizo painting she has done for me - and there was Z, peeking out. And it all made sense - slowly my sadness for no more Z in my arms, and in our house in her fleshy, nearly 18 month old realness, is mingling with a wonder that I can still get little peeks of her. I was walking to the shops the other day and it hit me that she might have been walking with me by now (perhaps that shows how little I know about the energy levels of nearly 18 month olds) - but I suddenly thought, here, this is where her little hand would be, tight in my hand. Walking together. And I could just about feel her chubby fingers, the softness of her skin, and could suddenly feel both the no more and the more at the same time. I love you exactly as you are, my darling girl.




Painting by Angie Yingst, reproduced with permission.

Grief & doing my tax return

It had to happen eventually. My 09-10 tax return has been sitting there glowering at me, waiting for me to pull out all the pieces of paper and play with spreadsheets. Tonight, I've finally started to wrestle it.

I was expecting the urges to procrastinate, the frustrations with having no filing system since we moved to Melbourne (the filing cabinet which I'd just gotten organised before we left sydney is in the garage), the general head-achey-ness of trying to find documents from nearly 2 years ago.

What surprised me was the emotional gut-punch of looking at our bank statements from before & around the time of our accident. There we were, doing mundane things like getting the dogs vaccinated, when we only had 12 days left with that beautiful round living bump that was Z. There is the parking fee for the last scan we had at the hospital four days before, there is the movie we went to see (Where the Wild Things Are), all weary from making the big move, the last bits of Christmas shopping. And then, suddenly just a whole lot of withdrawals from hospital ATMs. It still shocks me, even 16 months on.

[ps thank you so much for the beautiful warm welcome back xxxh]

Blighted

This morning's scan showed not much more than Thursday's - the beginnings of a yolk sac, but nothing more, and the gestational sac itself was way behind the size it should be by now. This means (according to our doctor) that it's a blighted ovum, "though that doesn't mean there was anything wrong with your eggs", he added helpfully.

So what now? Wait to miscarry naturally, or a suction curretage to speed things up. Our doctor recommended the second option, because apparently for miscarriages after 6 weeks, they are often incomplete and require a curretage anyway. Gah. As my best mate put it, I want neither of these options.

I've cried so much today, and now it has peeled back into a white hot rage - at our stupid extortionately expensive clinic, my stupid body, our stupid car, every stupid f$#ing 4WD on the roads, the ridiculous car-dependent culture I live in and this stupid little thing that was persistent enough to stick around through all that bleeding, but not persistent enough to grow into a baby. And which is still making me nauseous and giving me sore boobs. It is a destructive, petulant, three-year-old anger and yet I can't throw enough things to satisfy it, and calming adult voices only infuriate it. I'm not a very nice person to be around at the moment, as El Prima has found out.

Please don't tell me any stories about blighted ova you have heard of that grew into lovely healthy babies - we've already put this scenario to our doctor, and with three scans, he is 100% certain that this one's going nowhere. That doesn't mean I'm taking his advice and booking in for the procedure. At the moment, the idea of bleeding my guts out is almost appealing.

*P* Being here

These are the things I would love to believe mean something:
- half-waking, trying to get comfortable in bed and thinking, "ow, boobs!".
- extreme 'right now or I'll eat your head' hunger mixed in with queasiness.
- having to get up in the night to pee.

Is my hope playing tricks on me? Meanwhile, I just continue to hum my vague little 'who knows, who knows' song.


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Sydney is so thick with 'before' memories. They are heavy on the ground, mostly still undisturbed because I have spent so little time here since 27 December 2009. The sight of kids in the school uniforms from Snacky & Snazzy's old school, the shops where I bought ordinary, inconsequential things, the road that led to our house - all of these things can't fade into the background until my brain has trotted through its 'last time I saw x, Haloumi was here' routine.

Today, I returned to one of my favorite Sydney spots - the women's baths at Coogee:


Image from here.

The last time I was there, my haloumi-filled belly stuck out obscenely between my bikini top and bottom. I greeted other swimmers with my stretchmarks. That belly was remarkable - everyone remarked on it, speculated on Haloumi's gender and wished me well.

I first swam in this rockpool nearly ten years ago, when I was doing a temporary work placement in Sydney. And when I discovered it, I thought (or kind of *knew*) that would swim here when I was pregnant. Even in the pre-El Prima days, I was so hungry to have a baby, that that moment in the rockpool was one of the things that propelled me most strongly to move to Sydney.

I had so many unpregnant swims here over the years - some involving mildly athletic laps, some snorkelling and marvelling at the starfish, shellfish and once even an octopus under the surface, some splashy and noisy with El Prima's girls, some quiet and contemplative with no one else in the water. And so many beautiful pregnant swims with Haloumi - contemplating the sea snails and feeling her kick almost in time with me.

I've seen it in a storm, with the waves crashing over the rock wall, I've seen the surface sparkle with a beating sun, and I've eyed off the greeny-blue depths when it was far too cold to swim.

And now, who knows? I'm egging on this tiny potential, hoping it is in the right spot, hoping it isn't ectopic, molar, blighted, all kinds of words for 'lost already'. To swim there today felt like an act of love - towards my tentative self and this little question-mark of cells.