Right Where I Am 2012: Two years and five months

I'm glad Angie has decided to put on the Right Where I am Now project again -  my god it feels like so much has changed in a year.

Its a Sunday the 27th again, which makes it two years and five months exactly since I was strapped to a trolley in the emergency department, hand on my 34w pregnant belly, still hoping that we might hear Haloumi's heartbeat.  I'm back in hospital now - this time in the adjoining maternity hospital, but things are so, so different - and I am acutely grateful for that.  This time, it's our six day old baby boy, Ali, who is a patient in the special care nursery, but his outlook is the complete opposite to Haloumi's.  He's alive, to start with, and in rude health, but needs phototherapy for jaundice due to ABO incompatibility.  I'm sleeping on a recliner next to his isolette so that we can continue breastfeeding.  I'm still in a state of disbelief that we have a living baby who I can breastfeed, who gives me serious looks with his dark eyes, whose noises I wake up to in the night, thinking, "A baby is crying... oh, that is *our* baby". 

In the family lounge I talk to the grandmother of a baby girl born at 27 weeks, and I send out a silent thank you to all available deities for our chubby, healthy, full term little boy who looks so much like his older sister.  But where we only got still glimpses of her, he is here in real time - moving, making faces, clearly enunciating his "Waaaa" cry and drinking my milk - all the things I longed for so much  with Zainab.  I know now that all those possibilities are gone for her.  What she (and we) missed out on still makes me cry, but there's now an ocean of experiences which mothering her has given me.  If I had to choose, I would always choose for her to live, but none of us get the luxury of that choice, so I have to take what I can from being her mama.  And even if it isn't what I would have chosen, that is still a lot. 

It feels corny to try to enumerate what exactly to that is - to be honest, it feels as though my whole personality and belief system has re-shaped around being mama to Zainab.  It isn't that I've "found religion" or anything like that.  It's more that being mother to a dead child has meant that my love follows her into death, so I've had to think about what death entails - where is it exactly, and can I still connect with her while she's there?  I've come to realise that, if I thought of death as some separate, alien place that I needed to get to in order to be close to her, then being comfortable in the land of the living was just not possible. I didn't want to choose between being close to her and living - so I had to find her here - to inhale her softness with the rose petals, to wear her memory in my choices of jewellery, to let death sit comfortably at our table - feeling her existence each time we missed her.  And now, to notice all the resemblances between her and her brother. 

I feel like she is built into our lives now - we have our small rituals for her, and family and friends (mostly) acknowledge her as a significant part of our family.  The blanket my mum knitted for her - which she was wrapped in for much of the time we held her, is here wrapping Ali - especially on car trips, and exerting a protective warmth.  I like to think that they know one another - that her cells watched over his as he grew within me, maybe bossing him around a little like the big sister she is.  He's still in that newborn place where he seems to be in two worlds at once - staring at things just beyond my shoulder, making inexplicable but beautiful facial expressions.  I whisper in his ear, "tell your sister we love her".

Just as I refuse to choose between living and being close to Z, I've also realised that I don't need to choose between feeling the sadness when it comes, and enjoying pure joy when that arrives - even if they both tumble in the door at the same time.  It doesn't make sense, but I've now given up on trying to make sense of emotions - just feeling them honestly and genuinely is big enough. 

Looking back, my post last year touched on similar ground, but while I'd started to make friends with the intensity of losing Z, I was still so so sad, so much of the time.  I feel like my life has recovered a lightness since then. There really was a cruel little part of me that felt like I would never have a living child, that mocked me for wanting one so badly.  And yet here he is - soft-snoring, velvet-cheeked proof that the universe can be unimaginably good as well as unimaginably cruel.  I am so grateful that the odds favoured us this time. 

Nesting with a vengeance (or, Grief is grotty)

To be honest, I was really a bit scared to start nesting.  But then our dear friends S and C offered as their baby gift a whole day of spring cleaning to help get our place in lovely shape for Adzuki to come home to.  And somehow, having someone to work alongside, and who were really imagining a living breathing baby in our house, unleashed the nesting monster.  All the nesting we never got to do for Z, because we were moving interstate and she died before we moved into the new house - and a whole lot of new nesting for this baby.  For so long, we had just been in survival mode.  We'd unpacked in such a random way - I was discharged directly from the rehab hospital to our new house, and friends and family had unpacked all our furniture the day before. 

El Prima and I were never the biggest fans of housework to start with, but grief sucked much of the remaining house pride out of us.  Just getting back into work, getting the girls to school, dinner on the table, bills paid, laundry done, and then starting IVF took all our energy.  And when you've been given an acute appreciation of how the people you love can be gone in an instant, well, dusting just really doesn't come very high on your priority list.  And El Prima and I really didn't need another thing to argue over.  Oh look, we had all kinds of good excuses, but essentially we'd given up on the notion of having a lovely clean house - it was all just too overwhelming.  Somehow, having S come and clean broke that pattern - and as the one day of spring cleaning turned into about three and a half, and El Prima and I started getting into it, I  realised I could start caring about this house again - that looking after it didn't have to be an act of drudgery but could be an act of love and care - for ourselves and for Adzuki.

That doesn't mean that our place is now spotless, but it is so so much cleaner before, and with this new energy, we've been able to let go of lots of stuff we don't need, and to re-arrange and tidy up the stuff we do need. Who knows if our hearts will be broken again, but I figure - we're already so in love with Adzuki -  holding out on preparing for him to come home living and breathing wouldn't make things any easier if he didn't make it.  If we're jinxed, we're jinxed already by loving him so much.  The first thing I bought for him back in November was this vintage kimono - it is now hanging on the wall near his drawers and change table, hot pink with hope.  We're now at 38 and a half weeks - ready when you are, little one!

Curiouser and curiouser

As promised...



This morning's number was 630! And although it was the same Nurse Realistic, she was much more upbeat this time. She's spoken with my doctor, and he didn't see any need for a further blood test, just a scan in a week's time.

When I started with my confused/excited, "So this might mean that it may actually be viable?", she did get all realistic on me, saying, "With all early pregnancies, but especially when your betas started low, we can't really confirm anything until the scan, but yes, congratulations. But if you do have any sharp pains or bleeding, don't ignore it, go straight to emergency."

So, somehow, my BFN of 15 Feb is starting to look a bit like a BF-might-possibly-conceivably-optimistically-be-P. It's now starting to feel like uncertainty of a much friendlier kind. Come on, uncertainty, welcome in.