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

Breathing and (mostly) functioning

Here are some of the things that make it a bit better:

- the sound the cat makes when I accidentally sneeze on him. Both surprised and disgusted all at once.
- Rima being home, although she was kind enough to bring back a sniffy head cold especially for me.
- pulling my finger out and starting to sort out actual dates for starting back at work, even if the idea of it is still pretty scary.
- finding people who seem to have survived this kind of loss and are even "integrating" it into lives in which good things happen.
- random stories about otters from lovely people.

Mostly

I'm calling around getting insurance quotes for the new death-machine we are due to pick up tomorrow. It is not "new" new - just new for us. A 2002 Subaru - but one of the models with stability control and a ..... of airbags.

A prize for whoever can come up with the best plural noun for a group of airbags. A cloud of airbags? A reassurance of airbags?

The person giving me an insurance quote has to ask whether we've had any previous accidents in the past 3 years, "regardless of fault". I tell him / her - a 4WD hit us, head-on, yes, the car was written off. Inevitably, she/ he says, "That sounds awful. I hope everyone was alright?"

...

I don't know what to say to that, so I usually just say "mostly" in a tone which (I hope) firmly communicates - do not ask me any more about this. If they do ask more, I blather on a bit about broken knees, ribs, spleens, liver etc etc. That makes them uncomfortable enough.

I don't say, "No, we are not alright. My baby daughter died." I want to be correct and accurate and honest, and I want our loss acknowledged, but I have to make a number of these phone calls, get a number of quotes. My composure is stretched thin enough already. I have functions I need to perform today before I disintergrate into a weepy pulp. I can't go there - not for a flipping insurance quote, not with someone who only knows me as one voice in a call-centre shift. I can't risk the random responses the truth might evoke.

It feels ridiculous, shopping around for insurance when something like this has happened. Everything feels ridiculous, flippant. To continue to live and breathe is a cruel insult. I didn't realise I could become so bitter. I didn't really know the meaning of it. But bitter and interesting I could handle maybe, bitter and boring - trapped in this repetitive ongoing grief - is harder. I think this is why I've gripped so hard onto the idea of making a book, making artwork out of this grief. Nothing will compensate, but can't I at least make something beautiful from the ruins?

Things which don't help

- Not having El Prima around to tell me it is time I went to bed (she's in Sydney for the weekend).
- Staying up till the tiny quiet hours reading and weeping.
- When we decide to go for a walk to the market as a cheer-up, having a heavily pregnant woman ask "Are you pregnant?" (the second such comment in 3 days)
- Getting poured on by rain on the walk home.

Actually, I think the rain did help. There is something about getting completely drenched - as though the internal and external water levels reached a balance. I've lost all compunction about sobbing while walking along the footpath - rain running down my cheeks and fogging my glasses helps.

I'd worn a favorite singlet with a little red corduroy mini - I'd been happy with what I was wearing, and it made me feel better than in my pajamas. But once she said that, I cursed my choice, and that I had nothing with me to hide this belly. It has been nearly 8 weeks. I still look pregnant. I haven't made the t-shirt I wanted to make in hospital. The one that says "I'm not pregnant anymore. My baby has died. Please don't ask". I think I need to make it before I venture outside the house again.

What is worse, the shocked looks on people's faces when they read it, or their unwittingly painful comments?

Birth Certificate

We grabbed the mail on our way out of the house to have coffee with Aron, an old friend who did his history PhD on the Royal tours of Australia. I tear one envelope open and can tell from the feel of the paper that it is not a bill. This is thicker, watermarked paper. When I stare at it, I can’t tell if it is just my eyes or whether the colour of the paper changes softly towards the centre – from creamy white to pinky cream.

This paper certifies me as a “mother”, and certifies Z’s birth – that she was here – a human child, even if she never drew breath. [Why do they produce these certificates? Is she ever going to need it to get a passport? To get her driver’s licence? Will we ever need it to enrol her in school? Is this some kind of sympathy consolation prize just to make us feel better? The most comforting reason I can think of is pure administrative completeness. A child was here. She must be recorded.]

On paper, I am a mother, but there is no pram here, no noisy squirming baby. Only a flat two dimensional photo and this certificate.

I feel like one of those flat felt figures we had at kinder. You can peel me off this situation and stick me onto another scene. It makes a soft ripping sound as you do it – quieter than velcro. Here is my picture-baby, here is my piece of paper. I love her so much, but she’s now my two-dimensional child – stilled, flattened out on the page like a rare flower. I didn’t dream her three dimensional little life, she was definitely here (right here) – moving and being. But all the remaining evidence I have of that fact is unsatisfying.

The next envelope I open is an overdue fine from the library – Sheila Kitzinger, “Rediscovering Birth”. We have to go, to move on, we’ll be late for coffee with Aron. I fold these pieces of mail together and worry that I’ll mix them up or lose them – confuse the proof of my daughter’s existence with a library fine.

Today

is the day I decided I was ready to see the pictures of our car post-crash.



I'm still writing but the blogging thing is tricky at the moment. February has come and gone - a very different month to the one I had thought I might be having. My knee is getting better - at some stage in the next few months, people won't be able to tell how damaged I was/am from the way I walk. I'm not sure I'm ready to masquerade as a well person though. But I'm starting to face up to the things that need to be faced - work, publications, buying a new car, doing our tax return so we can afford all the freaking safety features.

Sending lots of love and congratulations to those who've got to meet their babies this month. And SO SO happy to see this news. See, the world is still an okay place.