Long Black Veil

I have a sudden yearning for mourning.

I want a big black dress and a long black veil.
I want a black arm band.
I want a mourning ring.
I want some jewellery made of jet.
They knew how to do these thing properly in those days. When the handy phrase "I have x children still living" was in common usage.

I want to re-decorate my house, change to black curtains and a black front door.
I want to spray my car black and tint the windows.
I'd like a dead tree to plant in my front garden and dead flowers to plant in our window boxes.
I want to leave my hair long and greasy.
I want to let my skin wrinkle and sag, the bags under my eyes darken.
I want to carry extra weight around with me, pads of fat on my hips.
I want to walk around in clothes that no longer fit me properly, let my stomach poke out.

I know that the world still turns, the sun still shines, people still go shopping in supermarkets, The Simpsons is still shown on television, children are still being born, books are still being written and published, other people's surplus junk is still advertised for sale on e-bay, people still die, celebrity gossip magazines are still purchased and read, I still breath in and out. Treacherously.
But I stopped. On the 29th of August last year, some vital part of me just stopped.
The world carried on and left a bit of me standing, frozen, waiting, stagnating, paused.

When I say that I am still waiting for Georgina to come back to me, I really mean it. Some crazy part of my brain is still waiting for someone to leap out from behind a bush and go "surprise, really got you going there didn't we? Here, you can have your baby back now. You didn't really believe that all that crazy tiny baby stuff was actually reality did you? It was all just a test. A game. We were having a laugh with you. Here you are."
And I'd nod sheepishly and hold out my arms for her. And we'd be back how we were. Me and my girls. And my husband I suppose, I'll make a bit of room for him in this strange day-dream. Grudgingly.

This whole pretending that Georgina never existed thing. It's just not cutting it for me anymore.

I suppose what I really want is an external sign that I am not over this yet. Not yet. Every time someone tells me how strong I am, how well I am coping, how they don't know how I get up every morning and how amazing it is that I do, I don't feel as though I am being complimented. It cuts me to the quick. All I hear is, you're over it. Swiftly followed by either (a) good stuff, now we can move on and discuss something slightly less embarrassing than your tinchy, tiny, dead/ill children or (b) my God but you're a cold one, to be living and breathing and walking around still. How could you?

I think, rather oddly, that I am actually missing the oxygen. When Jessica was discharged from hospital, she still needed constant oxygen therapy. She developed chronic lung disease as a result of being born so prematurely and being ventilated for such a long time. On a practical level this meant that she was hooked up via tubes to either a large machine in our house or a gas cylinder. She hasn't needed oxygen for about six weeks now, apart from the odd day or two.

Nothing screams 'something didn't go to plan with this one, avoid, avoid, avoid' more loudly than a baby with tubes taped to her face and stuck up her nose. Most adults seemed to avoid catching my eye. The poor folk who stuck their heads in the buggy to see the baby always looked as though they regretted doing so and moved off pretty sharpish.

Children were a different story, they always wanted to know what is was all about, what it meant. Some of them asked me straight out if my baby was going to die.

A few adults were a different story, oddly enough mainly young guys. The young man who cleans our windows came out with "what's all this she's got going on then? What's all that about?", and the other delightful young man who remarked that the shop we were in wasn't a hospice.

But now we just look 'normal'. I look like any other happy young mum clutching her first born, fussing over the buggy, twitching the blankets, wiping her mouth. I feel so torn about it. Part of me seems to want to inflict the whole sorry tale on everyone, like I'm desperately waiting for an 'in' , as if to say look, we aren't what we seem. I often look at all the women around me and wonder which of them might resent me, hate me even. I want to rush up to them and say, wait I'm one of you. Not exactly I know, it's complicated you see but I'm not just another blissfully ignorant new mother.

But when I do tell the whole tale, either including or excluding my Georgina, I don't feel any relief, any catharsis. I just feel embarrassed, like I've said too much, let my mouth run away with me. Uneasy.

Perhaps I should make up a ficticious age, birth-weight, birth story. A labour that went on for hours. How pleased I was to bring Jessica home the very next day. How proud my husband was of our big, bouncing baby girl. How her grandparents crowded round to meet their first grandchild.

I think I'll skip the baby that didn't make it. I think I'll skip the incubators, the ventilators, the lines, the CPAP machines, the blood transfusions, the infections, the kangaroo care, the sheer fragility of those little lives that meant everything to me, those endless days of incubator watching, the endless nights of pumping breast milk. They just make people uncomfortable.

Looks like I'm right back where I started. I still want my long black veil. Just to tell people to stay away from me and not ask too many questions.