Miracles

Lately I've read quite a number of posts about 'miracle' babies and how hurtful these stories can be to people who have lost a child. As you know, I've got a foot in both camps here. For whatever reason, a reason that even I am not entirely certain of, this blog has been mainly about Georgina. The twin that did not survive.

Maybe because I have nowhere else to talk about her anymore, not in real life. I suppose that this could have been a blog about my miraculous micro-preemie, Jessica. But it isn't. I question why it isn't myself. I don't think it is because I am ungrateful. I hope that I don't come across that way. I tried to reflect the nature of this blog in its title. I feel as though I was torn in two the day I met my girls, I don't think I will ever be able to stick myself back together. Not seamlessly. Not without cracks.

I don't particularly like stories about 'miracle' babies myself. I don't like seeing all the too-familiar equipment in the accompanying photographs. I don't like the way that I always have to read them, to mentally jot down the gestation and the birth weight and compare them to my girls. I hate the suggestion that the survival of very sick or very premature babies has anything to do with the 'determination' of the mother or the 'fighting spirit' of the child. I'm afraid that I don't believe in miracles, if the word is being used to imply the direct intervention of a higher power in the workings of this world.

I am told frequently that Jessica is a 'miracle' and I don't generally debate the issue or even take particular objection to the term. I think she is a miracle. I have no other word for the combination of medical technology, luck and biology that conspired to result in her being here today, sleeping in the next room. It knocks the breath out of me on a daily basis. I simply cannot believe that a child so small, so vulnerable, so very, very sick at times is still alive. A miracle seems as good a word as any.

Nobody will ever mention her twin, nobody will ever call my sweet Georgina a miracle. And she was. She really was. A miraculous person. My daughter, I wish you could have seen her.

All of our babies are miracles. No matter what happens.

The waiting room of the NICU where the girls were taken was plastered with incredible stories of survival against all the odds. I appreciate that these stories are placed there to provide hope to parents but I can't help but wonder if they sometimes inspire false hope. Understandably, there aren't any stories about the babies that die in the NICU.

I remember desperately searching for babies of the same birth weight or of a similar gestation who had survived. In the corridor was a newspaper article about twin girls, of similar birth weights to Jessica and Georgina who had been resident in the NICU the previous year. The twins had survived and gone home after a stay of several months. In the few days that Georgina was alive, I stopped and read that story every day. I hoped, wished and prayed that I would be that mother, that mother who took both her daughters home. But I wasn't. And I couldn't stop by that particular notice board again, after Georgina died. I just didn't want to see that mother's smiling face, I hurt too much.

Google reader recommended that I read a blog about surviving life with twins, it is not the most tactful of technological gubbins and obviously does not have sufficient powers of discrimination to tell that the reason I'm writing this blog is entirely because I don't need such advice. To torture myself, I clicked. The article that came up was about 'single baby envy'. How much twin mamas envy women with one baby. I very nearly posted a comment. But I didn't. In another world I'm probably typing a comment saying how I wish that I could have one moment of peace or sleep or relaxation and just one baby. Sadly it isn't this one, not this world, not this time around.

And in that other world, the world where I have a Jessica and a Georgina who were born healthy and at term, I don't have a clue how lucky I am.

Sometimes I worry that I am that woman in the newspaper article, the smiling woman with her 'miracle' twins who doesn't quite know how lucky she is.

Sometimes I worry that I am that woman writing a blog article about single baby envy, that woman who doesn't really understand how lucky she is.

I know I must be at times. I suppose I'm just trying to say that I acknowledge that.
I know how it feels when your baby isn't the 'miracle' baby who defeats the odds and lives.
I know how it feels to walk out of a hospital and know that one of your children will never come home.

But I don't know how that feels when it doesn't occur simultaneously with another one of your children being the 'miracle' baby. That is all I know.
These two experiences occurring at the same time.
That is how my first and only experience of pregnancy and childbirth worked out.
So very unlucky.
So very lucky.

Sometimes I hear an old Massive Attack tune playing in my head 'just be thankful for what you've got.'