Over and over and over and over . . . .

'For many babies, the NICU stay is like a roller coaster ride, with ups and downs, triumphs and setbacks. Of course, the parents are also along for the ride.'

A roller coaster is very good short hand for a NICU stay. When you have more than one child it is like trying to ride two, or more, roller coasters simultaneously.
Georgina's ride was shorter, bumpier and came to an abrupt halt.
Jessica's ride felt endless, involved a number of major dips and dizzying climbs but we both managed to step off the roller coaster, basically in one piece.

When Jessica came home from hospital, at the very end of December last year, I naively assumed that I would finally be free of that roller coaster. But seven months on, I am still crashing up and down with boring regularity. The moment I feel that I am making progress, tentatively starting to glue my life back together, I find myself dumped back right at the start. Chewed up and spat out. Do not pass go. Do not collect £200. Back in the old 'stages of grief', my old friends, my good chums, let me introduce you to . . . . . . .denial (or disbelief), anger (or fighting), bargaining, depression and acceptance (the most elusive, like the popular friend you desperately want to come to your party but who rarely deigns to show up). On second thoughts, you probably didn't actually need an introduction to those five. Sadly. I would dearly love a break, from all this endless cycling, round and round. Just as I make a grab for acceptance, wham, bam, back to denial it is.

Thank you for all your kind comments. I really love reading all the memories that you so kindly share of your children. At times I feel that I have almost met them, somehow. Even though I know that is impossible.

I am going to try and finish working on Georgina's memory box. I stalled with it because I am so angry with myself. So angry that I can't remember more about her and the time that I spent with her. My memory seems to have performed some fairly effective erasure of most of the time she was alive. I can remember her birth and her death but nothing in between and not a great deal from the next month. I remember one of the nurses telling me that this was evidence of nature's inherent mercy (hmmmm), that it was a blessing that I couldn't remember those days. But I still wish I could. It was all I had and all that I am ever going to have.

I am so lucky.
I have many photographs of her.
I have a diary that I kept whilst she was alive. I wrote to her as though she was going to survive. I have a diary that my mother wrote to the girls whilst I was pregnant.
I have all the medical facts about her that I asked her doctors for, what happened to her whilst she was in the NICU, her blood type, her time of birth, her weight.
I have the clothes that I was wearing the day she died, when I held her. I also have my husband's clothes. They are a little blood stained and neither of us could bear to wash her blood off. I don't think I could have worn those clothes again anyhow.
I have all the clothes that I bought for her whilst I was pregnant. I couldn't bear to put them away or to give them to her sister (except for one cardigan which, oddly, I know is 'Georgina's cardigan' somehow but I want Jessica to have it)
I have all my maternity clothes.
I have her small toy elephant, her blankets, her identity bracelets, her patient identity sticker, the monitors and probes that they removed from her body, hats that she wore.

The day that Georgina died, I held her for the first time. I tried to write about it at Glow In The Woods " . .the experience was strangely peaceful. All my fears and doubts just disappeared. Temporarily sadly. All I could think about was how very much I loved her, how perfect she was, how full of grace. Not her corporeal form, but her. . . It was as though we both became suffused with light. I wasn't a grief-stricken mother. She wasn't a dying, tiny premature baby. We both became something else entirely.'

It came out sounding a little 'mystical' but in reality it was quite a matter of fact experience. Earthy rather than other-worldly. Total aside but Georgina means of the earth or farmer.

Perhaps every mother experiences something similar when she holds her baby for the first time. I've got nothing to compare it to. I am so very, very, very grateful that I 'met' her, in that instant. It is an experience that I will never forget. Maybe that is why I can't remember more about Georgina, all my other memories are saturated with the final one, those last breaths. So very full of grace. So defiantly alive.

I feel that I should be able to fight off every other emotion with that memory. All the anger, sadness, upset. Begone. But I can't. That makes me angry with myself. As Gal wrote, perhaps it is because I was in an extraordinary state whilst Georgina was alive. Now I am ordinary again. Angry and graceless.

I also have Jessica. I am so incredibly blessed. I feel very uncomfortable writing about her here as, just as she is Georgina's 'shadow baby', I know she is a shadow baby to many others. She is an amazing person in herself and also in her relationship to Georgina. I know that they will always be connected in a way that I can never hope to understand. I don't know how Jessica and the doctors conspired to end up at a living, breathing Jessica but I am so glad that they did. Some days it still feels impossible that she survived. I hope that I didn't do the wrong thing by wishing for my twins to be divided. I feel that it is only through her that I grieve for Georgina fully, that I understand some of what I lost when Georgina died, the relationship we could have had, the relationship that they could have had. But it is also through Jessica that I live, that I let go of her sister, she is my greatest joy.

Sometimes. Just sometimes. I catch myself wondering which one of my daughters had the lucky escape. The one that lived or the one that didn't have to live. Life is a two-edged sword. When Georgina died, I remember sobbing to my husband, "at least her children won't die. She'll never have any. She'll never go through this experience."

Then just when I have all my soothing, comforting memories, words and thoughts around me. I want to smash them all apart. Back at the beginning. Repeat.