The Secret Garden Meeting - July

Thank you Carly, Sally and Sophie for the beautiful website, for these questions and for sharing your own answers.

The Secret Garden Meeting - July

How do you see or imagine your baby now that you do not have her with you?

I expect that there will always be an element of Georgina that is at the same stage as her twin sister. As Jessica approaches her first birthday this month, I often picture Georgina at this age and wonder what would be different, what would be the same. I think that I will probably always do this.

At times, I find it very comforting to have such a direct connection to my missing daughter. At other times, I find it disconcerting. Georgina is often present when I look at Jessica, just outside my field of vision. Sometimes I feel that, if I could only turn around quickly enough, I would catch a glimpse of that other daughter. She is there, flickering in the static between my eyes and her sister.

Like Laura's boys, Georgina and Jessica were fraternal twins, not identical. Because of their prematurity I find it quite hard to say for certain whether they might have resembled one another. I like to think that I can see some similarities, in their features and their proportions, in those early photographs.

Often when I dream about Georgina she is an extremely premature baby and looks as she looked in life. Sometimes the Jessica of my dreams has grown but Georgina is still tiny. But in my dreams, she lives without ventilators and without wires. About a week after she died, I dreamt about her. I was sitting in a field, under a huge tree. I was holding Jessica and Georgina in my arms. They were tiny and red but I wasn't frightened. They were breathing without effort, the sun was shining. I was thinking about whether they would be hungry yet as I wanted to feed them. I felt so happy in my dream.

I think because it resolves two minor issues that trouble me, that the girls were never together after their birth and that Georgina was never outside. I wish that I had asked if the girls could be together or if I could have carried Georgina over to Jessica when she was dying. I wish that I had asked to take Georgina's body outside.

For some reason, I often imagine Georgina as a young teenager. In that brief moment when girls are still all skinny ribs and limbs like dandelion stalks. Still clear eyed. The age of about 12 or 13 years old. It didn't last long for me, I remember my aunt saying to me wistfully, "Ach Catherine you used to look so Pre-Raphaelite." I didn't dare to ask what she felt the Pre-Raphaelite had been replaced by. Something more solid. A person more reminiscent of something by Rubens perhaps? I wish I'd asked her now.

Sometimes I see a group of these girls on the cusp of womanhood wandering around the shops. The one at the back, the one who seems to be day-dreaming. That is the girl that tugs at my heart. I wonder if that would have been my girl.

And most frequently of all, she is just herself. Something free of her corporeal self, something insubstantial. Perhaps she is everywhere. Or nowhere. But I know that she isn't really to be found in my memories of that tiny, aching body. Not inside that bruised and swollen skin. Not a being with any sort of physical presence. Just my daughter, Georgina. Always with me. In some ways, even closer than her sister.

How did the loss of your last pregnancy affect your choices/decisions about the birth of your subsequent pregnancy?

I don't know.
Sometimes I am frightened that there will never be a subsequent pregnancy because of the events of my first.
I am too scared to try again.
I am too scared not to try again.