Mistrust

mistrust - lack of trust or confidence arising from suspicion

Thank you so much for all your comments on my last post. I found them really helpful. I am so lucky to have 'met' you all. I would feel infinitely more alone without you, your kindness and your understanding.

I think that my feeling of loneliness was sparked by an incident that happened a couple of weeks ago. I was out walking with Jessica, in a bit of a dream. I'm a terrible one for walking around looking slightly abstracted. Like one of those nutty professor types but sadly without the associated brains. I noticed that I was approaching another couple of walkers, an older woman and a younger woman carrying a toddler. I moved to overtake and as I did, I heard a hesitant 'Catherine?'

The younger woman was a girl I had attended school with. I haven't seen her for a long time, possibly ten years if not more. We were not particular friends at school but we know many of the same people. I also knew her husband. We all went to the same schools until our ways parted when we went off to university.

She slightly wrong-footed me by asking if Jessica were my child. I don't know why this question caught me off guard. Perhaps because I was waiting for the dreaded 'if she your first?', a question that always floors me even now. So I said yes and we chatted about her little boy and her husband's career and her career and where they live now. And I'd just started to say something about Jessica being born a bit early when she reached the driveway to her mother's house. So I never said anything. Not about Jessica. Not about Georgina. Not about the hospital. Not a squeak.

Which is what I always intend to do. I expected to feel pleased with myself, that I had resisted the temptation to give her the whole sorry story.

But, somehow, I felt so sad. I felt ashamed and disappointed in myself. That I hadn't told her anything about my life. Or the past year. I expect she might tell mutual acquaintances that I have had a baby girl, if she even remembers running into me that morning. But part of me wants to say, two. I had two little girls, I have two daughters. I don't know why. And I don't know what to do with that impulse in myself.

When I re-read my post and the responses to it, I thought to myself.

(a) I do have a tendency to imagine that, if both my girls had lived or if I had a more 'normal' birth, everything would now be peachy keen. It ain't necessarily so.
What is attributable to becoming a mother for the first time? What is attributable to a multiple birth? What is attributable to the premature birth? What is attributable to a long NICU stay? What is attributable to the death of one of my children? I could sit and stir this tangled web of strings round and round for hours and still be no closer to the truth.

(b) I do see the world very much in black and white. I still keep thinking that I can find the elusive magic bullet, that one size fits all explanation that I can roll out on all occasions. That I can find words that I can use to talk about Georgina and Jessica every single time to every single person that will make me feel good about what I have said. That these magic phrases are in existence.
I dont think they are. It is up to me to judge the context, I can say as much or as little as I want to. It isn't really lying if I don't tell the whole story from beginning to end. It isn't a betrayal.

(c) Hmmmm, I don't really trust anyone do I? Not even myself.

One of the lovely counsellors I have seen over the past year confided to me in a revelatory tone "You have some issues around control and trust don't you?" Really? Really?! You're kidding, no s***! As if I'd never noticed. Still, sometimes it does pay to have these things spelt out for you and I suppose that is part of the role of these good folk. I do have some minor league issues with these two things.

Control. Trust.

Most of the time I am not even willing to let people try because I don't trust them. I simply don't trust the world at large anymore. I don't trust them to understand. I don't trust them to listen. I don't trust them to take this fragile memory of a few days and look it at, give a little bit of kind attention and hand it back to me so I can tuck it back into my heart. I'm frightened that they will stamp on it. I won't even give them the opportunity to listen, to understand, to say something comforting. The majority of people will never know about Georgina because I don't trust them enough to tell them that she even existed.

As Sara wrote 'some people will do better with it than you think' and I think she is right. But I am so terrified of people saying the wrong thing or nothing at all. I feel as though I cannot absorb any more bruises at the moment. Georgina is my heart. She is my tiny, precious, beloved baby girl and I am very protective of her. Protective in a way that I am not with her sister. My relationship with Jessica is one that is plain as day, understood by most people and generally not subject to interpretation. It is what it is. A child and her mother. Nobody feels the need to call upon religious imagery, cosmic schemes, deeper meanings or to question the validity of my feelings because Jessica is young and small.

I am very wary of talking about Georgina because I do not want others to dismiss her, to make light of her, to call her a miscarriage, part of a grander plan or somebody that simply wasn't meant to be. No matter what their motivations might be for doing so. I do appreciate that the platitudes that I hate so much generally originate from kindness, they are said to offer comfort, in a vain attempt to console the inconsolable. Georgina is my child, my daughter. My relationship with my dead child is very similar to that I have with my living child, minus the practicalities. I love her. Plain as day. This similarity might not be immediately apparent to everyone. It might not make people feel comfortable. But it is what it is. Just the same.

I have to learn to trust other people with my daughter's memory and the love that I hold for her. Outside of this place. Who knows I might even be pleasantly surprised. People might want to talk about her. People might even understand that I love her. It almost seems a bit stupid that I am so scared and spend so long agonising over speaking about her.

But then I will get occasions like a family gathering last week that just make me squirm. My SIL felt the need to tell me a whole long tale about how her friend's daughter is expecting twins and how the cost is such a worry to them. I just wanted to scream 'well perhaps one of them will die and it won't be a worry.' I didn't though.

Has she already forgotten about Georgina? Does she not think that I might not appreciate hearing about someone else's financial worries with regards to the cost of raising two babies? I would love for that to be my only worry. This is coming from Georgina's aunt. Whenever something like this happens, I want to snatch up Jessica, snatch up my fragile little memories of Georgina, stuff them deep inside my chest where nobody can say anything that hurts them and run like hell.

After every incident like the one I've just described, I have to start building myself up again.

Having established that I don't trust other people it also turns out that I don't trust myself either. Ho hum.

I don't trust myself to relate these events with the 'matter of fact'ness described so well by Sophie. But I know that I can. It isn't a question of shrugging it off, I can stick to the facts. And I suspect that being matter of fact will make it easier for other people to hear about Georgina and Jessica, to ask questions of me and for me to talk about her. I obviously still need to talk about her or why all this blogging?

I don't trust myself not to play down her importance in my life when, as so often happens, I end up trying to comfort the person who has asked some awkward question and caused the whole thing to come tumbling out. I hate catching myself saying those same platitudinous, trite little phrases, it wasn't meant to be, it was for the best. They aren't true. My life will never be happier or better for not having Georgina in it. Never.

I don't trust myself to recover from this. Why am I still, a year after the fact, still sitting here in the dark, early hours of the morning pouring my heart out to strangers? Why am I still waking up in the middle of the night, sweating, heart pounding, from my dreams of tiny babies? Babies that I cannot hope to save, blood, pregnancies that end abruptly, malevolent machines, kindly machines. It still feels as though I am living under ice, separated from the familiar world I used to navigate so easily. I now live on the perpendicular to that world. At a strange angle.

I have to go back to work next month. I have to trust myself to go in there and not scream the place down, to be able to concentrate for longer than a few minutes on things that do not concern either of my children. I have to trust myself.

I have to try and have a pregnancy that ends . . . . well, can I ask for more 'normally' than this one? If this is to be my only experience of pregnancy and childbirth I will still count myself more than fortunate, more than lucky. But I hope it will not be. I have to trust that my body can still conceive and carry a healthy child to a decent gestation. I have to trust myself.

But I can't. Sigh.