Falling even further behind

One thing that I have learned from my attempt to write 30 posts in 30 days. 

I am not designed to blog every day. 

My attempt has been very feeble and I feel slightly ashamed but I don't want to give up. 

It might just be 30 posts spread over 130 days.

Day 4 - Your favourite book and has it changed since your loss?

I seem to have a strong affection for Canadian authors, most of favourites hail from that part of the world. Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields. My favourite books by these authors would have to be Fifth Business, The Robber Bride (with The Blind Assassin hot on its heels) and Various Miracles. I've read all of these books multiple times and they pop up in my inner world frequently. 

Since Georgina died, I feel a greater need for books to be 'resolved', like a perfect chord. 

I want to see the bad and evil get their comeuppances, I want to see the good rewarded. I don't like fates left dangling, threads loose. Too much like real life. 

My favourite book is Vanity Fair by William Thackeray and it hasn't changed. I started re-reading it whilst, unbeknowst to me, I was in labour with the girls. It came with me to the hospital. It sat with me in the NICU waiting room. I think I probably read it, or tried to read it, the evening of the day Georgina died. When it was finished, I started toting about The Way We Live Now by Trollope, another fail-safe favourite of mine.

I stopped my studies in literature when I was sixteen so please forgive me if I talk nonsense. What I like about these books is the echo in them, that humanity doesn't really change, people are foolish, greedy, loyal, clever, dishonest, kind, unkind. We have always been this way, we will always be this way. Nothing really changes except the participants.

As Jessica's NICU stay lengthened, I read all the Twilight books (except the final one, been told that it is slightly stinky so I might avoid), re-read all the Harry Potter books and read every single word ever written by Jilly Cooper. Now there's resolved for you, all is right with the world in Jilly Cooper land. Or it will be. And I don't care if that means I have to carry a book entitled 'The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous' with a half naked man on the front, whatevs, as Jess-Carter Morley would say.

I see it has also made a list of book entitled 'Awful Books I Would Rather Burn Than Recommend' on Amazon. Well, I would never burn a book on principle and, if you ever find yourself immersed in grief or the strange world of intensive care or a chemotherapy ward, I can't think of anyone I'd rather have holding my hand. 

I have also been immersed in the world of Outlander in recent times. The guy who sits next to me at work asked me what I was reading and I had to explain to him that it was a romance / time travel / fantasy set partially in Scotland in the 1700s. He looked at me as though I had just dropped down from another planet. Still, I can now use the word Sassenach with confidence.

Day Five - my favourite quote 

Hold your ground and take it as it comes, there's no other way.

from Philip Roth's Everyman

For a long time after Georgina died, I expected rescue. I thought that, somehow, somebody, would save her, would save me, would save her sister, would save my family. My own parents, the doctors, the psychiatrist, my husband. I looked to them all to restore her to me.  I almost reverted to being a child, expecting someone to come, swoop down on me, pick me up and tell me that everything would be okay. That we could fix this, that we could fix her. 

But slowly, it dawned on me that was not a possibility, it wasn't going to happen. I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes. I think part of my mind came unhinged when Georgina died and flapped around for a while in the breeze. 

I knew I had to just put my head down and keep going. Just take it as it comes. Life, death and all the bits in between. Because there is no other way, no rescue. Just this plodding onwards. And, come the time, I knew I would be able to look up again. And it came. And I did.

***

Today my mum told me that one of her friends has prayed for me every day since Georgina died. She has been praying that I will fall pregnant with twins again. I'm not sure how that makes me feel, grateful and sad.

I find myself, unexpectedly but most welcomely, pregnant. It is not a twin pregnancy despite my mother's friend's kindly prayers. I went for a scan today and saw the tiniest baby, the tiniest heart. A flicker. A glimmer. An echo of another.

Elated and heartbroken. 

I want to do something, to protect, to ensure. 

I wish I could somehow transfer this pregnancy to another, less treacherous body. 

But all I can do is stand by, take it as it comes. And wait.

'Cracking asphalt under foot

Coming up through the cracks,

Pale green things

Pale green things."