Tuesday 24 April 2012

My Pallas Athena

Just a note to say that this post is mainly about my relationship with my surviving twin daughter and my living son. Forewarned is forearmed and all that. 
And this post was written and then disappeared as I decided it wasn't quite . .  truthful. As though I sit and ponder about these issues all day, every day. Which I don't. I haven't got time, I have to bounce on beds and prepare meals and sing silly songs. Not quite as earnest or as neurotic as I might come off here.
This post was the result of a conversation with my mother, we both agreed that we feel differently about Jessica than we do Reuben. We don't love her more, or less, not at all. We just feel somehow . . . differently. Second (first) child? Girl? One of what might have been two? One of what should have been none? That was as far as we got. This is me taking that thought for a walk. And not quite reaching any conclusion . . . .

"I have three children." I say it aloud, when I'm alone.
It feels like a lie in my mouth, a large round pebble that fits perfectly between my teeth and over my tongue.
"Three children."
The click of teeth against stone. Lies.

My relationship with my son is straightforward.
He is grasping, scratchy, neediness.
He is sweet, slumber, sucking.
Tiny hairs like golden wires, faint covering over the red, purple mottled birthmark adorning his scalp. Skin plumped out.
The curve of the back of his head resting on the curve of my breast.
He is expectant, baby birded mouth open, hands reaching upwards.
Towards mother, the Other so vast that he is only just now starting to glimpse around my edges.
At once tender and oppressive, the giver and the denier.

Today he storms and wails as he has a nappy rash.
And I hover, in my ambiguous role as both cure and cause.
Filling up his sky uneasily.
Hovering with cream as he utters curses up at me, that I do not ease his discomfort NOW. Five minutes ago preferably.

My relationship with my surviving daughter is different.
It has a metallic hint of desperation and unrequited love.
Closer to the ashen love of the dead than to the robust cursing and slurping of the baby.
Pale, wan but clutching, so strong.
I did not bear this child, she did not share the shadowy underwater existence of her brother.
Whilst he was gently held inside, she was splayed out on plastic.
Like a dissection.

And I let her sister go. A sin. A crime.

I do not have a high pain threshold.On my list of the 'many, many things I feel inadequate about' is how quickly I would crumple if I were ever tortured. It comes just under my inability to make a sponge cake that doesn't sink.

But I would reveal all my secrets, betray anything and anyone. I'm scared of pain, my experiences giving birth to Reuben just confirmed that I am a big ol' wuss. No stoic.

I wrote in a blog comment recently that I could not consider my own grief to be suffering as it could never be the equal of my daughters' sufferings. Their prior claim to the word was so strong.

The grief of others is suffering. But not mine somehow. Mine seems feeble, misery, self-pity, ignoble.
Or perhaps it is because, to me, the word suffering has connotations of the physical.

Images that I do not like to remember. Of inflamed, shiny skin. Of limbs jerking. Of hands and feet pierced time and time again.
I remember her writhing as though even the air brushing against her were unbearable. The nurses telling me that even the sound of my voice talking quietly would upset her today.
So I sat in silence. On a tall stool. Ungainly watching. Then I left.
I remember asking a doctor to let her go. To let her follow her sister.
Because I could not bear it.
Ever the Mother, ambivalent, wishing both for Life and Death.

My daughters, in truth.
Piteous and valiant in equal measure.

I'm still stuck there. A place I cannot leave.
Afraid to love too much.
Afraid to love insufficiently.
To be ungrateful.

It feels as though I have been watching over her, time out of mind. Ever since I can remember.
Watching, willing, wishing, wanting.
Wanting to help. Uselessly.
The pain was hers, the trial hers.

I wonder what it was like.
I used to think that, one day, I would be able to ask her.
'What was it like? All that time you were stuck in a box with machines attached to you? What did it feel like? Did you know that I was there? Did it hurt? Was it as awful as it looked?'
Then I remember that she doesn't remember. It's just a funny story that her mummy tells her.
Or perhaps it is there, somewhere, but inaccessible. In the strange black box recorder of memory.

She never raised her arms to be picked up.
She was never expectant.
Simply waiting for the hours to tick around until the next feeding or change was scheduled.
It wasn't until I had another child that I realised how different she was.
Although she is just that, a different child with a different personality, and perhaps it is merely attributable to that rather than her unfortunate start.
She had a different mother too. She still has a slightly different mother. But then perhaps all families with more than one child do.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

I can hardly remember the mother I was in that first year, the mother of these early blog posts here I suppose. With ringing ears and blinded eyes and disbelief.
My own mother says that I didn't laugh a lot.
I was cautious, earnest, anxious.

She looks at me now. Quizzically.
I shake my head and the memory vanishes.
It's just Jessica. With her love of 'numma 8' and Lightning McQueen.
Just a child. A little girl. Who skips with excitement and grabs my hand.

But it leaves me feeling strange.
As though I can't quite fit into my role.
Mother.

And I've written this blog post before.
What a game played slowly. Ah me.

9 comments:

  1. "afraid to love to much
    Afraid to love insufficiently
    To be ungrateful"

    I was thinking the other day "I wonder if my son thinks I am bipolar in my love" one minute smothering him with hugs and love and kisses, the next, crying, yelling, than pulling him close and saying I'm sorry. Because grief is desperate and sad and angry and full of love and frustrated at the lack of our ability to control.

    Watching your daughter suffer... My god I don't know how you could do it. You had no choice. One of my greatest fears is that my daughter suffered in her watery death in my womb. Out of my control. Writhing wordlessly, waiting for the help I never provided, couldn't provide. I sat by as you did only mine was an unknowing silence.

    The lack of control on either of our parts is hard to fathom. She does not remember. Probably because her brain was nit yet developed in a way in which to remember. Or are all childhoods so traumatic in some way that we are all programmed to forget.

    This was a lovely piece about all 3 of your children. You do have three. It is not a lie. It is the truth which makes it more painful.

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  2. As a six year old I spent a week in ICU after open heart surgery. I remember it. I remember the worst part wasn't the tube down my nose helping me breathe, nor the wires, nor the discomfort of immobility...no the worst part was not being able to communicate. At six years old, I couldn't write yet so anything that I wanted I had to mouth to people. I remember trying to ask for my stuffed bunny over and over again, even pointing to it with my toe, and no one understanding what I wanted. At one point they thought my foot hurt. The tubes and wires look like they hurt more than they actually do. They are more annoying than anything else.

    I don't think you need to be overly concerned that Jessica is somehow scarred from her time in the NICU. I had 5 heart surgeries before I was 7. Kaia living in a very cramped womb, a plastic box, a cast and now a helmet during her existence is proof that kids are resilient. Kaia still smiles more than any baby I've ever met. She doesn't know any different.

    Jessica is likely stronger for all her trials, as are you for all of yours. One thing I've learned being a mom to both my living child and my dead one, we are all stronger than we think we are. Give yourself some credit.

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    1. Ah Emily. I don't think Jessica is scarred. In fact, I know she probably isn't. Just as your Kaia probably isn't. It's me and our relationship that is somehow scarred? Does that make any sense? Because I feel as though I let her down from the very beginning. It's hard not to bring adult perspectives to children in ICU, I don't know if having a brain haemorrhage hurts, or if having sepsis hurts, or if a child that tiny has any conception of hurt at all. But it hurt me I suppose.

      Logically I know she does not remember but, a story that isn't mine to tell, my relationship with my own mother when I was a very young baby was disrupted. And I think it is the echoes of that which have exacerbated my concerns about Jessica and the bond that I have or don't have with her. Sigh. I think it just troubles me and I occasionally need to vent about how things are or may possibly be?

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  3. Oh Cat... This post just brings me to a shattering stop. It's so much what I feel on a regular basis, sans another (fuller term) child to give me contradictions.
    loves and hugs

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  4. I always feel queasy when I answer three and they don't ask any more questions about age, or where one of them is, etc. But almost always, I say three. It is the truth, though it doesn't appear that way.
    xo

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  5. Your heart, forever changed, forever uncertain and unsure. Babies shouldn't suffer. Babies shouldn't die. None of it makes sense and it leaves so much confusion in its path.

    Hold her, love her, remember she is forever, all three of them forever your babies.

    You didn't let her down, you saved her. You sat by her bed and saved her. And all of that pain she suffered you absorbed at the same time greiving and missing Georgina. She won't remember the pain but she will know you loved her so greatly you wouldn't let her go. Your amazing and one day when she is grown, she will tell you all of this and then you will know, you didn't damage her, you made her whole.

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  6. I'm not sure that stoicism has ever really gotten anyone anywhere. I'm a lifelong stoic--when it comes to pain, anyway--and I think it mostly just leaves me painted into a corner.

    I know it's a little pat to say it but I truly can't imagine what it must have been like to watch Jessica fight through all of those challenges in the NICU for so many weeks. C probably had the world's easiest NICU course and it left me tied in knots. But even so, she doesn't seem to process pain or fear like the other kids I know. I have a niece who's had a dozen surgeries to correct a birth defect and she's the same way--low fear, high pain threshold. There's something to it and it definitely rearranges your world view once you've seen it.

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  7. I feel exactly the same when I say "four" but you said it so beautifully - lips against stone. I am a mother of four but I don't feel like one at all.

    And I can't pretend to know what yours or Jessica's or Georgina's experiences were and I know you don't lay claim to suffering but what happened to the three of you has always struck me as the most complicated of all babylost griefs - and, reading here, I have such admiration for the mother you were back then to your girls and the mother you are now to Georgina, Jessica and Reuben - a slightly different mother to each. I had never thought about that before but it is so true.

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  8. Your description of the lie in your mouth is perfect. I stumble over whether I have one daughter or two, sometimes, I am ashamed to admit, even to myself.

    I don't know that I will ever feel like I fit completely and comfortably into my role as mother. I catch my breath sometimes at the sound of the word 'mommy' from my daughter's mouth. I am someone's mother; it astounds me still. Strangely, having a dead baby has made me feel more like a proper mother, as though I have now come closer to earning the title; before, with just one, I often felt I was playing house, acting out the role.

    You know, it is a terrible weight to bear: the fear of being ungrateful. I don't know if grateful is really all it's cracked up to be...

    You write so beautifully of

    You write so beautifully

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