Between The Snow And The Huge Roses

Joining in

2012-01-27T03:15:00.000-08:00

It has been 3 years, 4 months and 29 days since the 29th of August 2008, the date of Georgina's death. Since Angie's Right Where I Am project, I tend to check more often. Who knew there was even a handy site to help you do just that. I never could bring myself to install one of those tickers, so I could see her fading off into the distance.

I don't know who I am. I used to be a person. Now I feel like a conduit. Just an empty tube for pouring feelings through. Love seeps out of my fingers on to skin, hurts drip slowly through, saturating to collect in a pool. I long to feel . . . nothing. Just nothing at all. Because I don't want to feel and reflect and ponder any more.

Pondering is nice, thinking is nice, melancholia can even be pleasant. But the price was too high. I don't want insight, I don't want to understand, I don't want any of this.

I have to join in again. Worse and more impossible still, I have to want to join in again. With the world as I used to know it. To play nicely with others. For the sake of the two children I have with me, if not for myself.

I go into the post office, bearing my bead to join a birthing necklace in one hand and Reuben tucked up under my other arm.
The lady behind the counter wants to know why I am sending a single bead all that distance.
"For a friend of mine who is having a baby, it's to make a necklace with. Many people across the world will be sending one and she will string them together to wear when she gives birth."
"Ooo must be an American thing."
It's quite common amongst women who have lost a baby at, or shortly after, birth actually.
"When is the baby due?"
"February I think. She's having a planned section so I should really know the date."
"Ooo, I've only ever had sections." Wistful sigh.
"Well, I'm sure that every way of giving birth has its good and bad points."
I don't like the way this conversation is heading and I need to get out of here. Panic is starting.
At this point the older lady behind me starts asking to see the baby. So I'm turning around to let her see Reuben's face and trying to maintain two conversations, one with the lady behind me in the queue and one with the lady behind the counter. My blood is throbbing around my brain.
"I had two babies you see."
If you think I'm responding to that you've got another thing coming lady. You with your wistfulness over your section births that presumably resulted in babies that lived and now I know exactly what you are going to tell me next. You're really pushing my buttons here.
Slightly raising her voice, "Twins you see."
Whoop-de-doo, how very nice for you.
"Yes, I've heard you often have to have sections with twins as they are slightly more risky aren't they. Thanks for your help. Bye now."
Smile until I get to the doorway.
Crumple the moment I get outside.
So did I. I had twins too. But it all went wrong and I'm now I'm broken and I can't talk about normal things anymore. Sometimes I think I shouldn't go outside of my own house anymore. I don't want to join in, I don't want to play.

Surely it shouldn't still hurt so very much. How can I stop this happening? This crumpling. How will Jessica feel when she is older and I cry every time that somebody mentions twins? That isn't fair, I have to do better than this.

But sometimes I feel that is all I am now. A hurt. I hurt and I hurt other people by still being hurt. A flinching anticipation of being hurt. Exposed. Scrabbling around trying to tie something around myself. Every morning I try anew, to be braver, to smile, to be sociable. Then the world scrapes on my skin and I only want to get back in my car and turn the heater up and cry.

So I get back into the car and switch the radio on.
It's Woman's Hour. They are talking about when you should announce your pregnancy. To avoid raising the hopes of others. I'm thinking . . . ummm, after the baby is born. Possibly not even then.

Then they are interviewing a group of pregnant women on this issue, when to choose names, when to tell people. One says, laughing, "When we were choosing names we went round the cemetery. Because, well, they're not using that name anymore." Giggles.
And I can only think of her calling her baby Georgina Jane. Even though Georgina doesn't even have a grave, let alone a stone with her name on it.

And I sit. And I think to myself, I can't join in. Not with this.

My not joining in feels like defeat. But equally, joining in would also feel like defeat.
So I sit. Ready to fight. Wanting victory. But very uncertain as to how to achieve it.

Shadow

2012-01-17T14:33:00.000-08:00

A shadowy clot of people emerge from the fog. Hunched. Bunched.
They cross the road together as the traffic lights turn against me. Red in the dusk.
They seem overwhelming in number, although there cannot be more than twenty.
But so many.
Grown. So tall.
I am looking. For my daughter.
But the profiles are shadowy. They are too close together. Indistinguishable.
I might not even recognise my own kin at twenty paces.
My eyes strain.
And I am still waiting for my heart to leap.

They are each unique, their very difference, their heterogeneity, makes the lurching mass unbearable to watch. Somebody's son, daughter, husband, wife, lover.
Web upon web spinning out from each shadowy, curved head.
Squirming into the night air.
Sickening fragility.
Not a new thought.
And not one I have enough tenderness to contain.
I have just enough for myself and mine.

I teeter in my heavy, hurtling metal. Poised on one heel.

I look.
Amongst the grown.
But that place.
It is not for her.

Not for her.
The breath.
The mediocre bewilderment bedazzlement of her mother, that fool with the jangling bell.
The inconsolable wail of her brother when denied his feed.
The soft slurp slump sleep contentment of after.
The sturm und drang of her sister, blotchy and thwarted.
The rhythmic kicking of the feet on the back of the car seat, the thrash of the skull against the head rest.
The red light reflecting backwards through our eyes, the dark procession passing in front.
The breath.
Not for her.

List

2012-01-14T22:00:00.000-08:00

Well, if anyone remembers my grand un-slumpification project, it is still (ahem) on-going. Long after everyone else has packed up and left. Yes, admittedly, that is rather slow progress. It's a relapsing, iterative process. I can be walking along, nonchalantly, jauntily even. Possibly whistling. Then SLURP with a suck and a twist and here I am. Back in the slump. And the slump isn't even much like grief. It's just . . . . kinda slumpy. Like grief's boring, miserable second cousin once removed.

And I feel so guilty. Horribly guilty. A great deal of the time. When Jessica cries because she's tripped or when she gets frustrated because she can't communicate, I see her eyes fill with tears and I hear the echoes of alarms beeping and the slap of feet running down hospital corridors. Her skin changing colour, becoming bluer. I feel as though I'm falling and I can't breathe.

When she smiles, I feel another hand tugging at my clothing. A very small hand. Cold. And I wonder how long I can keep this up? Trying to make her happy. Ignoring that small cold pressure at the periphery. It just feels so very desperate and heavy, the love, the sadness, pressing down on me. And I need to feel less. Because this feeling stuff is all very well but it isn't productive. It is getting in the way of practical things like sewing name labels in clothes and batch cooking. Stuff I actually need to do. Stuff I should be doing right now as a matter of fact.

Guilt. Guilt that I'm sure would have come to rest on my shoulder regardless. I've always been one for self recrimination and I'm sure that motherhood just on its own will do a number on you if you are inclined that way to start off with. For me, Death and motherhood came along at once. Bony hand on one shoulder, plump, ring knuckled hand on the other. Pressing downwards.

Sit. Back. Down.

I feel as though the world is leaning to one side, as though the externals are listing because of a leak or an unbalanced cargo. I'm not sure what the leak is, where the imbalance lies. Death? That time in hospital? The threat of further death or illness, now that my cover is blown and I know that they can come a-calling any time they like?

Sometimes I feel I am just waiting for them, reduced to a trembling pile of jelly, pressing myself against the earth and hoping not to catch their eyes. At other times, I feel that I am defiantly dancing about, daring them to come and get us. Flipping the bird at Death and his cronies.

Either way, at this point in time, we are out of joint, the world and I. Nobody else I know in real life is either quivering on the blasted heath or dancing around giving unfathomable semi-deities or equally unfathomable biological processes the finger. Well, not as I far as I know anyways.

Even states that were once comfortable, peace, happiness. There is often no contentment to be found in them now. They are too, too sharp, with hooks that stick in my flesh. Frenetic. Manic. Because I know what it is like when they vanish . . . . poof. And you are left wondering if you will ever come across them again.

Everything seems laden with significance. Portentous. But I don't know what the significance is. I'm just baffled, bewildered. Someone signalling, miles away, through overheard conversations and encounters with strangers. And I'm either high above the clouds or sitting at the bottom of a well. When I just want to stand with my feet on the ground.

I know it won't last. I'll un-slump and be fine. For a time. I'm just slumping because my maternity leave is about to finish and I have to leave Reuben. That's probably the truth of the matter. But everything, everything always seems to come back to the girls for me.

Constant monitoring of feet to check that they are on the floor. Constant monitoring of hands to check that they are doing something useful instead of falling to my sides, instead of covering my face, drifting off to the computer keyboard, balancing to stop this listing, to fake the stability so necessary for spending the majority of one's time with small children. Or anybody at all. Not many people want to spend time with someone who sits on the floor, head tilted to one side, trying to correct the world back to the way she thought it was. Or the way that she feels that it should be.

And I suspect that this angled world, that upsets me so is the way the world truly is. Probably. That whole humankind cannot bear too much reality schtick. It's true. But I need to see some vision of the external that is compatible with ploughing forward, be that outer world imagined or forced or otherwise, just one that will accompany me whilst I am making sandwiches, smiling, with friendship, with posting photographs of four of us on facebook with a jaunty "all of us!" caption and not feeling haunted by that possible fifth. Or the two who flicker in and out of focus.

Of looking at other people and not looking for a tell tale motion in the corner of their eye, for signs of their own muscles straining to tilt the world to a respectable angle. To be able to hide that motion in my own eye.

To be square with the world. Standing in my proper place.

To look squarely at the world. Eyes up. No flinching. No looking away.

To be the bow that is stable.

Any tips?

Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

And for the dancing suggested by Emily . . .

Siblings

2011-12-28T17:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the W family went to visit my sister and her husband.

Jessica and her dad, my brother in law and his son, went to see the rugby at Twickenham. Jessica was part of a record breaking crowd, the highest ever attendance at an English regular season domestic league game, to see Harlequins play Saracens. I can't decide if she has, subsequently, talked more about the rugby or the bus journey there (her first, a red double decker). I think that public transport is edging out sporting spectacle in her three year old mind.

My sister and I stayed behind with Reuben. We were playing Kirby's Epic Yarn (which I can highly recommend if you are the computer game playing type) and had an equally epic conversation about parenting styles, the influence and idiosyncrasies of our own parents, how these have formed various aspects of our personalities and our own, previously discussed, parenting or mis-parenting, how we might have influenced one another, how we have communicated and mis-communicated throughout the years. And so on. One of those looping, sustained conversations that occur between people who have known one another for their entire lives. Well, I have known her for her entire life. Prior to that I was mooching about on my own for nearly five years waiting for her to show up.

And this was interspersed with occasional bouts of shouting and cries of "take me OFF your head you fool! No, no put me back ON!" related to Kirby.

The rugby fans returned. We packed the children up into the car. We said goodbye to my sister and her family and drove home.

I thought, as we drove home in the dark silence, I could have spoken for longer. I would have enjoyed talking for longer. I would have liked playing that computer game for longer. But only with her. Not on my own. Because it wouldn't have been so much fun on my own.

Without the conversation. Without the faux mad and jostling.

Because although we are 32 and 28, we aren't really. Not when we're together. We could be 8 and 4 sometimes. We are some weird essential flickering self, composed of many selves. So many that it is incoherent to anyone other than those who saw the infinitesimal progression from one step to the next.

Because there is a depth to a conversation with a sibling (or a sibling equivalent) that there simply isn't with anyone else? Perhaps? It is like reading a webpage absolutely jammed pack full of hyperlinks. Or a book crammed with footnotes. Somebody whose formative years and cultural touchstones are so similar to your own that you can both flick back and forth at speed through your own histories and current life and times. So I say, "you remember that time when I was so sad that I tried to melt myself with one of the small electric fan heaters that Dad gave us even though they were incredibly dangerous and I'm surprised we didn't burn the house down what the hell was he thinking and I think I was just hoping to evaporate myself at that particular time with said dangerous fan heater and I'm never giving either of my children access to a fan heater by the way" and she knows exactly the time that I am referring to. The sadness that I am referring to. Even the fan heater. In fact, that fan heater is probably the mental image that pops into both of our minds when we hear the word fan heater. Because we had the same fan heater. She just wasn't trying to melt herself with hers.

No matter how you try, I don't know if you can really create that kind of sibling bond. It all its deep weird rich annoying loveliness. Generally the longest relationship of your life. If you're lucky. Well, I suppose it would only be lucky if you liked one another and that is certainly not guaranteed.

It's almost a strange kind of experiment, sibling-hood. One that would not be granted ethical approval. Here - we will take two young(ish) creatures of the same species with a similar genetic inheritance and force them to compete for parental attention and affection in a very limited space (I live in England without substantial financial backing thus forcing me to live in a glorified rabbit hutch and it is often dark and cold, forcing you inside) and see what transpires? Nah, never going to make it past the committee that one.

Like knocking two pebbles together inside a very tiny sea in a very small glass jar. With one or two prevailing tides. Or a couple of moons.

I suspect a twin sibling relationship would stand an even smaller chance of passing ethical scrutiny.

But I don't know. It hurts. And I worry. Jessica could have expected a life long companion in Georgina, someone who would have that fullness of shared knowledge and experience. I don't know what that relationship is like with a brother, if it is different in quality or just the same or purely dependent on the people involved. I've never had a brother. I hope that it is this fact, rather than some inherent sexism on my part, that makes me worry that you can't have that sort of closeness between a brother and a sister.

I rather hope that Jessica won't mourn Georgina too much. If that doesn't sound odd. That Reuben won't seem less or worse for being younger, for not being her twin, for not being a female, for not being a sister. That he will just be himself and be accepted and loved as such.

Perhaps Jessica herself will never contemplate any of this at all. I kind of hope not. When you have one parent who very rarely seems to reflect on anything (or not that I have any inkling about) and one parent who ruminates from now until kingdom come on the same three small days? Who knows which way that wind will blow? I'm hoping in the opposite direction from me.

Long may she be more interested in buses.

I was going to write about parenting, inspired by Aoife's comment on my previous post, but now this is already far too long and it's getting far too late here. I will save my ramblings on that for a later date although, given how this post worked out, perhaps I should save them permanently.

Here's some sisters, I'm nursing a serious obsession with this particular song of theirs.

Can any of you who have brothers or sisters advise? Or no siblings at all? Just interested to hear how it all panned out for you.

Christmas Eve

2011-12-25T15:54:00.000-08:00

Last night, Christmas Eve.

My boy, he cries. His stomach bloated.

I get out of bed and blearily pick him up. He slots in, between us. My husband's back, turned against us. My son and I turned into one another. He has a large birthmark on the back of his neck, forcing lopsidedness, it puffs up his skin. Ready for kissing. My lips find that mark. The ever-fixed mark. I imagine seeing that mark on his thirty two year old neck. Him as me. Imagining life times away. And still wanting to kiss it. Perhaps I will just run my fingers across it briefly. As I hug him in a polite, motherly way. Because I will have to let my ever-fixed mark go. That is the nature of motherhood.

And worlds and worlds of assumptions fall away. Assuming that I will be here. Thirty two years later. Me, doubled. Sixty four? When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now. Will you still be sending me a valentine? Birthday greetings? Bottle of wine? Will I? Will you? Will they? The walls wobble under the weight of my complacency.

My sister and I sung that song to our father yesterday. Jokily. But I wasn't joking. I don't think he knew that I wasn't joking.

Because I'm glad. I'm so glad I get to sing that silly song, so stupidly, to my father. So that he thinks that I'm joking. Because I can't sing. Because if it wasn't so light, it would be too heavy.

Will he? My boy? A full grown man? That, which seems greediness now, such a gift.
Reuben, thirty two. With children. Without children. With lines on his face? Oh I hope so.
Breathing? With that same birth mark on his neck? Me, with my same eyes, here to see it?

I rub his poorly tummy. We discuss it. I say, "Say goodbye poorly tummy. Bye bye. Once there was a boy. A boy with a poorly tummy. But they were parted. They never saw one another again. Say bye bye."

And they were parted. Bye bye poorly tummy ache. Don't come again. He falls asleep.

I wished. I wished stupidly and without the hope that should surely underpin a wish. I wished for that moment of reassurance. Mutual reassurance.

I wished I could just touch her skin. Touch her tummy. Rub a bad tummy away. Kiss her birthmark. My ever-fixed mark. My love. My girl. My first born. Who'll never be thirty two. Or sixty four. Or anything at all.

My love. My love. My dear girl. Bye bye.

Service

2011-12-17T15:29:00.000-08:00

There are three Christmas trees arranged by the altar. The church is old and beautiful with a vaulted ceiling, crammed against a rather smart hotel and shopping district in London's Knightsbridge. The jolly red and green tags tied to the trees seem at odds with their purpose, part of me wants black paper tied to a blasted twig. But I'm obviously in the minority as the jolly trees stand up at the front. And I suppose my alternative isn't going to cheer or comfort anyone.

There are more people than I would have imagined. Although fewer than I know could have attended. There is some comfort in the democratic nature of bad luck, of tragedy. That which seemed so unfair, in this place, rights itself and shows the inherent fairness of its nature. Like blind justice. Unfeeling. The finger simply happened to point at me. At her. They'll do for our purposes. Those two.

We are slightly early, I queue for the toilet. As ever, there is a line for the ladies. I suggest using the gents which is empty. Twas ever thus. An older lady kindly offers to keep watch on my behalf, to ensure that none of the intended users walk in on me. My friend tells me that she jovially chased a man away. So kind, so twinkly. But I know why we are here. Me. My friend. The lady who guards the toilet door for me. The man guarded against.

We are here for the dead. To remember the dead.

I can't help staring. I stare and stare. And sometimes the sheer volume of 'us' makes me panic. Sends my mind soaring to the roof. Because it seems impossible that one building could contain so much pain. Or so much love.

My eyes snag on certain people. A young couple. So young that I could be the mother of one of them. A young blonde girl in a bright red coat, leaning against her dark haired partner who, if I had met him on the street I'm certain I would have called a boy, but here . . here he has to be described as a man. They lean together, inward, like an upside down V.

The lady in front of me. Her head is bowed.

I want to ask. Who is it? Who is it that you miss? But I don't. Because, even here, where we are all the same, all missing. It seems too bold. Almost rude.

We cry. We light candles. We emerge into the cold night air.

Suddenly everything seems full of meaning, full of significance. As though a thousand, thousand people were whispering to me, each imparting a secret, words of importance, lips pressed against my ears. But their voices are just slightly too quiet for me to hear.

It is an overwhelming sensation. Almost like being under attack. A feeling of urgency, that if only I can grasp this, all will be revealed.

We descend to the underground. I notice the feet of the woman opposite. She has pretty feet, pretty shoes. I look up and see her face has been scarred. She is carrying a bag with the slogan, "looking for a smile? well, look no further!"

A beautiful girl is flirting and fighting with an extremely tall, far older man. She is so light, she seems hardly to touch the ground. He is abashed and flattered. Eager. She holds all the cards.

Once, I might have wanted to be her. But now, I sit back in my seat. Content to be myself. My feet suddenly seem to be more firmly planted on the floor, denser, stronger, attached to the soil, to the worms and the dirt. Despite being in a train. I feel strangely giddy and golden, as I imagine I would on drinking a double brandy. Although I've never even had a sip. The light, beautiful girl and the burnt woman and the tree labels and the church all spin around and make a horrible, perfect sense. I feel that everything is as it should be.

Which I might as well. I might as well feel that everything is as it should be. Perhaps this is what resignation feels like.

***

A poem, written by H.D., loved by a long past sixteen year old me and forgotten about until I heard an extract from it on the radio last week.

H.D. has been described as an Imagiste - writing about the image, a radiant node or cluster, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.

It is odd how this description, of a thing preternaturally dense, radiant, alive, rushing, reminds me so very much of my dead daughter. I think of her as a small set of images, superimposed upon one another, again and again, so that she becomes something so definitive, so very much herself. A super concentrated being, like a dying, collapsing star.

By comparison, my many incarnations, my comparatively long life, becomes something hopelessly fuzzy and chaotic. Because I've been so many different things. Sometimes I'm not sure that I was, or am, any of them at all.

Rose, harsh rose,

marred and with stint of petals,

meagre flower, thin,

sparse of leaf,

more precious

than a wet rose

single on a stem -

you are caught in the drift.

Marred, stint, meagre, thin, sparse. And yet precious. So precious. Dear child.

***

And, as if this long ramble were insufficient, I'm also at Glow writing about good grief.

Preoccupations

2011-12-02T14:25:00.001-08:00

Prompted by Cathy from Missouri noticing some connections between several of my more recent posts and the amazingly gracious (and tenacious) Aoife who has been delving through the archives here.

Georgina.

Denial, disbelief, waiting. Still.

Wombs, machines, whirring, gasping, aliens, isolation, unusual, outlier.

Maternity, motherhood, parenthood, failure, shame, embarrassment.

Fooled, foolish, fool, fool, fool.

Creepiness, self consciousness, self doubt, self loathing, rotten, rotting, rottenness. Rotten inside.

Smallness, discreteness, separateness.

Shot through with gold.

Time travel, space, temporospatial fluidity, movement, communication.

The after life, contact, wires, threads, strands. Loneliness. Cut off. No reply.

Chaos. Construction.

Regret.

Georgina

Love.

I hope?

Love.

***

Proprioception is an underrated sense. Not one of the big five. Smell. Touch. Taste. Sight. Hearing. Proprioception doesn't even feature on Nina and The Neurons.

The sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.

I don't know if it is possible to experience proprioception in relation to a body other than one's own. Probably not. I suppose my constant awareness of my living children's bodies in space, their rib cages, their brains, their moving hands, their turning eyes, would fall into the category of awareness of the outside world, exteroception. But I imagine that I feel it, it is as though I experience their proprioception. Using my long, maternal antennae which brush up against their little brains, intruding and sending shivery signals back to me.

I feel them, moving through space, their bodies displacing empty air. Emptiness replaced by solidity. Such an unlikely occurrence. How it ever happens I simply don't know. How it is so widely accepted that it will happen? And not end in death and despair and mourning? Regret?

A mystery.

***

I was out Christmas shopping this week and I was feeling happy and benevolent, kind of avuncular towards the world at large, gazing at the window displays and idly thinking about the presents that I would buy to put in Jessica's stocking. Amongst others (too many others) I've opted for a space hopper, which suits her personality I think. And a powder that will turn your bath water into pink jelly.

But suddenly, amidst bath jelly and feelings of good will, I had a flash of a First Christmas outfit. Almost reflected in the window that I was looking in to. Like an eerie flash of Christmas Never Was. Christmas Imagined by Catherine W in July 2008 perhaps?

It is an outfit that I own. It consists of red velour dungarees with an embroidered reindeer on the bib, a red and white striped vest. It is size 0-3 months. It still has the price tags on it. Actually I own two of these outfits. For the daughters I never had.

One is in the loft in a bin bag I think. The other is in Georgina's box. Too big for the girls. Too small for Reuben. And so achingly, achingly flat. Occupied by nobody, filled out by nobody, worn by nobody. Never or ever.

My mother bought them. For granddaughters that never existed. But were expected. Were wanted.

And I'm so sorry. For the whole thing.

So very, very sorry. So sorry I could curl up into a ball and just keep curling.

Regret. Again.

***

And why is this still being written?

Three years of emptying my chatter into a void the size of my daughter.

I'll leave it to someone else to explain.

There is no deadline.
There is no schedule.
There is no plan we can fall back on.
The road this far can't be retraced.
There is no punchline anyone can tack on.
There are loose ends by the score.
What did I come down here for?
You.
You.

Georgina. You. My love. You.
I hope you don't mind.
I hope I am not keeping you from your rest.
Somehow tying you here, trapping you here.

You.

Plumb line

2011-11-20T14:30:00.001-08:00

I often wish that Georgina's little life, her death, everything to do with her, could be separated from the rest of my life. By a process like fractional distillation or skimming or the like. That she could be a discrete part of my life. Here, she starts. There, she ends. Complete. Small. Perfect. Contained. Just her. Not tangled up in this nonsense over here, that triviality over there. Here, Georgina. There, bills and supermarkets and putting the bins out. She is above all that, beneath all that, so far away from all that as to be unrecognisable, an almighty overarching presence, a diminishing echo, existing in a set aside place.

Her life and death occupied such a short amount of real time, a temporal blip, and yet they have expanded. Perhaps I have puffed them up with air, inflating something not designed to be inflated and stretching it thin and macabre with my own preoccupations.

Georgina's death felt like a rounded stone, no seams, no joins. Dense and homogeneous. It plummeted downwards, with one perfect splash, concentric ripples evenly spaced. And a wire stretches from that stone. Like a plumb line. Straight. At right angles to the rest of my life, to the living, to her sister, to her brother, to her mother. Away and down, down to the bottom of the sea, to the centre of the earth. Far away but yet. Yet. Just at the end of a wire. A wire that I twang at and tug at and telegraph hopefully. Trying Morse code.

Only problem is that lots of other stuff seems to have got tangled up in that wire. Old fish hooks, swallowed anger, empty wine bottles, baby clothes, jobs that don't quite meet expectations, cigarette ends, failures, dissatisfaction with our house, shopping receipts, dead things, fluff and hair, silences, vandalism, chocolate wrappers, frustration, resentment, the glare of the internetz, smashed bowls, matching outfits, words I've written, things that I've said. Because all of these things seem somehow involved, implicated, in her death.

I want all this superfluous stuff to get lost, because it is getting in the way. It is blurring my memory and it is spoiling my tenuous lines of communication. With the stone? With her?

A voice that says, "This wire? You're querying this and its many attachments? This wire is here because you are rotten. Rotten. Rotten. Rotten. Why did you think it was here? You idiot. Why do you think she died? You idiot. Idiot. Just in case you didn't hear me the first time."

I pull at my over burdened wire and think to myself, this? This is the link? This is not what I remember. Not this.

I leave the sea and fishing wires and hooks and mix my metaphors hopelessly.

Because it was something different. I'm sure of it. Sparse and elegant. Clean of limb. Small and precious and shot through with something golden. Desiccated and poised. More like a fire. Or tinder, kindling.

Not slimy and rotten and knotted. Not like this.

I look at my twisty wire and wonder how this mess ever happened.
How did I let her get tangled up in all this?

Probably because I carried on living when she didn't.

Geography

2011-11-14T13:55:00.001-08:00

I'm posting about geography over at Glow In The Woods.

Thank you / Long legged beasties

2011-10-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to say thank you so much to Angie and to everyone participating in the Spoken Word Blog Round Up. I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed listening to every single post. I am so very grateful to Angie for having this brain wave, setting it up and being brave enough to post herself, and to everyone else who has contributed. My husband thinks I have gone completely mad as I don my ear phones and laugh, cry and utter little squeals of recognition at my computer screen. Alone. Yet very far from alone.

I know I found it quite scary to record myself speaking, it is strange how anxious you can feel sitting alone in your own bedroom talking to a totally non judgemental piece of electrical equipment. I wish I'd been brave enough to give it another go and at least tried to look more presentable or to speak more clearly but thank you so much for accepting my spoken word post, warts and all.

***

I've been thinking about Jess's post at Glow, turning it over in my mind. Ghouls and gruesomeness. How I sometimes feel that I am going out of my way to avoid them? That I am a liar. There are things that, even after all this time and all these words, I find difficult to give voice to.

In an act of divine retribution for my contribution to the realm of the spoken word I have, today, lost my voice. Sunday, when I decided to record my post, seems to have been a merciful respite between the appearance and lingering disappearance of a massive pimple right between my eyebrows and the reduction of my voice to a low croak. If I believed in favourable omens still . . . .

The sore throat, combined with the sudden cold and dark weather and the approach of Halloween, murmurs of the arrival of winter. Jessica exclaims at her own reflection in the window, "DARK! Look DARK!" I open the door to retrieve something from the car and hear soft, socked footfalls creeping up behind me. I rush her back in and cram her feet into bright, floral patterned wellington boots. They clash with conditions outside, incongruous against the damp, autumn mulch.

We are going hunting in the dark. We discuss what we might find. Or I say their names and she repeats them. 'Discussion' is over egging the pudding a wee bit. Hedgehogs perhaps? Bats? Owls? Foxes? But I know that all of my suggestions are a little over ambitious. More of an attempt at educating her with a brief 'Who's Who' of nocturnal animals than a list of what we might actually see here in suburban England.

I know where I am taking her. To the great evening snail crossing. She puts out her hand to hold one. "Eyesssss," she breathes out heavily as the delicate stems unfold and poke up at her accusingly.

We put the reproachful snail back down into the damp grass and tread carefully around his companions, all crossing in the same direction, on some mysterious snail business of their own no doubt.

We head into the large, unlit pavilion that stands outside the front of our house. It is dark in here. Very dark. There are no streetlights. Jessica's pale hair flashes past as she runs around the outside. "Look Mum-mee, woooooooo!" I laugh, a strange, rasping croak. An old crone's laugh. A witchy laugh. We run around, my little wailing ghost and I. It feels a mite creepy. But what am I to do? Is Jessica never allowed to pretend to be a ghost or a skeleton? I suspect she's doomed to a lifetime of spider, pumpkin and cat costumes given my reaction to even the mere sight of a skeleton costume in size 2-3. Thanks to my over-thinking and ability to find pathos and symbolism in every fricking thing. Sorry Jess. You aren't allowed to play at dead things. Though I know you will, most children do.

Her attempt at ghostliness. It's unsettling and oddly comforting both together. Perhaps we are being haunted. By an absence. Or I say we. I, really. Her haunting may be only just beginning. I hope not. My mum told her today that she loved her, that she loved Reuben, and Jessica piped up with "Georgie." Scared that this strange, elusive presence known as Baby Georgie might be missing out, might be left out. I was proud but sad. That she trusts me to the extent that she accepts the existence of this other baby, this sister baby, that she has never clapped eyes upon. Just part of a story that mummy tells her about tummies and plastic boxes and death that seems as unlikely as the other stories mummy tells about pigs and wolves and fairy princesses.

I wouldn't mind being haunted by a presence, by a connection. But not by this small void, the size of a three year old girl. This sort of haunting isn't fun or spine tingling. But yes, like something squirming in my heart.

***

It's strange. As I said in my spoken word post, it honestly never occurred to me that other people would feel awkward when I talked about Georgina. It took me about a year to tumble to the fact that even a cursory mention made some people feel very awkward indeed, not knowing where to put themselves or what to say next. But I was caught up in such a rush of love that I didn't see that. I honesty didn't. I thought everyone would let me carry on talking about her, forever.

Now I wonder if people find me creepy. Am I a thing that goes bump in the night? A three legged beastie? With the necklace with my dead daughter's name on it around my neck and her listing on my facebook profile page and my burning candles and my box of ashes. And this blog if they've found it. "Hai, enjoy the car wreck folks," if you have. Here I am in all my (possible) creepiness, step right up and come on down.

I try to imagine myself back into my pre August 2008 mind. But that door is firmly locked, no matter how hard I kick at it. I would like to be let back in, just for half an hour or so, to assess my own level of creepiness. Not those exhibited here but as seen through the eyes of my ex-school friends on the horribly compelling facebook, through the eyes of my old friends, through the eyes of my sister or my mother. Do they find it gruesome? This is a thought that has only recently started to trickle down the back of my neck, like ice water. Perhaps this is something like the awkwardness effect, one that, through my own lack of imagination or awareness, I am slow to see. I suppose I could ask but I don't really want to hear the answer. I hope, hope, hope that there is understanding, sympathy. I'd settle for indifference.

I suppose I don't much care if other people think I'm gruesome or creepy or strange. Do your worst acquaintances. If you think you can make a dent in me after late 2008 go ahead. But I don't want them thinking that Georgina is creepy. She wasn't creepy. What happened TO her was creepy and gruesome and painful. Some elements of it certainly were, there is no denying that. Not even for me who viewed them through a haze of love and shock.

But she wasn't creepy. She was a lovely little baby. At least that is how she looked to me. And I'm sorry that she died. I'm still really very sorry indeed. More than I can say.

As I watched Jessica poking in the puddles with sticks and talking to snails, I think how very acceptable my love for her is. I can post endless pictures on facebook and coo and tell stories and I am probably never going to get told to shut up or that I am sick or creepy. The harshest response I'm going to get will be 'breeder' from some quarters.

I don't know how people would react if I posted anything truly about Georgina. Not just a memorial. I mean really Georgina, a photograph of her or something about what happened to her. Medical details, her birthweight, even her blood group. My store of facts is small but true. Probably truer than my posting about my living children, whose mouths I am frequently to be caught stuffing words into. Assigning personalities and quirks and publishing them on the internet. Yay me!

Those who find my breeding tendencies laughable or who sit in silence. What do they think when I mention Georgina? I find I've started to fill in the silences with all sorts of poisonous words. And I don't like it.

Because it is just the same.
That is what I want to tell them.
The love is just the same.
Jessica, Georgina, Reuben.
The root is just the same.
The stem is just the same.

"From ghoulies and ghosties and long leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, good Lord deliver us"
Old Cornish (or possibly Scottish, the wisdom of the internetz is conflicted about this) prayer

Spoken Word Blog Round Up

2011-10-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

Joining with Angie at Still Life with Circles in the Spoken Word Blog Round Up

I tried to find a quiet time in which to record this but just to warn you that you can hear a child (Reuben to be precise) crying faintly in the background on the audio. I haven't abandoned him to his fate, his father is trying to rock him to sleep as it's getting late here and it's past his bed time. I'm afraid I'm simply not brave enough to try recording this again! Once made me nervous enough.

New Skin for the Old

2011-10-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

Out walking with my mother, Jessica and Reuben, we run across two ladies walking their dogs. These are two of my mother's 'ladies' from church, members of that stalwart group that actually does most of the good rather than just talking about it. They are pleased to see us and, although I have never met them before, greet me like a long lost friend.

They crane their necks forward to see Reuben sleeping in his buggy and wave at Jessica, head bobbing away into the middle distance of the field. She is more interested in mushrooms, stick men and making nests in the grass than she is in ladies. Although the dogs catch her eye and lure her back toward us.

And the inevitable occurs . . .
"Is that . . . her?"
"We prayed for her you know. Everyday."
"That's the power of prayer."
"She looks normal doesn't she? She's quite big."
"And he . . . he was . . normal? That must have been a relief."
"Everything happens for a reason."

Over the course of a conversation lasting less than five minutes, they have managed to squeeze in nearly every comment about the situation that I find unbearable. Death by the stabs of a hundred needles again. Even after all this time, I'm not quite guarded thoroughly enough against these jabs. They're so kindly, goddamnit. Look at those leaning, beseeching necks, asking to be thanked for their prayers. How can I spit out that I don't think their prayers made a blind bit of difference? How can I snap at their simple pleasure in her normality, in his normality? That something went wrong but then it went right. Because they requested that it be so.

So I thank them. Meekly. She is normal. He is normal. Not dead. Yes, yes, it was a relief.

Who knows. Perhaps their prayers did save her. I've certainly been wrong before. It is more than probable that I could be wrong again. Perhaps there simply weren't enough prayers to save Georgina too. Perhaps she wasn't meant to be. Perhaps there is a reason. In the face of all that kindliness and good intent, it is hard to believe otherwise.

* * *

I take Reuben to a baby group once a week. This group is specifically for babies under the age of six months. It is an interesting experience for someone whom, in the world of word association games, the word 'baby' is swiftly followed by the word 'dead.' And I'm still freaked out by baby dolls, let alone the real deal. I do enjoy going to this group, I hope he does too. But I always feel a little out of kilter, at one cool remove from the rest of the pack.

I didn't do anything similar with Jessica at the same age. She was in hospital and then I was supposed to be keeping her at home, away from germs. My first attempt to socialise with other mothers and their babies was when Jessica was about nine months old and resulted in my lugging her, her oxygen tank and associated tubing into the toilet and sitting there sobbing. Then going home. I did return and gradually spent less and less time in tears in the ladies room but it was never easy. Now it is easier but no less . . . puzzling.

Sitting there, amongst all of these babies, my head spins with the question, why does it only work sometimes? Why not for Georgina? Why not for me? Why not (as you're reading here I guess that I can assume) for you? I look at the circle of women and see those solid heads, the gentle curves of the limbs and tummies, those bright eyes, the weight of the organs and limbs. I hear the murmur of mother speak, that total engagement to the exclusion of all else. That deep joy and contentment and connection. And I feel regret. Deep, deep regret and bewilderment. I wonder why I am here. Why is Reuben here and not Georgina? I wonder why you are not here with your child. Surely an accumulation of this much luck should attract a lightning strike. But I'm the only one who looks at all uneasy.

Lately I don't feel so angry. Or anything much. Distanced, sad. Just sad. And I feel like a fool. A sad fool.

A staircase that I had happily assumed had ten steps, had only nine. And here, in the baby class, I have that horrible lurching feeling that you get when you put your foot out, in the expectation of another step and there is nothing there. My stupid, groping, expectant foot goes plunging down onto nothing, just an absence. Lots and lots of other people knew that there were only nine steps as they watched me plunge downwards. They knew that the tenth step doesn't exist, that it is just a fable. They probably tried to tell me but I elected to ignore them.

As though I were about to step into, what I believed, was a bath full of warm water. And it turned out to be a bath full of rubbing alcohol or nail varnish remover. Something thinner and colder. Something that whispers, "Stay awake." I walk around with goose flesh and my hair standing on end and I can't identify who else might be living here, in the cold world, with this new skin. Chances are that they are here, in this room, in this class of mothers and babies, but that we won't recognise one another. My memorial necklace dangles hopefully in anticipation, "are you like me?" It winks and blinks at each new acquaintance. Or its absence signals, like a false siren song, "I'm like you." No regret here. He's normal you know.

Some weeks, I try and nod and chat and smile. Enthusiastically coo-ing and complimenting.
Other weeks, I'm just too tired.

"You'll always be a stranger in a strange, strange land."

And apologies that my musical influences seem to have stalled c. 2007.

Faith

2011-10-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

Meanderings around a comment on the previous post left by Cathy and a farsuperior piece of writing than that which is to follow from the wickedly good TracyOC.

I feel that this post probably deserves a word of warning. I havetended to avoid mention of religion here, mainly because when I attempt to even think about faith, God, sin, morality,mortality and so, I can feel my tiny wee brain sputtering, straining andgenerally reaching a state very close to kaput. But here goes, the wheels areabout to come off people. Consider yourself warned that this post doesn't make a great deal of sense.

One thing that has become glaringly obvious since August 2008 isthat I have the ability to believe two contradictory things at once, equallyfervently. Whether this ability was latent and activated by the events ofAugust 2008, pushing me out into a world where I had to consider possibilitiesthat, up until that point, I had preferred to ignore, or whether thatability was conferred upon me by Georgina's death, is a moot point. I canhardly remember what I thought, or how my brain worked, or even who I was, priorto then.

Between the 26th and 29th of August, I was convinced that Georginawould live, saved by medical technology and the cleverness of mankind, saved bynebulous forces of Good. Because she had survived thus far, because she wasnamed after my grandmother, because God loved me and would answer my prayers(although how I squared this with the fact that many, many other cries thatrose up over those three days would go unanswered I have yet to figure out),because the doctors were too clever and the machines too efficient to let theoutcome be otherwise.

Between the 26th and 29th of August, I was convinced that Georginawould die, because that knowledge was born deep in my bones just as surely asshe was born from me, because mankind simply isn't that damn clever, becausemachines malfunction and break, because she would be condemned by nebulousforces of Bad. Because I was a rotten, broken person, because God hated me andeither scoffed at my prayers or sternly waved his finger at me.

And I am certain that, if I were to root around in the distantpast of this blog, I would find two contradictory descriptions of that time.The happiest time of my life, the saddest time of my life. But neither of themare lies. My certainty that she would live, my certainty that she would die,are both equally true. My surprise when she did. My sense of somethinginevitable occurring when she did. Not irreconcilable to my new and twistybrain. Both descriptions are a reflection of the truth, in my Schrodinger's catlike mind where both things happened, happen and continue to happen. And I'mnot opening the box to find out the true state of affairs thank you very much.I'll keep the top of my skull right where it is.

In the Venn diagram of my superstitious and rather limited worldview, two circles can overlap and, eventually, engulf one another, amultiplicity of statements and intentions happily co-existing whereaspreviously I had felt that one had to be pushed out in order for the other toremain believable. I used to think that I couldn't have both. But now there isno room for mutual exclusivity in my world, the conditions in my brain fallinto perfect intersection every time. In the world of probabilities, thingsthat looked like P(A and B)= 0, blur and rearrange into a world where there areno disjoints. I can have it all. Even if I don't particularly want any of it.

My brain has become an odd, bifurcating place. Sometimes I look inthe mirror and feel vaguely surprised that I do not have a tree growing out ofthe side of my head. Or at least something slightly more branchy and leafy thanthe apparently smooth expanse of skull, skin and hair that is reflected back atme.

I suppose that what I am groping towards is that since Georginadied I have both perfect faith and no faith at all. So it provides both everysingle consolation and none whatsoever depending on the light and the prevailing windconditions. And I'm fairly sure that maintaining faith in the presence of nofaith precludes that faith being perfect? Hedging your bets, I hear you cry.Yes, 'tis convenient I will admit but there you have it.

I always found a strange beauty in the idea of the leap of faith,the virtue of the absurd, of finding certainty where, by rights and rationalargument, there should be no such thing. Something that makes so little sensethat, in a circular fashion, it could possibly make all the sense in the world.

It is hard to make that leap, to choose to believe in anythingbenevolent, or kind, or beautiful, when life has grabbed you by the head andsmooshed your face up against the plastic wall of an incubator and forced youto watch your baby die by degrees. So that there can be no doubt that thisparticular individual, this part of the wonder of creation, who to you isall the world and your heart and your dear, dear love, is going to stop beforeshe even really got started. And it is, in all probability, going to hurt her.It's certainly going to hurt you and anyone who has even a passing care for you.

But when I looked at my daughters, close up, how I could fail tobelieve in kindness, in beauty, in benevolence? Because the living yearn for life and those two tiny babies reached out towards it. Even watching those stretching arms made my heart curl around itself.

When you are in that impossible place, what else can you do, whereelse can you go? In order to carry on breathing in and out until your turncomes around. You have to believe. You have to disbelieve. All at once.

And because this sort of post would not be complete without somesort of Biblical quotation, here is a bit of Exodus 33.

And the LORD said unto Moses, I will do this thing also that thouhast spoken: for thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee by name.

And he said, I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.

And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee,and I will proclaim the name of the LORD before thee; and will be gracious towhom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy.

And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall noman see me, and live.

And the LORD said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thoushalt stand upon a rock:

And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that Iwill put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while Ipass by:

And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my backparts: but my face shall not be seen.

I've always liked these verses, particularly in the King Jamesversion. Everything sounds better in the King James.

When it comes to faith, I think that is where I am.

Wedged in theclift of the rock, facing the wrong way and covered up by a hand whose existenceI am uncertain of.

Part of me reads these verses thinking, "Hmmmm, magical face thatnobody can see without expiring? Back parts you say? Well well well, how veryconvenient for You."

Immediately followed by cowering and fear of smiting. And you willnote that I have capitalised the Y so I must believe that Someone is watching.

Part of me reads this thinking, why did you not show mercy to me?Why did you not show mercy to her? Or shew mercy even. And my question isanswered, left hanging in the air and rendered entirely irrelevant all at once.Mercy, no mercy or a world where it is just a question of chances and biologyand mercy never enters the equation. Or only the mercy wielded by merehumans.

A God whose actions were kindly but un-interpretable, a God whoseactions were a punishment, a God who is looking away, distracted by biggermysteries than mine, no God at all, a roaring void, a calm absence, a placewhere the absence of God would be a blessed relief. All of these things happily line upnext to one another. And I can choose which one I will or believe in all ofthem at once.

Part of me is convinced that a great deal of nothing will passbehind me whilst I am wedged in that rock, not looking.

Part of me is convinced that all the glory in the world rushespast my unsuspecting back.

Unforeseen conversation

2011-10-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

"Open it," she demands. Her eyes are narrowed, jaw jutting determinedly. She swings the fabric bag taken from the NICU by its ribbon handle, up and over, up and over. It smacks down on the mattress repeatedly, its jaunty pattern of blue bears on a yellow background flashing through the sunlight coming through the curtains.

Even looking at that print once again, those repetitive bears, makes my eyes sting.

The imperious demand, "OPEN it mum-me."

"Jessica," I say. "Jessica my girl, my love. Inside that bag is Baby Georgie's little blanket that my Ouma knitted. And also inside that bag are Baby Georgie's ashes. We are NOT going to open it today. It is a special bag. "

She bounces around the bed, bag swinging.

"Bounce, bounce. Jess-ca bounce, bounce."

"Jessica, watch where you are going. Jessica . . . Jessica. . . we do NOT hit Baby Reuben with Baby Georgie's ashes. Even by accident. Give them back to mummy. Now."

I feel unseemly laughter bubbling up my throat. I could never have foreseen that I was going to have to reprimand one of my children for hitting another with the burnt remains of a third. It seems too ridiculous, it seems too awful. Halfway between a giggle and a scream I sit down heavily on the bed.

"Mum-mee not happy? Bay-bee Oo-ben, Bay-bee Gorg-gie. Bounce, bounce."

I kiss her head. Her solid little skull with its small, crinkled brain fizzing about underneath.
So very far away from ash.

But closer than I would like to think.

It's all closer than I would like to think.

I disentangle the handles from her fingers. I wrap the ribbons back around the bag and plump it up again, as though that would help matters. A small comfort to my child of dust.

I return the bag to its place in a box at the back of the wardrobe wishing I believed in prayers and offerings, feeling as though I should burn something or slit the throat of a small animal. To fend off misfortune.

If only that were possible.

More pluckings from the brain of the sleep deprived

2011-09-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

"Not happy Mum-mee," she tugs at my hand insistently. "NOT happy."

This is Jessica's current favourite game. I must hold one object. This can be a plastic Happyland figure, a teddy, a stick, a stone, even a conker. This character must cry. Great, gasping sobs of boo hoo hoo. Any attempt to deviate from this formula, to claim that this particular stick or toy is already happy results in a steely stare and a quick slap down from Jessica's hand, forcing this unfortunate into the posture of one prostrate with grief. "NO! NOT happy Mum-mee."

The character must then state what would correct this state of affairs, what will make them happy. In the initial iterations of this seemingly endless game, the object of desire was an invitation to a tea party. So the character would sob their boo hoo hoos and then sigh, wrist pressed limply to brow (yes, yes, even a stone can do this) "I wish that somebody would invite me to a tea party."

Up pops the character held by Jessica. "TEA PART-TEE" she beams benevolently, scooping up the sobbing character and transporting them to the world of delight that is the tea part-tee where they partake of cake, tea and occasionally (as I understand it) pine cones.

For a while a 'tea part-tee' was some kind of panacea, a cure-all for the woes of all sticks, stones, dolls and teddies within a five mile radius. A 'tea part-tee' was even offered as a consolation to an unfortunate 'stick man' that was accidentally snapped in two.

As the popularity of this game had steadfastly refused to wane, the demands of the weeping character (as played by me for the majority of the time) have grown more and more outlandish. A trip to the pink castle. A ride in the helicopter. A dance party where they only play Cure songs. A friendly rugby ball. A little girl called Jessica to bounce on the bed with.

No matter the demand, Jessica will unfailingly pop up, grin on face and announce the arrival of whatever it is that will stop the weeping.

Then, two minutes later, the character is again, declared not happy and must lie down and weep once more.

Sometimes I wonder if I might have messed up her up a little. Either by being a sadder, generally worse version of the me that she might have had, somebody whom she has to jolly along with promises of parties and trips, a responsibility. Or by leading her to believe that a little bit of tea, cake and Robert Smith are the answer to misery.

So yes, Jessica. Her speech is no longer confined to that mysterious word, GUNK, which some of you may remember was her one and only word for quite some time. Her speech was declared *age appropriate* at her last review. Occasionally I still don't quite understand what she is saying and, when I repeat what I think she has said, she lets out a little, world weary 'No' which makes me feel at once like laughing and crying.

As always with Jessica, just when I think that she is never going to breath, regulate her blood pressure, maintain her temperature, move, walk, talk, she does. Amazingly, she does. I still can't quite believe in it. I am left in this state of nervous tension, expecting the next disaster. But she's fine. A little slow but just fine.

She will be starting school next year. As she was born right at the end of the academic year here in the UK, she will have just turned four when she is due to start school next year. And this situation has me tying myself up in knots of guilt and inaction.

I remember leaning over her incubator and promising her that I would fight for her, that I would protect her, that I would help her with everything she needed. And I've tried. I've changed oxygen tubes and made up bottles of high calorie formula and done the exercises the physiotherapists recommended and researched things to do to help her speech and spent and spent on (mainly unnecessary) clothes and toys. We've painted and crayoned and dressed up and soft played and been swimming. But it's considerably easier when I know what the right thing to do is but, when it comes to Jessica's school entrance, I'm not sure if I should be fighting to hold her back or letting her go.

Poor Jessica. With her dead twin sister and a mother who always hugs her a little too tightly. My father in law has a phrase that sums it up, 'I love the bones of you' he says. I do. I love the reassurance of her body, her bones. I hope she doesn't mind too much. I guess she'll never have known any different.

Tea part-tee anyone?

***

I catch our dual reflection in the bathroom mirror. A slightly tired eye woman with a baby. And an array of translucencies intercede between us and our reflections. A multitude of might have beens. And, just for an instant, I let myself imagine that he is her. Just for an instant. Something that I never, ever allowed myself to do with her twin. Because it was too close, she was too close.

But I held that particular image up to the mirror, up to the light. Just to find that moment of relief, of ease. To briefly inhabit a world where none of this had ever happened. A world where she didn't die. Because her death still presses down on my skull, not painfully any longer but . . consistently, uncomfortably.

But even as I see his sturdy little back, head balanced precariously on top, slightly bending over like an overly heavy flower, I know it is a nonsense. She was never there. She was never even close to this. My poor tiny baby.

I still dream of half made babies. I dream of pregnancies that give out only partially complete. I cradle tiny babies in my dream arms and yearn for that chance, that outside bet that I can't give up on. Sometimes the baby in my dreams is Reuben but long before I ever laid eyes on him. And my dream heart feels that love, fierce protective love for the tiny babies that were once mine. I wake up unsettled and sweaty and I can't find any rest or comfort.

***

I never really felt self conscious about admitting that I was sad that Georgina died. I never thought that people would think it was weird that I list her on my facebook profile as a child of mine. I never thought that people might think I was strange, that I was not a good mother to my living children because I mention her from time to time. I assumed that people who found this place would find it understandable, even if they could not understand it. Now . . . I'm not so sure.
It makes me wish that I could maintain a 'dignified' silence. But I find I can't.

***

'I love you oh so well. Like a kid loves candy and fresh snow. I love you oh so well.'

I do. Georgina. I love you oh so well.
Remembering that first sight of your little face still makes me smile.
Love you.

Glow

2011-09-05T14:28:00.000-07:00

Today I have a post at Glow In The Woods, pondering over the question, 'who was that?'

I'm very honoured to be writing there.

Georgina

2011-08-29T04:17:00.000-07:00

The day before your birthday, I woke up with a streaming cold.

It was raining.

I'd been trying to get a stain out of your sister's T-shirt but I must have left the stain remover on for too long and, when I went to rub the stain away, I rubbed a hole in the sleeve of the T-shirt instead.

I made your sister some porridge, a strange breakfast for late August, but she likes it. I wonder if you would have too. I still wonder about little things like that.

As I turned around to talk to your sister, I knocked the bowl of porridge off the top of the kitchen cabinet with my elbow and smashed it. Her favourite Peppa Pig breakfast bowl. And her porridge went all over the floor. And there was no more milk.

I picked up the ruined T-shirt, the smashed bowl and the porridge. I put the whole mess in the bin.

Your brother started crying. I wanted to cry too. For the T-shirt I'd just put a hole in. For the porridge that I'd made and then spilt. For the bowl that I couldn't fix. For your sister's bewilderment, still waving her hopeful spoon about, waiting for her breakfast. For all my good intentions heaped in the bin. But, you know, that's not the real reason I wanted to cry.

I can find pathos in anything these days. A broken Peppa Pig bowl leads me back to you. Spilt porridge leads me back to you. To you. The most irretrievably broken thing in my life.

I go onwards, not really knowing what I'm doing.
Hoping that I'm not messing up too badly but suspecting that I am.

I miss you. I wish you were here. I couldn't promise you a perfect life, you might not always have got your breakfast on time. Or indeed, got the breakfast that you had been led to expect. Some mornings we have to make do with toast instead of porridge. Even when you could have sworn that there was porridge cooking five minutes earlier.

Your T-shirts and your prized breakfast bowls might have disappeared mysteriously, leaving you wondering where they went.

But I wish you could be here. Down here, in this mess. Because this is all I know and it is all I have. This strange world where we all stumble around blindly, bash into a few things, knock up against a few other people and then leave.

Occasionally there is a brief glimmer of something that looks like beauty, that looks like sense. Amidst the spoiled breakfasts and rain. Sometimes I suspect that those things do, in fact, actually exist and I'm looking at the real deal, not merely a resemblance or a fraud.

Wish you were here my girl. To catch those glimmers with me.

Dots

2011-08-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

She peers at them, the silvery marks on the backs of her hands. "Dots Mum-mee," she says. "Look, dots."
I stoop and pass my thumb over them, admiringly.
"Yes, darling. Dots."

Those strange, inverted stretch marks that cover the backs of her hands instead of my stomach.

And, even nearly three years later, the guilt is still strong enough to pin me down to the soil.

In August, the air around her is thick with ghosts, making it difficult to focus.
The quivering in the air where one stands where could have been two. Or none at all.
And the ghosts of other girls.
Ones with no scars on their hands.
Others where those scars would be the least of it.

The ghost of myself. As I was. Or as I would be now. With two. With none.
Even Reuben becomes indistinct. Lost in that shimmer of imaginings.
Then everything resolves again. Refocuses. And I carry on.

It's four in the morning here.
I woke up suddenly. And, in that haze between waking and sleeping, imagined that all of this had been some protracted fever dream. Terrible and strange.
Relief washed through me. That I could let go. Of this experience that still makes my fingers twitch into fists and my jaw muscles clench. Even after all this time. Some part of me is obviously hoping that I can fight it off, defend my family, even nearly three years after the fact.
If only my left hook is strong enough.
Not us, please. Not today.

But it's mine. Mine to keep. Hers to keep. Ours to keep. This experience. No amount of jaw clenching or punching at the empty air is going to change matters.
And, usually, I am ok with that.
But sometimes, at four in the morning, whilst everyone else is asleep, you'll still catch me very sad.
Very sad indeed.
So sad that I can't sleep.
And I haven't anywhere else to go other than here.

Little brother

2011-08-07T13:29:00.000-07:00

He is irritable, squirming, plump, glorious, in my arms.
Glossy and new.
With a yellow pimple on his chin.

She is ash. Gone to ashes.

We put her cot up today. The cot she never slept in. Paid for a thousand years ago.

Although it was never used, it has been chipped from its trips up and down the ladder to our attic.
It looks second hand.

I'm sure there must be a word, loaned from German or from Dutch, that captures my state of mind. Perhaps there is an English one. I've just never happened upon it.

That of trying to construct sense from something you know to be chaos. To spin sense from sense-less.
Because you need something to hang your hat on.

Of forcing yourself to find beauty and meaning in something that you know has neither of those qualities.
To drag them out of this mess by sheer force of will.

Of perfecting the art of fooling yourself that there is something meaningful and beautiful lurking under all that mud. And there just might be. Or perhaps that is simply a double bluff.

But.

Even if it is just for a short time that you are fooled.
Even if the beauty and meaning that you construct flicker in and out of focus, slither out of your grasp.
Even if you know that you put them there yourself, for yourself to find.

It is enough.

August

2011-08-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

It's August again.

It's very hot here. Not much like England. The air feels like luke warm tea with one sugar. I smell like soured breast milk and sweat. The me of 'before all this happened' frowns in disapproval.

Jessica and I play in the back garden. She chases me with a watering can and I hide in pathetically undefended places. With my head wedged under my T-shirt. With my face hidden in the leaves of the next door neighbour's tree but the rest of my body sticking out.

Unsurprisingly, I got watered rather a lot this afternoon.

We have squelchy wet sand on a plastic mat, interspersed with stones stolen from her grandmother's rockery.
"All mudd-dee," croons Jessica, slopping the wet sand over her feet, "all mudd-dee."
"Yes, my darling. You're right. All muddy," I reply.

She chalks my big toe, blue. The remainder, orange.
I wonder what she makes of my adult toes.
I have ugly feet, a hammer toe on the third toe of right foot.
I remember looking at my own mother's body with my teenage vanity and wondering how it ever got that way. One day, Jessica will look at me that way. In her turn. Probably sooner than I would like to suppose.

Her latest medical report contains the word, remarkable. Remarkable.
I let out a breath I have been holding for a long, long time.
Yet, lobes in my lungs remains partially inflated.
Either not naive enough, or not quite ready, to exhale. Yet.
You'll jinx it don't you know?

I feel the scars on her feet. Little raised lumps.
For a child born as prematurely as she was, she is remarkably unscarred. Surgery only ever got as far as signed consent forms and desperate conversations with the consultant as to which anaesthesiologist had put his own son under.
Tiny stars dot her hands and feet. There is one larger, thicker scar on the join between her ankle and her foot. I'm ashamed to say that I am not even sure what this scar is from.

Sometimes I find myself rubbing Reuben's feet and wondering where his scars are.
Sometimes I find myself, in the blurry wee small hours of the morning, wondering how Reuben will feel about his dead twin.
In my dreams, babies only ever come in pairs.

My mother's next door neighbour comes round to return my car keys. I've left them in the lock of the boot. This happens more frequently than I would like to admit.

"Thank you so much," I say. "I don't know where my mind is these days."
Although that is a lie.

I have a memory of walking up my mum's drive and this lady, who I don't know very well, stopping me and saying that she was sorry. Sorry about the twins. And I flung myself at her, sobbing, "I lost her. I lost her."
We don't speak about that today. We never have.

She was so sweet. She just hugged me. What a kindness. In a world so very far from kind.

I lost her.

It's August. Once again.

It seems that I am not the only one . . .

2011-07-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

. . . .who is a little confused about the date.

My dear little car confidently informed me today, via the clock radio, that the date today is the 15/08/2008.

I know the clock is broken. It has been broken since before the real 15/08/2008. I could take it back to the dealership and get it fixed but I am . . .lazy. This is not some sign that time is spinning backwards, my perfectly normal little old Ford Fiesta is not suddenly going to spew me out back into the midst of three years ago, in a Back To The Future stylee. Although that would make quite the blog post, I have to admit. It's a sign that I am lazy and don't particularly care about knowing the date (the one that the world is agreed upon) or arriving anywhere on time.

Now I find that my eye is irresistibly drawn to the digits, surely incontrovertible proof that something is happening. Is bound to happen.

I am counting down the days.

In anticipation of what I am not entirely certain.

The return of the past?

An opportunity to go back and save her?

Perhaps that would be impossible even if I could, somehow, revisit that time.

And maybe she would not be there. She is not a creature who has much to do with time any longer. Perhaps death removed her from this continuum where her mother still paces back and forth and frets over her broken car and what this all meant. If it meant anything.

I find that I still pick and pick at this idea.

And re-visiting the lines from my original post, I find the final line, overlooked by whoever was speaking in that radio interview that first drew this quote to my attention.

‘It does not seem to me that we understand the laws governing the return of the past. But I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like. And the longer I think about it, the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead , that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision."

Still taken from Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, only now slightly more complete.

And I wish I could know that I did. That I did appear in her field of vision.

When the light is a certain colour, when the rain slants in a particular fashion, when there is a stillness to the atmosphere.

Or perhaps, it is when there is a storm.

Does she see me? Do I appear in her field of vision? On occasion.

Or are we forever cut off in mid-breath, all lines of communication down?

Then what I am to do with all this mess in my heart? This troublesome mind that itches and wants?

How I wish I could reach her. I don't care to know when, I'm not fussy about that.

I don't want to know the particular blend of conditions that would conjure me to her.

Just as I am forever conjuring her to myself.

Just to know it could happen would be enough.

That this isn't a one way street.

I hold the sturdy weight of her sister asleep in my arms. With her beating heart and heavy limbs. And I can't believe that this, this experience that so saturates me and her siblings could come to just . . nothing.

All to naught, to a . . . withering. Surely that simply cannot be? I cannot let it be. I can maintain both sides of this strange relationship if necessary. Just give me a basis for doing so.

And I can't stop thinking that I am nearly there, this thought tickling at the edges of my brain, that same feeling you get just before you grasp something complex and slippery.

Time is a trickster.

Perhaps her death was always just waiting.

When I was four, it was waiting.

When I was sixteen, it was waiting.

Was it always waiting? For her?

And perhaps it is still waiting, waiting for me to go back and find it. Find her.

One of those moments with no beginning and no end.

29th August 2008. My own perfect circle.

Trudge, trudge. Surely the circumference is getting a little worn now.

I'll let you know if my car actually does turn into a time machine. Eleven days to go until the day she was born. According to my car. You never can tell.

Us

2011-07-19T15:29:00.000-07:00

I promised myself that I would never write about him here.
And yet . . .

It's our wedding anniversary this week.

We were so hopeful. I look back at those drunken evenings, filled with potential, possibility and scribbled schemes on scrappy bits of paper. Lists of pros and cons. Holiday plans. Wedding plans. Furniture rearrangements. Plans to re-landscape the garden. Lists of baby names.

Sometimes I think that was all we had in common. Hope and a liking for plans.
It was enough to keep the conversation going for over a decade.

But now we have fallen. Silent.
I hope it's not a permanent state of affairs.

In the evening, the dull, dual buzz of baby monitors fills the house.
Although Jessica is nearly three and doesn't need a baby monitor.
We pretend it is so that we will hear her fall out of bed.
But we both know it is so we can listen to her breathing.
Just checking. Even after all this time.

He sits downstairs with a drink.
I think he is looking for our half-made daughter at the bottom of a glass.
But she isn't there.
I've checked.
I still have a good look around down there from time to time.
Just in case I missed her.

I sit upstairs.
Looking in the sparks and wires of the internet.
But I suspect she's not here either.
Only a pale imitation of someone who might have been her. Once.

He knows that I am searching for her.
That I write here in this semi-public diary.
Pouring my heart out to strangers and yet . . . he has never sought this place out.
Perhaps he doesn't care to know what I think.

Perhaps I have already bored him half to death with it all.

Whereas if I knew he was talking about her, anywhere, I would be there. Like a rat up a drain pipe.
Because I don't know what he thinks about her. If he thinks about her at all.

When he does mention her name, I am mildly shocked.
As though he no longer has any claim on her.

We are not always silent.
I have my evening store of anecdotes, saved up from my tiny patchwork day with two young children.
Small miracles and disasters.
He has his tales of work and the outside world, the latest car and TV series.

But we no longer plan. Only half heartedly. With caveats.

Sometimes I think it was all that hope that did for us.

Playing favourites

2011-07-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

Within our family, there have always been fairly well-acknowledged 'favourites', special relationships between various members that just don't exist for others. I don't know if we are particularly unusual in this regard, it isn't something that I've discussed with many other people in real life for fear of opening a can of worms, somewhere along the lines of 'My parents never loved me, sob sob, they always loved my brother, Jim, more. I've been scarred for life . . . . '

I know, for instance, that I am not my father's favourite child. My younger sister is. I don't find this particularly upsetting, perhaps because it has always been out in the open. I know it. She knows it. My father will neither confirm or deny it but his refusal to say anything (when confronted about his supposed favouritism) along the lines of, "Pish, I love you both just the same" leads me to believe that my sister is, in fact, his favourite. And I can see his point of view, my sister is less neurotic, more athletic, taller, prettier and generally an improvement on me. If I were my father, I'm sure she'd be my favourite too.

My sister occasionally tries to make this up to me by claiming, hollowly, that I am our mother's favourite child. But we both know that this, although kindly intentioned, is laughable. I think our mother likes us both equally, I'm fairly sure my sister actually thinks the same. She's just trying to redress the balance.

My grandmother made no bones about the fact that she favoured the eldest child in each family, as she was the eldest child herself. But within this hierarchy of favourites, the 'eldest eldest', the first grandchild, ruled supreme.

Amongst the grandchildren, it is recognised that some of us have so-called 'shining hero' status and, no matter how obnoxiously we behave or how badly we mess up, we will be excused if we are one of the 'special' ones. This operates separately from birth order and appears to be allocated at random. Just bad luck if you aren't selected. Thus cousin E complains about cousin J, "Hrumph, he can never do ANYTHING wrong JUST because HE. IS. J. Everyone in the family will always stick up for him simply because you all think he's SO great. No matter the evidence to the contrary."

But none of us are dead. I have no experience of this sort of interplay in a family where one of the siblings, or cousins, or grandchildren, is dead. Georgina is, in fact, the only infant death to have occurred in this, and the previous, generation.

I do sometimes wonder what it will be like for Jessica and Reuben to grow up knowing that they had a sister who died. That, where there are two, there might be three.

Perhaps they will take after their father and just won't be 'reflecting on what might have been' kind of people.

Because I am someone who likes to conjure up problems that don't currently exist a good decade or so in advance, I have already had hypothetical fights with a teenage Jessica. These proceed along the usual lines (I hate you, I never asked to be born, but I WANT to stay out until 3 am, date this undesirable boy, drink three litres of cider) until the denouement of, "I bet you wish I had died instead of Georgina. I bet you wish that she was still alive and I was dead so you'd have your perfect daughter who you think is SO great."

And yes, I do like to trouble trouble LONG before trouble troubles me.

My relationship with all my children is, at the centre, the same. I love them. They head butt me, ignore me, vomit on me or they pull the ultimate act of defiance and die on me thus removing themselves from my sphere of influence forever. Still I love them.

It is hard not to imagine Georgina as something otherwordly. Sometimes I lose sight of the fact that she would have been a real, honest to goodness, human child had she survived. Burping. Filling up nappies. Saying "no, no, no, no", when asked if she loves me (Jessica's latest wheeze).

As time passes, Georgina has become something purer. A spirit, a thin little ghost girl, ageless, wise, pure. Barely touching the earth. I feel the need to defend her, to keep mentioning her, just because nobody else will.

Will her brother and sister think I love her more?

That Georgina is, somehow, my favourite?

Because she is dead?

And, Reuben, whose birth was so far away from the absolute bomb shell of his older sisters'? Their birth feels like the epicentre of an earthquake. I watched Jessica hover between life and death for weeks at a time, so defenceless. During those early days it felt like I was walking into hell, every time I walked into that NICU. Every single day, I woke up and I had to walk back in again. To Jessica and her sister. And then just to Jessica.

That experience did something to me. I will never, ever be the person that I was. Not ever again. And the girls were right there, with me, in the midst of it.

My love for the twins has a desperate and despairing edge to it that my love for Reuben does not. Not more. Not less. Just different. My love for him in the immediate aftermath of his birth had a contentment and a peace that would have been inconceivable with the girls. How will he feel? Sharing the spotlight with a bona fide medical miracle?

As my sister in law said, "Everyone thinks their children are special. But Jessica really is special."

She is. It is hard to reconcile that with a living, breathing, nearly three year old who can occasionally drive me to absolute distraction. Sometimes, mid telling off, I see that tiny, baby again. I hear the ventilator wheeze and the alarms beep. And a voice whispers in my ear, "She nearly died you know. How can you not let her soak her baby brother with the watering can / eat gravel / kick you in the shin / throw her toast on the floor?"

But Georgina is special. Reuben too.

They are all equally special to me. Although nobody will ever be shocked or amazed by the story of the beginning of Reuben's life. Or the beginning and end of Georgina's. Events took expected turns.

I don't think that there will be any favourites in this family. I hope they won't feel that there is.

I love them. My dear, dear three.

And I can't imagine loving one any more than the others.

desiderium

2011-07-09T14:47:00.001-07:00

desiderium - an ardent desire or wish; longing or wish, properly for a thing that you once possessed and now miss; a sense of loss. A material sister to the geographical nostalgia. The Latin word means longing, sense of want.
Stolen from Philip Howard's 'lost words' column in today's Sunday Times.

I re-read some of the more recent posts on this blog. I'm mildly surprised at how angry I sound. I don't spend a great deal of time feeling angry these days. I would hate for some poor soul to stumble across this outpost of dead baby blog land and think, geesh, I'll still be THAT angry in three years time. Really?

I think I was so angered by the extract featured in my previous post because I am a former magical thinker myself. Reformed now obviously. And we all know who the most vehement anti smokers are? Usually the ex-smokers.

Yes, I confess. I once was one of those suckers who thought I could save my children from death with the power of my mind, with the strength of my love. I quite miss having those stupid, misguided thoughts. They made me feel safe. But, as Merry wrote, until you know, you don't KNOW. And I shouldn't be angry at people who don't know. That isn't fair. And as Monique commented, a pat on the head would be a better response than a whole lot of spleen venting.

Expressions of anger are unacceptable in day to day life so I tend to take them here. In the real world you have to do a lot of biting your tongue and swallowing. Which can make you a little acidic.And though I'm a little more snappish than I used to be, I am not as bad as I sound here. Promise. Or at least I hope I'm not.

I find that thoughts of Georgina, her small life and her death are a constant in my day. Like a trapped nerve or a pulse, a nystagmus. Pulse. Flick. Pulse. Flick. She died. She died. Her life permeates my own. Just a fact rather than something that drives me to extreme pitches of emotion. Like a sponge soaked in NICU machinery and small babies, I slop about on my day to day rounds. Obsessed with something I can hardly bear to think about.

Sometimes my hands extend like fleshy claws and I can see them, my hands, doing their thing. Driving the car, changing nappies, buttering toast, flicking pages. All at a distance. My life is peaceful but, sometimes, it feels very far away. As though it is happening to somebody else. Where that leaves me I just don't know.

I still cycle around the five stages of grief but these cycles have decreased in duration and emotional amplitude until I can deal with the whole process in less than a minute.
Denial - she isn't dead.
Yes, yes she is. Waste of time to pretend otherwise.
Anger - not fair.
Nobody ever said life was fair. Life is not a bowl of cherries. I never promised you a rose garden. It's nothing personal. None of this means anything. You aren't cursed or to blame. You just had bad luck. Waste of time to pretend otherwise. Go write on your blog.
Bargaining - if I have to lose her, please keep the others safe. Please take me instead. Please.
No takers. Waste of time to pretend otherwise
Depression - I am so sad.
Nobody cares. Waste of time to pretend otherwise.
Acceptance - Here I am again. But acceptance feels like a bit of a misnomer.

I find I can't take the process any further than the 'she died' part. I can accept having a pregnancy that ended abruptly, a daughter that died and another daughter that nearly died. In the abstract. I know that these things happen to people, I knew that before they happened to me. One of those things. Sending out ripples in concentric circles.
Very sad for me and my husband.
Very sad for Jessica and Reuben, although I hope they will not feel the loss as we, their parents, do.
Sad for our families.
Mildly sad for friends and acquaintances.
Not much of anything to anybody else.

Increasingly, I find the details unbearable to think about. So I don't.
I don't look at her photographs. I'm frightened of them. I am scared to see those blue eyes looking at me from all the time ago.

I can deal with the 'dead' part. Just not the rest.

Yet I can't leave it be. My eyes snag on the corner of that time. I cannot quite look away.

Long ago, I saw something horrible.
Long ago, I saw something wonderful.

So horrible and wonderful and strange and beautiful that I still stand here. Enchanted. Stupefied. Shocked. Still, after three years. I am in shock.

I cannot look away. I cannot look either.
So I just remain. Not angry or denying or depressed.
Just standing, staring at a point in the middle distance, at nothing.
Somewhere between August 2008 and here.

She was beautiful. That tiny baby. Georgie.
But I can't tell anyone that.
Because nobody else wants to hear it.
Except for you, here.
Because out there, in the real world, she is only dead.

But I miss her terribly. I love her.

I have a desiderium for golden days.

Did He Smoke?

2011-06-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

My mother and I were discussing a mutual acquaintance the other day, a lady in her sixties. My mother said, "The sad thing about Mrs. X, is that she's still afraid of death. You mention in passing that a friend has died and she is hungry for details. She immediately asks, how old was he? Did he drink too much? Did he smoke? And then she'll pounce on the thing that did for poor old Mr. So and So."

Death will never happen to Mrs. X because she is coated in the death repellent Teflon of the righteous, of the non-smoking, of the tee-totaller, of the good woman. Death will try and grab her and those bony hands will just slide right off. And she will dance away, clicking her heels merrily into eternity.

Because if she can pin the blame on the poor unfortunate sod who died, if she can make death somebody's fault, then she can walk away free. Immortal. Untouchable. Forever.

Boy oh boy. Is she ever in for a surprise.

***

I've spent the last three days immersed in a book I've been looking forward to reading for a long time, Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I love Caitlin Moran's writing and have done for a very long time. When I was a teenage, I had a scrapbook where I hoarded a few columns that she had written, clipped from my parents's newspapers.

And, as I expected I would, I loved her book. I laughed. At 4 in the morning. You have to be pretty funny to make me laugh at that time of day. And I laughed so much that poor old Reuben was hard pressed to keep hold of the nipple that he was trying to clamp on to for dear life.

But then I read this. About her own children.

I used to fear their deaths - The car! The dog! The sea! The germ! - until I realised it need never be a problem: on the trolley, on the way to the mortuary, I would put my hands into their ribs and take their hearts and swallow them, and give birth to them again, so that they never, ever end. I'll do anything for those girls.

Had she really thought this concept through? This intelligent, hysterically funny woman that I admire so much. And if she really thinks this, what does the rest of the world think? The stupider, less amusing majority.

Because I tell you what. I've got a new found respect for cars. And dogs. And the sea. And germs. And death. If you are not frightened of the deaths of your children, you are a bloody fool.

Because I know that you can only birth your children once. Just once. I know that in the marrow of my bones.
No matter how much you love them.
No matter how much you may believe your love matters.

I'm sorry but in the face of a car, a dog, the sea, germs, premature birth, leukaemia, sudden infant death syndrome or stillbirth, the feeling that you will do anything for your children means precisely jack shit.
I dearly wish it wasn't so.

But.

Your children can die. If they get too tangled up in any of the aforementioned I'm afraid that they will die.
None of this fancy, schmancy re-birthing crapola.

Believe me. I've seen one of my children die. And if I thought it would have made the slightest bit of difference I would have stuck my hands right into her ribs, taken her heart and swallowed it.

Against my better judgement and probably not without a slight wave of nausea I might add. But, Georgina my darling, I would have done anything. Even gut churning things like those suggested by Caitlin Moran. I would have cast any number of spells, sourced magical ingredients, prayed, pleaded or walked over the proverbial hot coals. For you. Anything.

But it doesn't work that way. To suggest it might, to even hint it might, makes me so angry.
So angry that I threw a book.
And I don't even like to break the spines of books as a general rule.

Still. I can thoroughly recommend the rest.

Apologies for my language.
Being brought up by a father who frequently turned the air blue, I don't generally swear.
But this issue, this peculiar denial, this belief that THEY live in some magical, protective anti Death bubble that carefully excluded me and Georgina.
Well, that makes me as mad as a cut snake. And makes me swear a bit. Apparently.

Plucked from the brain of the sleep deprived

2011-06-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

Those people who tell me that now I have concluded the matter properly and/or tell me how relieved I must be to have had a 'normal' pregnancy and childbirth don't understand that it is actually Reuben's birth that, to me, was the extraordinary one.

***

Serious conversation with a whining Jessica . .

"What noise does Jessica make?"
"Whinge . . whinge . . .whinge"
She laughs, knowing that I am imitating her.

"What noise does Baby Reuben make?"
"Wah, wah, wah . . WAH"
Giggles.

"What noise does Mummy make?"
"NO . . don't do this, don't do that . . NO!"
Faux stern waving of finger.
Bigger giggles.

And, inevitably, I think. Although I know that I should not. But whenever we do anything which involves counting family members, my mind goes to her.
I don't think that Georgina ever made a sound. Ever. Perhaps a gasp or two.

There, in the middle of a supermarket aisle, I would like to sit on the floor. Just for a minute.
To catch my breath.
Because that lack of sound seems so very sad all of a sudden.
Although it's been true for a long time, no big revelation.

***

Whilst watching Desperate Housewives (a major vice of mine but, to be fair, I do my ironing whilst watching) this little snippet of dialogue snags in my brain.

Bree to Gaby (of a mutual friend who has recently received a kidney transplant)
"Whatever topic you bring up, she (Susan) manages to steer it right back to kidneys."
"Tell me about it." Sigh.

And I realise that I am Susan.
And my children, dead and living, are my kidneys. The circumstances of their birth, Georgina's death, the NICU. The whole sorry thing.
It as though their births removed my flesh, my pith, leaving a hollow woman, only animated by discussion of them.
Of course I do talk about other things but, more often than not, I don't particularly care about whatever it is that I am supposedly discussing. I merely pretend to.
And I'm not even brave enough to bring my children into the conversations.
Instead my thoughts spin uselessly around and around them.

***

Perhaps my total and utter avoidance of anything resembling a birth plan or, indeed, any information entitled something along the lines of 'your labour - what to expect' was a little unwise.
The first part was pretty much exactly the same as, sadly and annoyingly, the cervix does not differentiate between babies of different gestations and opens to exactly the same amount, causing (in my experience) a fairly similar level of pain.
The pushing part was a little different. I had a while to reflect on just how different this pushing business was as Reuben was stuck for over two hours.
I had thought that giving birth would be terribly sad and remind me of the birth of the twins and have all these resonances. That I would think of my girls and wonder about my boy. That I would labour with tears running soulfully down my face.
But I had forgotten my wuss-ily low pain threshold which quickly put paid to any romantic or melodramatic notions I might have had.
In reality, I spent approximately 10% of the time screaming my head off, 10% of the time blacking out, 20% of the time thinking smugly to myself, "he he he, I am the sun and nothing can hurt me", 40% of the time thwarting the midwives' brave attempts to prise the gas and air from my hands (see the previous 20%) and the remaining 20% burbling away to my husband. Including the lines "Time is running backwards and he has already been born" and, apparently, thanking and apologising to everyone in the room multiple times.
Hmm, not my finest hour.
But, after his birth, those anticipated tears ran down my face.
Tears for him and for my girls who stood such a slight chance.
Who had such a different experience in the first few days of their lives.
No simple comforts of holding, feeding and looking for them.

It is only now that I know what I lost. What they lost.
What so many of us have lost, those of us who hang around in these parts.

And I wish that it could always be simple and happy and healthy.
For every mother and for every baby. Every single time.
I wish that with all of my heart.

***

If you have a slightly more complicated obstetric history you may wish to wear a laminated card around your neck explaining your situation prior to going into hospital to have a baby. Or due to staff shortages and shift changes you may end up having some rather surreal conversations.

"So, this is baby number four."
Umm, nope. Three. Ummm, one? Really? It's complicated. Try the lady labouring in the next room perhaps?

"You have very good stomach muscles for someone who's had twins."
Why thank you. I like you. A great deal. Do come around to this particular hospital bay again. Smug smile. Then remembers that the twins didn't really get a chance to bust my stomach muscles. Feel sheepish. Attempt to suck stomach in. Fail.

"Well you'll know all about that having breastfed your daughter."
Hmmm, not sure where you got that particular piece of information from but thanks for giving me a few maternal experience points. You should see me in action with a Medela and an NG tube.

At the registry office, registering Reuben's birth. . .

"Just the one baby? Not hiding a twin anywhere are you?"
She smiles, expectantly.

No.
Believe me.
That was the previous child.
She is the one with the hidden twin.
We're still hiding her, even now.

And of all the people who come into this registry office, you had to pick me to make this comment to?
Seriously?
I reply, "No, just him."

***

No matter how fast I run, how many books I read, how many meals I prepare, how often I tell them that I love them, how many trips to the park we make, how much money I put into their savings accounts, how many times I get up in the night.
It isn't enough.
To thank them for living.
To compensate her for dying.
It will never, ever be enough.
I could wear myself down into dust trying to balance the books on that one.

Right where I am: somewhere between 2 years, 8 months, 29 days and 2 years, 9 months, 2 days

2011-05-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

Posted as part of Angie's Right Where I Am project at Still Life with Circles

Where am I?

When I started writing this post, I didn't actually know. I had to work it out. I'm still not convinced that I have my sums right.

Where to start from?

From the births. Or from the death. Hard on the heels of one another and then there is that nastily direct line of causation. The death might not have occurred if it hadn't been for the birth. So horribly early.
I'm sure that I would have known instinctively which one was correct, births or death, months or weeks out in 2008.
Now I flounder between the two. Uncertainly. As the date does. The 28th.
Nearly the anniversary of Georgina's death, the 29th. But not quite.
There seems to be a bunch of 'not quite'-ness in my life lately.

When I started my calculation to locate my point on the map, the 28th didn't even produce a jolt of recognition. Perhaps that tells me everything I need to know.

Still, here I am. Apparently. Wry smile.

*

At my sister's wedding, earlier this month.
I'm at a distinct disadvantage, with doughy arms and sleepy eyes peering out.
I am wearing unfamiliar tall heels that make me feel as though I am teetering on stilts.
Where I am now, I again care about how I look. I didn't. Not for about the first two years.
I feel matronly and frumpy. All bingo wings and swollen ankles.
Caught between envious glances at, and joyful pride in, the beautiful young women that surround me.
Halfway between a competitor and a mother. Not quite a mother yet evidently. Not quite ready to lay down my weapons.

I am talking to someone much shorter than me.
I squint and lean towards them, feeling ungainly, wobbly.

"So, do you feel better now?"

I hesitate. Better from what?
Have I been stricken down with some mysterious illness and not even noticed?
Perhaps I looked ill earlier in the day? Pale?
I have recently given birth but people generally don't ask if you are 'feeling better' following the birth of a baby.
Or do they?
How the heck would I know. Nobody asked me very much at all after the birth of my first two children.

I lean downwards, precariously balanced. Feigning deafness.

She pipes again.

"So, do you feel better now? Now you've done it properly?"

Oh.
Do I feel better now I have completed a pregnancy that didn't end prematurely?
And in the death of 50% of the occupants?
Is that what she is asking?
Do I feel better?
Do I?
At least the very fact that she's asked this question, phrased in this way, doesn't make me want to scream as it would have done a while ago.
Perhaps I do feel better?

*

Right where I am.

Everything flickers.
I can happily occupy two diametrically opposed points of view and not bat an eyelid.
Contrary.

(a) I do feel better, everything is better, I am healed, grateful, happy. Because how could I not be?

(b) I actually feel precisely the same as the day she died, you don't come back from an experience like that. There is no 'feeling better.' Ever. Screw you, random wedding questioner and your proposed happy ending. I don't buy it and I don't want it.

(a) I have three children. And I'm not about to hide one of them away.

(b) Strike that. To save me and the questioner a whole bunch of awkwardness (mainly theirs) and heart ache (mainly mine) make that two.

(a) Perhaps I am over-egging the pudding a little when it comes to grief. It was, technically, a miscarriage. Here, in this community, I hang around the edges wondering if I should approach with my tiny daughter in my arms. So far from a baby. Such a long shot at life.
Perhaps Georgina's death has just become a convenient hook to hang my discontent upon?
Why am I still here, jibber jabbering away to myself?

(b) But it hurts. It hurts.
She might have lived. Just might.
I loved her. I love her.
The potential that was Georgina, my daughter, my first baby. And will never be.
And it seems like such a robbery, such a tragedy. So immense that my minds spins when I think about it for too long.
She was a person, a baby. A small baby. With blue eyes that looked about. Or appeared to.
With a small sprinkling of hair.
With limbs that stirred and jabbed the air.
I'm still here because . . . well, there simply isn't anywhere else. Not for her.

(a) I know absolutely nothing. I have brought another child into this world of chaos, where awful things are just waiting to strike at you and nothing makes any sense. Where we are all just temporarily suspended above a mighty abyss, waiting to fall endlessly.

(b) I know things that most people don't. Because this brief glimmer called life is all I have to offer. To anyone.
I held out my hands and tried to pull three people across. But one slipped.
We all slip in the end. But, in the meantime, we live.
I look at the sunlight moving across Reuben's face.
I hear Jessica proudly pronounce, "Ma-mee, Da-dee, Ooooo-ben" over her stick figures.
I feel my own blood pounding in my ears and look out at the world.
I feel stupid and I feel wise.

(a) I am miserable. How could I be happy whilst she is dead?

(b) I am happy. How could I be miserable whilst they are alive? Whilst I am alive?

My happiness isn't the same as it was before. It has teeth and claws. It is a strange, fierce happiness. Possessive. Jealous. Sharp. Toothy. It's spiky, carrying knuckle dusters. It is spoiling for a fight. Possibly with you, question popper at the wedding.

But here.
Where I am.
I am happy.
Happy in a way that I could not have imagined before.
Happy in a way that I would not have been had my daughters both lived.
I can only imagine that my happiness then would have been more placid. Flaccid.
More . . . appropriate. More socially acceptable.

Not this wild, mad thing that feels indecent and improper. A betrayal.
It does not look like it could possibly belong to that slightly rotund young mother with dishevelled hair, carrying too many bags and frantically shouting at that toddler not to run into the road.
But it does.
It's mine.

And so is she.

Birth

2011-05-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

Reuben George W arrived safely into this world on Wednesday 4th of May - Star Wars Day as my oldest nephew gleefully informed me, may the fourth be with you - after an induction at 38 weeks, 3 days. He weighed 8lbs 11oz.

His birth was fairly uneventful apart from the brief threat of an assisted delivery. This threatened assistance spurred us both on to one final effort as Reuben was born very shortly after the doctor entered the room waving scary looking medical bits and pieces about.

I've tried to write a little about his arrival but it does not feel as though I should post it here. Perhaps just not yet. This place is too firmly his sisters'.

I search his face for a trace of Georgina's. But she has not left one there for me to find. My wise girl.

We sit together. Four of us. Four and a half of us.
I'm tired and uncomfortable but so happy.
Jessica suddenly seems to have grown up. Her birth, her sister's birth. Aeons and worlds away.
I try to imagine another big sister standing next to her but find that, suddenly, I can't.

As I gather Reuben's warm body to mine, I ache.
Ache for how tiny a 1lb 10 oz body is.
Ache for how very short a span of time three days is.
Ache for a daughter who isn't coming home to me.
Perhaps it is only now that I begin to understand that.

Fat, treacherous tears roll down my face and into his hair.
For however much I would like his birth, his life, to be separate from everything that came before it, to be simple and joyful, it isn't.
It's more of a tangle.
But perhaps all the more beautiful for that.

Stretch

2011-04-18T02:57:00.000-07:00

The elusive state of 'heavily' pregnant, that I seem to have been chasing for such a long time, makes me feel like a balloon.
A void with a thin scraping of me over the surface.
A hole filled with mysterious, shifting flesh. Digesting, fluttering, breathing, expanding.
Muscles that move and twitch without being directly instructed.
And another consciousness flickering. Those same fleshy processes repeating themselves inside.
Only a duplicate this time. Forget the initial over ambitious triplicate process and the other that never even got off the ground. Goodbye to all that.
As I get bigger, as this baby grows, I feel as though I am shrinking, thinning.
Nobody wants to know what I am thinking, not really. To admit to any doubt or fear at this point would be somewhat impolite. Shocking. Ungrateful. So I stretch my lips into a smile and discuss names, age gaps, Jessica's likely reaction. My mouth is not quite stretchy enough to wrap round the words 'birth plan' or 'everything will be fine this time', not quite yet.
Sometimes I feel that I have been stretching my lips upwards for so long that my smile might even be genuine.
If a little taut.

I'm not even sure that I feel frightened any longer, it all feels so very far beyond my control.
I hold my belly and I can feel this baby's movements. New and strange. I barely felt movement from the twins before they were born. My scrabbling fingers reach to try and hold him here, to stop him slipping away from me. But, despite only being separated by skin, he feels as distant as his sisters. One with her own existence, one without.
His limbs stretch. My skin stretches to accommodate them.
We both stretch together.

***

I was worried that when I became a mother, particularly a mother of twins, that I would forget who I was. I was very concerned that I would lose the things that defined me, that I was proud of.
I was worried that I would lose (in no particular order). . . . friends who did not have any children, my husband, my figure, my career, my ability to walk in five inch heels, time to apply an entire face full of make-up, time to read books and watch films, the time and place to drink myself into a semi-silly state, my ability to concentrate, my ability to earn money. . . .the list goes on. All of these seem fairly stupid and trivial in the light of what I did lose, which was all of the above and then some.

To be honest, people who had children used to irritate me. They seemed smug, with their 'oh you'll feel differently when you have your own' and their 'you can't understand x, y or z until you've had children of your own' as though, by failing to reproduce myself, I had also failed some test of emotional intelligence or humanity. That I couldn't possible understand them with their mighty depths and their wondrous insights into the inner workings of the universe. Because they'd managed to do something as mundane and everyday as have children? Hrrumph. As I said. Irritating. I didn't appreciate being told that I simply couldn't understand them with their children. It hurt my pride.

But, as it turns out, there are a huge number of things that I cannot understand. Higher maths, other people, religion, the meaning of life, biology, death. If it is any consolation to me, at least I can say I'm not the only one.

I still don't understand those wise parents who told me that everything would become clear when I had children of my own. That I would be glad I hadn't taken that promotion, or a risk with a larger mortgage, or gone back to university. Because, at last, I would understand.

But, when my children were born, I understood less than I ever did. Big gaps opened up in the meagre little pile o' knowledge that I believed I had accumulated.
I became less like those parents I knew, less like anyone that I knew.
Other people's motivations and lives became even more incoherent and strange, not less.
An experience I thought would bond me to people, to my family . . . didn't. It just left me stranded, in a weird no man's land, where the only people I feel understand live inside my computer.

Sometimes when I look at Jessica, I am not entirely sure which one of us is, in fact, me. Perhaps it comes of trying to anticipate her, trying to understand her, spending so much time with someone who I can't really communicate a great deal with by way of the spoken word. Spending so long staring into those eyes and listening to those sounds. I press my nose into the back of her neck and, momentarily, want to merge us back together. Part of me wants to be her. I feel consumed. Perhaps all parents feel this way? All her life, I have watched Jessica. From outside an incubator, from across our living room floor. Watching. I spent hours every day for months simply watching Jessica because it was all I could do.

But, another part of me, is desperately trying to maintain a similar relationship with a child who is dead. Georgina consumes me just as much. It is hard to try and inhabit the consciousness of someone who is dead, who hardly lived, who I scarcely know. To understand my other daughter. To try and forge something from such a short space of time, without the feedback that we get from the living. Georgina will never smile or stamp her feet at me.
But I can't bring myself to let go of the threads that stretch between us. Be they all in my imagination or not. Perhaps they don't stretch to anywhere at all, simply loop towards me and bury themselves in my back.
But I know where I want them to go. To my child.

Antenatal

2011-03-28T14:32:00.000-07:00

We stand in the hospital car park, collapsing into one another.
I sag, my belly pulling me forward, my head bowed.

A thin voice from somewhere very far away says, "I just want my little girls back. I just want my girls."
The thin voice is mine.
I think.

The sunshine is frail, the air is cold and it burns the mixture of salt and phlegm in my throat and around my eyes.

He looks at me, confused.
He says, "It's still like yesterday to you, isn't it?"

Perhaps it is the proximity to the building. My daughters were born there. This baby will be born there. I'm worried I'll have to go back into that same room on the tour of the delivery ward to be held after this break is over.

It is not a pretty building. Squatting squarely on the horizon in grey concrete.
Sometime I can walk past and not even notice that it is there.
Sometimes I walk past and remark cheerily to Jessica, "Do you remember that building? You used to live there on your own when you were a baby. There's your room, behind that window. Mummy and Daddy used to come and visit you everyday? You and your sister were born there my darling. Do you remember?"
Sometimes it is just a place, just a building, tuned out alongside the rest of the surroundings.

But sometimes I feel like I can reach back through concertinaed folds of time and tap my former self on the shoulder. I trudge down the stairs. I once jumped down these same stairs, trying to persuade twin 1 to turn around for an ultrasound. Another spring. Tantalisingly close, just out of reach.
It's only been a year,
two years,
three years.

It isn't far away.
Perhaps not quite yesterday but . . . close.
I feel as though I've failed. Because I don't know how to fix myself, how to stop myself returning to this same worn out spot. To a memory that is so fuzzy that it is probably now half a fiction.

Perhaps it is because I'm still hoping to find a few more memories of that little girl.
Another image, another glimpse.
Perhaps I don't, in truth, want to stop going back.
I want to hang out in August 2008 forever, that month that held out so much happiness, that held my little girl's entire life. Why would I want to leave it?

Except for the fact that trying to stay there is ruining me.
And everyone else seems to be under the impression that it is 2011.

We go on the tour. We correctly identify forceps, ventouse, hospital gown, drip. We discuss the merits of TENS machines and epidurals. We count up the number of people who will be present if you have an emergency C section. Doctor, health care assistant, anaesthetist, midwife. One of the men is told to lie on the floor and he is then surrounded by people to illustrate how intimidating we might find this.

We are the only couple in the class with an older child. Nobody seems to think this odd. The beautiful young girl next to me is worried. I smile and say, "I wouldn't be doing it again if it were that bad would I now? Please don't worry."

I could never begin to explain the complex tangle of reasons, some of them surely dubious, that have brought me back to this building. I could certainly never tell her that I was also expecting a baby girl, born in this hospital, who died.

I feel so sure I could fix this, if only I knew how.
That I could leave it alone, pretend it never happened, that I could put it in one of those mental 'boxes' so beloved of my husband, so easy for him to open and shut at will. Never grasped that trick myself.
Or that I could just remember my dear little girl's short life and how much I loved her. Leave the rest to dust.

Walking up the stairs of the multi-storey car park after work, I catch myself thinking idly how pleasant it will be this summer.
When Georgina comes home.

Sometimes I wonder if I am now irreparably screwed up.

Protection

2011-03-06T14:48:00.000-08:00

I dreamt about Georgina last night. I don't dream about her very often so it was a little unsettling but nice, all at once.

The Georgina of my dreams is generally herself, as she was in life, an extremely premature baby. Red, thin and bruised. Either that or a strange near-facsimile of her twin sister.

In the dream, Georgina was wading in a stream. It didn't seem unusual to the 'me of the dream' that Georgina could walk, let alone wade. The stream must have been extremely shallow as she was very small. I was concerned that she would slip and fall down in the water. There was a sinister looking fish lurking off to one side and I was worried that he might try to eat her or inadvertently knock her down.

But I didn't pick her out of the water. She seemed to be enjoying herself with the paddling. So I just leant down and looked her in the face. Her face was so familiar. I thought, I'll just keep an eye on her to check that no good fish doesn't approach her and to make sure that the water stays under her chin.

A thought crossed my dream mind, 'Well Georgina, here you are happily wading in the stream. I thought you were dead all this time.'

Then I woke up.
And I realised that she is dead.
Still takes me by surprise some mornings.

***

30 weeks pregnant. A gestation in double figures that starts with a 3. Unknown and unexpected territory although still, as I don't need to tell you, no guarantee of anything.

It makes me feel so tender and protective of this little one inside and of his big sisters. They never really stood a chance, they were so under prepared. I never wanted my daughters to be born into an ethical and economic shit storm where so many seem to have an opinion on those little lives, on the validity of those bodies, those people.
On how much they cost.
On whether their chances of disability rendered them a poor investment.
On whether I am one of the selfish parents that pushes medical technology further into the outer realms than is appropriate.
I know there is only so much to go around but . . . it is hard to hear people speak about your own children in that way. Particularly when you consider the resources expended on patching up drunks every weekend of the year.

As a healthy 29 year old, I decided to start a family.
I didn't smoke, drink or take drugs during my pregnancy.
I took my vitamins and attended all my antenatal appointments.
I didn't expect anything to go awry.
In fact, I thought that my twin pregnancy was auspicious. A sign that my body could manage two babies. (Laughs heartily at former stupidity)
I thought my body was a fortress, that I could monitor what went in and what was going on inside.
That nothing could harm my children, that I could protect them.
As it turned out, once they were born, I could do absolutely nothing.
Not even make the decision as to whether they would receive treatment or not.

I wish I could blow myself up like some giant inflatable and throw myself around the whole damn situation. Puff up like a bull frog and absorb the impact of all the blows that land on my family as a result of a something that we didn't ask for. Become an ever expanding roll of human bubble wrap and spin myself out around my family. Protect Jessica from the consequences of her prematurity and the judgements that others will make about her worth and her prospects, protect Georgina from myself and perhaps even from the doctors. Wrap myself around her and just let her die in peace. But it's too late.

I always liked this song. But I always wondered why the singer sounded so sad. I thought it was a triumphant song, about a person standing in front of someone that they loved, taking the force of the blow for that person.

But now I think I understand. You can't protect anyone.
I've never felt as protective of anybody as I did over my daughters. Those two tiny, fragile beings.
But you can't fight biology.
Love can't defeat broken kidneys.
Caring can't cure sepsis.
I couldn't overrule those tiny broken bodies simply because I wanted to or felt as though I could.
But those bodies belonged to my children and I loved them. Those people, those bodies.
Not merely collections of disabilities or expense. Not to me.

Love, luck, prayer or hope. None of these things can guarantee a future for their brother either.
It's all a horrible, horrible game of chance.
One in which most people will never even know that they have been a participant.

But the standing in front of them regardless, perhaps that is the trick of it all?
The brave, foolhardy, crazy and futile attempt. Just to say that I tried to protect them.
So I stand here. In front of Jessica and this baby and Georgina's memory.
I stand here uselessly. Watching.
But not running away.

Tongue Tied

2011-02-25T15:13:00.000-08:00

I seem to have lost my voice. Probably temporary. I'm sure I'll be jibber jabbering away again soon.

I also seem to have lost one of my daughters. Permanently. I think. Although my mind always creates a nagging doubt that this might, just might, not be the case. That I can snag her back if I could figure out how.

Those days.

Interleaved amidst my days and hours that trudge along in their mean, unflinching way.
Sometimes in glaring bursts of colour, with sound and light.
Sometimes like thin, thin tracing paper with only the merest impression on it, accompanied by silence.

Different.
But.
There they are again.

Interposed between my eyes and the things that pass before them.
In odd flashes of the extraordinary.

Sometimes unexpectedly, causing me to catch my breath.
But at other times I know that I have sought them out deliberately.
Like flicking an enlarged taste bud over the edge of my teeth or peeling at a strip of skin by my fingernail.
An irresistible urge.
Pick, pick, pick.
Jab, jab, jab.
Fiddling about with this messy stuff because I can't seem to leave it alone.
All bodily fluids and salt.

Attempting to make the ending different.
Attempting to bring you back to me.
Still.

Wishing that I could remember.
Wishing that I could stop remembering.

In my car.
In the bath tub.
In front of the computer.
At night, as I go to sleep.

That time. It never quite seems to end.
Or perhaps I simply do not want those days to let me be.
Because they are all you left behind for me to keep.
That short little stretch of time now worn to unravelling by my anxious fingers.

My dear child.
I do miss you.

Crosspatch

2011-02-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

*So I published this.
Then I felt ashamed of myself and deleted it.
Now I'm publishing it again.
Because, although I'm not particularly proud of this post, I do feel this way.
Angry and cross-patchy and kind of mean. Grinchy in fact.
With very little reason.

One more time.

26 weeks. The most pregnant I've ever been.
I am excited and filled with regret all at once.

I did not expect to feel so very angry.
I am tired of being angry.
Yet knowing it for the useless waste of energy it is, doesn't necessarily make the anger disappear. Frustratingly.
In a situation where there is nobody and nothing to be angry with, nobody to blame, nobody to curse. My anger is like a fight or flight response, a biological feedback loop gone awry.
Building and building a completely inappropriate response to the situation I find myself in.

I am at the age where it feels as though every other couple is having a baby.
Bump pictures and ultrasound scans abound.
Nobody else I know, in real life, of my own age, has anything other than the traditional happy ending.
Just me.
Only me.
Who sits in the corner, trying to hide behind my hair and chewing my lip whilst babies and pregnancy are discussed.

One of my colleagues laughingly says that he thought his baby had every congenital anomaly in the book as he couldn't make any sense of the picture at the ultrasound.
I want to howl.
Because it isn't funny. Not really. If he thought about it.
But nobody does. Because babies with congenital anomalies, dead babies only happen to other people. People like me who sit at the desk opposite.
But he's probably forgotten.

Most people just don't remember. Or they don't want to make any kind of allowance. Or they just don't care.
Or they aren't interested in my life. Why would they be? It is not as though I remember every detail of their lives.
But.
They think I love having discussions about the validity of screening records belonging to babies who died before they were eight days old.
They seem to think I relish opportunities to query whether any babies would STILL be in hospital 72 hours after birth. Erm . . .try four MONTHS. Or just maybe they might have died by that point.
Why in hell would you ask me this question?

That stupid, whining voice in my head persists, "Why couldn't it be me? Why did my baby die? I wanted it so badly and I was so close. I just wanted the normal run of things goddamnit. Why couldn't I do it? Why?"

I know that question is futile.
There isn't an answer.
Or not one that will quiet my internal temper tantrum.

Sometimes pregnancies do not end happily.
Sometimes babies die.
In this instance, it was my own pregnancy that did not end happily.
And it was Georgina who died.
It isn't something that other people are going to remember.
It isn't something that other people are going to care about.
I am expecting too much. I know I am.
My husband is always telling me that I expect too much of other people.
That there are only two people who are going to carry on remembering, who are going to carry on hurting.
And that's us.

There is nothing to be angry about. Not really.
I just need to remember that.

No reply

2011-01-17T14:29:00.000-08:00

It rained all morning, heavy drops from a gray sky.
At lunch time, I went out of the office and hid in the book shop.
I looked at the books for longer than I intended.
The ladies behind the counter were talking about one of their daughters (granddaughters?) who is currently expecting her first child. They thought she was a good age, twenty five.
I felt suddenly haggard and self conscious.
I ducked into the children's section.
I recovered myself and took my selection to the cash register, feeling like the prow of a strange, luminous ship in my bright purple maternity coat.

The lady working in the shop took my money and said, "You'd better read whilst you have time dear."
Her eyes flicking down to my belly and back up.
I felt, momentarily, confused and suspicious. Why would I not have time to read? Oh yes, the seemingly impending baby.
Would I be too busy grieving? My eyes too red and sore to read? Did she know something that I didn't?
Then I came to myself, realised what she meant and smiled. I hope she didn't see that panicky pause pass across my face.
"Oh, this is my third so I know how to make time."

I felt a thrill of bravado saying that, that third.
A very, very small punch landed on Death's shoulder. I waved my puny fists about and reclaimed her, just for an instant.
Because she's still mine. Still my child. Even if she doesn't stop me reading novels. At least, not these days.

I don't want to go back to the bookshop now though. Just in case the lady behind the counter asks me any more questions.

I wonder about this child. He is nearly as old as his sisters when they were born now.
I try not to think too much about this flicker of a person although his small, precise jabs and pokes make me aware of this presence. Yet I cannot deny him, my little red shiny frog-child, a half person in hidden in the strange twilight of my belly that makes the very young appear older than all of us, older than time and so very wise. He is one of those small, thin beings that I know for children of mine.

He seems so palpable to others, so real. A child whose arrival is only a matter of time.

But to his mother, he is merely another ghost.
I'm waiting. I'm waiting for both my ghosts.
The return of one seems as much a possibility as the safe arrival of another, although I know that this is not the case.

I wonder what the future holds. I try to second guess, to ask. But there is no reply.
I guess I'll just have to wait a little longer still. I should be getting good at it by now.

How terribly strange to be seventy

2011-01-07T02:27:00.000-08:00

I've never dared to re-read many of the old posts on this blog. As I've said before, it seems to be quite a cyclical old thing. I know there are some pre-occupations that I keep returning to. One of these is the passing of time.

When Georgina died, something strange seemed to happened to time. Or at least to my perception of it.
It truly seemed to fall out of joint, askew. No longer neat sections of 24 hours, 365 days, one after the other.
Time seemed to stop when she died. Or at least part of that flow stopped dead. As though it were held back behind a dam.

Part of me is convinced that those three small days are still being played out somewhere, away out of my sight, by pale versions of me and my daughter.

Subsequent time seems to pass in fits and starts, achingly slowly or running past me so quickly that I can't keep up. I look at the physical evidence in Jessica, who grows according to the conventions of time, and can hardly believe my eyes, hardly believe the weight in my arms when I pick her up, hardly believe the small snatches of conversation that we can have. How can all that time have passed?

Before Georgina died, my own old age seemed terribly distant. When I was twenty nine, I could not imagine seventy years superimposed on my body. Now I am thirty one, seventy seems achingly close. Or as close as something I really have no conception of could ever be. Just a little slip away, a trip and a stumble and I'll be there.My Ouma always used to say, "Catherine my dear, old age has nothing to recommend it." I can still hear her voice saying that so clearly, although she has been dead for longer than Georgina has. I'll let you know if she was right when I get there, I'll probably still be wittering on here when I am seventy!

I am sometimes shocked to see my own face in the mirror. It seems, at once, older than I expect and younger. I feel mild surprise and shock that when Georgina died my hair did not turn white over night, that deep lines were not instantly carved into my face, that my bones did not immediately start to crumble. It felt as if all of those things should have happened. But she was born and she died and I just carried on getting older at the conventional rate.

When I am seventy, if I am lucky or unlucky enough to make it that far, I know I will still be thinking of my little baby. My child who tried so very hard. Who lived so very well. I hope that I will never lose that memory, it feels as though it should be one of the last to depart from me. Although maybe they don't leave in order of importance? Perhaps I'll only be left with memories of dresses that I wore as a four year old or something equally useless.

When I am seventy, Georgina might have been forty one. Jessica, if she lives, will be forty one. Strange that I have no idea what that forty one year old Jessica will be like but I feel that I have already spent hours in attempted conversation with my imagined forty one year old Georgina. She has already been all ages to me over the past two years. Probably because she will only ever truly be three days old. And where else can I go from there?

I have to use these imaginings to bind us together, to force a relationship from nothing, to make Georgina my daughter, my own. All those invisible filaments that extend between me and my own mother, joining us, those years, the shared experiences, the misunderstandings, arguments, reconciliations, bewilderments, the interest and love we share in my father, my own younger sister, Jessica. Those will never exist for me and Georgina. As though a mighty pair of scissors came down and went snip, snip, snip between us. Death will do that kind of thing to you. There is love and yearning and wanting and grief, grief, grief. On my side.

So I try to coax new growth from those snapped little lines that joined us. Those threads that dangle and that I so much want to attach a daughter to. My daughter. Georgina. Who knows if I have any success or if I am just anchoring myself more firmly to somebody that I have dreamt up?

Last night, Jessica wouldn't go to sleep. She cried and cried. When I tried to put her down, she extended her claws into what I fondly call 'the monkey death grip' which means I have to either rip my clothes or hair or pick her up. Very unusual for her. In despair, I finally took her to my own bed and we lay there, in the dark. I recited my rather limited selection of poems that I know off by heart. She looked at me. Her blue eyes looked dark and her hot little hand twisted bits of my hair around.
I thought, I know everything about her.
I thought, I know absolutely nothing about her.
Perhaps it isn't that different?
I felt that there might be another pair of dark eyes watching. But no.

Daughter of Heaven

2010-12-22T14:28:00.000-08:00

'Daughter of heaven Oh, daughter of now

Drifting away and you don't make a sound
We'll cry when we hear that you ran from this town
She's gone to a new place now
She's gone to a new place now'

Happy Christmas my sweet child.

I wish I knew where you were.

In the new place of this song?

Nowhere?

Everywhere?

All I know is that you feel so far beyond my reach.

This song reminds me of you.

It is the only song that your Daddy ever asks me to switch off when I play it.

I know it is because it reminds him of you too.

And, strangely, this song comforts me for that very reason.
That he can't bear to hear to it.

Our daughter.

Georgina.

I miss you.

I love you.

I hope my love will find you wherever you may be.

Maybe it just evaporates up into the air?

Perhaps it doesn't truly matter?

My love is still here.

My love for you cannot be undone, just as your brief existence cannot be undone.

And perhaps that means that they will, inevitably, meet.

I hope so.
Happy Christmas my sweet child.

May the holidays pass peacefully for everyone who reads this, especially those who are missing children of their own.

Shame

2010-12-21T06:15:00.000-08:00

I felt ashamed when the twins were born.

Not of them. Not of Jessica. Not of Georgina. Never of them. I was only ever proud of my children. Still am.

Shame was not my main reaction but one of many subsidiaries. I was ashamed of myself.

Ashamed that my body had performed so disastrously badly.

And also, embarrassed.

I felt as though I had waltzed out on the middle of the stage in front of everyone I knew and told them that I was going to do an astounding magical conjuring trick. But it didn't work. And not only did it not work. It went wrong in ways that nobody could have foreseen. Involving extreme peril and death. And I was left standing up there on the stage whilst the audience looked on with expressions ranging through pity, distaste and horror.

I was embarrassed, mortified, humiliated, ashamed. But those minor emotions were overwhelmed by the enormity of the grief that I felt. That Georgina was dead and that I would never, ever see her again.

I've always had a little store cupboard in my brain for 'The Shameful Words and Deeds of Catherine W.'

It's a surprisingly big cupboard given that I've never murdered anyone or been sued for slander or done anything out especially of the ordinary in fact.

They are, in the main, small, weak things. Built of dust and feathers. And, somehow, that makes them even more shameful. That they are not even proper shameful deeds, not particularly muscular or even interesting.

But also, here in the cupboard, lurks the shame I feel that I somehow caused all of this to come down on my children's heads, that I was a rotten person, that I somehow caused, or failed to prevent, an infection, that I couldn't stop the labour, that I cried out giving birth to two such tiny babies, that I couldn't save Georgina, that I was complicit in her death by my tacit agreement to withdraw all her medical support. Deeply and horribly ashamed. So much so, that these particularly shameful articles are pushed to the back of the cupboard as I simply can't bear to look at them or to think about them. Sometimes in the dead of night. But it isn't usually a good idea.

Over two years later, I look at myself in the mirror. I wonder if am simply sticking my stomach out, puffing myself up with hot air and too many biscuits. I feel as though this little belly is simply a balloon, one which will inevitably pop and leave me standing here with nothing to show for myself except damp, plastic-y bits left over from the explosion. When I tell people I'm pregnant, I blush. I wonder if they think I am taking an irresponsible risk. Or perhaps they don't remember my previous proud announcement and how . . . strangely that all turned out. Or perhaps they just think that everything will be better this time. After all, the doctors are 'keeping an eye on me', what could possibly go wrong?

I tried to buy a baby doll for Jessica for Christmas. But, when confronted by all those plastic, newborn limbs and staring eyes, I couldn't. Hot shame and bile climbed up my throat and I wanted to knock all those plastic babies, who looked so different from mine, on to the ground and jump up and down on them. Which doesn't even make any sense. Do I really want to buy Jessica a 2lb NICU baby doll for Christmas? Still they would come with a hell of a lot of accessories I suppose. I wanted to steal the chunky limbs and apparent life in the eyes of one of them and grant them to my other daughter as a Christmas gift.

An outfit catches my eye with 'Baby Alive' emblazoned on the packaging. I briefly consider the launch of an accompanying, less appealing range. Don't think there would be many takers for that one.

I still insist on trying to join conversations about pregnancy and child birth but, as I can't quite bring myself to spell out the story to those who don't already know, it comes out terribly odd. Bits and pieces emerge which must leave the listener thinking, 'Eh?' Or perhaps not, as they never ask.

I always intend to keep quiet but the words keep tumbling out. I obliquely refer to a twin pregnancy, I apologise for Jessica's poor speech and attempt an explanation, I try and shed some light on my lack of sympathy for complaints about young children and stretch-marks and disinterested husbands.

But I can't bring myself to say what happened out loud any longer. I feel too ashamed of myself.

Twins

2010-12-03T14:27:00.000-08:00

I remember reading a book about twins, in that brief pause between discovering that I was expecting two babies and taking home one.

I remember I wanted to skip the chapter on the death of one or both babies, as that seemed an outcome too horrible to contemplate. But I read it. There was a passage that stuck with me, about how women who lose one or more babies from a multiple birth, mourn the loss of their 'status' as a mother of twins or triplets or more. That seemed strange to me at the time. Now . . . not so much.

I did feel special, clever almost. That I had conjured up two babies where you would normally expect only one.

I don't feel quite so clever about it now.

The fact that I will, in all probability, never raise twins is a strange, subsidiary little loss.

That people will never know me for the mother of twin girls.

That strangers will never stop me in the street and ask if my two babies are twins.

Those weeks of searching for double buggies and buying identical outfits rise up before me like a fever dream. That proud, bustling woman unrecognisable. And, quite frankly, rather irritating.

I was so very proud of 'my twins' but the loss of that formless, faceless doubling of babies is nothing really.

A drop in the ocean.

Compared to the loss of the person that was Georgina.

But Georgina's 'twin-ness' was a part of her. One of the few things that I can say confidently that I know about my eldest daughter. That she was one of twins.

When I found out I was expecting twins, I was upset for a little while. I didn't believe that I would be able to cope. I was frightened of being a good enough mother for one baby, let alone two. I felt somewhat outnumbered.

Although I haven't had to worry about the practicalities of changing two sets of nappies, trying to synchronise two sets of feeds or two sets of naps, I am still Georgina's mother. Just as much as I am Jessica's. I am still a mother to twins, although not in a way that would be immediately remarked upon.

That inverse space where Georgina could be, that tiny, ill baby just beyond my reach, that pale ghost of a toddler, her living sister in reverse.

An imagining that I scarcely dare to try to colour in, because if I started I don't think I could bring myself to stop.

I cannot wish her away. I cannot undo her. I wouldn't want to. My thoughts often whir around that strange emptiness, that 'could have been'-ness that is Georgina's absence. It is my want and love that keeps her here. It nudges at me. It murmurs in my ear. It keep me returning to the places where she might have stood, or sat, or eaten a rusk, or had her nappy changed, or slapped her sister's cheek. To all those things she might have been or done. Might. I just can't leave that possibility alone. Although it hurts and hurts and the places themselves are worn to unravelling with my pacing, waiting feet and my yearning that she will, impossibly, come back.

That lack in the middle of our family has formed us. We have grown around it, contorted and twisted and grown in strange new patterns to accommodate the death of one of us.

That tiny absence is so powerful that bits of me have simply dropped off and turned to ash, friendships that I trusted have untwisted, new parts sprung out.

We are a different family because of Georgina. Her life and her death and our witnessing of both of them.

I don't think I ever saw anyone live quite like my daughter did.

I've certainly never seen anyone else die.

I am a different mother. My husband, a different father.

Because we were Georgina's parents.

As well as Jessica's.

Because we had two daughters.

Twins.

This time, when I found out that I was not expecting twins, part of me was wistful.

Stupidly, as there are a multitude of reasons why it would not be a good idea for me to have twins again.

But there it is.

Sometimes I still feel a little pang of regret for my twins.

Misunderstandings

2010-11-29T12:45:00.000-08:00

"Catherine," she said. "It must have been two years."

I turn around. My eyes are dazed and small from staring at the computer screen. I'm not at all sure of her name. She is a project manager of some description. She is cheery, breezy. Perhaps pleased to have remembered the name of someone who played a minor minion role in a long ago project of her's.

"Really?" I say. "Two years. Huh? Doesn't time fly?" I try to smile whilst I scrabble about for a name. Something beginning with S? Sharon? Hmmmm. I'm not confident enough to try it out.
Particularly as she has remembered my name.
Although the name plaque on my desk does give her an unfair advantage.

"Last time I saw you," she says mock accusingly, eyes narrowed, "you had a big bump."

I feel a small internal electric shock, a jolt of disbelief. I did?

"So . . . . . what did you have? A boy or a girl?"

I believe I hear a small intake of breath from my colleague, sitting next to me. But perhaps not.
I feel as though the focus of the room has suddenly snapped to my chair, to my awkward, flapping face as it hangs there. Uncertainly.

But it hasn't. Nobody is looking, nobody is listening.

I hear the blood thump in my ears.

I want to, very quietly and slowly, get off my chair and crawl into the space under my desk. I just want to fold myself up and sit cross legged in that small, dark void. Amongst the cables. I don't want to cry or scream or bang on the desk. Just sit. Very still.

But that would not be fair. To this pleasant and efficient woman who is pleased for remembering my name and the fact that I was pregnant.

I undo my hair in an attempt to hide my reddening ears.

"A girl," I say. "A little girl."

I fumble for the photograph frame with its picture of Jessica.

"Here she is. She's two."

"Yes, she would be," smiles lady beginning with S.

She doesn't ask about the other photograph of the sun setting over the ocean and a name written in the sand. Nobody ever does although I often wish they would.

"Nice to see you again," I say. I turn my eyes back to my screen. They ache.

***

"Is this your first?"

"No, actually, this baby will be my third."

"Your third? Oh wow, you're an old hand then!"

I suppose I am.
In a strange way and not how the speaker imagines.
Old as the hills.

I smile to myself as I walk away.

Precarious

2010-11-13T13:51:00.000-08:00

I seem to have little to say these days.

I feel reduced to fleshy parts, precariously balanced against one another.
I watch myself tottering, wait for myself to fall.

I had my next scan.
A baby. Alive.
The consultant talked us through the butterfly of the brain, the bubbles of the stomach and the bladder, the chambers of the heart.
Measuring a week ahead.

But my cervix is short. Already.

A desperate race of growth against shrinking in which I cannot give either side any assistance. Despite the fact that it is all happening inside my own body.

Poor little baby. I wish I could give you something better to balance upon. Such a tiny distance to rest my life, my marriage, my living child's future, upon.

I dream of tiny babies again.

I hope that these dreams do not come to pass.

I hope for . . . I hope for so many, many things.

I wait.
Sometimes I feel as though I will disappear into myself with waiting.

Thirty posts by January

2010-10-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

I'm now aiming to have my thirty posts written by January as progress around here is pitifully slow! Despite my good intentions, my posts are always far too long.

I haven't managed to sort out the situation with Jessica's nursery yet and this is filling me with gloom. I have asked for a meeting with her key worker and I'm hoping to get to the bottom of the issues (his issues and Jessica's) but I'll have to wait until next week. Thank you for much for all your lovely comments, every single one really, really helped. By the time I sat down to write that post last week, I felt utterly hopeless but I felt better and better with every single word of advice. Thank you.

I left that nursery feeling like the worst mother in the world. Not only had I let Jessica down by having her too early, causing her to go through all that pain and (possibly) to have some of these developmental problems in the first place, causing her sister to die and well . . . many things related to her early life fill me with guilt BUT I was also raising her to be a brat and a bully. This sent me into a spiral of doom, pondering whether I should even be attempting to have another baby when I obviously can't bring the one that I do have up properly. And then, in one of those horrible coincidences that life hands us every once in a while, I came home to find I was bleeding and possibly wouldn't have to worry about having another baby much longer.

I'm still not entirely sure if I do or don't have to worry on that score. I'm more hopeful than last week but I will just have to wait until my first 'official' scan at around 12 weeks. Hopefully next week.

Day 10 - a photo taken over 10 years ago of you and how it makes you feel seeing it now

This photograph was taken in . . . . ummm, 2002? Which makes it not quite ten years old but I wanted to use it because it was taken at a Halloween party which make this photograph nearly exactly eight years old today.

I've had to crop it as I've obviously got people sitting on either side of me and I don't know that they would like to feature on my blog so excuse the skinniness. Although perhaps it will make me look thinner? The me of eight years ago would have approved of that.

It makes me feel grateful. That I lived a long life, a whole life really, of twenty nine years without a crushing blow. Not a single one. Damn lucky. And in this photograph, I've still got a good six or seven years to go.
If I could have given, somehow, the rest of my life to Georgina, I would have done it in a heartbeat. Because I'd really had enough already, a fair crack of the whip. She could have had nearly the same, assuming that I'll make sixty. Half and half, mother and daughter, seems fair to me. If only life could be so simple and I could go about donating hours and weeks of my life to others.

I was happy in this photograph. The slight blur of grey shoulder to my left belongs to a man I thought I loved dearly. Sadly, he was not quite so impressed by me. But I hadn't figured that out yet, eight years ago. I think you can see in that in my smile.

The arm to my left belongs to my beautiful friend M. We are still friends now, eight years later, although when this photograph was taken we had only just met. She has certainly been a good friend and I'm lucky to know her.

And it makes me feel wistful. For the girl I was and for my beautiful girl. She won't ever breathe in that cold English night air, burning her lungs. She won’t walk to a party with friends and a man she thinks she loves. Or feel beautiful even if she is just a plain girl, beautiful for a couple of hours and boosted by a few beers.
Oh I just wish . . .I could give her a little of what I had and accepted so lightly, so ungratefully and ungraciously.

It's such a beautiful world
You're such a beautiful girl
So much that you want to try
The world wants to sleep with you tonight
But Minnie
Minnie if I could I would give you the rest of my life

Straw poll

2010-10-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

Just to warn you that this post is about (a) my pregnancy going slightly awry, although hopefully not completely off the rails. Just call me the girl who cried pregnant. Also (b) Jessica. So you may want to skip if either of these are likely to upset you.

I've had a rotten day today. First, a rather unexpected encounter at Jessica's nursery and then an alarming bleed which sent me scurrying up to the hospital. Everything looked ok on the scan but as ever, they don't want to give me any false hope. Sigh.

Anyway, I just want to conduct a little bit of a straw poll as I need the collective wisdom of the interwebz.

When I went to go and pick up Jessica her key worker (a young man) came marching up to me and told me, in front of several other parents, that she had been an absolute monster (straight face, presumably not a cute monster or a funny monster).
That she didn't listen.
That she had hit another child and, when told not to, had apparently hit the same child again.
That she kept sitting under the table even though he had told her not to.
That putting her in 'time out' didn't have any impact.
That if things didn't improve we should have a meeting with the special educational needs co-ordinator.

I left completely shocked and horrified.

Jessica doesn't always listen to me.
I haven't used 'time out' because I don't think she's old enough to understand the concept yet.
I have never, ever, ever seen her hit or push another child in all the time I've spent with her and other children (lots). Not to say that she isn't capable of it (I'm under no illusions on this front) but it surprised me. I've always taught her to be gentle. Mainly consisting of grabbing her hand mid smack and pulling gently down the side of my own face and saying 'gently, gently.' To randomly attack another child, to the extent of this young man needing to inform me of it, seems . . a little out of character?
She is allowed to sit under the table at home. Perhaps I shouldn't let her?

I just don't know how I can improve the situation. She is two years and two months which makes her twenty two months biologically but I've been told to knock off a bit more given her shaky start so I'll go for a nice round twenty months biological age. But she is tall and sturdy and perhaps they expect more of her because of that?
She has perhaps five reliable words still, absolute tops.
She quite often knows I'm talking to her, or telling her off, and chooses to laugh it off.
I take her hands, crouch down to her level, look her dead in the eye and say 'no' firmly. I don't laugh or smile. But she laughs.
If I raise my voice, she cries.
I'm not about to start smacking her wrist or anything.
I just don't think she has any 'sense' yet as such. I can't argue with her, rationalize with her, debate with her. All I can think of to do is try and get her attention and say 'no'.

I don't know.

I think that she is only little and I simply wouldn't expect her to listen consistently or to sit in a 'time out' chair for any length of time.

Lovely people out there, am I expecting too little of her? Or are they expecting too much?
Should she be able to do these things and I've sent her off to nursery ill-equipped?

I'm certainly appalled that she hit another child. I would have come down on her like a ton of bricks if I'd been there because that sort of thing really makes me mad.

I just feel awful. I know I'm super sensitive anyway so, when pregnant and particularly in a' this pregnancy is possibly going quite badly wrong' situation, I've become super super super sensitive and I'm taking all this to heart more than I should.

I'm so worried I've let Jessica down and let her become a bully and a spoilt brat.
I don't think any parent wants that for their child. But I don't know what to do to help her.

Any tips? Or am I already a day late and a dollar short?

In an aside, when I told my Dad this story, he reminded me about the time that Brown Owl threatened to evict me from Brownies. Perhaps she gets it from me?

Tender

2010-10-22T01:44:00.000-07:00

A photograph that makes me happy and a photograph that makes me angry or sad.

Turns out that I can tick all of these boxes by looking at the same photograph.

I have quite a few photographs of Georgina.
Some were taken whilst she was still alive, her eyes are open in a few.
Some were taken whilst she was dying, I am holding her or my husband is holding her. I have no idea at all who took these photographs. I have no recollection of anyone taking them, although in a rather surreal one I am smiling at the camera with my dying daughter on my lap.
Some were taken after her death, I think. Some I'm not sure if she is living or dead or changing between the two. Caught in transition.
I wish I'd asked them not to photograph us. I wish I'd asked some of the people that were there to leave.
There are even a few where it has been a process of elimination to work out which twin the photograph is actually of, Georgina or Jessica.

None of these images are 'good' photographs.
Some are computer print outs with cute cartoon borders. Incongruous to frame such a beautiful and painful image with little cartoon rattles.
Some are black and white, processed by the hospital laboratory. They are very fuzzy. Her blood appears black and the definition of her mouth has been lost. It looks strangely large and smeared.

I don't look at Georgina's photographs often.
I don't have any photographs of Georgina out on display around the house.
I don't show them to anyone.
Even those where she is alive.

I just find those images too. . . .overwhelming.
They make me feel happy, angry and sad. They make me feel everything that I can feel.
Every nerve is stretched, reaching for something, although heaven alone knows what.

They make me feel so tender.

Tender for my little girl. I push my finger down the computer print outs of her limbs and press my lips on to that after impression of her face. It is hard to believe that she was ever real, with a beating heart, with a brain that fizzled and thought.

I miss you. I love you. You tried so hard and I am so proud of you. My girl. My tiny Georgie girl.

Sometimes I feel as though the love I feel is not for my Georgina but for another child, one that I have imagined. But I look at these photographs and I know that it isn't. Not really. I love her. In that tiny, bruised body, that corporeal presence that I miss so dearly not just some imagined spirit, the little frame that I wanted to nuture, that I wanted to see grow, although every organ was collapsing on her from the moment she was born. I loved all of her, the bits that worked, the parts that didn't. I wish my love could have held her together.

And I feel tender for myself. When I look at these photographs I feel like one giant bruise. I don't want anyone to touch me. I don't want anyone to speak. I don't want anyone to look at them and feel sorry for us, or to think that she isn't a person, or that she wasn't beautiful.

I feel tender for my dear Jessica. When I look at the photographs of her and Georgina side by side, I can see how physically similar they were.

This is an old song, from long before any of this ever happened, back when I didn't really know what tender meant.

Sorry I haven't been around much lately. I just feel so tired and sad and I seem to need more sleep recently. Edited to say that I am also happy and grateful and many, many over things. I'm making it sound worse than it is.

Falling even further behind

2010-10-14T15:07:00.000-07:00

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."

Falling behind

2010-10-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

Oh dear. I haven't done too well at the thirty posts in thirty days meme.

I find that days in the office tend to result in getting little else done, apart from basic feeding and watering of my little family. By the time I do get to the computer, I get caught up in reading blogs until my eyes start to close and my husband is shouting "Stop reading blogs!" from our bedroom.

I'm going to try and catch up . . .

Day 2 - a movie that helped you get through the hard times, or one that jumps out at you after your loss.
Not so much an entire movie as much as a scene.
Quite appropriate really given that my attention span is now zip.

The scene is from Three Colours - Blue. It is the story of Julie who loses her husband and her daughter in a car accident. In this scene, Julie scraps her hand along a stone wall. It is a famous scene as the actress playing Julie, Juliette Binoche, did not wear protective covering over her hand and drew real blood. You can see the scene here starting at about 1:40 in.

I saw this film before Georgina died but now I find that I recognise myself in that scene.

Day 3 - a television program that helped you either get through hard times or that moves you.
Because I have problems with my attention span when it comes to watching movies, DVD boxsets could have been made for me. I could not have got through the initial weeks and months after the birth of the girls without them.

Whilst Jessica was in hospital I had to express milk every three to four hours. This was no problem during the day as the hospital had pumps and a room to sit and express in. But, although I appreciate that I was so incredibly lucky to be doing it, I struggled at night time. The house was so quiet, nothing had changed and yet everything had. Our daughters, who we'd been so excited about meeting, weren't home. One of them was never going to come home.
I'd shuffle downstairs and stick my hands in the cold water sterilizer to get the pump and the bottles out. I used to look out of the window and see my neighbour's lights on. I'd wonder what was keeping them up at this hour.
Then I'd fill the pockets of my dressing gown with biscuits and make a cup of tea, switch the TV on, switch the pump and settle in.

Believe me, it makes it a whole lot easier to get out of bed in the middle of the night to go and spend time with a machine, if you have a good episode of something to look forward to. And biscuits.

During the four months Jessica was in hospital I watched. . .
House M.D.
Gossip Girl
Dexter
Mad Men
The Wire
The West Wing
Dead Like Me
The 4400
Prison Break

A TV show that I absolutely love is Six Feet Under. I have the complete box set on DVD and I've been meaning to watch it again for a while. But I just can't face it quite yet.

I wonder what my own family's version of this finale will look like? Sadly, I already know how, and when, it ends for one of us. She's gone. And those of us left here hurtle onwards.

Until we don't.

Day One

2010-10-03T14:03:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try and join the thirty posts in thirty days that Angie has put together at Still Life With Circles.

I don't know how many I will be able to find something to write about (and I think I'm already running a little behind schedule) but I'd like to have a go.

Firstly to get away from my oft-discussed 'same three damn posts' problem. Secondly because I'm a sucker for the first question. Anything for a song. I'll link any old post to a song, however tenuous, as you may have noticed if you've been kind enough to hang around here for a while.

So . . here goes.

Day 1 - a song that reminds you of your child, or one that you can't listen to anymore and why.

The song that reminds me most strongly of Georgina is Nick Cave's 'Into My Arms' because it was all I could hear after she died. Although I think that I have only played it perhaps five times since then, as I now find it unbearable, it was on a mental loop. Over and over. Into my arms.
The very first time I ever held a child of my own was to take her in my arms as she died. A tremendous privilege.

"I don't believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms"

Because that was how I felt about her. Despite the fact that she was so tiny and so ill, I didn't want to change anything about her. I loved her precisely as she was, every tiny hair on her tiny little head. I wish that I could hold her in my arms again. I miss her so much.

A song that reminds very strongly of that time in my life, August to December 2008, leading up to Jessica's final release from hospital is a song called 'This Year' by The Mountain Goats. The refrain is 'I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me.' Now I've seen the video it seems even more apt. The band get bundled up, kidnapped and forced to perform under what seems to be some threat of violence. That did feel a little bit like the end of August 2008 for me.

There is a feel of physical menace to this song, of being about to battle something knowing that you might come off the worse. Until that time in my life, I'd never really had to be brave. I'd never been in a fight or even in very much physical pain. I have always been a weak person, in body and otherwise, quick to expect others to save me or leap to my defence.

But during those months, it was fight or go under.

I had to go back into that same room where Georgina died.
And keep on going back in there.
Day after day after day.
I sat beside that box and I felt angry, useless, hopeless, hopeful, stupid, superfluous to requirements, overjoyed, overwhelmed, sick to my stomach, desperate, devastated.
But I. had. to. sit. by. that. box.
Opposite an empty space.
Sometimes I just wanted to run away, at others I just wanted to die.
My heart, my life, my every desire were in that body weighing less than two pounds, in a plastic box.
So frail.

It was time to man up, ante up, shape up or ship out, grow a pair, walk like a man, talk like a man.
Except the female version.
Make it through this day and the next day and the day after that.
Take the news of brain bleeds, kidney failure, retinopathy, laser surgery, cyst removal, sepsis, infection, death.
Take it and don't you dare start to fall down.
Even if it does start to feel like it's killing you.
Four months can feel like a very long time.

Towards the end of December it was snowing, Jessica had moved to a hospital within walking distance and I remember wading in through the snow, listening to this on my iPod. It felt as though my whole life would consist of this, snow, freezing wind in my face, going to visit Jessica in hospital, wondering where Georgina was and more bad news.

I'm glad this song was there. It got me through those freezing walks to the hospital.

That combined with X Gon' Give It To Ya.
Thank you Mountain Goats and DMX. Although I doubt you wrote your songs with a situation like mine in mind. I could feel you straightening my spine and squaring my shoulders. Bulking them up so I could carry this. Helping me kick the snow out of the way. Helping me feel that I could kick anyone and anything else out of my way that cared to stand in it.
I think my feet would have failed me on that walk to the hospital more than once without you.

Sick

2010-09-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

I've been sick. So sick that I took to my bed for over twenty four hours.

If I hadn't had to get up intermittently to puke my guts up, it would have been quite luxurious.

I am so lucky to have my parents living close by, poor old Jessica would certainly have had a very miserable day if she had been left to the tender mercies of her mother. I would probably have managed to stumble around and thrown a bit of food in for her, perhaps changed one or two nappies.

She was most unimpressed when I had to stop my (rather less wholehearted than usual) rendition of Tanka Skunk in its tracks. She was unceremoniously shoved on to the floor and attempted to chase me into the toilet, hitting me around the legs with the book and then, when that plan was foiled, beating on the door with it. I emerged to an irate toddler and an enormous spider scuttling around the kitchen sink.

That was when I placed the emergency call to my parents. The spider was the final straw.

It was a strange day. Being in bed with the curtains drawn during the middle of the day made me feel like a child again.

I drifted in and out of sleep. The radio muttered on.

I learnt some interesting facts about Gauguin who is having a retrospective at the Tate.

Although when I say learnt, I find that I can dredge nothing up now.

Apparently all we thought we knew about him was wrong.

But as I can't remember the new things I guess I'm still misguided.

I must have fallen asleep.

I dreamt that a woman was standing over me. She had smooth brown hair and blue eyes. Kindly.

At first I thought she was my mother.

I thought that I was four or six years old.

Then I realised that it wasn't my mother.

In my half dream, my heart leapt as I realised it was Georgina.

And that I was an old, old woman.

I felt so awful because I was dying.

Then I woke up properly. I wasn't dying. I felt a bit foolish. I just had a stomach bug. Like I've had tens of times before.

It wasn't Georgina.

I cried.

I remember reading somewhere that some people loom large in our lives, like giants.

The girl that bullied you at school, the lover who snubbed you, the passing stranger that saw you trip over your own toes and fall in a heap on the ground.

Scenes of our grandest humiliations, our defeats, our upsets. People associated with those times stalk through our dreams and thoughts.

And we probably never, ever appear in theirs. Such a one-sided affair.

So it is with me and Georgina.

She did not see me hurt or embarrassed.

Yet she persists because I love her so very dearly and there is nobody there to love me back.

Unrequited in the fullest sense of the word.

I have spent hours and hours and days and weeks and possibly even months and hundred on hundreds of words trying to bring her back. To make sense of her death. To bring something back. Anything.

I lost a three day old premature baby and my dreams hand me back a forty year old woman. With kindly eyes.

Her presence, or more appropriately, her absence is such a void in me.

That I will fill it with anything.

Any old words. Any old dream. Any old image of a person that might be her. That could have been her.

Oh Georgina. I'll try anything but I often know that I'm not close. I'm not close to you.

'What I meant to say

Is that I didn't mean to say

the things I said

Cornered, cut and rolled

and going mouthful mad

with things I never said to you

All this time,

All these words,

I'm not even close. . . . .'

You'll have to excuse the video. This song comes from the land that You Tube forgot, the early 1990s.

Darcy and Elizabeth's silences have got nothing on me and my daughter.

Drive

2010-09-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

I have often wished that I worked closer to home. I went from working ten minutes walk away from my front door to over thirty miles away. So I have the best part of an hours drive to work in the morning and the same on the return journey. It is mainly motorway so it is not particularly interesting or taxing to drive. Sometimes it is hard to stay awake at the wheel.

It is a strange time. Spent doing nothing productive and yet unavoidable. A kind of enforced 'sit and think' time. Even when I would rather not have it. Of course, part of my brain is fully occupied with controlling the hurtling chunk of metal that I sit in. But the rest is free to roam.

I'm frightened of silence these days. So I put the radio on. Even then, I frequently find myself driving down the motorway crying. I wonder how many of us there are. In all those cars charging past me. How many of us have tears running down our cheeks, which we try to wipe away clumsily with one hand, all the time trying to ensure that we don't hit the car in the front? Sometimes I try to peer in. To find a fellow travelling mourner.

The radio murmur has it own little triggers.
The phrase 'strangled at birth.'
Discussions about medical ethics.
Snippets of news related to pregnancy or miscarriage.
Some poor member of parliament who found himself telling us all about his wife's recurrent miscarriages in an attempt to defend himself from allegations regarding his sexuality.

One evening this week there was a story on the news about an elderly woman who died at the grand old age of eighty nine in the seaside town of Torquay. What nobody had really known about her, until after her death, was that, at twenty three, she had been a secret agent in occupied France. She was found out, captured and tortured by the Gestapo and wound up in a concentration camp. She had survived but kept her secrets to herself. Nobody had known about this lady's past.

She had been due a pauper's funeral but, instead, was buried with full honours. As befitted her.
The closing sentence of the item was "You will never be forgotten, addressed to a lady none of us really knew."

Inevitably, I suppose, I thought of Georgina's funeral.

My mother used to say that the old mourn more at funerals than the young.
That they have a cumulative effect and that, at every funeral, you mourn again for all those that came previously. I used to think that was awful, that humans couldn't even take a few hours to mourn specifically for one individual but that we had to take out all our own little individual griefs and superimpose them on the one we were supposed to be mourning currently. Seems a little disrespectful somehow. But that is why we are human. Those ties that bind us to the dead may stretch and strain but they never snap. Those threads only go slack when we go to join those who go before us I suppose.

I'm not entirely sure of the date of Georgina's funeral.
It has merged into that blur of after.
We wanted to have her buried initially. We live within walking distance of a children's cemetery and I wanted her to be buried there. But they wouldn't take her, the cemetery is full.
And so she was cremated.

There were two mourners.
The service was taken by the hospital chaplain who had blessed her days earlier.

I remember waiting outside the crematorium. We weren't sure where to go. We walked around the gardens.
There was a path around the edge of the building and this was edged with places to put flowers. Each slot had a name. And there was her's.
Baby Georgina W----.
That appellation. That 'Baby' nearly undid me. At once so tender, so gentle. My baby. Baby.
And simultaneously, so dismissive.
Only a baby.
Not even her full name. Georgina Jane.
Just Baby Georgina.
And there are those who would argue with affording my daughter even that status.
Other people being cremated that day did not have a qualifier prior to their names. Old Man Joe Bloggs. Middle Aged Woman Sarah Brown. Because they didn't need any clarification.

We hadn't thought to bring flowers for her. We didn't bring anything. The place where her flowers were supposed to lie was bare. Just like the space her life should have occupied.

The slot next to Georgina's was also a baby.
As we walked into the chapel, another couple walked out. Like walking into a mirror.
As we passed them, I wondered if we looked as destroyed as they did.

We sat down. Georgina's coffin was at the front. As there were only two us at her funeral, the chaplain told us to come and sit right up by the coffin. And so we did.

The three of us, my husband, myself and the chaplain sat around the white box that contained our little girl.

I remember that I wanted to open the coffin. That I wanted to pick it up and run away with it. That I wanted to fall to my knees and cuddle it.

But I didn't. I just sat there and cried.

There was no music.
There was the funeral service for a child from the Alternative Service Book.
I didn't say anything.
My husband didn't say anything.

Sometimes I regret Georgina's funeral. I wish she'd had choirs and horses and doves and hundreds of mourners.
I wish her mother had wailed and pulled out her hair and thrown herself on to the coffin.
I wish that there had been somehow . . . more.

Because she lost her life.
Life is a strange state. But it was all I had to offer. It was all I hoped to give her. I don't know anything else.

I sometimes wonder about the process of cremation. I wonder what the inside of the ovens look like. I wish I hadn't left her there, in the chapel. I wish I had walked down to wherever they were taking her, stayed with her.

I have a vision of flames burning my daughter's body away. But I don't suppose it works like that.

Sometimes I think Georgina's funeral was right. In a horrible way. Right.

Sparse, short and sad.

I miss her.
I miss her so very much.
My baby.
Georgina.

Dance

2010-09-14T23:36:00.000-07:00

We are at the wedding.
The only wedding we will attend this year.
After last summer's glut, just this one.
Lonesome at the end of the summer.
A day of mourning.
September 11th.

The groom, handsome and kindly.
The bride, radiant.
All is as it should be.

Jessica sleeps through the speeches but wakes in time to snaffle the lion's share of her mother's chocolate fondant pudding and ice cream. Spoon fed to her by a proud and careful eight year old relation. Wary of stains, grass or chocolate. Some kind of cousin one or more times removed. We tried to work it out, her and I, but decided it was too complex and we would just call their relationship 'cousins.'

Later the first dance.
The happy couple have chosen Starship's 'Nothing Gonna Stop Us Now', not the choice I was expecting to be honest. It was released in 1987 when these two can barely have been knee high to a grasshopper.

The lyrics take on a strange poignancy and I'm suddenly whizzed back to my own wedding. In a strange, half light my husband and I dance through the NICU to the sounds of Starship.

They look so happy and brave.
I think to myself . . . nothing?
I hope so. And find I am crying.

The band starts. They are playing 'Johnny B Goode' and red and green lights chase around the floor. Jessica alternates between attempting to capture one for her very own and staring at the band. My husband and I work out, shamefacedly, that is probably the first time she has witnessed anyone playing an instrument.

My aunt and uncle dance close to the front. Proper dancing belonging to their generation. Not the shuffle of the 1980s. Jessica watches. She puts a leg out and up. Then brings it down smack on the floor. And again. Joining in.

I take her hands and we are whirling in the midst of them. And I am happy.

Not the flattish contented feeling I termed happiness before.
Life gave that old thing a good shake and up it popped, into three dimensional solidity.
Happiness sits over my heart, claws extended into my skin. Like a small vicious animal.
So sharp that I can almost feel it, a shard of glass penetrating my skull.
I am suddenly self-conscious. I wonder if anyone else sees me and my happiness and judges.
Look at her dancing over there, her with the dead daughter and all that shiny, spiky mess over her heart.

But nobody is looking.
Their eyes register briefly then slide on.
A sweet toddler in a silk dress. Mistook her for a boy initially, with that short hair, but in a dress?
A woman with hair that is too long for her age. She would have done well to have attempted to squeeze into those Spanx this morning but perhaps she's just the type who lets herself go? That child is too old to still be carrying that baby belly. Don't know who these two belong to, bride or groom?

But I don't care for their thoughts.
If they even pause for long enough to spare us a thought or two.

I feel free.

We whizz around and around. Chasing one another, this way and that. I smile, she smiles.
Everything tumbles into place, just for an instant.
My heart beats. Her heart beats. It is enough.

And on the edges of that splintered, glimmering, glowing mess that is my happiness hovers Georgina.

Three Years

2010-09-05T14:53:00.000-07:00

Since the second anniversary of Georgina's death, I feel sad. Very sad. Too sad to feel angry. Too sad to feel anything other than just . . . . sad. My heart is so heavy.

In that first year, I felt such a strong connection to Georgina, the person. My daughter. A human being who moved and thought and looked about. Inside my womb and outside.

Now I think of her as a spirit or a ghost.
A brief touch on my shoulder, then gone.
A tiny hand in mine, withdrawn.
A few breaths, then no more.

Or as a copy of her sister.
A toddler who has never been, who never will be.

Neither of these incarnations are my Georgina.
That connection that I had, or thought I had, feels so very gone, so absent.
I don't take her photographs out of their box.
I don't take out her ashes in their plastic bag.
I don't take out the only hat she ever wore, that scrap of pink woollen with the ties and the crust of blood on the strings.
I don't cradle it in cupped hands as I used to. Trying to will the former occupant back into some form of existence, even if only to fill it with a memory. A memory of a glimpse of a ghost.
This is the hat, that held the scalp, that held the skull, that held the brain, of the person that was my daughter, Georgina.
Who I miss so terribly.
Or so I claim. I feel I've lost my hold on who she was. That makes me sad.

On the evening of the 29th, I played some music. Loudly. I don't usually play my music that loud although our neighbours in the adjoining house are not likely to complain. Three young guys who like to play their own music loud occasionally and have a few beers out in their back garden from time to time.They won't come round a-grumbling. They are nice neighbours to have and they seem to like Jessica which is the most important thing.

I played Ben Harper, Regina Spektor, The Shins, Nick Cave, Mountain Goats, Bette Midler, Snow Patrol, Peter Mulvey, Pearl Jam, Ryan Adams, Kate Rusby, Florence & The Machine. A jumble of everything. Songs that remind me of my daughters. Songs that I have found here.

I lit some candles. I gazed out of the window in to the darkening evening.
I hoped she knew that I was there. That I remembered.

My husband came downstairs. I went into the front room to speak to him. He went into the kitchen and turned my music off and blew out my candles. I was hurt.

Later he mentioned something about Jessica's 'learning disabilities' and again I was hurt. I felt he had slighted my mothering. I felt he had slighted our daughter.

My husband is a practical man. I often think that he would be a better mother than me.
I'm likely to be looking at Jessica and saying "she looks lonely, do you think she misses Georgina?" and he will bat me out the way saying, "Can't you smell that her nappy needs changing?"

I know that he is not the sort to play music, light candles, gaze out of a window. But it still hurt. It hurt that he didn't know that I needed to do it. Because that is the type of person I am. That is the sort of mourning I do.

We spoke about it later. We both apologized.
We do things differently, we always have. If the knowledge of over a decade has taught us anything it is that we are not the same person. We can think, and act, very differently but that does not necessarily mean that one of us is wrong.
However.
We are both such terrible 'fixers', we both want to make everything perfect.
We look at our broken daughters and want to fix them. To give life. To fix damage.
We look at each other and we see the fractures. We want to fix them.
We look at our marriage and we want to fix that precariously balanced mess too.
But we are not gods. More's the pity. Only mortals. Such gifts are not within our grasp.

We try. But there are things you cannot fix. And some things still work even if they not perfectly intact. Function, not form, is what matters.

After two years, I feel like the slow one.
The child who can't quite grasp it.
Not the joker, occupying the back row with a nonchalant gaze at the teacher. Flicking bits of papers about.
The earnest one.
Right up at the front.
Chin stuck out towards the blackboard.
Tongue poking out in concentration.
All available brain power directed toward unravelling this one thing.

She died.
Your little baby girl died.
She isn't coming back.
Not soon.
Not ever
No matter how much you yearn and love and wish and write and attempt to support and cry and ache and drink and talk and swallow pills and sleep and dream and wake and wish. You can wish your life away on this one.
She died.

When you thought you'd been handed the golden ticket of an instant family. Of more twins joining the family. A grandmother who told her colleagues that it was twins AGAIN. The strange weirdness of those weeks when something almost unbelievable had happened to you. Not only one. But two.

Well, you did have the golden ticket. You had them. Those two daughters. Georgina. Jessica.
If that isn't the golden ticket then I don't know what is.
Even if you had only had them for an instant.
They are the golden ticket.
Even if you had never known that they were there.
The. Golden. Ticket.
Once in a lifetime. Winning lottery numbers. This is my perfect moment. The real deal.
Not the fact that they are arrived together, not their 'twinness' although that was a quiet satisfaction all of its own.
But them. Those particular children.

It wasn't quite the prize you'd been expecting. That's all. Still the prize but . . . .
She died and you have to live.
To live well.
Because there is nothing else you can do.

This is the lesson. My tongue is out, tasting the air. I can hear the words, they make perfect sense. Like a nice neat mathematical equation. My brain nods.

But my heart. . . . my heart is a dunce.

***

In other news . . .

Jessica appears to be saying something other than GUNK! At last!
Thanks for the advice Heather, it was much appreciated and it's helping. She now says . . . .Aaaarrrrrr (Car). . . . D'oh (Dog or Cat or any animal with four legs) . . . . Aaaapppp (Apple) . . . . still GUNK (who knows?) . . . . and Doooooooooorrrrrr (not door, seems to be a catch all for all other words she can't say yet)
She understands so much, I feel awful for her sometimes. It is almost like living with the wise old owl who lived in an oak, who . . . .

The more he heard, the less he spoke.
The less he spoke, the more he heard.
Why aren't we all like that wise old bird?

The next lot of tests at the fertility clinic seemed more promising. I saw a different doctor who did a different test. She thinks that the first result was an aberration. Hopefully everything is where it should be and it all appears to be 'doing the do.' Just to no benefit as yet.

Still that has to be a good thing? Right?

***

'Little ghost, little ghost,
One I'm scared of the most
Can you scare me up a little bit of love?
I'm the only one that sees you
And I can't do much to please you'

I am sorry, my love, my own sweet girl. I wish I could please you. I wish I could remember you. I wish I could stay but time does pull at me so.

'When I held her, I was really holding air.'

Inbetween Days

2010-08-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

These strange inbetween days.

Yesterday, I took Jessica to nursery for her second visit. She stayed for an hour and a half and I left her there.

With strangers.

On her own.

It is the first time I have left her with anyone outside of the family (and only the second or third time I have left her for any reason other than to go out and earn money). When I left the nursery, I missed my turning. Which necessitated turning around and driving back the same route I had come, past the nursery building.

I knew that the little frame, those bones, that skull with its thin covering of hair and skin that I have pressed my face against so many times, that brain, that sweet face, that child of mine. She was inside that building. And I couldn't see her. A woman who I hardly know was responsible for her.

Would comfort her if she cried.

Or so I hoped.

Every instinct I possess was screaming at me to storm back in there and retrieve my daughter. But I didn't. Because she deserves to have some normality, playing with other children, a break from her overly protective and hovering mother.

Before I had children, I remember hearing this quote.

'Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.'

At the time I found it at little . . . hysterical. Kind of over-egging the pudding.

But it isn't. And it is even harder when you make the decision to have your heart go walking around outside your body when it doesn't walk around. When it dies instead. When part of your heart is lost to you forever. When part of your heart is ashes. Momentous indeed.

Georgina rises to the surface of my thoughts during these inbetween days.

Two years ago she was alive. She was alive. She lived. It seems so improbable that she ever did. Those words seem so incongruous even as I type them.

Georgina was alive.

That tiny child.

My daughter with her blue eyes, her tiny hands.
Lived.

I was in the supermarket with Jessica after her nursery visit. The supermarket has just re-opened with the addition of a large clothing section. Supermarket clothing is, generally, very cheap here in England. As the department was new there was a 25% discount on top of the already tempting price. I spotted a duffle coat. Navy blue and cream with a pink stripe and a hood. Large buttons down the front.

I frantically calculated the discount and walked around the shop internally debating whether I really needed another coat (I don't), if the coat was a bargain or not (it was) and how pissed off my husband would be to find another coat in the wardrobe (mildly).

My thoughts were full of this potential purchase.

Then . . . .

I thought . .

this time last year she was alive.

And suddenly I wanted to rip that coat up. And the 25% reduction. And myself.

In front of everyone.

I wanted to be mad. Shredding clothes in a surburban supermarket.

Keening in the aisles.

Banging my head on the cold, bland, uncaring shop floor.

Because my daughter died.

A while ago now.

I wanted to burn down every item there.

Because I was so full of rage.

Because my daughter died.

Even after all this time. All these days.

I am still, sometimes, incandescent.

In my own feeble way.

But, of course, I did nothing.
I reached a decision.

I paid for the coat. I left.

Because that is all anyone can do.

In the face of this.
In the face of all those hidden pains that inhabit the discount clothing section of a supermarket.
More than just mine I fear.

Three days.

These inbetween days.

They are simultaneously long and so painfully short.

Three days.

Can pass very quickly.

Time flies by when you are having fun as they say.

On the other hand, if you are experiencing intolerable pain, I should imagine that the time drags rather.

I wish I knew.

Did it hurt?

Was she in pain?

I hope that the morphine did as they promised me, wrapped her in a comfortable haze. That the pharmaceuticals embraced her body, soothed the pain that her mother could not.

That question will resurface throughout my life.

Did it hurt you my sweet girl?

And I will never, ever know the answer.

I've asked it here before. I know I'll ask it again.

Georgina.

I know that you will never be far from my thoughts.

Birthdays.

Christmas.

Your sister's first day at school.

Your sister losing her first tooth.

Your sister's first . . . well, everything, anything.

Jessica is accompanied by a pale sister, a transparent filigree of a might have been.

Delicate and gleaming. A glimpse. A ghost.

A sister forever at an angle, leaning away from us even as I lean towards her. Angled away. That child who escaped me. Who I can never hope to touch.

I drove myself to tears by attempting to imagine how I will feel at Jessica's wedding.

This was when Jessica was still in hospital. Not even three months old.

And already I was conjuring.

As my mom would say, "do not go and fetch the baboons out from behind the hill, they will come anyway."

The English equivalent would be something like "never trouble trouble, until trouble troubles you."

But the loss, the inverse of Georgina will, I think, always be there. I don't have to reach for it, it is already a part of me.

I already imagine how I will feel when I can no longer have any more children. That day may have already come for all I know but when it comes conclusively. How will I feel? To know that I will always be missing one. That my child bearing years started out like this and are now complete. That there will be no more chances.

When my mind starts to falter. When I can no longer remember. Myself. My name. Her father. Her sister.

Will I remember her still?

Will I remember my Georgina?

As more than a sister that could have been?

As more than my child that could have been?

More than a twin that wasn’t?

More than a shadow?

As her very own sweet self.

Who was.

Very briefly in this world.

That particular person.

Georgina.

Never again.

But she was.

Georgina.

I miss you.

I love you.

Still.

And I still don't have anything new to say.
But I am so very without you my girl.
Without you.

In these inbetween days.
And those that follow.
And next year.
And the year after.

Two

2010-08-25T15:44:00.000-07:00

It doesn't seem possible that two years ago I was trying to sleep in the same double bed that still stands in this room this evening. That I was curled up on the floor not a few feet away from where I'm typing this. Just hoping that whatever was going awry with my pregnancy would simply stop and go away.

It seems wrong that I still have the bed, the carpet, the house, the computer desk that I sit typing this at, the same books on the shelves. That all these things are still here. Exactly as they were two years ago.
That I can still touch them.
Sometimes I hate them for that. If you can hate a bed, a desk, some books, a shelf. Like they care.
Sometimes I would like to smash them all down for their sheer, implacable continuity.
For their bare faced cheek of continuing to exist when Georgina is dead.
When anyone's child is dead.

Two years ago, Georgina was alive.
Inside this room.
Inside me.

I wish that I could go back.
Not to be that person again.
But to go back as some sort of ghost of childbirth past and advise the old me.
Tell myself to give up and go to the hospital.
That this wasn't going to end here.
That this wasn't going to end as I wanted it to.
That this wasn't, in many ways, going to end well.

That if I thought this was painful, I had another thing coming.
That this puny physical pain wasn't even the half of it.
This was going to get much, much worse before it started getting better.

Part of me wants to go back and put my arms around that stranger of two years ago's shoulders.
Hug her tight.
Hold her hand.
Because what she is about to go through is not going to be easy.
Not how she imagined it.
She doesn't even know what the acronym NICU stands for.
She doesn't yet know the meaning of PDA, CLD, NEC. ROP. But she will.
She is still counting the days until the magical point of viability at 24 weeks gestation.
Her pregnancy isn't going to get that far but one of her babies will die on that awaited date.
That she won't be bringing home the twin daughters that she had led everyone to expect.
That she expected.

I think she could use a friend this evening, 25th of August 2008.

A friend that would tell that one of her children is going to die. Soon.
That time is short.
That one of her children is going to survive this.
Despite a number of moments when that does not seem probable.

That her daughter will grow up to be the child that she already fancies she knows.
That the occasional jabs and hiccups are signals.
That the slight bones and defiant mewling cry that she will hear in just a few hours time are indicators.
That she knew her children before they were born.

The one who dies.
The one who lives.

Similar in their tenacity.
Similar faces.
Yet distinct.

Jessica.
My sweet child.
I am sorry.
That you had to enter this world so unprepared, so unready.
That you had a twin sister who died.
I'm sorry that you were promised a friend and companion.
A sister. Georgina. Only to have her taken away.
I have so many regrets about the beginning of your life.

But I can't regret you.
Or your sister.

When Jessica was still very, very small my sister picked out this song for her.
My sister spent a lot of time with Jessica during the first three days of her life. Just watching her.
As my husband and I hovered on the opposite side of the room as Georgina slowly died.

Although, oddly, I don't think I have met many people as alive as my daughters in those early days. Perhaps because I could see the effort that living cost them, how strenuous and risky the process of living actually is.
To breathe, to digest food, to filter out toxins.
Something that is hidden away in humans in good health.
Work.
So blatantly alive in the face of it all.
Defiantly.
Rebelliously.
My daughters.

The song . . .

The song is called Bright as Yellow.

And you live life with your arms reached out
Eye to eye when speaking
Enter rooms with great joy shouts,
Happy to be meeting.
And bright.
Bright,
bright as yellow
warm as yellow.
And I do not wish to be a rose,
I do not wish to be pale pink
But flowers scarlet, flowers gold
And have no thorns to distance me.

My little girl. My Jessica. Bright as yellow. Scarlet. Gold. Truly.
I love you.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Soothe

2010-08-23T14:07:00.000-07:00

Driving home from work, listening to a discussion about infidelity on the radio.

The pundit speaking is a RELATE counsellor, working for a charity providing relationship support.

He says that, in his experience, men and women cheat on their spouses for similar reasons, to help them to get through the complexity of life. He says that, if you watch, when a child falls over and hurts themselves, their mother or father runs over and comforts the child. Because children cannot soothe themselves.

But as an adult there is nobody to soothe your hurts, you have to soothe yourself. As an adult, you have to find a mechanism to cope with the hurts that life inflicts. One of the things that people use to patch themselves up is sex.

I'm not sure if I agree with his theory about infidelity.
That explanation seems a little simplistic to me. Low self-esteem is at the root of most infidelity? Seems almost a little . . . pedestrian, a little dull.
But what would I know?
I've only ever had two relationships. I'm kind of a dunce with these things.

But I was thinking about soothing. The need of the child to be comforted, the need of a parent to soothe. Something deep within the most basic recesses of the brain. Need seems almost too weak a word.
To brush away tears.
To hold those small limbs close to your bones.
To mutter those strange nonsense words, that parental babbling that bestows strange nicknames and sings funny little songs.
To mutter the even more nonsensical, "Mama's here. You're safe. Nothing will happen to you. It's okay now."

The first time I uttered words like that in earnest, it was such a terrible lie. But I wanted it to be true, so badly. And the instinct to tell that lie is a strong one.

I still tell it. To Jessica. Mama is here and she will save you, protect you. Chase the monsters away. I only wish I could. Shut down the noise of traffic whilst she sleeps, dim the sun that shines in her eyes, run my finger over the scars left by the many lines that were plunged into her veins and erase them.

My mind runs riot. A private education. A pony. A castle. A crown. A twin sister.

None of which I can provide. But perhaps the fact that I wish to provide them is more to the point. I don't think anyone wishes ponies and crowns for me. Perhaps my own mother. Still.

I couldn't soothe my daughters after birth. They were thrust out into pain, light and noise before they were ready for even the most delicate touch. Their cries went without response. Their hurts were simply left to ache. Comfortless. I find that very difficult to think about now. Very painful. Their little bodies flinching. Their attempts at cries.

I don't know if my presence helped Georgina at all. Love can do many things. But I don't know that it can overcome pain, I know that it can't overcome illness and death. I did love her. I do love her. In a world that appears to be infinitely more confusing than I suspected that is about the only solid fact I have left.
And I can only hope. That it was a comfort to her, to be held at last. To hear a familiar voice.
As I held on and she let go.
Perhaps it was a relief for both of us.

Being an adult I should have, supposedly, developed the ability to soothe myself. To produce some mental equivalent of sticking my thumb in my mouth.

I suppose I had, to some extent, prior to this.
When I was upset, I had my little surburban dreams to dream, to soothe myself to sleep with.
Of houses I would decorate. What colours the walls would be. The items to be placed neatly on shelves. Stacks of ironed sheets. Cool tiles.
Gardens that I would plant.
Strangely, even children that I would have.
That one is no longer on the soothing dream schedule surprisingly enough.

Sometimes I try and manifest these dreams into physical being. I purchase coordinated bed linen with a matching cushion cover. I buy one of those air fresheners with three separate scents that clicks over over the smell is always noticeable. I plant a pink lavender. But these articles lose their sense of perfection the moment they touch my clammy hands. They know something is wrong in my house.

I don't often dream of children these days. We all know how that one ended up. Nothing soothing to be found there.

Sometimes I imagine that I am a child again. That I can appeal to my own parents. Or to the large fuzzy benevolent God of my childhood. I shrink my limbs. I shut my eyes. I can almost hear my parents putting out the breakfast dishes downstairs. My father's voice reverberating. The kettle boiling. The smell of the early 1980s.

But there is no true comfort there.
Maybe some things simply cannot be soothed. Too painful to patch up with even the most far fetched sticking plaster.

From as early as I can remember, my mother used to sing Leonard Coh.en songs to me.
These songs run through my childhood like a steel wire.
I don't know if it is because they remind me of children or because they remind that I am not on my own.
I always used to play 'Sis.ters of Mercy' to myself. When I was upset.
I don't know what it is about. According to the You Tu.be commentators, possibly nuns? Or prostitutes?

But I think it is about something more graceful than that. More graceful than religion or sex.
I don't think that the mercy he is singing about is something embodied in a profession. Or even in a person.
It would take a great deal to be a true sister of mercy all of the time. But perhaps we all can be, albeit transiently?

I think there are some around these parts.
A comfort.

'Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so long.'

In Search of Lost Time

2010-08-13T01:07:00.000-07:00

August finds me, unprepared. I am not ready for this time of year to be here so quickly, once again.

It is the tail end of the summer here in England.

The dregs of the pale, sharp sunlight.

The evenings darken.

The weather chills.

It is raining here this morning and the sky is grey.

It suits me.

The dates loom on the horizon, sometimes welcome, sometimes ominous.

The 26th.

The 29th.

The time in-between.

When two years ago, Georgina existed. Breathed. Had a chance.

A voice murmurs in my ear, "She lived, she lived. It could have been."

The world was shot through with gold. Briefly.

As it has been by many brief lives before it. Many brief lives since.

Those pure golden veins of possibility, potential.

Glimmer.

Closed off before they became sluggish and tired.

Increasingly, I scurry about. Trying to remember those days.

Because how can those important hours, the only hours I will ever spend in the company of my eldest daughter, be so very lost to me?

My imagination tries to patch up those flapping holes. Conjuring up memories from photographs, from wishes. Memories which are not real, are not true.

Trying to sort out what actually happened over those three and a bit days is difficult.

It becomes increasingly so as I am irresistibly drawn further and further away.

A different person from that woman in 2008.

I am still shocked when I look up and see that things have changed.

The change of shops in the high street.

The Wool.worths where I bought the twin's first outfits, an empty shell, then filled in by a pound shop.

The news stories that are seared into my mind.

My husband bought a newspaper every day that we stayed at the hospital. Something that we do not usually buy.

The opening of the large Hadron collider.

The US presidential election.

These events have grown smaller, duller. They are part of the past now.

I can scarcely believe it.

I remember.

I remember sitting outside the hospital with my husband.

We were both sitting on the kerb, at the front door of the hospital.

It was late evening, the sun was setting.

We were drinking cans of fizzy drink.

We were so stupid, we didn't understand.

We were trying to cheer one another up.

We kept saying, "She'll pull through, she's been so strong. We can't lose her now. Surely she would have died last night if she was going to. The doctors are saying that there is still a chance. Our daughter won't die."

I think we simply couldn't believe that something so terrible had happened to us.

We walked back into the hospital.

I felt stronger. I felt sure.

I would like to go back and give myself a good, bone clattering shake. Tell myself to wake up.

Because time is pressing.

There was a single, solitary decoration in the lobby of the NICU.

A Mr. Daydream hung from a string dangling from the ceiling.

We used to reach up and touch Mr. Daydream for luck before we went in.

After Georgina died, we stopped doing this.

I remember when Georgina opened her eyes for the first time.

They were so blue. She looked so wise.

I felt as though I knew her a little. I hope I was right.

Her movements looked so strong to start with.

Then they became spasmodic.

After her brain was damaged.

She had beautiful little feet.

I remember that her skin was slightly hairy, as it often is in premature babies.

She had a sweet chin.

Her profile was like her sister's.

I'll always wonder how alike they would have looked.

I remember talking to one of the consultants in the family room.

It was the middle of the night.

He was kind. He looked tired. His hair looked pulled about, as though he had been running his fingers through it in exasperation.

I was crying.

I was asking if there was any point to any of this. Because I couldn't bear it.

To see them so exposed. Like tiny open wounds being poked.

With needles and lines puncturing their skins. Their small eyelids flickering.

Was there any chance of a life?

A life with any understanding, a life with a chance of happiness.

Because, in the dark hours of that night, the whole endeavour seemed futile.

I remember holding Georgina for the first time.

I felt such joy, happiness, peace.

I can't really explain why.

We were something other than ourselves at that time.

Or, perhaps, we were the most like Georgina and her mother that we are ever likely to be.

I was glad to be with her.

To finally touch her.

I very much wanted to feed her. I remember that. The last desperate instincts of a mother not ready to face the truth. Not ready to let go.

I held her.

My husband held her.

The ventilator was removed but I'm not sure how. I can't remember that part.

I seem to remember Georgina trying to take some breaths in my husband's arms. I have written that in my diary. But I am no longer certain that it is true.

We left the ward.

The medical staff did something to Georgina. I think they gave her morphine and they took her lines out.

I remember being worried that she would not have enough morphine.

I think I asked. I hope I asked.

I think they reassured me that she would not hurt.

We went to another room. I think that the curtains were green. Or perhaps I am confusing it with the green of the memory box that the hospital gave us.

We sat in two chairs opposite one another.

I held Georgina, or possibly Georgina's body.

As she turned from one to the other.

It felt like quite a long time.

Or possibly, no time at all.

We seemed to be operating outside of time somehow.

A nurse came in periodically to check if her heart was still beating.

When it had stopped we unwrapped her.

I washed her body.

I wish I could remember doing this but all I am certain of is that the water was cold and I was upset by that.

I dressed her.

The clothes were the hospital's.

They were too big.

She had a very thick, woollen cardigan. I think it was white with a pale pattern.

A pointed hat with a pom pom.

I thought she was beautiful.

The family came in.

I gave Georgina's body to my sister.

I took it back.

The family left.

We put Georgina's body in a crib left by the hospital.

As my hands left her body, I experienced a lurch in perspective.

Blood dribbled from her mouth.

The clothes seemed innocuous and wrong.

The hat too jaunty.

The cardigan overwhelming. Its wool, irritating.

I wanted to snatch her up and take her with me.

She looked suddenly purple and alone.

But I couldn't take her.

Yet I didn't want to leave her.

But I knew I had to.

I felt as though I was about to rip off a plaster. Enlarged to a massive scale. A plaster stuck to every inch of skin I possess.

I looked at her.

I looked at my husband.

We walked out of the room.

I never saw her again.

I have another memory but it is a false one.

I am holding Georgina in a 'kangaroo care' hold, upright, as you are taught to do with premature babies.

I never held her that way round. I'm fairly sure.

Her hand is moving across my chest. Patting.

I think that the memory of that tiny hand is actually a muddle of wishful thinking, a dream and an actual encounter with Jessica, some weeks later.

I don't think Georgina was capable of that patting motion by the time I held her.

But my brain has determined that the baby should be Georgina.

'A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.'

This time in my life will never completely unhappen. I don't believe that it will ever stop.

Some times in our life, perhaps, just carry on happening. In another room. Parallel.

Times which are shocking, altering. Which send heart racing up throats. They cannot just fall away.

Like my memories of brushing my teeth yesterday morning or what I ate for lunch one afternoon in 1995 have fallen away.

Some things remain. Because there is nothing else to do with them.

They cannot vanish. They cannot happen again, they can never take centre stage again.

So they are pushed to the sides, where they continue.

I go forward, in a seemingly linear fashion.

But next to me, just out of reach. She lives and dies.

Georgina does not completely unhappen.

Perhaps there is a strange comfort in that.

These are what I search for.

Those strange, comfortable places where I can rest myself for a few moments.

With my memories of that sweet girl who was so nearly my daughter.

She was such a lovely baby. Truly.

It might have been hard to see underneath all the illness and equipment.

But I saw her. She was lovely.

****

Our trip to the fertility clinic resulted in pretty much what I had expected.

Husband dearest, nary a problem.

Me, slightly more complicated.

My previous pregnancies and surgeries introduced a mild infection which has damaged the structure of my womb. One of my ovaries is wandering around where it should not be.

Releasing eggs into the wild blue yonder of my abdominal cavity.

So I guess that explains a lot.

On the plus side, we are good candidates for IVF. Just need to locate the money.

On the negative side, this feels like a bit of a kick to the ribs whilst I was already on the floor.

But, as my husband says, "Catherine, it is nothing personal. Shit happens."

My predominant feeling is actually relief. It seems that the Gods do not smile kindly on my efforts to reproduce myself. Perhaps with good reason.

But somehow, unlikely as it was, one snuck past them.
And for that, I rejoice.

More tests await.

August Holiday

2010-08-06T13:27:00.000-07:00

The sun is sharp.
Its pale lemon colour belies its intensity. Its heat striking at my skin.
The sea glitters briefly before the sky becomes overcast again.
Grit under my finger nails.
Delicate traceries of salt.
The pale fat of my own legs, marbled with blue and purple veins.

She tries to look at me.
Her voice is thick with held back tears and breaks slightly.
"We just don't know Catherine.
We don't know what to talk to you about any more.
You don't talk about anything else."

And I know that she is right.

I have forgotten myself.
And I don't know how to talk to her either.
I am too sad.
I am envious and over-protective
Of her as yet unblemished life.
Her wedding.
Her children yet to come.

Georgina. Jessica. My twins.
My ever-fixed mark.
My thoughts spark off on other trajectories, away from them.
But by the time the fuse sputters out.
I am back. My daughters.
My heart rises to my lips. Slowly. Unintentionally.
Yet it rises.

The memory of a small child clings so steadfastly to my chest.
At my heart. At my breast.
But I cannot nourish her.

I bring her here.
I hold her out to be seen, although to what end I am not certain.
I try to nurture her with words, to resuscitate her.
Pump a little blood, stir a small breath.
But she does not breath, she does not grow.

She does not change. Ash to ash to ash to ash.
I do not change either, it would appear.

I am wistful.
Wanting.
Comfort-less.

One child so defiantly, recklessly alive.
One so very, very dead.

Silence.
A holiday.
In August.