Thank you

Thank you so much to everyone for all your support over the last week. I am so very, very grateful. Beyond words. Thank you.

I struggled more than I had imagined that I would, all the events of this time last year seemed to come flooding back.

My stiff upper lip only quivered once at the wedding. When the beautiful, young bride told me how much she was looking forward to having children. She loved holding Jessica, who was fascinated by her sparkly tiara.

I hope that she falls pregnant quickly and easily.
I hope that she has a healthy pregnancy of at least thirty eight, or preferably forty, weeks every single time she conceives.
I hope that her babies are born alive, alert and healthy.
I hope that they are in her arms within minutes of birth, rather than weeks.

All I could see for a brief moment was her and her new husband arriving in the NICU, with that bewildered expression on their faces that all 'new' parents have, that I have worn myself. Luckily this vision disappeared with a quick shake of my head. I hope it never, ever comes to pass for this lovely young couple. So full of love and hope.

I wish that I could be like the fairies at Sleeping Beauty's christening and have a 'gift' to give. A real gift. Not money, ornaments or towels. That I could wave my magic wand and say 'Kazaam, no fertility problems, dead babies, problematic pregnancies or NICU stays for you.'

Hah, take that fortune or fate or random biology or God or whatever. Whatever you were planning for this couple, I got in there first with my trusty magic wand. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

If only.

Thank you so much for the Honest Scrap award.
It means so much that it comes from others within this community. I admire you all so very much.
Your writing. Your honesty. Your generosity. Your compassion.

If I am a follower of your blog, consider yourself nominated. I love all the blogs I read. I've loved reading all the other Honest Scrap lists. I wish that mine were more interesting but they are honest and a reflection of the (honest) fact that I'm pretty boring.

Ten honest things about me . . .

1. I love food. I am a very greedy eater, particularly crusty bread and sweet things. I used to save my weekly money at university to spend at the pick'n'mix sweet cart in Euston station. I looked forward to these sweets more than I would readily (or happily) admit to in real life.

2. I used to smoke. Mainly to keep my weight down (see 1) during my late teens and early twenties when I was always dieting. Which made the massive difference of all of two dress sizes, why did I even bother? It really wasn't worth all the agonising.
Although I haven't had one for over six years, I STILL miss cigarettes. I really miss them, not the smell or the cost or the trouble with what to do with the ends but that quiet moment. That smoke time. I have had an occasional craving since the girls were born but I don't think I will ever smoke again. I can't be trusted to stick to the odd one or two.

3. I love music. I must own at least four hundred CDs, in conjunction with my husband. I have spent more money than I ever want to admit to on going to see bands and festivals. I don't regret a single penny of it.

4. I find it really difficult to watch television or a film without doing something else. I get twitchy hands. I need to do the ironing or sewing or something. If I don't, I pull a face, the face known to my nearest and dearest as 'Catherine's television face'. It must be hysterically funny but I don't know how I look because I've never seen it. I know that I am really enjoying a film if I am not furiously calculating the minutes until it ends. It doesn't happen often.

5. I have a degree in neuroscience. So I was thinking about brains when I wasn't obsessing about pick'n'mix sweets whilst at university. Good times. This means that I have dissected a human brain, taken frozen sections of brain, peered at brain down an electron microscope. Eeeewww. Prompted by a quick move into the field of applied statistics which doesn't require dissection as a skill. Phew.

6. My mother is South African. I sometimes blame my lack of stiff upper lippiness on my Afrikaans heritage. When I was learning to speak as a child I had more Afrikaans words than English. I wish I had kept it up. I always suspect my mother is a slightly different person in Afrikaans, a person I will never really know.

7. I can do loads of things one handed (brush teeth, apply make-up, eat cereal, make tea) as I need a hand free to hold the book that I am reading. I used to live a couple of miles walk away from the library and the librarian used to laugh at how many books I would attempt to cram into my rucksack and toil away with up the hill. Like an ant with a massive leaf.
Perhaps it is escapism? I exclusively (nearly) read fiction (unless it is for work but I shouldn't imagine anyone reads books about statistics for recreation) but I will read anything. Backs of cereal packets, newspapers, Heat magazine. I was always late for school as I would be wrapped around the heater, reading. I used to read on the way to school. I love books, everything about them. I feel sick if I don't have one to hand.

8. Despite being the sort of child that read on the way to school, I was never bullied. Most people were kind to me or didn't realise I was there (I was very quiet at school). This seems to have given me some sort of weird survivor's guilt.

9. I love my children. I love my husband. I love my family. My nieces and nephews. My in-laws. My cousins. My second cousins once removed. If they are some sort of relation, no matter how distant, I will claim them. Possibly to their annoyance. Be warned, if you ever find yourself to be some distant relation you may find yourself adopted into 'THE FAMILY W'. And you'll never leave once you're in. I'll be sending you Christmas cards into your 80s.

10. I really thought I might be pregnant by Jessica and Georgina's first birthday. I wanted to be. I didn't want to be. I don't know. But what I wanted was irrelevant because I wasn't. Perhaps the girls were a fluke, a lucky chance. Who knows?

And as you might have guessed. I didn't succumb to temptation to make my list more interesting. Boring but honest.

Georgina

This song was all I could hear after you died.
I don't have anything new to say.
I don't have anything of interest to say.
This is all I have.
I have thought these same thoughts every single day for the past year, every single day since you died.
I will probably think them every single day until the day that I die myself.
When all my other clumsy words have dried up.
I miss you.
I am proud of you.
I am proud to have known you.
I love you.
I hope that we will walk together again.
I hope that you will be in my arms again.
Hope is all that I can do.

Pulse

It is there in the recesses of my brain, poised at the back of my throat.

Pulse, pulse, pulse.

'This time last year, she was alive.'

Whilst I'm going about my mundane daily life, it speaks in a quiet voice in my ear.
Sometimes gentle, sometimes taunting, gloating.

When I look at her sister.

'This time last year, she was alive.'

I should have a memory for every hour she was alive. It was so crushingly short a time.
But I don't.
Some of them were washed away by the shock.
Some of them I never even bothered to make.

I wish, oh how I wish, wish, wish that I hadn't wasted our time.
On sleeping. On eating.
Not concentrating.

I didn't realise it would only be three days and some odd hours.
I didn't want to realise.
I didn't want to admit a possibility, a probability of death.

I'm attending a wedding this afternoon. Why on earth I said I would go I don't know. I must be even more stupid than I sometimes suspect.
I just didn't anticipate that this time would be so difficult for me. I thought it would be just another day. And it is. And it isn't.
I hope my good British stiff upper lip doesn't let me down. Wish me luck old beans (feeble attempt to channel Bertie Wooster there).

When I see the photographs of this afternoon's wedding, of me and Jessica in our frocks in the English drizzle, I'm sure all that I will really see will be that pulse.

'This time last year, she was alive.'

* * *

And thank you so much for the Honest Scrap award. I think it is the first time I have ever been awarded anything.
I have been enjoying reading everyone else's responses.
I am going to have to try and think of ten interesting things about myself.
It may end up having to be slightly Dishonest Scrap or it will be too dull to read. :)

Birthday

Today is Jessica's first birthday.
Today would have been Georgina's first birthday if she had survived.

Happy first birthday Georgina and Jessica.
My sweet girls. I can't believe that it has been a year since I first met you.
My two beautiful daughters.
I am so proud of you.
I love you so much.

I wish that life had dealt us a different hand, one where I welcomed two healthy little girls of an adequate gestation kicking and screaming into this world. Breathing. Pink.

Not stifled by your own underdeveloped lungs.
Not bruised and battered by your own mother's body.
Not red and shiny and taut with prematurity.

One where my husband and I didn't mourn a daughter.
One where my parents didn't mourn their first grandchild.
One where my younger sister didn't mourn her first niece.
One where Jessica didn't mourn a sister and a relationship that I can never hope to comprehend, that of a twin. How will that play out? I just don't know.

But I could never, ever wish for either of you to be different.
Not by a single atom.
Not a single hair on your tiny heads.
If this is how it had to be to have both of you in my life then I count myself amongst the very, very luckiest.

Georgina, if I don't speak your name aloud today.
If I don't cut you a piece of cake.
If I don't wrap and unwrap a birthday present for you.
If I don't light your candles or look at your pictures until everyone else has gone to bed and I'm alone.

It isn't because I have forgotten you. I never do. I never could.

When that photograph is taken. Of your sister in my arms, when she is wearing her crown and I am wearing your crown. You will know that you are not forgotten. Even if mentioning you results in an uneasy silence.

It will be a secret between you, me and Jessica (I'll whisper it to her) and all these people here. They won't tell. You won't tell. Will you?

But today has to be about your baby sister, Jessica. I know you understand that.


Today is for my bird girl. My tiny, fragile baby bird girl who has grown so much.

This post contains a video of Jessica at various times over the past year. I tried to add some pictures of Georgina but I couldn't, I just can't bear to scan them in. The photographs look so very different from how I remember her.

I'm not sure whether I should even be posting this here. I don't want to upset anyone.

Please be warned that this video does include pictures of Jessica shortly after birth. NICU equipment and so on. It also includes pictures of her as she looks today. She is now wire-free and has been for the past three months.

I do appreciate that this might be hurtful or upsetting and I hope that the video will only start if you click play. I thought it might shed some light on my on-going struggles with the word 'miracle.'

This video was going to have a different soundtrack.
It was going to be either 'Do You Realize??' by the Flaming Lips or 'Bright as Yellow' by the Innocence Mission. The latter is a song that I have come to associate very strongly with Jessica ever since my sister told me that it played and played on repeat in her mind during the first few days in the NICU.

However, I put the photographs together listening to 'Amazing' by Janelle which was one of the options available on the player. This song is not my usual thing at all but now it just seems to fit and I can't bear to replace it. I've become sentimental.

For my daughters.

For my sweet Georgina.
Who is lost to me for the time being.
I hope and pray I will find you one day my tiny girl.
I want our conversation to continue. It was cut too short.

For my sweet Jessica.
For my little bird girl.
The person who showed me that, when I thought my heart was broken, it was only cracked.

'There is a crack in everything, that is how the light gets in.'

I hope you know that I think you are both amazing.

A Year Ago

A year ago today.

I was very happy. I was looking forward to meeting my daughters.
I didn't realise that this meeting would not happen on the 19th of December.
Or the more probable time of late November as twins often come early. So I've been told.

It would happen the very next day. Tomorrow morning, a year ago.

The two halves of my life hang from this pivot. Limp and useless, flapping in the breeze. They dangle down either side of these four days. The 26th, the 27th, the 28th and the 29th of August 2008.

I wish that I could reach back through time and twist it.
To change the course of events.
Those events that seem so inevitable now but would have been unthinkable a year ago today.

Surely my yearning and my love is strong enough.
Occasionally I feel certain that time cannot stand a chance against me.
It is only time after all, time is such a flimsy thing.
What can it do but pass?

But it is too strong for me.

A year ago. How can it be a year?

Odds and Ends of NICU Time

I think that when I held Georgina for the first time, my milk came in. I had an overwhelming urge to nurse her. To pull the ventilator out and snuggle her up to me, to feed her. Which was completely insane and ridiculous. My little girl couldn't even breath on her own, let alone feed.
Whilst Georgina was dying, all that stupid milk was enthusiastically plunging down into my breasts. To nourish my two tiny children. There is nothing quite so cruel as Nature sometimes.

But, in my case, nothing quite so kind as Nature either. I was so, so grateful for that milk later on that day. Jessica's doctor asked me if I had tried to pump any milk, he told me that she couldn't take breast milk currently but that they could freeze it and she could have it at a later stage.

I hadn't tried. The nurse looking after Jessica on the night shift took me to a little room next door to the ward where Jessica was and Georgina had been and showed me how to use the breast pump. I don't know how long I sat in there, trying to figure it out. But finally, it came.

It is stupid but I can't describe the dizzying sense of triumph that I felt. I remember stumbling back into the ward with these bottles of milk and this kind, kind young doctor telling me how well I had done. I will always be so grateful to that young man, who somehow knew what to say.

That pump was to be my constant companion for the next six months. In the day, in the night. I loved it, I hated it. I watched so many DVD box sets whilst I pumped, I can't hear the theme tunes without being taken back to those days. The West Wing, Dexter, Desperate Housewives, House, The Sopranos, Blue Planet, anything and everything. A word to the wise, Dexter doesn't do anything for your supply, Desperate Housewives has twins and pregnancy loss, House, just don't go there. I'm not kidding. Don't.

That pump. A reminder of my abject failure and a reminder of the only thing that I felt I could actually do to help. With varying degrees of success, I pumped and I pumped and I pumped. For my little tiny girl who I felt sure would live, for my little tiny girl who I was certain would die. For her sister who would never need any of it at all, not a drop.

I had printed labels from the hospital, with Jessica's name, address, GP, hospital number to stick to the bottles. I grew to know her hospital identification number off by heart, so I could write it on when I ran out of 'official' labels. I used to stare and stare at those labels until I swear I could see Georgina's name on them. I wish I had some of her labels, if only to remember her by, to prove she existed. I wish that I had been pumping milk for her too.

In the middle of the night, I used to look at the sterilizer and the pump sitting in our kitchen. I used to feel so alone. So unnatural. Freakish. A mother without her baby. Getting up for a machine. But now I know there are so many mothers like that. I know how damn lucky I am to have had the chance to get up in the night and pump milk.

Sometimes I think that the grief of losing a child is exacerbated by the expectation of happiness. I thought I was going to be happy.

Perhaps that is where it differs from other losses. When I have lost other relations, old or untimely, there has been a different feel to my grief. I mourned my grandparents but I was prepared. I mourned the death of my godfather, who died suddenly leaving a wife and four children. But, in all of those circumstances, I was not prepared for a time of happiness. I was living my life, on the flat as it were, and then a sudden jolt downward. More or less expected but with no reason to believe I was on the up, that the good times were about to roll.

My GP told me, in a fit of straight talking and trying to pep me up, imagine losing your husband of 50 years, imagine how much worse that would be? I wanted to say (I didn't) you don't understand, you just don't understand. She was my child. My child. I can't imagine how it must feel to lose your husband but I don't believe that some pains can be compared. There is no measure to them, they are 100%. Pain. That is all there is under these circumstances. No degrees, no gradients. A contest that is not contestable.

But losing a baby. I was so full of expectancy, anticipation. So happy. So complete. I felt like my life was coming together at last. I had what I had always wanted.

The gap between what I had thought would happen and what actually transpired was breathtaking, heart-wrenching. Enough to send my mind into a tail-spin. And I don't know the half of it. I don't have the fear of death that I used to have or should have. My own or others. I'm 'prepared.' I just wasn't prepared for the first one, to attend my own child's funeral. Perhaps no other death can hurt me as much. Or perhaps I'm just kidding myself? Who the hell is ever prepared for any of this?

Perhaps I had never experienced grief before? Or love?

I used to question that, before Jessica and Georgina were born. Had I ever truly felt?
I don't anymore.
I know that I can't feel more than this. This is all that this particular human is capable of feeling, however ineptly, however stupidly. I can't do more than this. I can't love them more.

Fell On Black Days

It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday. I had some candles burning for most of the day and I listened to music for the first time in a long while. Really listened. To music for 'adults.' I think Jessica was slightly perturbed to realise that not all music is 'Old MacDonald had a farm' although her Dad has been known to blast her with Black Sabbath and their ilk on the odd occasion. She seems to quite like that sort of thing actually, kicks her legs along to it.

I feel so very sad. I can't sleep which is I am sitting here typing this at four in the morning instead.

I wish I could do more than light candles. For all of those before me, for all of those yet to come. All those women still walking around in the sunshine in blissful ignorance of how this particular pregnancy is going to end. This particular pregnancy is not going to end well. Every single day of the year. I do so, so wish I could save them from this. Somehow.

Perhaps it is the date. This tail end of summer last year, when my life broke down. I know that it is only another day, one in a sequence. But I find my mind drawn back to replaying those events more and more frequently in recent days.

I've been dreaming about the NICU. That place. 'At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; at the still point, there the dance is. But neither arrest nor movement.' That is how it felt to me. Like a place that had fallen out of time. No arrest. No movement. A place parallel to my previous existence, I stepped sideways and there I was. It's still there, that strange sideways place. My four month home. Other people live there now. I wish they didn't have to.

That place of breath held and held and held. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Months of waiting. Seasons of waiting. Summer, autumn, winter.
One moment idle chatter, jokes, elation and the next, utter despair. For someone. Part of you is praying that it isn't you. And you loathe yourself for that.
That churning in my stomach. Cries.
Those rooms, I felt as if I could blow them away with one breath, like a flimsy stage set. Knock the whole thing down with a flick of my wrist.

That place. Those walls. Hope, crushed hope, every shade in between. How many prayers prayed, bargains struck, pleas pleaded. Such frail, fleshy, human things to be offered up in the face of these machines, those tiny, impossible bodies. Granted or denied.

Sitting on the floor in a hospital corridor. My husband is speaking to me but I can't really hear him. It is almost as if he is talking through thick glass or heavy salt water. I also hear myself wailing, at a remove. Me yet not me. I know that I sound like an animal but I can't stop. I'm gone, lost, a vacuum.

Sometimes I feel I have never really left that hospital. A part of me is still sitting on the floor in that corridor wailing. I think she'll always be there, that strange, wailing creature.

I'm still waiting.
I've been holding my breath for nearly a year now.
I want my other daughter back. I want her back. My greed know no bounds. These clutching hands that always close on nothing. I want her. I want her.
Still. Always.