Cycles

'But I want to watch the SICK mummy. The sick video. That video where Jessica is really sick. I want to watch it again.'

Nearly eight years since my twin daughters were born so terribly early, a younger sister bounces on the sofa. Blonde curls bobbing, robust arms and legs pumping. Visiting a time when she might have had two big sisters, a time when she might never have come to pass at all.

So I roll the reel. For what feels like the two hundredth time this morning, we will again watch the video where Jessica is sick. It is a montage of photographs I made of Jessica's first year of life, an activity seemingly beloved of parents but especially parents of premature babies where the transformation is particularly startling. Where what is usually hidden by flesh is revealed. It's this video here http://betweenthesnowandthehugeroses.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/birthday.html

This is not the sort of video I intended to show my two year old daughter. Our fancy-schmancy TV uploaded all of our photographs and videos to a cloud accessible directly from the TV and she somehow clicked around and found it. And, for some inexplicable reason, took a shine to it.

Back again to 2008. The chords of the music that I never really liked, the opening photographs of a tiny, red baby that looks as though she has been burned or skinned. All those machines. And over the course of four minutes or so she transforms into a baby like any other.

The first couple of viewings I sit and hold back tears. The next few I just sit. By what feels like the twentieth I don't feel anything of much, only boredom.

I've cycled through and through these days in my memory for nearly seven years. Some days I cry, some days I don't. Some days it hurts, some days I find it hard to summon up any feeling at all. Like anything else over played, over thought, material that my fingers have run across over and over, it becomes worn away.  I have become habituated.

"Pretend I am the sick one," she insists. Lying down and sticking her tongue out.

"And now I am the dead one,"  she declares dramatically. She closes her eyes and sinks even further down amongst the cushions. Eyelids fluttering.

I sigh. I wonder if I should ever have shown her this video. I wonder if I should ever have told her that our family has its very own 'dead one.' I wonder how much money I should save for future therapy bills.

'Let's do something else now. Too much television will give you square eyes,' I say.

***

'When I am a grown up, you will be a granny and then you will die.' He looks at me coolly, appraising my chances. 'Yes, you will be dead. Then I will be the granddad and then I will be dead.'

He looks thoughtful. But not afraid. My little boy who has always been the one with the questions. Who once had an obsession with building a graveyard in the back garden.

'It is like a circle,' he says.

'Yes,' I say, 'it is like a circle.'

He seems satisfied and changes the subject, to how he is bored of the summer holidays now and wants to go back to school.

***

Yesterday a family trip to the museum took a dark turn when we were unexpectedly confronted with a major exhibition about the sinking of the Titanic.

Peering at a yellowed newspaper report of the disaster, a family of eight trapped under glass. They were not even supposed to be aboard. Yet there they were. On the boat, in the newspaper.

'They all died?' says Jessica. 'Even the baby?' Concern fills her voice and she turns her head away, eyes closed and face pressed into my rib cage.

'Yes they did,' I say, 'even the baby.' I think about how to spin this one, to make good the death by drowing of this small child so long ago. I open my mouth but close it again. Some things are beyond amelioration.

I finally settle on, 'It's sad isn't it?'

'Yes,' she replies in a muffled voice. 'It is very sad.'

She unsticks her face from my jumper.

'Can we go and look for Pokemon now mum? Please.'

***

The headphones buzz slightly. I readjust the connection of the jack.

The writer, Norah Vincent, is speaking.

'We've found, over time, we need all these pretences. It looks like a stage set, fabric we put together, that of culture and society that makes things run. It's not really there. Your brain is taking in what it can take in, what is really there would scare the living shit out of you and you don't have the ability to see it anyway. Really what is out there is mostly light and an atom is filled with space more than anything else. Everything we are touching seems solid but really it is made very much of air.'

<<taken down in note form whilst listening to the audio, all mistakes are of my own creation.>>

This is where I find myself, nearly eight years later. I pull my little scrappy blanket around my shoulders, made of books, paid employment, TV series, housework, Pokemon Go, wine, car maintenance, pets, Instagram, Two Dots. Whatever frail scraps I can find and stitch together.

I fancy that I catch glimpses of what is really there. The yellowed photograph of a baby who drowned in an icy sea years ago. The video of Jessica transforming from a raw foetus into a baby. Another baby dying in my arms. Light. Space. Solidity quivering. The starts and the ends, the threads all catching up one another and snarling. No possibility of patching and stitching together into anything coherent.

But I don't care to look too long. Because Norah Vincent is right. It would scare the shit of me if I could see the truth. Even the tiny glimpses of it I do catch scare the shit out of me. And I couldn't begin to understand it anyway. It is all light and space. Pushing on the edges of my brain, of my abilities.

Georgina. Made of air. Caught up in her own tiny circle and sent to who knows where.

Books

I have been reading a book.

One of the characters gives birth to a baby.
A baby that everyone believes is a dream as the mother is older and her pregnancy seems to last for two years.

She births the baby alone. The baby is tiny with blue eyes.

A strange and unbelievable tale.

And although I was younger and my own pregnancy, far too short.
You are in my mind.

You never leave it. You are there all the time. My might have been.

My own tiny baby with the blue eyes. That seemed to see everything. Seemed to know everything.

***

Perhaps because of the book you were in my dreams.

A strange half-dream dredged up from a deep guilty afternoon nap.
It was your sister's face that was uppermost. A gaze of sadness and disgust.

I thought to myself so THAT is how Jessica looked as Georgina was dying. Which isn't the truth. Just a glutinous sticky thought peeled from sleep.

I didn't know she was there.

When you were dying, it seemed as though it were just you and me.

But obviously that is impossible.

She was there. She was in the room when you started to die. But not really. She was too busy trying to die herself. Two small brains firing away.

You finished dying somewhere else. Another room.
They move the dying to other rooms you see.
Away from your sister.

I'm still so sorry. Even after all this time. I'm just so sorry.

I only wish there were some way I could undo all of this.

August

I listen to an interview with a funeral director.

'It's overexposed me to death, and it's created burnout and depression. At the same time, it's allowed me to see beautiful aspects of humanity: compassion, empathy, tolerance. A close experience with death changes us. It changes all aspects of our being.'

He is not wrong. It does change us. Since I held my dying daughter I think of death every day.

Not in some quivering, hide in the corner, shuddering, fearful way.

Just that I do. Think of death. Everyday. In a weird inverse Buddy Holly kinda way.

Every day, it's a getting closer. Because it is. For all of us.

I think of my own death. I ponder many deaths.
The deaths of my parents.
The death of my husband.
The deaths of my children.

Somehow I think I will be there, to hold their hands, to tend to their feet. When they are dying. Heaven forfend. Please, please may I die first.

But conclusions?

Zip.

***

The same funeral director was re-interviewed recently. He said that he had tried to find words. Words to speak to death. Then he realised that there are no words.

I think he's right.

***

Re-reading this blog gives me a similar feeling to re-reading my teenage diaries. Squirming-ly embarrassing.

My own attempts to understand what had happened to me when it felt as though the world had blown up in my face. What had happened to my daughter. That same small circle of grief that has been described and described and described, accumulating and accumulating words. Woven and re-woven and re-woven into a great, big knot. Senseless and tangled.

But I see the love and care, in that network around me. And I can't regret it. I'm glad I tried to speak, to write. So may people were kind to me when they didn't have to be. When I needed kindness so much.

***

I tried. I think it is part of being human. We are inclined to try. I tried to speak to death. To that strange death of someone who had hardly begun.

So many of them are very present to me. They are thought of. Those babies who never lived or who barely lived. A strange presence of someone who never knew them at all, only of them through the words of their parents.

I was bewildered.

Now I am resigned.

***

But I'm not defeated. My hands open. My fingers relax.

I surrender to it. I stop fighting it. Because there is nothing to fight against.

It wasn't me. (That was the longest fight of all)
It wasn't her father.
It wasn't her.
Or her sister.
Or medical incompetence.
Or a punishment.
Or a blessing.

She died.
That's all.

She died.

I still hate it. I still wish it had not happened.

***

If it be your will.
That I speak no more.
That my voice be still.
As it was before.  . . . 

Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well . . . .

All your children here. In their rags of light. . . 

And end this night.
If it be your will.

***

video NSFW but it was so beautiful that I wanted to share it and it's worth the annoying five seconds of adverts before hand.

It reminded me of all those times it felt as though I were drowning. I don't generally feel like that anymore, seven years later. But, just sometimes, I slip. Back under.

Miss that tiny child, miss all that she might have been.

And love her still.

Nearly seven years later

I sit at work. It is a hot day. Summer again. I don't like summer as much as I once did. These days it makes me feel slightly uneasy.

I am struggling with a bit of recalcitrant code. I run, re-run, de-bug. Fiddle faddle. It still doesn't want to play nice, doesn't quite want to do what I think it should.

I adjust my head phones. The endless burbling in my ears stops boredom and too much idle conversation. Both of which I am prone to getting sucked in by.

***

A song plays. A song that featured on the OC - showing my age here. A song about the seven people who died aboard the space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart upon reentry.

And my brain fizzes. The transition between space and earth, womb and life. The pause, when you realise that you are going to die. That there is no chance you will survive this.

***

Boys and girls in cars, 
Dogs and birds on lawns,

And for a moment I bask in it. This luck of mine. This undeserved moment in front of a screen. With the sun shining in the window. The pesky code. The pasty office workers. A sandwich and a cool drink, I am giddy and sick with my own good fortune.

***

Put your jackets on
I feel we're being born

All that anticipation. That moment just before. And that little conversation about jackets and the turn of phrase, 'we're being born.' Reminded me of my girls. Maybe not even aware that they were together. But they were. About to be born. 

And I feel as though I am spinning far above my office, my screen and my bit of coding. Maybe as far off as a space shuttle. 

From here I can touch the sun.

***

My typing is interrupted by Jessica. I'm not at work now. Back home and reflecting on how I felt earlier.

It is too hot and she wants another drink of water. We briefly debate whether she wants the hot meals provided by the school or a 'packed lunch' of sandwiches when she starts her new school in September. She wants the latter. She says it is my decision what goes in the packed lunch but please not to put a chocolate in her lunch box as she will get in trouble. 

And now she is back in bed.

*** 

I briefly wonder what Georgina would have wanted? What she would have said? There is usually a small shadow conversation, in the wake of these everyday exchanges. With someone utterly gone. Burnt up on entry. 

This is all I wanted to bring home to you.

A certain house

'It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.'
- W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

***

Over six years later, I went back to the hospital where Georgina lived - if she ever really did - and died. I always meant to go back. I've frequently gone to meetings for work in a building just around the corner. The drive down toward the hospital always tempts me. In case she might still be there. Just checking, I would tell myself.

But I never could quite bring myself to do it until last week.

I walked down past the butchers where I used to go in and buy a pork pie for my dad. The butcher was cheery and always asked how much my baby weighed now. My dad and I would sit in his parked car, looking out at the dismal sea and eat our lunch whilst the NICU was closed for ward rounds. Not really knowing what to say to one another but unable to stomach any more of the hospital canteen after the first six weeks.

Past the petrol station where my husband and I went to a buy a newspaper the morning after she died. I remember feeling as though the ground were unstable, my hands shaky, freezing cold in the late summer weather.

Last week I went in and bought a phone charger, joked with the chap behind the counter, smiled at the workman coming in and attempting to hold the door open for me. I insisted that he come inside first, it was freezing out there. The last time I was here, I thought I might never be able to speak to strangers again. That I would open my mouth and all that would ever emerge would be some half strangled screech of woe. Yet here I am, smiling and bantering with brushed hair, make up and some attempt at workwear. I don't know whether I feel disheartened or pleased about that really.

I walked on clutching my plastic bag of phone charger and sandwich. Past the cemetery that I thought was a bad omen, looming ominously next to the hospital. I turned the familiar corner and was met by utter confusion. Half the site was in the process of being demolished. Other buildings, those of the more photogenic historical sort, being repurposed into flats.

I walked towards what I felt should be the front door of the hospital but it is no longer the front door. Deliveries only. I whirled about confused. I finally found the current entrance and reception. On the opposite side of the building.

The NICU is long gone, that was relocated very shortly after Jessica was discharged. I had hoped to find the chapel - with its cold echo and stained glass. But even that was gone, replaced by a multi faith room with cosy carpet. Which is good progress my liberal, inclusive brain believes. But my heart wanted that old uncompromising chapel with its prayer book. I wanted to see if my writing was still there, from 2008. I would have liked to have seen what I had asked for, all those years ago.

I wandered out again. Trying to locate anywhere that might be anything to do with her and her sister and that time of my life. I tried to think where I had wept, talked with my husband about what to do, screamed scaring some passing child. For a moment I considered running onto the building site and trying to snatch up a brick before the builders told me to piss off. Because maybe it might have been a brick that had something to do with Georgina.

But, in truth, I could no longer identify where any of those places were. I remember, shortly after she had died, looking at the hospital from the pavement and thinking that, maybe, I knew which windows they were, the windows to the rooms in which she lived and died. All these years later I turned and turned but finally had to admit to myself that I had no idea at all.

So I walked back to my car and I drove off.

***

'Everyone has their own shit,' she sighs.
'Yes, yes I know,' I reply.

It's just that sometimes all I can see is everyone else's shit.
Well - that's not strictly true.
It's more like everyone else's imaginary shit.
I end up paralysed with it. All those people, who pass so close to me physically and I have no idea what is really going on. Realistically, I couldn't bear it even if I could know. Even my guesses leave me feeling frantic and gulping for air.

And calling all that stuff your 'shit' is really such an awful misnomer.
All that death, illness, problems. Anything slightly less than shiny and we label it 'shit' and stick it away. Something to be embarrassed about.

Mine is still my compulsive need to make light of pregnancy, childbirth and twins. Thus the reason that I am even having this awkward 'shit' conversation in the first place. Because I am aware that my attempts at joking my way through something incredibly painful to me is ending up by trampling all over somebody's else's 'shit.'

Oh hell, what hope is there for any of us realistically? I cringe at everyone I hurt before and I cringe at everyone I hurt since. Once I should have known better.

But what troubles me the most is the part of me I like the best. Isn't that sometimes the way? You don't really get down to the nitty gritty until you are clearing up the shit? And, speaking as someone who, for the first time, is down to one child in nappies - I know that of which I speak. Maybe all my walking on egg shells, trying not to upset anyone, is where I am going wrong?

***

Sometimes nothing good or wise emerges. I look back at my writing and so much of it seems . . hysterical. But I am rather envious of the person that could feel so much and try to write it down. Rather than the plodding person I am now, of incremental tryings and reachings.
Sighing and giving it all up for lost.
I feel as though I have been relegated back to my proper size now. No more messing in the big leagues of death and life. Now it all hangs on whether we get to school on time, whether anyone will ever deign to eat a vegetable, whether anyone will ever stop screaming for a whole consecutive hour.
So often I feel defeated. Ill at ease.

But you can't be defeated. With three small children. One small child. No children at all.
Your little reachings and ploddings are necessary to them. To you. To everyone that knows you and cares about you. You might wish to be more enthusiastic and fun. You might wish to have a coherent thought. You might wish for a whole bunch of things.
But you cannot just sit and wail.
You cannot just sit and wish.
That is their job. The children's job. Be they here or not.
Your job is to get up and plod.

Perhaps this is the job of all adults and I was just somewhat late to the party.

You had your day in the sun, your day of wailing and wishing.
My mother tells me the story of her sketch book, ground to a halt in 1979. The year I was born. Her final effort a victim to my baby-ish scribbles.

***

We moved away.
From the house where I expected her.
From where I rubbed my belly, full of two babies at once.
From the house where I cramped and cried the night before her and her sister were born.
From the house where I cramped and cried when her little sister was born.
Delivered into my own hands.
A circle completed.
As far as it could be.

***

I miss her.

My old house felt haunted. Full of visions of two daughters, twins, two curly haired heads bent together in conspiracy. So brief. But very persistent.

My new house feels a little haunted too. Her absence has shaped everything that follows. Her brother? Certainly her little sister. She probably would not exist had her eldest sister not died. I might have dreamt of four children but even three is not totally economically sustainable.

Yet this is the house I was due to arrive at, at this given time.

A house without her.
The house that once contained her, gone. Filled by another family now.
The hospital, changed.

All too late.

It's been too late for a long time.

Transposition

Taken from here

If I should die before you do 

When
you wake up
from death,
you will find yourself
in my arms,
and
I will be
kissing you,
and
I
will be crying.

–Richard Brautigan

I didn't die before you did.
That is the problem.

But when I wake up from death.

If I should wake.
I hope to find you.
I hope to hold you in my arms and kiss you.

Should such a thing be at all possible?

I will be crying.
That much I am certain of.

If I still have arms, a mouth and eyes.
Or any vague semblance of them.
If you are there.

I will hold, kiss and cry.
Look and look.
As best I may.

If I should wake.

Small comfort

'The thing is - nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think.  If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.'

from Levels of Life, Julian Barnes

Eavesdropping

Overheard conversation.

'Don't worry Alice,' she consoles. 'Maybe we can get you a new mummy.'

***

Mumbled.

'I wish that Reuben would turn into a pumpkin turnip. A SMALL pumpkin turnip.'

***

Office chat. On moving to a larger home.

'I was only ever going to have one child.'

'But you fell at the first hurdle there!'

Oh thank you. Random work colleague. For remembering. That there were two babies, all these years later.

I didn't say anything. I think you felt awkward. But I smiled.

Six

I was busy extracting your sister's birthday presents from the depth of the wardrobe when I saw your box. Its deep pink ribbon caught my eye. I haven't opened it for years. It sits perched on top of two boxes of various baby clothes that I cannot bring myself to part with. All three of these sit on top of a box containing my wedding dress which has never been opened since I wore it.

Quite why I'm devoting all this storage space to boxes I never open I couldn't say.

I took out the presents. There didn't seem to be much. But there never seems to be enough. 

Your sister's main present this year was a bicycle and it seemed silly to save that until the end of August, the end of summer and the warm weather. 

So she had that. Spokies. A bell. A Hello Kitty helmet. Streamers for the handle bars. Because that sales lady knew a sucker when she saw one coming.

So I'm left with a few boxes of plastic stuff to wrap for tomorrow. A couple of books. 

We went out today. With your brother and your sister. Your uncle, your cousins. Your sister sulked over toys and not being able to make herself understood. She said to me, 'everything is harder than it looks.' I said, 'you're not wrong. Lots of things are harder than they look.' 'Go away,' she snapped. My advice was obviously useless to her. But she pretty much had it right. I wasn't going to lie and tell her that everything is a cakewalk.

Anyway I saw your box and opened it up. The bright yellow cloth bag with its cheery teddy bear print. It hadn't changed. The small woollen blanket wrapping the zip lock bag of ashes. Urn never bought. The ashes seemed fewer and finer than I remembered. I held them for a moment, hoping that I might somehow persuade you back to life. 

I looked at the few photographs I have of you. So tiny. Your blue eyes. Your tiny strands of hair. My own stupid eager face whilst you were alive. That was the photograph that shocked me the most. A full face portrait of me. I'm not wearing the same clothes I was on the day that you died so I guess it must have been taken before. I look so hopeful. Smudgy hopeful black and white me, developed in a hospital lab as the photographs were deemed too grim to send in to a conventional place. 

And looking at the photographs I have of you I see what a slim chance it was. An outside bet. I'd forgotten how many there were. Those photographs.

I also have the stabbing realisation of how very much you look like your sisters. Both of them. Not just your twin. So certainly one of us. A W. baby. I see that in your looks now I have had two of your siblings. For a brief moment Jessica and Alice share your fate as I lose focus. 

When I look at those photographs I hope that you got away. That you simply slipped out of this life and were set free. There isn't much to be gained. Mulling over the unknowable after all these years have passed but it is all I have left. I'm still concerned. I still love you. I miss you more than I could ever say.

And I still do not know. After all this time. If it is relief or grief that I feel for you.  

'I do not know' is the only true statement that the mind can make.
Nisargdatta Maharaj

Happy Endings

'The only authentic ending is the one provided here. 
John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun.
True connoisseurs, however, are known to favour the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.'

Taken from 'Happy Endings' by Margaret Atwood

***

This is what I am left with. Six years on.
I know the ending. The only ending.

What to do in the meantime? Attempt to become the true connoisseur, to favour the stretch in between those two inevitable, single file gateways?
That strange, bewildering gap.
It is, indeed, the hardest to do anything with.

My gratitude, my sadness, my happiness. My very self.
Always seem a little lacking.
When set against that small, dying body.
Perspective makes me cower.

I can't really make her death into something pretty or acceptable.
No matter how I squint or twist.
Looking at it too directly is still like. . . . well, like being stabbed in my observing eye.
And so I tend to look elsewhere.

I promised her I would never look away.
And yet.
Here I am.

Eyes right.

***

Next month, it will be six years since Georgina died.

I still think about her, and about what happened to her, a great deal.

Sometimes I feel disappointed that this is the case. That I didn't forge a happier ending for myself.
For my living children.

I load the dishwasher as the children sit, glazed, in front of yet another rendition of 'The Gruffalo' on DVD. She looks at me, annoyed. One eyebrow raised into her scarcely-there blonde hair,  'Really mother? Is this the best that you could do? With your life? With their lives?'

I shuffle around the kitchen guilty. Half heartedly stirring up craft drawers and homework folders. A flurry of pinterest induced shame and loathing.

Sometimes it is great fun. And sometimes it isn't. Three children and a mother.
None of us perfect.

In my more forgiving moods, I give myself a pat on the shoulder and say, 'Understandable Catherine W. old bean. You aren't really ever coming back from this are you? But that's ok. It's really ok. You knew that you never would. Even as it was happening.'

Three children and a fourth that flickers around, a faulty light.
One that I can't bear to look at as she'll bring on a headache.
But I can't let her go either.

And, if you are still here . . . .

Are you alright?

I wonder about people I met along the way.

How is the stretch in between working out for you?

The Stabbing Machine

"Where is it?" he shouts. An angry three year old boy with skinny legs, indignant upon the sand.
"Where is what?" I ask.
"My stabbing machine," he replies.

A thin slice of stone. To make long, deep matching dents in the sand.

Stab, stab, stab. Driven by something endlessly mysterious to me.
And yet familiar.

The stabbing machine.

***

I think about his big sister so often. My first baby.

Yet I could not, if questioned, articulate what it is that I am thinking about.
That poor little body, that tiny baby that existed so very fleeting-ly?
Not especially. Not often.

The hypothetical teenager? The Georgina that I see in every-girl.
Every self consciously turned head that matches my stare.
Curiosity.

***

"Why are you staring at me middle-aged woman?"

"Well, my love. I had a baby who died. She'd only be five now but I seem to imagine her most frequently as a teenager.
I don't mean to look at you so. But I wonder.
Would she have been like you?"

The way that you and your boyfriend stroll across the road.
Your laugh, the way that your chin protrudes reminds me of her.
Your curly hair, so like her sister's.
Arms wrapped around one another.
I am looking for her arms you see.
The arms of my first baby who never really was.

It isn't half as sinister as you might imagine.
I am not mourning the me that was you. My own slim, shiny self.
Instead.
I'm growing foetus arms to length. Strength.
Her arms.
To wrap around some skinny young boy.
Whom she might have loved.

***

This blog often feels like an admission of failure.
Every post, a defeat.
A stabbing machine.
Constructed and manned entirely by me.

Through the haze of blessed, sleep-less nights.
Of children that stir and wake.
Who ask for milk and comfort and endless stories of pretend.
Mr McGregor. Princess Celestia. Asterix. Cat in the Hat.
I will be them all. Reluctantly I admit. But I will try.
I will wake and hug and be grateful.

I miss her.
And I don't know where else to go.

In the real world. Even here.
Everybody's kindness is  . . . . worn out.
But I still miss my tiny first daughter.
My Georgina.

Bewilderbeast

'You just don't get it at all, do you?'

Taken from 'The Sense of an Ending' by Julian Barnes

***

Nearly six years later, as spring turns to summer.
I'm trying to pinpoint what, precisely, it is that still hurts.
What prevents my limbs from moving loosely.
A hurt at once so brain stabbing-ly sharp and so thudding-ly dull.
Fitting every description.  Every metaphor.
Yet none at all.

A childhood spent lost in one too many novels expects a resolution.

That Georgina's death will yield something for me to 'get.'
At which point, I will ditch that tiny body by the side of the road, click my heels and waltz off into the sunset.

But I just don't get it at all.
I don't even get that there is, in all probability, nothing to get.

***

It's one of those mornings. Mornings where nothing goes according to plan.
Where every act is a conflict of wills. Eating. Dressing. Brushing teeth. Getting into the car.
Where every negotiation, every bribe and plea ends up escalating into a stand off.
I'm tired. Too tired to fight. A lazy parent.

I huff and puff into the car. Then I sigh.
As tears crowd into my eyes. Frustrated by images of death, tiny broken children and promises that I cannot keep. The song on the radio. Trite and sickly, pulling at my tear ducts.

Jessica reaches out her hand.
'Do you need a hug Mummy? I think you should go slow and steady. Only one argument at a time'

And I wonder how she became so wise whilst I remained so foolish.
But I just don't get it at all, do I?

***

I wake up. She wakes up.

She smiles. The baby with the dimpled wrists and the blue eyes.
The little sister.

She pats my face. Pat. Pat. Pat. Pat. In tentative Morse code.

She falls asleep once again.

Consolation. My eye pressed against her closed eye.
My mouth pressed into the space behind her ear.
Pressing.
Soured milk and baby skin.
Electrifying.

And where I had thought there could be nothing, spaces barren or undetected.
Extra corridors and rooms open up. Doors flapping.
In the wake of that patting hand.

Consolation floods.
A furious saturation.
Then dries up again.

But I just don't get it at all.

***

I don't write here often.
But it isn't because I don't think about her.
Like many blogs, it is a furious flurry of posts.
That tends to silence.

But she settles into my bones.
As her name dangles around my heart and lungs.
Years pass.
She is there. In my marrow. My alveoli.
The little cavity. In me.
Neurons, synapses and valves.
Whatever it is that causes a thought. Or a breath.
Autonomic. Conscious.
Her.

I still linger here. A stupid fool, jaw flapping. Speechless. That she left me.
I'm still so sad that she left.

I just don't get it at all. Treading my own strange circular path of unmet expectations.

I have been here before and I know the way.
I have been here before though I know I am lost.

Both equally true.
I know how this goes. An unresolvable cycle. A little better, a little worse.
But, in the greater scheme of things, I am utterly, utterly lost.

Six years. Quite a long time. But not long enough.
Because I just don't get it at all. Still.

Mumblings

"You make me sad Mummy," he wails. "Sadder and sadder and sadder. That is how you make me."

"You sad Mummy? You sad? Wanna hug?"

"Your fault. My fault. Our faults."

Because this child is not silly. He has identified my weak spots and is honing his aim. My attempts at discipline falter and fail amongst sadness and fault and blame and 'positive parenting' and 'aha! parenting' and all the other things I read. In the interests of damage limitation. Trying to do the right thing and ending up paralysed. Frozen with indecision.

***

'You can't see me,' she boldly claims. Lurking around the corner with a stolen slice of birthday cake. At breakfast time. Heavily coloured icing stains the edges of her mouth.

'Oh yes, I can. I can see you," I reply. "You know that cake isn't a breakfast food."

***

It is the best I can hope for. Because your big sister died and I . . . . . well, I lost my confidence. And, really, that is what you want from me. Confidence. To show you the way.

Because mothers aren't supposed to stand empty handed. Bemused. Amused. Confused.
Mothers aren't supposed to get lost.
Mothers aren't supposed to be sad.

They are supposed to say that cake is a fantastic food to eat at breakfast time.
Or that it isn't.

But truly. I'm indifferent. Eat cake. Don't eat cake. There are larger things at stake here.

Just breathe. Please do continue to breathe.

I don't see my way clearly on the smaller issues.

***

But this be the verse. This be the way. Sigh.

Some things are easy, like, 'don't bite your sister, don't poke me in the eye, don't squash the baby.'

Others like cake for breakfast, requests for DVDs and help with putting on tights.
Well they are a bit more tricky.
Take it or leave it.

I'm probably not a very good parent. Despite all my avowals and wishes to be so.

And if I'm not a very good parent then I have let you all down horribly. Including the one who is dead.

***

I lie awake at night. When everyone else is asleep.
The pressure on my chest. Makes my lung crackle a little.

The pressure of a baby. Not a tiny baby. A baby that weighs 13 lbs. At least. A 3 month old. Fourth in my arms.

My mind slips. Back to five years ago. The click, hiss, click of the oxygen concentrator. The feel of plastic tubing against my skin. In the dark, time shifts and layers of memory pass over one another, transparencies containing feelings and smells. Acetates overlaid.

Time flexes. In my mind. I nurse you. I hold you. It seems unbelievable that I didn't. First.

The sweet curved head. The short blonde hairs. Tiny, dear girl.
I bury my nose into the tender neck, slightly sour with unwashed milk.

Because I can repeat and repeat. I can pretend. That she is you. Just for a moment.
But it is a lie. I never nursed you and I never held you. Well, just that one time but you were dying and it was so very far from this that it almost feels like a different action. Because surely that was something other than simple holding. Regret, regret, regret.

Terrible, terrible regret. Still stalks me. When the house is dark.

Alice will be my final baby. I don't have enough money, or enough house, or enough heart. or enough brain for another. Yet already I yearn. Because what will I do? When there are no more babies? I've always had a baby. To stave off the pain of the one that I will never hold.

The touch of tiny, tiny limbs. The clicking of hospital equipment.
Overlaid with broader limbs. Lighter breathing.
But always a baby. The one age that I seem to be confident in my abilities to care for.

And soon there will be no more.

***

"Five years ago," he says. "It is all so very long ago. How can you still think about it? So often? Surely that isn't right?"

I can't explain why. And so I say nothing.

•••

So come the storms of winter and the birds in spring again
I have no fear of time
For who knows how my love grows?
And who knows where the time goes?

3/4 time

'Hey love,' he chirps. 'You're missing one - didn't you notice?'

I wheel the oft-coveted double buggy around the queue in the bank.

'Oh no, I haven't lost anyone,' I respond. 'There is usually another but he's at nursery this morning.'

***

'Ooooo,' the lady-in-the-lift coos. 'I was checking for twins!'

'No, no,' I say. 'No twins here. I know he is too old for a buggy really but he does tend to run off. Better safe than sorry.''

***

And there is pressure, a pressing. Against my skin. On atrophied tissue. Something wasted. Something that was once vital and passionate.

Bump, bump, bump. Against the shadow of a five year old bruise. Kind, well meaning chatter. Strangers bumping up against a sore spot. It aches momentarily. But is shrugged off. Because I haven't the time. And they mean well. Who would, or could, ever know?

***

Her earnest blue eyes search for mine. She talks and talks. She writes and explains. She shows me her sketch book, and her maths book, and her letter. I see myself as a child. I smile wryly. I sigh.

Because her mother isn't here. She's a childminder and has to work. I'm a poor substitute.

But I think that perhaps I am not completely rubbish with children?
Perhaps I am not an awful mother?
Perhaps I am not a terrible, horrible, ungrateful person?
Or maybe I am.

Who can call it?

Because I can connect with a child. Just not my own.
Not this one of the three, of the four, anyway.
But I will wait. I'm very patient.

I'm still waiting for her sister after all. And five years waiting for the dead is as nothing.

I can wait longer for the living.
I will out last you and I'll be here, waiting.
When you are ready.
To find me and for me to find you.
We will meet. Eventually.

Blur

I own a pair of glasses. Glasses that I, for reasons that even I am not entirely certain of, rarely actually wear. Despite the fact that I know that I can see more clearly when I am wearing them.

The world often appears slightly blurry to me. More so when I am tired.

I go to see Jessica perform in her nativity play. I lurk at the back, standing up so that I can see sheep number 4. I can't help but think that this may be a part reserved for those whose speech is . . . not the clearest. But maybe I'm paranoid. And her 'Baaaa' is amongst the most convincing I've ever heard if I do say so myself.

I stand and my eyes blur. The green programme names 'Georgina Walsh' - perhaps as a sheep, maybe a star.

A narrator? It's doubtful.

But in that world where she lives? Everything may be different and Jessica's speech is as clear as a bell. Perhaps she is out front, telling the whole tale.

But Georgina? She isn't a star. Or a sheep. She doesn't speak. She doesn't live.

She's dead. Still shocks me. I miss her. I miss my tiny, first baby so very much.

And I curse my slowness. Why so slow Catherine W.? After all this time?

Is it because you refuse to see properly? Silly, blurry you.

Daughters

Alice Mary was born safely, three days overdue, on the 12th of November. The labour was so quick that she was born at home. My husband had gone to take Jessica and Reuben to school, on the agreement that we might think about going to the hospital when he got back. But by the time he returned, she had been born.

Having never had a spontaneous labour at term before, I don't think I realised how quickly progress could occur. I am so very grateful that Alice's birth was straightforward and neither of us any the worse for the amateur nature of her delivery.

A strange full circle completed as I caught her head and felt her body slip out, my own scream echoing around my own bedroom. I want to make it mean something, to go from technological innovations and medical interventions to just my own quivering, screaming flesh. But it doesn't mean anything at all, it is only the way things worked out this time.

An ambulance crew and midwives soon descended and the strange, solitary spell was broken.

***

She's always with me. Irreplaceable. Implacable. The constant at the centre of the equation as other things are added and subtracted. Georgina is the never changing 'c' - always. I'm always waiting for her, she is always dead and so we remain, in solemn stasis, whilst everyone else spins around us in unseemly haste.

I am reading a book, 'Far from The Tree', which is a reflection on how families cope in situations where children are very different from their parents. For instance, where the child is born deaf, with Down's syndrome or homosexual and thus, arguably, becomes part of a subculture that their parents cannot fully enter. It would seem that part of us wishes to, or believes that we will, simply perpetuate ourselves when we have children. That we will reproduce literally.

It seems to me that was never my intention. Perhaps it is the legacy of having a first child who is so very, very different from me? She is dead and I am alive. I will, one day, become like her and thus perpetuate her deadness. She will not inherit any of my qualities or failings. Not for her the dreaded shyness or self doubt. Instead I will inherit her single and defining characteristic.

I think that I take pleasure in the elements of my children that are most at odds with my own character because their difference is . . . . . delightful. Perhaps because I do not much like myself and would not want to see them become a version of me? But Jessica's gregariousness, Reuben's no nonsense staring down of the world and sharp toothiness, Alice's . . . well, who knows as yet. They delight me.

***

I am back in the strange echoing place of childbirth and newborn. Probably for the final time. I look into my daughter's newborn dark blue eyes and see her sister's. That far away look. And I wonder.

The small, scrawny limbs with their peeling skin, the ache of the fuzzy head and rolling eyes. The mouth that seeks and the hands that pat, pat, pat. She seems unbearably small but I know that she isn't. I wonder, fleetingly, if she might stop breathing. But put the thought from my mind as I can't even start to think it.

***

"Was she a single baby or a twin?"

"Single."

"How many other children do you have?"
"Two," he says.
"Three," I say.

He peers at us with some consternation, perky bow-tie suddenly seeming somewhat droop-ish. His hand poised over the keyboard.

"Three," I pipe up decisively. "If you look at the register you'll find three other children. Our eldest daughter died but her birth is registered as she died at three days old."

"Ok. Any stillborn children?"

"No."

I fleetingly wish that he had said that he was sorry. But I didn't really expect him to.

And this is where it ends I suppose. There will be no more babies. I am tired. I just hope to keep going, that I am not an absolutely awful mother. That I am not overly harmful.

***

Drifting in and out of sleep, I hear this song from the radio. It was written by Molly Drake, mother to the famous song writer Nick Drake.

Happiness is like a bird with twenty wings
Try to catch him as he flies
Happiness is like a bird that only sings
When his head is in the skies
You can try to make him walk beside you
You can say the door is open wide
If you grab at him, woe betide you
I know because I've tried
Like a butterfly upon an April morning
Very quickly taking fright
Happiness is come and gone without a warning
Jack-o'-lantern in the night
I will follow him across the meadow
I will follow him across the hill
And if I can catch him I will try to bring you
Why yes, happiness
If I can catch him I will try to bring you
All my love and happiness.

Perhaps it is my imagination but to my mind there is a catch of weariness in those final lines. Because the following isn't always easy or enjoyable. But I follow him, that twenty winged trickster, on behalf of other people.

If I can catch him my dear loves. If I can catch him, I will try . . . . .

Because that is what I want for you all. Even my littlest one who has tried to foil me by dying.

All my love and happiness. Happiness.

Enduring Love

I never meant to fall quiet.

But it shuts you up. As somebody far wiser pointed out.

It does. It simply shuts you up, it grabs your words away and runs off into the middle distance.

Whatever 'it' may be.

***

I bob about, broadening, surfacing occasionally from whatever heaviness it is that presses down upon me so. Guilt mainly. I think. I'm so clogged up with it that no senses are free to probe its precise identity. It is something that I press through, viscous and syrupy, I squelch along, my body like an ever expanding rock.

36 weeks pregnant now. But I find that I can't really think of her at all.
I can't imagine her alive, can't imagine her dead either.
Either the first or the last.

I try to speak. For my eldest daughter, my first child. But I find that it has  . . . .  shut  . . . me  . . . up.

Because I can't talk about her, or about what happened to her, in a way that anybody would want to hear. Or that would even make sense.

The quick phrase that I have prepared for occasions when I feel that I have to mention her, 'my daughter was one of twins but her sister died in intensive care' is as dry as tinder.
But it never catches alight.

Five years on and it is still only a howl that will do. Or silence. Which is the more acceptable option.

My silence peers at others. Where it sees a suspicion of a companion, sticking out around the edges of conversations and glances. Not properly tucked away.

I sigh and avert my eyes. Because what could I say? In places where there is no comfort. There is simply nothing. It shuts you up.

When people talk to me about this pregnancy, I want to change the subject. I don't want to draw any attention to myself, to her, to any of them. I don't even feel like I want to draw attention to Georgina. Which is daft - I mean what is the worst that could happen to her? Didn't it already happen? Well, one variant anyway. There are whole worlds of 'worst' out there, it transpires.

So it seems best just to quietly drift along, trying to remain inconspicuous, hoping to stay on the right side of the numbers.

***

Jessica selects a library book, 'Hello Twins', and I feel a slight stab, somewhere in a minor heart valve. We read the book, I try to explain that she was a twin. She looks at me, utterly mystified. And I lapse back into silence.

The same old battles rage inside, guilt and regret. Wishing that I were a better parent, a better mother. Perhaps none of this would have happened. I still expend a foolish amount of energy on simply wishing that it hadn't. No matter how many healthy babies I can birth, there will always be the first two. The unexpected and half finished twins. They look at me reproachfully, heavy with symbolism and meaning.

Although I don't believe in either of those liars, symbols, meanings. Not anymore. Doesn't mean I don't miss them from time to time however.

I plough on.

Struggles with homework and communication and toilet-ing. The slow, grinding acceptance that I am not a minor deity, that I cannot rearrange this world to suit the needs of one small child. Instead I am forced to assist in squishing her into a more socially acceptable shape instead.

Reuben bites me (unexpectedly as I thought this time had passed) and looks up, toothily satisfied. I can hardly blame him. If I had access to the being seemingly in charge of all this would I not be sharpening up my own teeth, ready to get my quick chomp in when an opportunity arose?

***

But, in the quiet, something still murmurs.
Despite my attempts to stuff it down into various holes, to stop its incessant, small voice.
It might have shut me up.
But it can't shut this up.

It won't let me forget.
It won't let me give up.
It won't keep quiet.
It chants.

I think that this un-shut-up-able element  . . .  might be love.

Repetition

Still the same. 

Still without you.

Mutterings

It is nearly five years now since Georgina died.

Like a slow tide, the grief that once turned me outwards now drives me inward.
Towards silence.

Jessica progresses. Sometimes slow. But steady.

"What did you say my darling? Try again?"
She repeats herself.
I fail to comprehend.
She sighs wearily.

We both stare out of the window or at one another in the rear view mirror, communication impasse locking us in place.
Toilet training grinds onwards into the middle distance.
Her kind eyes, her patient hands.
We will try again.

Reuben grows.
He issues orders, my tiny emperor.
Mildly unbelievable boy.
The unlikely child who did not die, who was not ill.
He looks like me, grey eyes, prominent ears.

Of the first (third) child, little mention is made.
The silver disc around my neck with her name engraved dangles, tarnished.
My naive expectations of kindness and comfort set aside, both for others and for myself.

Another baby kicks inside me. Just one. A girl or so they tell me.
Already bigger, already older than one of her sisters will ever be.

I imagine the flickering fused eyelid, the thin hand.
But not for too long as I cannot bear to.
I talk of her as though she will be born on her due date and live.
I do not claim her as the fourth child.

I stay quiet.
On the whole.

All's Well

After nearly five years, the words have dried up.
Nothing left except a heavy heart that shifts inside and aches.

Surfacing from sleep, a voice sings to me.

'And though death draws near, I've nothing to fear today.
As the colours they fade, the colours they fade away
All's well . . . all's well.'

A voice that sounds certain. Sure. Quiet and dignified. Seeming to echo through time, at one remove.

A song inspired by Dr. Edward Wilson, who was the chief scientist and artist on Scott's doomed expedition to the Antarctic. The lyric is based on a letter he wrote to his wife, as he realised that he would soon die.

Dr. Wilson believed that everything that happened to him was part of God's divine plan. He repeatedly used the phrase 'all's well' in an attempt to convey this in his final letters.

I wonder.
A death that was avoidable, freezing, lonely. Only a matter of miles away from safety and life.

I wonder.
Georgina's death seems so strange and senseless.
To half form a little body only to cast it aside.
Every narrative I spin to myself frays apart at the memory of the blood running out of her tiny mouth, the laboured breaths, the little hands that squeezed.

Two deaths. One remembered by some. The other forgotten. Except by me.

But it matters very little how I think of it. In truth.
I can fight with it, I can howl at it, I can curse and spit and swear.
I can cry and think it unfair.

It remains there. Implacable and suspended.
In a time that I cannot alter.
As cold as snow.

Perhaps I should just attempt to believe that 'all's well.'
To let some of that quiet dignity seep into my tired old heart.
Maybe if I said it frequently enough, whispered it to myself in the night, I would come to believe it?

All's well.

You can hear the song here