Induced fit

Thank you so much for all your comments on my last post.

I sometimes find my desire for another child incomprehensible and puzzling. I feel as though my family narrowly escaped a complete catastrophe. That we are standing outside a burning building with singed hair and smoke in our lungs but still breathing, still alive. We left a member of our family inside that fire, a daughter, a sister, a twin. But I no longer want to sit and watch the building burn to the ground. I want to grab my three surviving family members and hug them tight and run away as fast as I can.  (Tracy OC, sorry. I know you've already been subjected to this particular ramble ahead of the game.)

To decide to have another child would seem to be an open invitation for disaster to come calling once again. I don't want to test my luck. I feel as though I have used up all the good fortune I can expect from one lifetime. It would be stupidity to head back into that place of unexpected lightning strikes and their resultant blazes, wouldn't it? I'm still undecided. Double or quits?

I also struggle with the idea that my hopes for another child are a betrayal of Georgina. That a part of me hopes to replace her or to conjure her back into existence. 

I hope that I am clear in my own mind about I stand to gain. What I stand to lose.

Another child, a different child. Not twins. Certainly not Jessica's twin. 

Another child that could well die. Another child that could well live. It's a fifty fifty chance. It always is as far as I am concerned.

Another pregnancy, a different pregnancy. Not as hopeful or joyful as my first. But I can clothe it in some of the remnants of that joy and hope I'm sure, raggedy little bits left of those things that were left behind. I've still got them. I'm not letting go of them. Not yet.

No guarantees. There never are. 

I will never lose the grief. It is here to stay. No turning back. No ripping up and starting again. Permanent.

I sometimes find myself becoming short tempered with people who say that I can always have another child. Yes, I hope so. But it isn't a given. I hope it is something that I never, ever take for granted. But another child will not be Georgina. I will never have that particular person, my daughter, my first born, back again. 

In the newspaper today, I read a sentence that stopped me dead in my tracks. 

It makes me aware that it is not just having children that changes you. It is the children you have, too.

Self-evident you would think. Not something that you would need to publish in a national newspaper but ho hum. And, because of the person that I am and the turns my life has taken, I want to append, and the children you don't have. 

I'm not a creative type. It saddens me. I come from a family who draw, paint, write, photograph, create. But not me. When the gifts were given out, I wasn't standing in that particular line. If you've been reading here for a while you'll know that I sometimes go off on a weird scientific or mathematical tangent. Because that's what I know. The clumsy metaphors that I pick are from the strange collection of stuff that lurks in my brain, stuff I once studied. It's all I have. I wish I had more beautiful stuff to pick from but I don't. So bear with me. You've endured my life as the sea slug, Aplysia. Some of you have endured it twice. Bless your stoical little hearts. You've endured my description of the proportional relationship between gestation and grief allowed. If you're still here, I am about to launch into another. And my science is rubbishly remembered, hazy and partially derived from Wikipedia. So don't go quoting me. And I have a bad feeling that some of you, certainly biojen and bluebirdsinging to name but two, probably know a great deal more about this than me. So ladies, cover for me if I messed this up. Don't go exposing me as an ignoramus. 

An enzyme is something that makes a chemical reaction go faster. It isn't actually involved. Kind of hanging out with the molecules in a cheerleader type role. Some molecules go in to the reaction, different molecules come out. The enzyme kinds of helps it all along. The enzymes don't get used up in the reaction, they are just there making sure that everything is ticking along nicely.

These enzymes are picky guys. They won't cheer for just any old team that rocks up. They are choosy, they are selective. 

Initially, it was thought that this choosiness on the part of enzymes was because only certain molecules 'fit' them. Like a lock and a key.

Subsequently, this view was refined into the induced fit hypothesis. Enzymes may be selective but they react to the molecules that are around them. Their active sites, the places where the molecules bind to the enzyme, are continually reshaped until the molecules are completely bound. Then those molecules are released, as different products as a result of their interaction with the enzyme.

Like so. 

Diagram stolen from Wikipedia. Hope they don't sue. 

And I thought to myself. My children changed me. I am like the enzyme. I am not consumed by, or necessary for, their interaction with the world. Yet I'm there, cheering them on. Wanting them to survive, to thrive. Wanting their interaction with me to free them as something different, something more independent, happier. 

There are places in my body where, I could swear, their marks are left behind. My physical structure, my cell biology, my genetics, my 'active sites' were changed. Their fit changed as a result of knowing my daughters. Places changed, sites appeared. Induced to fit Georgina. Induced to fit Jessica. Those particular children. The children that I birthed and the children that I love. No other person will ever fit those places in me. No subsequent child. Not my husband. Not other family members. Not anything. 

The places that fit Jessica are still changing. They mutate and change shape as she grows. I know so much more about her than I did. And yet I am surprised at how well I knew her prior to her birth. 

Jessica's shape is not fully defined. I hope to leave this world a long, long time before it is. She changes and the places deep within me that are solely hers change alongside her. Constant motion, spinning round to fit the person that she reveals herself to be. Someone who still likes to hear 'Green Eggs and Ham' read aloud about twenty five times a day in case you were wondering. But how precious. How astounding. That I know that is the book that she likes best. I'm so lucky to know that fact. 

Georgina's spaces are different. All that Georgina will ever be, she is and has been. She no longer changes. Her reaction is spent. This time around. Yet the spaces that are hers, hers alone, remain within me. She created them whilst she was still inside my womb, she changed them in the three days she lived. I knew something of her, during my pregnancy, during her life. 

She was bound to me, bound so tightly to those spaces within me. Then she was released. As something different, something I can never understand.

And the spaces she left behind. Carved into me. Created by her. By Georgina. Not her sister, not another child, not anyone else I will ever meet. By my precious daughter. By her particular being. The specificness of her limbs, her mind, her eyes, her personality. Created a void within me. A binding site perfectly matched to a child who no longer exists.

Or perhaps she does exist still, in a shadowy fashion. In that negative space within me. The space that longs and yearns only for her. Her precise inverse. Georgina's true twin. The place she left behind. 

In me. In my husband. In her sister. We miss her.

Trying

In November last year, I saw a negative pregnancy test for the first time in about ten years.
I have seen quite a few of this variety since.

I had taken about two or three pregnancy tests when I was younger, back in that strange and distant land known at the 1990s. I remember my hands shaking and my stomach churning, hoping and hoping and pleading that there would be no second line. Unsuitable boyfriend. Degree to finish. Inability to look after self, let alone child. All the usual reasons.

Then, like most women I suppose, there came a time when my hands were still shaking and I was still hoping and pleading. But now I was pleading for that second line to please, please, please show up.

I've been so very 'lucky' up until this time, the so-called third time lucky. I fell pregnant with the twins on the first cycle we tried for a baby, I fell pregnant again the first time we decided to try for a third child. But then I miscarried a few weeks later.

Since then. Still trying for that elusive third. Nothing.

I worry. I wake up in the night and worry. Worry away at the idea. Until I am worn away.
Perhaps I've left it too late.
Perhaps I will never have another child.
Perhaps I will have another child, another child born too early, another child who dies.
Perhaps the brief 'half' pregnancy I had with the twins will be my only pregnancy.
Perhaps I will never feel a child move in my womb and know it for a baby and not indigestion.
Perhaps I will never move with the slow consideration of a heavily pregnant woman, my husband will never feel a child of ours kick from inside my body.
Perhaps this is all I will ever know of pregnancy and motherhood.
A hovering.
A circling around a plastic box of wires and machines.
A slow, slow, slow cessation of breath and the faltering beat of a heart that fades away to silence.

Endless waiting, waiting, waiting.
Seemingly endless on one hand.
On the other, yes, endless.
I will be waiting a very, very long time to see Georgina do these things.

Waiting to touch my daughter.
Waiting to hold my daughter.
Waiting for her to feed, to fight infections, for ducts to close, for eyes to open, for ears to form, for unruly growths of blood vessels to die back, for protruding organs under the skin to be swept back in.
For her to take a breath.

And I am still so very, very angry and bitter.
That this is the hand that I was dealt.
That this is the hand that my children were dealt.

And I hate myself for that bitterness and anger.
Because I have no right to them. I have a living, breathing child.
A child who should be a ghost. Who should be with her sister.
A child who, in all honesty, has no business being alive.
In my mind's eye, I still see that tiny human that was Jessica.
Certainly that dainty, red body was my very own Jessica beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But my brain seems to have trouble taking it all in, even now.

If it were up to me she would be dead. For all my love, for all my care, for everything I might fancy I know.
If it had been left up to me, I would have watched both my daughters die.
Those early faltering breaths and cries would have been their whole lives.

Because love doesn't mend broken things.
Love can't act as surfactant for immature lungs.
Love can't work it's way through a body to clear infection, to fix faulty circulatory plumbing.
I've obviously been wired incorrectly, as part of me believes that it might have done. If I could just have tried harder. What a cruel state of affairs.

And I wanted two. I wanted my two tiny, broken daughters to survive. Both. And now I want more.
Strange to think I would have been almost eight months pregnant if I hadn't miscarried.

Easter Basket Blog Hop and Project Sweet Pea

Right, I'm going to try and do something technical with this post. Sorry if it comes out a complete mess. I'm completely out of my blogging comfort zone!
The lovely AnnaMarie at A Garden for Butterflies tagged me in the Hershey's Better Basket Blog Hop. Beautiful Mess sent a lovely Easter Basket in honour of Toren's birthday. 
For each post in the Hershey's Better Basket Blog Hop, Hershey's will donate $10 to the Children's Miracle Network. The blog post must occur before 12pm on April 4th so hop to it and give baskets to your blogging friends!

The official rules:

HERSHEY’S BETTER BASKET BLOG HOP RULES

• Copy and paste these rules to your blog post.
• Create a blog post giving a virtual Easter Basket to another blogger – you can give as many Virtual Baskets as you want.
• Link back to person who gave you an Easter Basket.
• Let each person you are giving a Virtual Easter Basket know you have given them a Basket.
• Leave your link at BetterBasket.info/BlogHop comment section. You can also find the official rules of this #betterbasket blog hop, and more information about Better Basket with Hershey’s there.
• Hershey’s is donating $10 per each blog participating to the Better Basket Blog Hop to Children’s Miracle Network (up to total of $5,000 by blog posts written by April 4th, 2010).
• Please note that only one blog post by each blog url will count towards the donation. 

I suspect I might be too late to give Easter Baskets to anyone who will be able to write a blog post before April 4th but consider yourself tagged if you are reading this. I'm hoping that mine will be able to sneak in before the deadline! 

And can I just say that I have no idea why England doesn't really seem to DO peanut butter? But I am in a permanent stress about this state of affairs. Looking at all those lovely Reeses  peanut butter eggs is making me jealous that I will not be able to eat one tomorrow. However, we do have the equally gloopy Cadbury's Creme Egg so I will just have to be content with one of those instead! 

Whilst I am attempting to do technical things with my blog, I'm going to try and post a voting button. I'm feeling very ambitious this evening!
Megan, who writes at MJ's Memories, is working with Project Sweetpea to donate care packages to families that have a baby in the NICU. They have applied for a grant through the Pepsi Refresh Project, and have been selected as a finalist to win a $25,000 grant!! So here is how you can help: vote once a day, every day for Project Sweet Peas to win. They need to be in the top ten at the end of the month to win.

You can set this up to vote directly through facebook as well which is pretty nifty! So if you have a spare moment at your computer during the day, please vote for Project Sweet Pea.

Peekaboo

A game for amusing a small child, in which one covers one's face or hides and then returns to view saying "Peekaboo!"

I watched that stupid fly on the wall documentary about a maternity unit last week. The one that I had been planning to avoid. I had just settled Jessica to her night-time bottle and the television remote was on the other side of the room. When the announcer piped up with the title of the next programme, I was just about to get up and switch the channel when he mentioned it would be about 'special care' babies. So I thought I would watch it. Because I really like to poke my own healing wounds with a nice, sharp, pointed stick. I'm just that kind of person.


The documentary followed the journeys of two babies. One of whom was a surviving twin, one of two girls born extremely prematurely. I made it through the first ten minutes then I had to switch it off. The sight and sound of all those familiar machines, the tiny limbs, the alarms beeping, was making it hard to breathe. 


But I simply had to find out what happened. If those babies made it out of the NICU. I suppose the people who make this programme are bargaining on that. So I watched it on-line the following afternoon when I was supposed to be working from home. Very bad I know and not at all like the conscientious employee that I generally am. Honest. Cross my heart and hope to die.


Strange, seeing your own most horrific experiences laid bare for anyone to view. Those parts of you that are bruised, those bones that will never set straight, broadcast into other people's front rooms, to watch on their television, for . . . hmm, I'm not sure. Is it for entertainment that we choose to watch television programmes like this? Or to understand? I'm not sure.It made me feel slightly revolted over all those documentaries I've watched in the past, that I might have cried over but then I simply . . switched off.

But I can't switch this one off. Because this one happened to me. Sadly. It plays across my internal mental screens every single day. My very own phantasmagoria of hospital and tubes and wires and very small human beings. I'm still here, sitting in that spot. The same place I was sitting as her heart stopped beating. I'm still here, taking out these same old memories and holding them up to the light. Turning them this way and that, trying to make sense of them, trying to understand.

What was once an understandable grief is turning and twisting into something knottier, older, more familiar, something which settles in, rearranges the bedclothes over itself and call my brain its home. A worry doll. Something to run my mind over and over until I am sick of it.

I hate myself more lately. The feeling that it was all somehow my fault has come back to sit on my shoulder and whisper in my ears again. Like Sinbad and The Old Man of the Sea. Stupid bag of meat, he says, you would have let them both die. No wonder, look at you.

Other people have long forgotten that anything out of the ordinary happened but I'm still holding it close to my heart, letting it permeate my brain. Still expecting it to be mentioned one day. But it isn't. I would bet that nobody else even thinks about it at all. Except me. And I can't seem to think of anything else. Perhaps I'm overcompensating? Trying to set a lop sided world to rights. Where nobody speaks of unspeakable things. Perhaps that's why I feel I need to think about them all day long to set the world back in balance.

I can hide behind my job, a computer, a book, lose myself in the soft mutterings of the radio, drown out my internal wailing with the tunes on my iPod.
I can hide in my house.
The weather outside is bad. It's cold. It's raining. There is no need to go outside. Not really.
I can sit here in the warm and maintain a virtual farm if I so desire.
I can hide behind Jessica. I've been hiding behind her since the day she was born.
Because if I just stare at her hard enough, my eyes won't drift to the side.
Because if I can make myself grateful enough, it won't hurt.

Those things that were me, rise up and evaporate away.
I can't even remember what they were now.

I am not sure how to step around these memories. To stop hiding.
My life needs to go on.
Jessica's life needs to go on.
My husband's life needs to go on.
Our lives will go on.
Whether I'm ready for that to happen or not.
Georgina's life stopped. It's been stopped for a while now.
Short but complete.
Spooled out in its entirety.
There is no more.
Spent.
Gone.
Over.
A lifetime of wailing and gnashing my teeth won't buy her back a single second.
She doesn't need me to hide her or to hide away because of her.

Maybe it's time to stop hiding. To return to view.

Resilience

It's late. The house is quiet and dark.
My husband has gone out to the pub with his friends.
Jessica is still ill and is sleeping, a little fitfully, in the room next door. I'm listening to her breathing on the monitor, it sounds as though a very small Darth Vader has come for a sleep-over. Snortling, as my husband calls Jessica's, occasionally rather noisy, night-time breathing.

She has a chest infection which, whilst it isn't great news when combined with her ex-preemie lungs, she seems to be coping with pretty well. I'm just hoping to steer clear of the hospital. To that end I have spent the day studiously spooning honey & lemon linctus into her mouth, and reading 'Green Eggs and Ham' in various silly voices. I've tried to replace 'Green Eggs and Ham' with other books whilst Jessica seems distracted but she isn't buying them. Even 'The Cat in the Hat,' Despite the same author, same rhythmical nonsensical thing going on but no, no dice. I'm sure I'll be murmuring the words of 'Green Eggs and Ham' in my sleep tonight.

For the first time this week, a number of people have said to me something along the lines of 'shouldn't you be over this by now?' Including my husband. Even I'm starting to wonder.

It is strange. I hadn't really noticed how long it has been or how much I still talk about either Jessica's premature birth, Jessica's health or Georgina's short life and death.
Perhaps I should be thinking about it less frequently?
Mentioning it less often?
Writing here less?

My mum mentioned an Afrikaans saying to me the other day which roughly translates as 'that which is upon the heart, rises to the lips.' Whilst this is not the case for some people (my own mother included), whose self-possession I can only envy, it is the case with me. That which is on my heart inexorably rises to my lips. Despite my frequent promises to myself to be more self-contained, more dignified.

Regardless of how inappropriate it is or how boring it is or how often my listeners have heard it. It still comes out.

My poor husband, he tries to introduce a hundred other topics but I will bend them all back to my heart, our girls, Georgina and Jessica.

When the doctor (a general practitioner who doesn't know Jessica's history) mentioned that he didn't like the sound of her breathing, the whole story bubbled up to my lips with an eagerness that took me by surprise. I still want to tell people. I still want people to understand that when this child was born she was no bigger than a 500ml bottle of soft drink. That she had a twin sister. That her sister died. I'm not even sure why I would want to tell people this story any longer. Why can't I let it go?

Something within me is so deeply, deeply hurt by what happened.
And I'm ashamed for feeling so hurt. For being so very ungrateful.

I seem to have lost my resilience.

One minute, I am all happiness. I look at Jessica and I am plunged headlong into wild elation. I still can't believe it. I still can't fathom it. Not many children born at that gestation survive. How is it possible that something so unlikely should happen to me?

The next, all despair. I miss Georgina. I miss her terribly. I ache. I wonder what she would have been like. Not many children who are born alive in this time, in this place, die. How is it possible that something so unlikely should happen to me?

All at once.

And I can't seem to turn it off. This continuous up and down of screeching emotion. I'm tired. I miss Georgina.  I miss her so very, very much.
I'm so very grateful and happy that Jessica is here, breathing with her noisy lungs in the next room.

I wish I knew what the future held. But I'm stuck here, for the time being.

"But I can see, 
The planets are aligning for me, 
And I dare not breathe for then 
The clouds will come and then deny me".

Evening

Driving home through the early evening gloom this evening.

The grey light catches on two tall, skinny girls loping up the pavement.
Two heads of long, fair hair.
Bags slung with casual grace on slender hips.
All elbows and knees and friendship bands and lip gloss.
Head gently bent together, bodies turned slightly inwards.
Their trainers hit the pavement synchronously.
They move on, unaware, engrossed in each other.
Unaware of the woman driving past
In a car not a few metres from them.
A woman whose gaze is caught on them,
whose heart snags on the sight of them.
Who suddenly finds it hard to draw in air, to catch a breath.

The sight of those two heads leaning so conspiratorially together.
The casual intimacy of  those two inclined bodies, that leaning towards.
The secrets, the memories that I imagine thicken the air between them.
Those two girls, probably not even sisters, maybe not even friends.
Those two girls who seemed so close, who appeared so familiar.
Walking home in the early evening of a cold, grey March day.

They'll never be my girls.
My daughters will never walk together.

Who knows, perhaps they would never have walked that way together anyhow.
Perhaps they would have been distant, have fallen out with each other, have been on a 'no speaks' since the age of three, been embarrassed by each other.

Perhaps it is because my own sister has been visiting, making me sentimental about sisters.
Perhaps because Jessica has been ill and sits in lonely state on the sofa, watching cartoons with glazed red eyes, wrapped in a Waybu.loo blanket with her arm around her teddy bear.
I still see a shadow next to her, her equal in misery.
I still hear two coughs where, in reality, there is only one.

But I like to think of Jessica and Georgina as those two leaning girls.

But I'll never know.
They'll never know.
Never.

Never.

It is a very long time.
Longer than I realised.
An expanse that unfolds and unfolds continually.
Without her.

Edit

A: "Is she your first?"
C: "Yes."

B: "Does she have any brothers or sisters?"
C: "No."

C: "How old are your boys?"
D: "Just turned one. Argh, twins are such hard work. It just never ends."
C: "Oh, I'm sure. I really can't imagine, you must be exhausted."

E: "Do they know why Jessica was born so early?"
C: "No. Perhaps an infection of some description."

F: "How old is she?"

C: "Um, eighteen months."

F: "Oh, same as my little girl. She wasn't due until September but she decided to come in the middle of August instead."

C: "Oh really? They'll be the babies of the class won't they, being born in August."

G: "Wow, I just can't believe how much she's grown. A true answer to prayer."
C: "Yes. She is amazing."

Poor Georgina. Your life was so short and now your own mother is unravelling the thread of the hours that you had. Taking that tiny piece of cloth and tugging on its frayed edges so that the time come spilling out into my hands and on to the floor. Only to disappear into the earth.
Forgotten.
As people have slipped through this place since time immemorial.
I will follow you one of these days. Edited out.

You will always be my daughter.
You will always be tiny.
You will never be called a miracle or an answer to prayer.
You will always be dead.

I will always sit here, shaking my head in disbelief, holding my breath and waiting for the doctors to tell me different news. Part of me still waits in that August, of two years ago.
As though the sheer force of my want for you is strong enough to force me backwards through everything that has occurred since.
My hands are still clenched and I watch the numbers on your monitors rise and fall.
I feel as though the space occupied by my body, all my atoms and hairs and organs, must somehow be visibly twisting towards you with the desire to make you live.
And they've never completely come back to rest.
I remain somewhat out of alignment, in a state of tension, still trying to change that which is permanent.
Because I don't want you to die.

I still can't believe that you did, my girl. My sweet Georgina.
Oh how I wish you hadn't died.
Every single time my lungs fill with air, every time my heart pulses.
I wish they were your lungs, your heart.
I wish.
It's stupid and futile.
I'm stupid and futile.
But I can't help myself.