for babylost mothers and fathers

I scream at a hospital bill for naught.
I scream at your big brother for things that aren’t his fault.
I scream “I’m fine” at all the well-intentioned questions.

Each day since Olivia died, I’ve considered what it means to be a parent to a child no one else can see. Even I can only see her in my mind, but she’s there, the primary variable in our family calculus. No matter how many more children I have, the number people see – the number I see – will be n-1. Always missing one. 

a missing piece of our family
gone for so much longer than he was here

just an echo
and my biggest what-if

The words and tears dry up. It really is like a wound, healing. For days, months, years, I walked around with an open, oozing sore, yelling my pain, unable to be comfortable, making a mess. And then – slowly – the skin grew back.

sometimes I pull out
my old map of the world
it’s foreign now, but recognizable
the familiar landscapes are still there
I just can’t visit them anymore

Being a mother is just that, your state of being. It doesn't matter if you carry your child in your arms or your heart. You have a mother's heart, a beautiful one, and you should be able to express all the joys and pains of being a mother on Mother's Day. Being a bereaved mother is not something to be ashamed of.

This was the least trivial of things, and yet, the outrage just didn’t boil up inside me the way I would have expected…

…at first.

But then, slowly, as my bruised and bleeding heart started to heal, it started to peek its head out every now and again. And then when I got pregnant once more – when again I had something to lose – it came roaring back with a vengeance.

Though I know that what is mothered can never really be lost.
My heartbeat is mundane,
and the same as before my baby died
And so much of motherhood is mundane delights,
Laughter and wet grass beneath our feet,
So close I can almost feel it

This was a much sadder swag bag. In it were pamphlets for bereaved parents, funeral home brochures, and a teddy bear weighted with marbles to give us something to clutch in the absence of our daughter. This time I walked out the door, bag in hand, chest sunken, head bowed, my body utterly broken.

But maybe, just maybe, still a warrior.

Yes! Yes, I think. We need different words – a new language – to say what or who you were. You never breathed air. You were never that kind of baby. When I’ve pictured you, you’ve never been a baby, in fact; you are always a girl, but because I never got to know what girl you’d become, the shape of you just slips away, again and again.

One year, Angie started a project she called “Right Where I Am,” which was a prompt to babylost parents to write about where they were right now, in the present of their grief. With parents writing from all stages of grieving, from maybe just a few days out to years and years out, the project was “like a map on the road of grief.” Importantly, the project also aimed to acknowledge that wherever you are right now in your grief, “it is right.” In the accumulation of writing about the right now of grief that rightness really became apparent: wherever you are right now is right for you because there is no other way to do grief but your own way and we are all moving in and around and through grief however we can and need to.

But when the ornaments with her name on them began to show up in the mail, we decided that we would get a tree after all. And we would hang them, and her stocking.

And I would capture this on video, for some reason.

Looking back, I think, perhaps, I needed some solid proof that this nightmare was actually happening.

I wish he was here
not just in photos
and half remembered dreams

For my sixth birthday, my parents surprised me and took me to a bubble show (that’s actually what it was called) where a woman literally put herself inside a giant bubble. I remember thinking how safe she looked. Nothing could touch her. Bubbles were safe.