the mother, the spectre and the bargaining crone.

This post is a reflection on my sense of self before baby loss and after and the effect that Freddie's death has had on that. I was a stay at home parent of young children before I had him and my life therefore revolved around the trappings of that life. There is some mention of how I was shaped by ordinary pregnancy and birth as well as infant loss. Please bear that in mind before reading if you are in a sensitive phase of loss.

Once it defined me, my knowledge, my experience, my hoard of stories, grim and detailed.

Once I huddled in gaggles of mothers and gossiped  - heartless midwives, empty threats of dead babies. I thrashed through birth trauma, postnatal depression, botched, unsatisfactory deliveries. My ill-used body, caught in the nets of a harried medical system that sucked me in, processed my heaving body, signed me out alive, with scant regard for my soul or sanity.

Those things, the worst that could happen, consumed the centre of my wounded being. All encompassing, damaging, poisoned.

All talked out, gradually growing around and through the pain, I became something new.

****

Once it defined me, my knowledge, my experience, my hoard of stories, gritted teeth and battles won.

Once I huddled in flocks of mothers engrossed in motherhood - failed breastfeeding, sleepless nights, babies born with challenges (I will not call them small, not even now) to be overcome. We loaded laundry and knew not the value of the little people in our care. The minutae of the tedium was our currency of connection.

I had no idea how lucky I was. I do not hold myself responsible for that.

And, all talked out, we grew, moved on. Stories rolled and rubbed and took on the sheen of a well fumbled pebble, soft, smooth, snag-less.

****

I became something new; lacking nonchalant patter, I formed an armoury of parenthood, my tales the scales of my skin. A persona grew, I became the mother people love or hate, who fought the battles, won and lost and emerged confident, skilled and with all the answers I needed. I believed in me.

I do not begrudge myself that confidence. It was good while it lasted.

****

And it all came tumbling down. In the screaming silence of the birthing room without a cry, I lost every opinion I had ever had about birth and babies. In the humming heat of SCBU, I lost everything I knew about parenting. I couldn't help him. I didn't know the language, couldn't do the procedures, couldn't choose when to hold him, might hurt him if I did.

No time to learn.

My outer shell smashed and washed away, all my conversation, all my wrath and passion, all my innocence and ignorance. I didn't know I had that.

****

When I lost my son, when I crumbled him to dust, consigned him to a memory, I also lost myself, my role, my place in society. A core was left, naked and bruised.

****

No one wants the baby lost mother. We are not welcome. We are the spectre - festering and infectious. Who would want my knowledge? It is tainted by Freddie's death, despite the four before him. I would run a mile from me. Who would chat to me about birth and babies, fearing to see me cry,  hoping that "please god, she doesn't mention HIM again!"? Who would believe my nappy choice might be right when I let my baby die? Who would believe I had knowledge about breastfeeding when I couldn't even tell he was sick before he lived.

I see the recoil even if it never comes. I see the blank weariness as they wait for me to find a reason to mention him. I see myself, hovering in their joy and deserved naivety, spoiling the thrill of the moment. I imagine myself tainting their hope, excitement. I imagine them making the opposite choice to mine, hoping to ward off the devil.

I cannot ever re-enter that world. I will distance myself even from my daughters when their time comes, hoping - irrationally - to not remind them of the brother who died.

****

So, crone like, my gift is to the girl I once was, to all mothers who never walk a harder path than tired out drudgery.

I will try not curl my lip at those with no reason to know better. I will not belittle them because their path has not been strewn with ashes and they know not that ashes can arrive in a tiny box with an etched brass plate. I will not deride them for a merry life with smaller hurts and smaller mountains to climb.

I envy them. I'm glad for them. With gritted teeth I will smile for them and the rose-tinted life they lead. I do not want them to know this pain. And I will barter my forgiveness of their lack of understanding for the gift of no future grief in this family.

If I could. If only I could.

How do you feel about the person you were before loss arrived in your life? Do you miss that person? Would you have that person back? How do you feel about people who have not experienced loss and their world view? Has it changed over time, have you become  more or less tolerant about ignorance of loss?

the other extinguished flame

Mrittika, or, as she often identifies herself, AahiRaahi's mom, is mother to Aahir and Raahi. Mrittika writes with a blunt honesty about the loss of her daughter Raahi two days before she would turn three months old, and the ways it has affected her relationships, both with others and with herself. Her writing is often winding and lyrical, inviting us in deep to experience her story. I am incredibly honored to welcome Mrittika as a regular contributor to Glow in the Woods. —Burning Eye

There’s another unnamed word document opened on my computer, along with this one. It contains the idea for a paper my advisor had sent me in winter. It should have been written in the past few months. It has not. Even the file containing the idea has not been saved.

That’s how my career is. Unsaved, undeveloped, unwritten.

How can there be anything else, I wonder every day. How can there be anything else, apart from missing Raahi and taking care of Aahir and Som, that my mind can occupy itself with? How can I miss, feel sad and have regrets for, anything else? How can anything else matter, and cause me pain?

There was a flame. The only one that burned. The flame that kept me alive, gave me purpose, offered me flight. The flame to be exceptionally trained, hardworking, and skilled, and make a difference somewhere, soon, and then forever. As a teenager, I was never interested in romance or a family. I was fierce, and almost destined to be a hardhitting corporate dragon or academic eagle someday. My friends already teased me with the jobs I would have to get them and the research projects I would have to acknowledge their encouragement on. My male friends sympathized with any man who ever eyed me ‘that way,’ and my female friends wondered what this hankering for my ‘own identity’ at fourteen was all about.

Then I met a man for whom sacrifices seemed possible. We made joint decisions about our careers, which somehow always seemed poised in head-on collision with one another, and I saw my career in media and publishing gradually taking the backburner in order to accommodate his more successful one in technology. Still, I had a career, and much to look forward to, and every time a byline appeared, or someone praised my ‘keen editorial eye,’ I warmed a finger in that flame, now dimmed, but not extinguished.

Then we started wanting to make babies.

A surgery to remove a cyst, followed by an unexpected pregnancy, followed by a heartbreaking miscarriage. Then, a year and half later, another one. This time, the doctor advising me to give up my job.When my husband’s employer decided to transfer him to the US, I finally wanted to go back to graduate school, even though all I really wanted at this point was a family. The flame was going strong, except that it had changed color. I often could not recognize myself. But I was getting to like this new me, the one who wanted to be a mom.

Suffering from undiagnosed infertility, I focused all my energy into applying to a second Master’s, and instead, was offered positions in four prestigious PhD programs. Every admissions committee wondered why I wouldn’t accept these better offers. The truth is, I wanted it too, but I wanted to be a mom a lot more. I was not ready to commit to five years, and accepted a Master’s admission, moving to the Midwest, leaving my husband, and all chances of being a mother soon, in the northeast.

Aahir came to us in the end of the first year. By now, my first and foremost mission of a family accomplished, I wanted that PhD after all. My husband wanted a graduate degree too, a plan he had shelved as someone needed to have a stable job amidst all the instability and uncertainty of not being able to get pregnant. We started applying to graduate schools together, and chose ten pairs of schools in the same city. We got admission in two each, none in the same city.

So, with my son in my arms, I moved to Chicago, while my husband quit his job, but stayed in Columbus, to go to school there. He would commute on a bus for ten hours on Thursday nights to spend three days being a father. On Sunday nights, he made the same trip back, this time, to be a student. That summer, after the first year, we were together as a family after a whole year. We were still staring at another year of being apart, but we were so happy that we made a little girl!

Now pregnant, and taking care of a toddler, my professional flame burned the brightest for the first time since those young days of dogged determination. After putting Aahir to sleep, I would drag my pregnant body to the dining table, where I would eat dinner and write papers, grade exams and read a hundred pages before I dropped on the pile. Som now arrived on Thursday mornings, and after whirling like a windmill taking care of Aahir and me, he would work until dawn on papers, projects and coursework. Then he would take the train to downtown Chicago on Sunday night, and from there a bus at midnight to reach Columbus in the morning, heading straight to class.

Raahi was born three days before Som would be done with his program. As he packed his life in Columbus, the birthplace of our Aahir, and the battleground for my warrior husband, Raahi began to fight her battle in NICU. She came home in time for us to move for Som’s hard-earned job on the east coast. I had to give up my workplace again, in order to be with my husband, and raise our kids. Our family was complete, my reproductive aspirations had been hard-earned, and it was time to focus on my productive ambitions.

Raahi left the day after Som started his job.

Along with Raahi, I also lost the structure in my professional life. Left without a campus, an office, meetings, events, and colleagues to occupy my life, it has been impossible to feel productive or purposeful. In the absence of a swinging infant in the house, the desk, chair and bookcase suddenly seem too wooden, too pointless. The eleven unpacked boxes of useful and useless papers and books in the office are a few feet away from unpacked boxes of diapers and baby clothes in the closet. There is a computer whose battery has slowed from the months it was not turned on. Because it houses still and moving images of my daughter’s tiny life. I could not see them, and I also could not open the dozens of papers and projects also contained there.

The burning flame, a desire. As a girl, it was to make a mark, a difference. Then another one started to flicker.  As a woman, I wanted for the flame of my motherhood to warm my home, and the fire of my intellect to signal my place in the greater world. For the most productive years of my life, I have struggled to be reproductive. Now I am neither. After ten years of trying to have a family, and of giving up everything else for it, the two flames burned together for a little while, and then died down together, forever.  

How can there be anything else, I wonder every day. And yet when I read about someone not having time because of a job, or struggling with their job, even if it is a bereaved mother, I wish I had something to show for my fourteen years out of college. For my thirty-seven years of life.

Other than a desk and a bookcase and eleven unpacked boxes of useful, and useless, papers and books.

What other kinds of loss have you been dealing with along with grieving your baby(ies)? How has your loss affected your views of your career and your intellect? Have you returned to work since your loss? Do you take refuge in working, or does it add more stress to your life? 

hard hearted

I am grown hard hearted you might say.

Grief - which might have softened me and uncovered my humanity - turned my core to stone, you might say.

If you did not know.

Sometimes I do not know.

I think of him, wait for grief to rise up and bubble to the surface, tears to come, grief to reassemble, manifest in the centre of my soul - but nothing comes. I wait to be strangled by the loss of him, for my arms to lift themselves up, shocked and empty from the lack of the weight of him. Nothing comes.

I try to write, show the world that still I miss him, that my whole self is changed and nothing will ever be the same without him but the words seem bland and empty now.

I miss that pain. I hanker for it. I ache, in a way I never thought I would for a bottle of grief to take out and tip up on my sleeve to sniff the scent of loss and feel it fill my nostrils, freeze my brain. I want to huddle, struck to stone by the loss of him, the utter total disappearance of my boy. I want to stare at photos and feel tears stream down my face, flicking away from them as child or husband strays to my side. I want to remember when there was no way to make it through a day without saying his name. I want to be back in the supermarket, telling a horror struck assistant over frozen peas that my baby died and so I can't cook a proper meal just now. I want to be folding baby clothes and finding places to hide them, cramming crates into a cupboard and forcing coats and blankets over them, tears of rage and hollow pain pouring down my face. I want to be in sunlight, the world dark around me, furious the world is spinning, wind is blowing, sea crashes and days continue. I want to hear his loss in every song on the radio, pick up every book to read and find a Freddie in the pages. I want to flinch away from baby aisle and pushchair, avert my eyes from bump and newborn, shut the computer in despair as another pregnancy is announced, another baby born.

But time has moved on. The days that sparkled with over bright reality, harsh and glaring and scraping the surface of my skin till I was raw and broken are gone. I felt everything then - and I hated it. Longed for it to end.

My life has grown to hold this pain, pushed it small, forced the grief and disbelief to a tiny molten core inside me, encased and covered by a crust I cooled and grew to cover it.

I can ignore the core. I exist around it, function, smile, talk of my children and skip a beat as I describe them, choose to keep him private. I have learned to slide my tectonic plates over the places where the fault lines are, pushing the broken, ragged places beneath a smoother surface. What was once a brutal landscape has softened, moulded, eroded away, grassed over, become old and gentle.

And if you saw me, you might think me heart hearted.

You might think I do not care. You might think I learned to live without him. You might think I had recovered.

***

I watched one night a story of savannah; the dusty landscape, parched and bare and half dead itself with bare branched trees, empty river, devoid of food or greenery. The smallest elephant in the pack gave up, lay down, stayed down. His bewildered mother, on her knees, tugging at him, lifting at him, trying to pull him back to life and her desperate moan, her grief, her utter helpless disbelief to lose him broke through all the defences I had built.

It was her moan that broke me. It could hardly have been more human. I do not think there could have been an ounce more pain contained in it, not if she had had words to say to us.

I cried for her. Gasping, wrenching, sobbing tears.

That's how recovered I am.

In the early days I had a million triggers; it seemed as if the world was determined to bring me down at every turn. The triggers are more subtle now and often unexpected and in a strange way I welcome them at times. What triggers your grief? Do you have ways to manage them, have you learned to accommodate them in your life or have you had to change to avoid them? Do you, like me, ever welcome them?

The never-ending story

The month after I got pregnant with A, I started a new job, New post-doc, same institution, different emphasis. My friend from the post-doc before this one started a new job that same summer. This semester now is the second of her seventh year at that job. Next fall she will be on sabbatical.

Perhaps it's the oddity of the academic culture in which I stew that seven year increments mean so much to me. Sabbatical, the time to not do what you are normally doing at the institution, but to still be paid your regular salary for the time is not a uniquely academic phenomenon anymore, but it is still mostly academic. It's a nice incentive and a chance to do something you don't usually get a chance to do-- learn something new, experiment with a new approach, or just catch up on everything you normally don't get to do.

In my religion too, though I don't very often participate in its formal rituals, 7 is a big deal. After all, we're the ones who started the whole day of rest thing, as God rested on the seventh day, having done all the heavy lifting in the first six. The idea for sabbatical itself comes from the Torah (Old Testament) rules about letting one's fields and one's people rest on the seventh year. 

Seven. Seven. Seven. It rings in my head with a strange wistfulness. He's not more gone over the precipice of seven than he was before it. So why does it gnaw on me so very much this snowy-snowy winter? Why do I find myself coming over to the fireplace mantle more often these days, just to glance at the little stuffed puppy we have that is sort of our A avatar, just to flick it on its nose, or to gently kiss the same? I miss him insanely, voraciously. I am sad, anew, maybe more now than before, that we didn't get to know him. Is this me missing him as a seven year old boy? I don't think I've felt this way about other ages before. Why now? I was remembering Monkey at seven the other day. She started competing in gymnastics that year. She seemed so very big to me then. The current crop of first year gymnasts seem so little.  

The Cub, the boy who came after A, he's five and a half now. He's grasping at the enormity of our collective loss, of his personal loss. This year, after asking for the upteenth time how and why A died, he got to the very edge of it-- "but we didn't even get to see him when he was big," he said, his voice ringing with indignation at the unfairness he just discovered. Yeah, kid, it's like that. And man, don't we all wish we would've gotten to see him when he was big.  

When we first started Glow, some of our readers were five years or even more out from the death of their children. I was a year and change. Five seemed so far removed, a lifetime or more. I thought that somehow it would be different at five. Or maybe I didn't. I sensed from the beginning that this is a lifetime commitment kind of a gig, at least for me. I remember saying and writing, even in that first year, that I expected to learn to live with this, but never expected to get over it. And I certainly have learned to live with A's absence a lot more now. These days I can get through a whole morning of classes without thinking about him. But then, to be fair, I also don't usually think about the rest of the clan during class.

So is this winter's intense longing just a part of ebb and flow, or was the thought of my friend's sabbatical also messing with my head? I know and I knew that grief can't be scheduled, that it does what it does when it must. But did a small strange part of me expect a grief sabbatical to roll in with the first day of February? I suppose it doesn't much matter except as another instance of proof that my son and my grief for him is, really and forever, a part of who I am.

What milestones have you crossed so far? Have they held any surprises for you?

Would you want a sabbatical from your grief, one that you could schedule or one that would come up on a predetermined schedule?   

inside the broken

There are things which broke on that day which will never be repaired.

My ability to give a toss, for one thing. I walked out of the hospital wearing pyjamas, clutching a yoghurt. Less than an hour after watching my 11 day old son die, I left the building having forgotten to dress but feeling it was important to not waste the money spent on a breakfast yoghurt that my throat had been too constricted to eat.

A million times I have reconstructed that morning, imagined that I screamed and howled and refused to be parted from him, imagined myself cradling him - illegally outside a car seat - on the journey home. Imagined his breathless body in our home, loved by us all, for a few hours. Just a few. Long enough for all of us to hold him.

A piece of me broke when I laid the body of my child upon the bed, turned my back, walked away, left him forever. I went quietly. I walked with measured steps, climbed inside my car, composed myself for breaking the news at home.

I stared at the car in front of us, proclaiming in a jolly yellow sign "baby on board" from the back window.

I didn't cry, or snarl, or instruct my husband to ram their smug, unknowing selves off the road with their sneering, crowing, baby sign.

I don't miss the drama queen, nor the woman who put her own needs and wants first and had a baby to suit herself. She broke. She is long gone.

The mother who arrived labouring and optimistic was not the one who walked out empty armed and brokenhearted. I wonder at what became of her on those haunted corridor days, the long nights hovering above a SCBU crib. I wonder at the mother who left, grief already put to one side, able to turn her back to a beloved but dead son and focus on the living.

I would not have believed that I had that in me. I would not have believed that my soft soul, so often such a shaken and shifting thing, would have hardened, frozen, stiffened and done the deed.

I am not sure if I want to be the mother who walked away. It does not feel honourable nor does the walking illustrate the love, or the desire to stay forever, suck him inside of me, curl up upon that bed with him inside my arms and keep him warm with my warmth until we both grew cold.

But the one who arrived home. Broken, yes, but strong. So very, very much stronger than anyone believed. Least of all me.

There are things that broke inside of me that day; faith, trust, patience and tolerance. Energy for the small worries, some measure of mercy for human foibles are long gone. I do not wish to be troubled by the minutiae of petty irritations. I do not suffer them gladly.

What was left, when all that cracked and fell away, was new, pressured hardened, solid, changed.

I survived.

My son died, in my arms, under my gaze.

But I survived. I changed, changed deeply to my core, but I have survived. Sometimes, I rather resent that it is possible to do so.

Can you identify parts of your personality that have changed since the loss of your child? Are there changes you welcome in some way or do you resent them utterly? People talk about 'becoming a better person' as an aspiration after experiencing loss; is it possible for that to happen? Is it damaging to even try? In what ways has grief been a journey for your 'self', your character and how do you feel about it if it has?

the scbu legacy

There is a boy on my lap, ten months old, and he's been gasping for breath all evening and the antibiotics that should be helping are making a red rash creep up his cheeks. It's getting harder to breathe now and I'm looking at him and I know what the doctor - kind, understanding - is going to say next.

"I think we need to admit him."

I'm all on my own with a million screaming voices in my head and I don't know how to help him - or me - and a tear splashes down on his face.

I'm always raining tears on my boys.

And then she says:

"He will be okay."

Beat. Follows Beat. Follows Beat.

I look up and I can feel the look that I give her.

"I've been told that before."

Flatly.

Don't tell me this will be okay. You know nothing. You people can't save my boys. I don't believe you.

***

There is a boy on his lap, ten days old, and he's arching and gasping and the room has stilled to a horror struck silence. He's been stable - doing better -  but suddenly the world has dissolved and a hiccuping gulp for air has become a desperate grapple for life and he's suddenly all ours, our responsibility and I can see that he's dying and it's going to be unbearable, painful, the cruelest and worst possible ending.

The antibiotics that should be saving him are doing nothing and no one knows why.

I know what she's going to say next. Kind, understanding.

"I think it's time to make a decision. If you wait, there won't be a decision to make."

Beep. Follows Beep. Follows Beep.

Damn monitors. Damn wires. Damn tubes that came between us and didn't save him. I don't know what to do to help him. Or me.

And then I do.

I look up and I can feel the look that I give her.

"Do it. One last chance. Only one. Give him till tomorrow to try to live."

Don't tell me this will be okay. I've been telling you for ten days that this won't be okay. And you can't save him. You don't know why, but you can't save him.

And I'm all alone, all night, with a boy who said no to his one last chance and who chose to give up on breathing and chose to reject the help that all the medics who wanted to save him offered and who left me, with a million voices screaming in my head, with the knowledge that I let him go because that was all the mothering I could give him. That was all the kindness I could offer. That was for the best, for him, for all of us.

***

We don't talk about the SCBU days. We don't talk about how the rhythmic beep of a monitor still sends us into silent meltdown. We don't talk about how each illness, erroneous blood test, each new health problem for our girls and rainbow boy forces us to silently confront the reality that our child died and when we needed them, the doctors couldn't save him. Didn't know. Can do so many brilliant things but couldn't save a little boy who lacked the fight to live. We don't talk about how one doctor said he would do well, that 24 hours later we crashed as another spelt out what 'do well' might mean for a boy who didn't want to suck. We don't talk about the peak as he opened his eyes and began to respond or the pit of despair that hauled us down as something inexplicable tore him away from us again. When our subsequent child is - repeatedly - admitted to hospital with breathing problems (and lives, I grant you) I go alone to care for him. Alone beats the companionship in terror of the SCBU parent bedside journey.

Just waiting for the balloon to go up. Just waiting for the hammer to fall.

Three years on, we do not let ourselves look at Freddie's 11 days and acknowledge how easily it could all happen again. And that means we do not look at his life at all.

***

They couldn't save him. They didn't know. And so how can we ever believe  in "it will be okay" ever again?

How has the loss of your child changed your feelings to illness since? How has it altered your parenting to subsequent or other children? Are you stronger or weaker in crisis since? Do you see death lurking around every corner or do you thumb your nose at it? And if you experienced a SCBU (NICU) journey, what is it's legacy in your life since?