What dreams may come

I don't tend to remember dreams. I used to say I don't dream, and then I learned that we all dream, but unless we wake up at the right time in the sleep cycle, we don't remember what it was we were dreaming about. So now I use scientifically correct terminology-- I don't tend to remember dreams.

The times I have dreamt of A? That I remember? I don't even need one hand to count. And never have I seen him as an infant, either the way he looked when he was born or as an alive one. Since I am by nature not an easily guilt-ridden parent, this does not usually cause me angst. I don't even know if I ever felt envious of the bloggers who have had these vivid live baby dreams-- the practical side of me kicks in right away with the "how hard it must be to wake up from a dream like that."

The times I have seen A in a dream? Well, a number of times before he was born. When I owned up last year to knowing he wouldn't be staying I left one thing out-- the dreams. I saw him in my dreams, a couple of times, while I was pregnant with him. Never as an infant. Always as a little boy, always in a distance, with a full head of curly hair, never looking at me, always running away. If this was a part of a storyline in a book or a movie, I would roll my eyes. Too much, too thick, too manipulative. But, as Mark Twain famously noted, fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth-- not so much.

A was born with curly hair. Tiny little waves of hair, perfect little squiggles, all wet from the birth, all over his perfect little head. And in one of the only dreams I remember from the weeks after, he was still running away, but this time he stopped and turned his head to look back.

My boys are different people, I am sure of it. Was sure of it the whole time, from before I was ever pregnant with the Cub. (Though who can really say how much of this surety is a pushback against the idea that a living baby fixes the grief and the griever-- one of my absolute favorites, that.) And even if I wasn't convinced of A being distinct from any future baby just on general principle, there would still be the part where he was running away from me in the dreams. That's not to say that I think that bereaved parents who believe that the souls of their children who are gone come back to them are wrong. I am, as with so many things in this grief world, agnostic on this. For other people. Not for myself. My boys are distinct.

And actually, since I was so sure that if we were to have a living baby it would have to be a girl, I considered the whole question, as it relates to me, purely theoretical. I think I was even a bit smug about that in the privacy of my own mind. Obviously that is not how it went. Though now that it went, now that I am getting to know the Cub, I am ready to attest with even more conviction-- they are different.

Except... Except that once in a while I think back to this other dream I remember from the early weeks. Well, "remember" is a bit strong there. The dream that was capital W Weird. Spontaneous human cloning-- oh yeah, baby! I dreamt, as far as I can remember, because it became hazy within minutes of waking up, that there were some cells left of A's placenta, and that at some point one of them went all pluripotent and created another, genetically identical pregnancy. This is both bizarre and absurd. So much so that I think I knew even in the dream that I was, in fact, dreaming. I certainly knew it the very moment I woke up (behold the power of years and years of my not entirely wasted edumucation). In the end, though, after I dismissed the literal scenario of the dream, in the end I had this unmistakable feeling that there was something tangible, something physical left. Even if I couldn't touch it.

Curiously, this dream happened only days before one of the handful of dead baby bloggers I was reading at the time posted about the research that showed that fetal cells can enter mother's bloodstream and remain there for at least 27 years. Physical indeed.

So what about you? Do you remember your dreams? How much attention do you pay to them? Do you dream about your dead baby? Do you want to?

replacement

With our surrogate, Kyrie, just a few weeks away from what we hope will be the safe delivery of our son, I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between this possible new baby and the twins we lost a little more than two years ago. Of course, this new child can't be a literal replacement for the twins. But there's less to distinguish them than one might think.

 Part of that is simply the mechanics of IVF. One afternoon in April 2006, on the third floor of a big hospital in the Northeast, ten embryos were coaxed into being. Curled in their petri dishes, cells dividing, the embryos, from my point of view, were interchangeable. I hoped that at least one of them would grow to be my child, but I didn't care which one and I didn't give much thought to what would happen to the others.

The doctors chose two embryos -- call them A and B -- to transfer and froze the rest. A and B became the twins and we all know how that turned out. So, in April 2008, they unfroze embryo C, which is now, at least theoretically, the baby due at the beginning of January.

Although the selection of which embryos to transfer wasn't entirely random, chance clearly played the guiding role. Right now, I could just as easily be mourning the loss of embryos D and E or cautiously celebrating the impending arrival of F. And that cascade of contingencies make it that much harder to attach significance to the individual identity of any of them.

Moreover, over time, the twins themselves have become mostly an abstraction. I have almost no actual memories of them -- a positive pregnancy test, a dozen increasingly ominous ultrasounds, a month or two or flutters and kicks. What memories I do have are really about myself, my hopes, my wishes, my painting an imaginary future in pastel shades of pink and blue. And, though much more hesitantly, I find myself now thinking almost the identical thoughts, transferring the old dreams to this new child and wondering whether I can see this child -- at least in some non-literal way -- as one of the twins returned to me.

Because I tend to think in metaphors, and extended and heavy-handed ones at that, let me put it this way. Imagine you're looking into a series of lighted kitchen windows at dinnertime. In one lucky house, all the chairs at the table are filled with cheerful family members. In the house next door, there are chairs with no-one sitting in them, but you notice that they're drawn close to the table, still part of the family circle. In yet another house, the table at first seems full, but if you look in the next room, you'll find the unused chairs carefully, lovingly stored away.

And then, in the house I hope one day to live in, there's a chair that, in the manner of Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously occupied and empty.  And in it sits a little boy who is at once here and, well, absolutely elsewhere.

Your thoughts on the concept of the replacement child? A dangerous or unfair idea? An understandable rationalization? Something in between?

What does your dinner table look like?

the 'are you there, god? it's me, medusa' blogolympics

Maybe, for you, it’s God with a capital G. Or perhaps it’s the Universe. Or Allah or Buddha or Shakti or Jesus or Gitche Manitou. Or the random spark of nature, of dust and regrowth free of myth. Or nothing.

For many of us, growing a headful of snakes through the experience of babyloss drums up a host of unanswerable questions: Why? Is there really anybody Out There? What’s the point of all this, and where do I go from here?

We thrash and cry and stomp feet and we may leave, answering what feels like abandonment with abandonment. Then we may find quietness, and we may find our way back to faith, or perhaps faith with a modified floorplan. Or perhaps not. Perhaps we are comforted with randomness, subscribing to no particular being who may or may not be responsible for who stays and who doesn't.

For the next while, babylost parents of varied faiths—Christian, Hindu, Atheist, Jewish, Buddhist, Islamic, Naturalist/Wiccan and more—will keep house here at Glow in the Woods. As guest authors, they’ll share with us how their beliefs have coloured their re-entry into the ordinary world and affected their path towards healing.

We'll be publishing them on the site through the month of October, and at any point we invite you to share your own story on your blog using the same meditations given to our guest authors:

• How has your religion or belief system helped you to contemplate the universal questions that babyloss props up so vividly in front of the heart?
• How did the institutions surrounding your faith (church, synogogue, temple, spiritual mentors) acknowledge your loss—or did they? If your beliefs are more freeform than institutional, what other sources of acknowledgement or comfort did you discover for yourself?
• Have you had episodes of startling clarity, or of being neck-deep in theological mud? Where did those episodes lead you, and for what purpose? How did they affect the kind of spirit-baby mother you are today?
• Trauma and loss can inspire moments of doubt and lapses in faith. What conviction, experience or encounter propelled you through that moment and brought you back into the fold—or helped you be okay with staying lapsed?

We're fascinated to see what comes to the surface for you. Don't feel you must explain why you believe what you believe. Just choose one moment, one idea, one teaching or mantra or sentiment that rang a bell in your heart—or simply tell us where you stand at this moment. The above are simply prompts from which you can explore as you wish.

how to participate

We’d love to see you all join in this conversation. Please share your reflections on your own blog by including your link in the comments of any are you there, god? post—either in response to a story written by an author who shares your spiritual background, or to explore new angles thanks to an author with a different perspective. Or, simply comment as you normally do, adding your voice to this space.

If you’re inspired to participate by posting your own story on your blog, the only rules of this exercise are word count—a maximum of 1000—and a few other points of commonsense.

• Be naked. Your writing need not be a religious hallmark card. The more authentic you are about what you know and what you don’t know, the more provocative and valuable this will be for everyone. Be open to talking about doubt, and uncomfortable lines of questioning, and episodes of therapeutic vice (we kid, but you get the idea).
• Please write in the context of your own experience, and refrain from using your beliefs as a basis to explain the spiritual fate of the loved ones of others.
• You’re all such clever mamas and papas we feel it’s almost unneccesary to qualify this, but we should: no proselytizing, please. Your intent is not to convince anyone of anything, nor to serve as an invitation to your faith. It is only to tell your story in the context of your beliefs.

The same groundrules will apply to all participants, contributors and readers/commenters alike. Please respect the sacred convictions and learning of everyone here by adding to dialogue rather than countering it with theologic generalizations or debate.

+++++++++

Let’s all subscribe to a Buddhist principle as we share: that of gentle speech. We are here to create a conversation that is non-divisive, encouraging, thoughtful, and reckoned and measured in accordance with solidarity and healing.

We’re curious to prove our hunch—that this gathering will serve to illustrate the oneness of parenthood, of love for children, of a need for light and hope that crosses all boundaries. That no matter what semantics we subscribe to and what shapes our beliefs take, we all share the same unanswerable questions and walk this path together.

The memory of birth and the expectation of death always lurk within the human being, making him separate from his fellows and consequently capable of intercourse with them. Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

From E.M. Forster’s Two Cheers for Democracy: What I Believe

no dominion

Just for a second, I saw them, as if in a child's picture book or one of those Anne Geddes baby-as-cauliflower-type photo montages.  Legion, the lot of them.  Some in crisp black and white, Rogers and Nancys with white, salt-crusted headstones, all little lambs and angels.  Others were more Technicolour, like the garish, blurry snapshots of my own childhood...a Jason, a Robin, a "beloved baby boy".  One, much newer, I recognized; the newborn girl with the hole in her heart, the first baby I ever knew who died.  Across the sweeping hill in the older part of the cemetery I could see their compatriots...almost too many to count, dim and sepia, names obscured or hopelessly ancient, buried with young mothers or the siblings who followed in a series like stepping stones of sorrow.  For a second in the peace of the cemetery, I could see them all, each one a story, a whole life anticipated, condensed to a few dates and letters on a stone.  Each one a silent, plaintive testament to thethreshold we living things must traverse...into life, some way or another, and out.  For too many, the challenge insurmountable, the dates identical, cut short.

I do not go to the cemetery very often.  My own child is not there...we cremated him, still hoard the ashes in our bedroom with ambivalence, unsure of how to stage a letting go.  But I have known this place since my earliest years, when the grandmother whose bones lie here was alive and the guardian of the family stones, and I her charge, her companion in the regular pilgrimages of caregiving.  I fetched water from the old pump and dragged it to black, faded headstones of people even she barely remembered, fetched again and helped water the graves of her husband and brother and parents, all gone before I'd been born.  I listened and learned my family history in this place. 

While she weeded, though, I ran wild...and it was the childrens' graves that fascinated me.  I spun stories to myself about the children they represented, these names on the small stones.  I knew them, could have led a tour around the cemetery from Douglas to "wee Elmer" - though I was agog at the idea that an infant had ever been named Elmer - through the ones whose names were already crumbled away.  Rapt with the morbidity of childhood, I wondered about them all, spoke to them, flitted amongst them w eekly through years of summer afternoons while my grandmother tended the geraniums of people I'd never meet.

I drove through the cemetery on a whim, Friday, nearby and suddenly guilty because my grandmother has no geraniums to mark her place, now.  I stopped, and stood by her grave, staring at her name on the headstone, assessing...her name will be one of my daughter's names when this child crosses the threshold into whatever awaits.  I spoke to her, then, my grandmother, though I do not believe she's really there...spoke with love and awkwardness mixed, like a shy suitor.  I speak to Finn the same way, self-conscious; I do better listening for the dead than trying to hold up my end of the conversation.  Then I sat down by my grandmother's grave and drifted for a minute, feeling closer to her in calling up memories of her hands in the soil beside me.

That's when I saw them, all the babies.  My eyes caught on the first stone, three rows back and a few over, where it always was. It is a baby's stone, one where the dates, like Finn's, are only a day apart.   Nearly sixty years old now, that story, that loss.  I realized that the parents of that child are probably long dead themselves now, gone beyond whatever remained of their sorrow to the same side of the threshold as the baby they marked with a sandstone lamb.  And I looked to the left, where I knew the next stone would be, and suddenly for that one moment I felt like I could see them all, every one of them laid here, too small or too sick or just gone for no reason anyone will ever know.  They were neither beautiful angels nor objects of sorrow, of absence...just babies and children, real for a moment.  And time, finally, seemed to have made peace with them.

I wonder if, sixty years from now, when we here are mostly just memory, if the sting of our stories will go with us...if the words we leave here will bear witness only to love, to moments lived?

I long for that.