Sugar and spice and sympathy

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Sugar and spice and sympathy

As I stand in front of that card section—trying to be the friend I know my friends wish I could be—I realize amidst shaking hands and unsteady heartbeat that I can’t do this. I can’t bring myself to select, pay for, and send that card. Besides, what on earth would I write inside? I feel anxious just thinking about it. My baby was sugar and spice and everything nice, a sweet baby girl who brought us so much joy and happiness. Her birth indeed fully changed our lives. Her death is what has changed us the most.

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The mannequin

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The mannequin

At the end of my 33rd birthday, I scrolled through a lifetime of photos of me wearing my tiara at breakfast, sipping tea with a grin on my face, opening gifts, blowing out candles, cutting a cake. In recent years, I've done it all with a smile plastered on my face, unnatural, my eyes as vacant as shop dolls. I have been posing. I don’t feel the way I look or look the way I feel. I am not that smiling woman.

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Waves

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Waves

You round a corner and the lamp swings just so, and you catch a quick glimpse of something entirely magnificent, something that steals your breath. A tapestry, perhaps. Or a floor to ceiling stained glass window. You know, completely normal things you find in normal castles. Except that long ago all lights in this one were put out, and there is no fairy tale twist to reverse this curse.

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The opposite of pride

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The opposite of pride

All the time, babies are born perfect and alive without prenatal care, vitamins, heartbeat monitors, ultrasounds, and tests. By doing these things, we think we have some control, when we don’t. We just don’t. So when something goes wrong (the baby is formed with a heart defect; no kidneys; neural tube problem; the cord knots; the placenta tears away; the cervix gives out) ….what do we have?

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Congratulations

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Congratulations

My friend shifted his weight and looked around the room. “Oh gosh, okay, wow. I’m so sorry. Oh, man. Yikes.” For days I thought about the exchange, and how badly I yearned to speak from the vantage point of a mother with a live child. No one had ever innocently asked me about my baby. Until I told this friend that Cora died, the dialogue was unfolding the way a typical one with a new mother should. It felt weird, wrong, wonderfully make-believe.

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