running on the spot
Inside is a mile-long glossy bar holding up various suits and skirts and a slew of dewy cocktails. The light is perfectly dim and golden, flattering. Our friendly Australian bartender has moved on after having slung us five perfectly mixed martinis of the pink variety. We cheers and clink, smile for a photo taken with someone’s Crackberry.
I end up at the head of the table. We’re sitting on the patio against a black glass wall that shows our reflections like a mirror in a darkened room. I see one, two, four faces sitting opposite each other, mostly blonde, mostly under 35. They’re gorgeous. Smiling, warmed and slinky as the vodka hits their systems.
I feel myself withering under the glare of their confidence. It’s an entirely familiar feeling. I know with certainty that at least one of them will happily end up in the bed of a stranger tonight and I stare back at myself in the glass once again, wondering what the hell I’m doing there.
.::.
I imagine what Archie, Gabriella, and Ruby, the three other babies in our birth prep class, look like now. The ones who somewhere out there now walk and talk and giggle.
I think about their mothers, who I had grown so close to, so quickly. I had come to rely on them for distraction in the months leading up to Sadie’s birth. We would talk, drink tea, and eat cookies while we terrified each other with potential birthing scenarios. Once the kids were born we ventured out the first time together, navigating life with a tiny human attached to us, finally, on the outside rather than in. In my mind they were the ones I’d happily spend my years in England closest to.
Of course I haven’t seen them since. My choice, not theirs.
.::.
I look around in silence while I wait for my husband to come back from the bar. It’s the pre-concert happy hour and I’m no longer sure my long cardigan and high boots are stylish now that I observe the wet-look leggings and gladiator heels. Everyone is magically 23, chins held high, their hair intentionally tousled and eyelids perfectly smokey. I’m astonished at the ease with which they carry themselves and in that moment I feel three hundred years old. Have I ever looked that carefree? He hands me a drink and I can’t stop myself from thinking, “I could be singing a toddler to sleep at this hour.” I should be.
I shake it off and concentrate on the story he’s telling me.
.::.
Every new situation I find myself in reminds me in some way of how different my life is from what I believed it would be at this point. As I find myself reliving the lifestyle I was once so happy to leave behind, I feel stuck. I'm wedged between my life before and my life after what should have been.
Where does the childless mother fit, exactly? We’re strangely and so reluctantly responsibility-free. None of it gives me the satisfaction I need. Yet I can’t seem to push myself to move in the one direction that would change all of that. Knowing there's even a chance we could go through it all over again leaves me painfully idle, and angry at myself for not having the courage to move forward.
My crystal ball has apparently been lost in the mail.
.::.
How did you reconcile the person you were before your loss with the person you were forced to become?
jen | Thursday, October 29, 2009 
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Reader Comments (19)
I'll write a bit more later, but this is masterful. This is so vivid, and so universal.
I don't know if the person I used to be and the person I am now are reconciled. Some days I feel like I've left the person I was behind, like she's irretrievably lost. And I miss the person I used to be, her optimism and youth and energy; I'm jealous of her, too.
I know exactly what you mean about the courage to move forward. I'm as big a coward as they come.
right now i don't really believe reconciliation with my past self is possible. i think my old life and old way of being in the world is completely and totally over. line in the sand.
but i'm open to the possibility that maybe what tash describes above will happen for me too - that (goddamn) time will do it's work and someday those other pieces of me will reappear and have a place in my new life. and also like tash said, i'm very aware that there's nothing i can do to make that happen.
As for the old me and new me . . . no idea. For one, I'm not that far removed from my greatest loss to see a terribly clear distinction. For another, I think the bigger turning point was the miscarriage a year ago (almost to the day that we learned there was no baby growing). That was when I learned firsthand that getting pregnant doesn't always lead to babies and that was when the trust and naivete were shattered. What shattered with Gabriel were my heart and the last tendrils of optimism and idealism in regards to pregnancy and birth. The next pregnancy will be a bigger test of the old me and the new me and I'm just hoping to reconcile the total fear and negativity with connecting and love for that child on their own terms.
In many ways, we haven't changed much over the last year. I can see a change from the before-miscarriage but not so much between those pregnancies. I still can indulge in books, I still love naps on rainy weekend afternoons, we feel no guilt in wholeheartedly enjoying basketball season again (though I remember the first time I knew I was feeling movement was when I was reading an article on my basketball team, and we laughed because we 'knew' Gabriel would be a Spurs fan too - and I feel a pang that he is not still inside me, kicking away as we watch them now . . . but it hasn't been a source of guilt or complication, just one shred of normalcy in our lives resumed and I am so grateful). And yet, the relationships that have changed have made sad, hurt me - often it was the opposite of what you write, Jen - their choice, not mine (though I doubt they would necessarily see it that way).
I know I am more sad, less joyful, but I feel that happiness and joy are not impossibilities for me. The place where I feel most stuck or compressed is in our house. We have accumulated a lot of baby items over the last year/three pregnancies. I have a laundry basket full of maternity clothes I no longer need and won't need if the next pregnancy is due in the fall, because they are geared towards being heavily pregnant in winter. II have room that has a completed changing table with a full stash of cloth diapers, a disassembled crib, an assembled mobile, a box of clothes for the first few months of a baby boy's life and a lot of storage boxes from our move into the house (er, 3+ years ago) just sitting. Like the baby swing that sits in our living room, assembled to train the dog. I know they are there, and they are just part of my landscape now. I've made no movements to put them away, to shut the door to the nursery, to move them. I can't while there is still hope of another pregnancy that 'works' this time. So I'm in this limbo of childless mother, frozen in time of preparing for a baby that is dead.
Like many others I lost my innocence when I lost my baby. I've taken a battering and my before and after can't reconcile. But I don't think they need to. I've grown up a little. I've moved on from my previous self. Hope that makes sense!
I'm not sure if I will ever reconcile the two but I feel certain that, underneath the grief and the anger, there are still some shards of the woman I was before Georgina died. Bits and pieces. Some good, some bad.
I'm slowly sticking those shards back together, in a different order from the way I was arranged before. The same materials but not the same person.
Actually, for me, before Isla died I was already disconnected from most of the social groups I was previously a member of. I have three primary groups of friends and a scattering of other individual friends I have made over the years.
I grew up in a small, very blue collar town and I have maintained a group of girlfriends from elementary school. But since moving during highschool, going on to attend University and then law school, relocating to the big city, and securing a Bay Street job, as time passed, I found I had less and less in common with my elementary school friends. Although, once I was married, moved out of my downtown apartment and purchased a small family home on the outskirts of town, and got pregnant, for a time I did find myself reconnecting with this group of friends as we started to have more in common again.
Then there are the mostly single bombshell friends of mine from law school. Once I got engaged, left my Bay Street job in prefence of a job in a small firm practising family law, and began thinking of starting a family, I naturally had less in common with those friends too, and nights out, sipping martinis and talking of sexual encounters and shop talk, became of little interest to me.
Finally, there is my other group of "real" friends from law school. The ones who haven't been afraid to abandon their Bay Street jobs in favour of social justice work and who are mostly in serious relationships, but not married or even engaged for that matter, and who are still a long ways away from starting families.
Now that Isla has died, I really don't feel I belong anywhere. My elementary school friends, while wonderfully supportive, have babies (one born just weeks after Isla's death and birth) and now that I am no longer talking diapers and strollers and still concerned about my career, its difficult to socialize with them in a group. And with the lawyer friends, while I am back to work now and no longer pregnant, I still cannot connect with them the way I once did because I still have motherhood on the brain.
I guess I was already struggling to reconcile me before pregnancy with my former self, so reconciling me after baby death with me before pregnancy is even more of a struggle. Looking forward, once I am pregnant again and fingers crossed become a mother to a living child, I think I will still struggle to belong. The thought of attending regular prenatal classes with those immune to the tragedy of baby death gives me nightmares and I can't really envision myself joining mommy-and-me groups and socializing with cheery, naive first time mothers.
It's clear from the comments above that most of us babylost parents are still struggling to connect or reconnect, and I think that is precisely why our online community is so important. So, thanks for posting!
i often read the posts here but have never commented
my first child, a son, was stillborn at 26 weeks.
the "before" me was anxious, pessimistic, analytical.
the "after" me is anxious, pessimistic, analytical, and unfortunately and horrifically validated in all my negative thought processes.
the "before" me was confident, compassionate, grounded.
the "after" me is confident, compassionate, grounded, and deeply connected to the emotional suffering of my fellow human beings - in a way i never was before.
i was never a naive, optimistic, light-hearted woman.
but now i know that i never will be.
the difference in the before and after versions of myself - aside from the overwhelming saddness added to the stress of everyday life, and the depth of emotion that i realize i am capable of - is that now i want to be an optimist.
now i want the lightheartedness, the naivity, the sense that things will turn out ok.
before, i accepted that i couldn't have things that i wanted.
now i want many things i can't have.
i want my son.
i want the old me whose fears and precautions and reservations were never validated by horrific events.
thank you for all the beautiful and thought provoking posts on this site.
Great post.
Time took it away; time and the live births of two other children. I don't think before I was pregnant with Flora, before we brought her home, that I did reconcile that before and after person. It's reconciled, integrated now, because I am a dead baby mama as well as a live baby mama. And there is still dissonance, the seeking after the third child, the missing son. I don't know if it ever ends.
ciao,
rpm
for those of us who lost our first and still don't have that child, it just really sucks. we were so ready and then we were knocked down. and i'm still not even pregnant so there isn't even that.
thank you for writing what i am living.