Robust, medically unremarkable babies are almost comical to me now, all linebackers and lumberjacks and riveter-rosies. Despite the safe arrival of these strapping boys and girls, labours that deviated from a triumphant ideal send some of their mothers into post-performance despair and the beast inside me tugs at its chain, lusting to snap.

But it's pointless folly to deny a hormonal, sleep-deprived postpartum mama her disappointment—like scolding "Think of all the starving children in Ethiopia!" to a teenager who sulks in front of a plateful of creamed spinach.

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One year ago this morning was the dawn of disaster.

If we don’t do this right now we’re going to lose both of them. We can barely find just the one heartbeat, and it’s extremely faint.

I lay strapped down and shaking and a masked face next to my ear whispered urgently through the chaos make a fist, make a fist… and the eyes behind the green paper were glassy and full of doom.

Then the world went black.

Instantaneously I awoke wondering if there had been some mistake, wondering why it hadn’t been done yet, clattering uncontrollably. The fluorescent, sterile room looked as it does when people come to their senses again in movies, shot through a vaseline-smeared lens, all sounds muffled as if underwater.

Which was fair enough. By fault of my own body, one of my sons had drowned.

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This is my goddamned territory. Stop choosing to be here. You don’t belong.

In my imagination I take birthers who mourn their lost goddesshood by the shoulders—especially those held dear—and prop them up in front of a billboard of my beloved Liam at his end, make them look as I had to make myself look. Turn them to stone with my snakes until the slats of the billboard rotate with that whirring click and these small, white words punctuate jet black:

BIRTH MATTERS.

UNTIL IT DOESN’T.

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In a pre-publish fit of uncertainty about this post, of which you see only excerpts, I spoke with Bon about potentially being the first bridge-burner here at Glow in the Woods.

I know it might be pain olympics, I know. But it’s totally true and don’t you think it’s justified and it has to be said and doesn’t that infuriate you too and there’s Us and Them and dammit, I’m tired of them thinking they can use the word ‘grief’ when Liam and Finn are gone.

In the space of this tantrum the post shrank in my head against my will, the venomous bits falling off with shame and imminent dissection.

A woman who calls her body a failure because of an unwanted c-section of a healthy baby leaves me with If you're a failure, what the hell am I? One of my babies is dead because of my body. Don't you dare presume to own my words.

Backed into a corner by the school of uncynical birth, I want to punch my way out. That’s all this is. One year later I’m still angry, blindingly so, hissing through a peephole at the rest of the world's sunshine-dappled daisy meadows.

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What does birth mean to you, now? How do you support birthing friends after what you’ve been through?

Most important: how is it possible to be up to your neck in self-pity and still have compassion for the relative heartbreak of anyone else?

Three years ago.

It was three years ago today I left the hospital for the first time after nearly three weeks of bedrest.  I'd been airlifted in during winter's last April gasp, but in my hermetic isolation in ye olde Craftmatic, the ground had transformed into a mushy carpet, spongy with sprigs of green poking through it.  I felt like Rip Van Winkle, utterly out of time.

We drove out of the city, to the old tower on its outskirts, the one I'd climbed as a child every time we visited.  My legs were weak and I walked gingerly.  I was not in pain, per se...just timid, afraid I would break.  The tower was closed, too old, too dangerous to be left open for tourists any longer.  I stood in front of it, staring, as if I looked long and hard enough I might catch a glimpse of a younger me, might disappear with her into a different time, any other time than this.

She did not materialize, that former self.  And I realized, viscerally, that she never would again...that there was no going back.  I had stepped off the side of my own flat earth.

I turned in the rain, then, and tested my footing on the slippery bank of overgrowth there that leads up and then down, eventually, to the harbour.  I climbed a little, until I was alone on a low ridge, looking down through the brush on tiny sailboats, seabirds.  And when I was sure I was far enough away that no one could hear me, I spoke into the wind, and spoke his name for the first time in the thirty-six hours since he'd died.

i had a son.  his name was Finn.

It was only a whisper, spoken to raindrops.  But I knew it might be a very long time before I had the courage to say those words aloud again, to risk exposing the gaping wound I had suddenly become, to risk being that crazy lady talking about her dead baby.  I knew too that I needed, desperately, to mark him on the world, to tell someone of my joy and my pride in him, of my sorrow, to tell that he had been here. 

My tears mixed with the rain and those eight words echoed.
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It was only in the year and more after his death that those echoes found expression anywhere, for me.  On my blog, I began to carve out a space in which I could say his name, lay out sides of my parenting experience that I had no way to speak in polite company.  I felt exposed, but freed, too.  And in finding ways to incorporate Finn's story into my own narratives of myself as parent, I slowly became, once more, a version of whole.

Of the six of us here, I am the furthest out on this road of grieving and healing, the one whose loss is the furthest removed in time.  I am the one whose firstborn died, who went home both a mother and not a mother.  I was utterly changed by the eleven hours of my son's life, but the disconnect between the internal sea change of becoming a parent and the external lack of anything to show for it...that sparked its own particular grief and isolation.  I am the only one, yet, who has had another child born since my loss, and perhaps the only one who has had another loss in the interim.  I am proof of survival. And I am grateful to be in the company of these woman here, sister Medusas and friends, all of us with our stories.  

My name is Bonnie.  I had a son.  His name was Finn. 

Welcome.