Luminous Grace

You have felt so far away recently.  The time with your sister is blurring the edges of my memories of you.  I need to re-connect with you.  I need to honor you.  I love you so much, my heart expands with the emotion with every beat.  I will try harder.  I will do better.

Thank You Carly Marie for the beautiful image.

Baby Loss all around

I have been meaning to write this post for sometime, but going back to work full time, and trying to be a fully present mama to Rosabella and mourn my beautiful Grace just exhausts me.  I have heard so many stories of baby loss in the last few weeks.  Did you know that Keanu Reeves lost a baby girl 2 years ago with his then girlfriend?  I had no idea.  I heard about a graduate school class mate of a co-worker whose baby died 23 hours after he was born.  Another woman had a miscarriage from an ectopic pregnancy, who then had her fallopian tube burst and during emergency surgery to remove her tube the surgeon nicked her uterine artery and could not stop the bleeding.  She was in a coma for days before going back to surgery and then had severe blood clots in her legs and is now on dialysis since her kidneys are failing.  Now people tell me these stories since I am the woman who lost a baby and I know what to say or do to help.  Oddly I do know what to say and what to do.  I am experienced and wise in the ways of living through the nightmare of losing your child.  I am knowing of infertility.  I inhabit that uncomfortable space of grief, since I have carried my own since Feb 10, 2012 the day my daughter died.

I had a dream last night that Rosabella had died, she was in her car seat at work and she was gone and a co-worker drove me home without her and I told him that we needed to go back because I could not sleep without her.  I woke in a cold sweat with my very living breathing baby at my side.  One of my babies is safe.

I ordered another picture for Grace from the Seashore of Remembrance.   I needed to connect with her again.  I wish that I could do more, I just don't know what more is.

The Nursery

I was just laying on the floor of the nursery, waiting for Rosabella to be deeply asleep enough that I could leave.  I was crying, quietly so that I would not wake the baby up, thinking about the first time I was laying on the floor of that room.  It was in the first few days I was home from the hospital, the room was unfinished, no crib, no changing table, and no baby.  Grace was gone and the room looked as if she was never here.  I just screamed and sobbed and shook and hyperventilated on that floor.  So mad at a world that would take my precious miracle baby away, so devastated that I was still here with an empty womb and milk filling my breasts.  Now this room has a baby, and all the accessories and clothes that come with a living child, but even with all that it is empty, because there is another baby who should have napped in there.  My dear Grace, my missing baby, I love you so.

My First Week Back at Work

I survived my first week away from Rosabella.  Holding her and nursing her and being her Mom has been like a balm on my wounded heart.  My heart that misses Grace every day.  Going back to work this week and being away has been so hard.  After Grace died going back to work helped, it gave me a few hours of the day to be distracted from my grief, a routine to keep my depression manageable.  I had a group of co-workers that supported me and it was a good environment.  Now just a little over a year later only 2 employees are still there from when I was pregnant with Grace.  Most of them don't know about her.  My clients ask about my new daughter and some know that I have another daughter, but most don't know that she is dead.  "Two girls only 15 months apart!  You've got your hands full."  I smile and say "yes I do."  What can you say?  I love that there are people out there for whom Grace is alive and I don't want her to die for them too...  It also makes me so sad because it brings back in that moment that she should be here, walking and talking and making life complicated with her baby sister.  The goneness of her resonates.  I am lucky to have her sister, I know this, but God would I love that complicated life that some people think that I have.