Both my babies
When I was in the depths of grief, it seemed as though all the books I could find on perinatal death traced a similar narrative arc: baby dies, sadness ensues, then the birth of new baby restores faith in life, the universe and everything. It’s a nice framing device, babies as bookends with the grief neatly contained in between. My own experience was more unruly.
Hearing all those ‘happy ever afters’ just felt cruel—particularly when we were trying so hard to replicate the formula, with no success. In that babyless space, I had to find something else. Mostly, it was a willingness to experience and sit with the things I wanted to run a mile from. I am now old friends with grief. I treat it with a healthy respect. On some days, it is still enormous and crushing, but at the same time has become ordinary—we fold it up with our washing and rinse it out when we brush our teeth. When I laugh, I want to know that her little cells are laughing within mine, and that when I see something beautiful, it is all the more beautiful because it feels like she is a part of it, and all the more heartbreaking because she is not here to see it.
If you are not yet in a state to hear about subsequent children, stop reading here.
•
This is our happy ever after. Three IVF cycles after the miscarriage, we got some good news. There was a positive pregnancy test, a scan with a heartbeat, and then, in May 2012, a beautiful baby boy, Ali. We still can’t believe our luck. He is, as a dear friend puts it, a ‘cube of joy’. Often a cube of joy that doesn’t want to go to bed, or put his pants on, but a cube of joy nonetheless. He is reassuringly robust. He bellowed the moment he was born, and continues to be—which is a comfort to me—a noisy sleeper. I hope he lives to tell his own story. That sounds a morbid way to think of your child (and, indeed, the thought of losing him makes me weep regularly) but it also gives me some perspective and sharpens my gratitude for him.
I have to be honest here. Having another baby did help. As the grief settled like muddy water in a jar, I could see there were different components of differing weights within it. The specific grief for our specific daughter was sedentary, solidifying at the bottom. It is with us wherever we go, it has become part of the ground underlying everything else. I am still heartbroken that she is not here, that we will never know what she would have been like as a schoolkid, as a big sister. But the grief for not being a mother of a living child—the hankering for the ephemera of tiny socks and small seashell ears, the patting and the rocking, playing peek-a-boo, making the train-cake—I have been slowly and happily pouring away since the wintery Monday afternoon when Ali emerged screamingly alive.
And while Ali is the happy ever after to our story, as always, the story has taken some unexpected turns. Rima and I have separated—mostly for reasons pre-dating our accident—but we remain friends, and co-parents to Ali and the girls. Our universe has fractured again, but no one has fallen down the chasm this time. And there is a freedom in calling a truce, and in deciding to stop pacing through the old dance steps that sent us round in painful circles.
Ali has changed so much already since he was born. Even within 24 hours of his birth, his head was no longer the soft squished newborn head, and the cord which was so plump and pulsing at his birth was quickly drying up and turning into a belly button. Too many tiny changes to catalogue—new skills, new habits, growth in every direction. He’s now over a month old, and yet his birth still feels so close—the surprise of having a living baby hasn’t worn off yet for me.
And it hit me that this is what being a parent is, to bear witness and care for another human being through their most intense period of growth and change—where their existing self is constantly slipping like mercury through your fingers, becoming a new baby, a new little person every day as they grow and change. As much as I want to grasp onto who Ali is this very minute, I know that this current version of him is just a snapshot—that he is the process rather than the minute by minute product of himself.
When I had that thought, it made me cry because I’m only just starting to grasp how much we missed out on with Z. Does that mean I completely missed parenting her, because, by the time I held her in my arms, she was still—she was not going to grow or move anymore? I felt lost for a moment as her mother. But not only did I love her through the constant transitions and growth of pregnancy—from a tiny cellular possibility to a kicking, hiccoughing, nearly six pound baby—I also loved her and held her through that other big transition, from life to death. I was there surrounding her as her heart slowed and then stopped as we sat in the wreckage, but I was also there after she was born, holding her as the living warmth ebbed away from her body and her little soul stretched away to begin its travels.
I asked Rima the other day whether she thought Z could hear my dad singing her a lullaby when he held her after she was born, and she said, ‘Yes, the soul hangs around for a while, at least a day—that’s why we stay with someone who has died, with their body for the first day.’ That second transition—from someone you love whose heart has just stopped beating, to a cold body—has always frightened me a bit, thanks to all those cultural phobias of dead bodies and deterioration. There was a moment on the day we spent with her, when I had slept briefly and I woke and asked to hold her again, and the cold on her cheeks was noticeable. I knew we didn’t have much time with her—that the little baby soul we loved so much was mingling back into the atmosphere and gradually relinquishing the atoms of her body back to the elements.
I look at all the beautiful cards and gifts that family and friends have sent congratulating us on Ali’s birth, and it feels so unfair that Z got condolences instead. It will always be unfair. But now she exists in a state beyond fair and unfair. And to hold her as she crossed into death and to love her even all the way into death was all I could do as her mama.
Last night I dreamt that I was out shopping with Rima and the girls. We were in a toyshop, and Z was with us—she was a curly-headed toddler about fifteen months old. One moment she was looking at toys in our aisle, and the next I asked Rima where she’d gone—we couldn’t see her anywhere. We were searching all over the shop, calling out her name, and when it was clear she wasn’t there, we ran out to the street and were looking for her. I saw Rima run across the road and I was so scared that I’d see her pick up Z from the road—I wanted to find her but please god, not on the road, not hurt or killed.
Then a tram came, and I realised it was our tram home. I felt compelled to get on. In my head all sorts of arguments were tested and rejected—maybe she would know it was our tram, maybe someone took her on it. I had no idea, but I just needed get on that tram. Somehow we were now looking for both Ali and Z. I stepped up onto the tram, searching—and there she was, running into my arms. I hugged her to me and breathed her in, simultaneously looking around for Ali. ‘Who found her?’ I asked. ‘Was there a little boy with her?’ I asked. Some lanky teenagers sitting opposite waved at me to indicate it was them who had found her. They pointed and there was Ali—himself but a toddler only a few months younger than Z. I drew him and Z in—a solid little person in each arm—sobbing with relief. ‘Oh my babies,’ I cried, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I took my eyes off you!’
I woke to my own crying, and found my arms around someone warm—Rima. I listened for Ali’s snuffling breath in the co-sleeper next to our bed, and when I heard him, I exhaled—grateful for him; grateful for Z visiting my dreams; and so, so grateful for that feeling, however brief, of holding both my babies in my arms.