Losing her

With the passing of time and the birth of a new baby, I am still struggling to know what to do with not only myself and my grief, but this space.

But I still want to write. I still need to write. Just don't know what to say or how to say it. Still so lost. Still so very overwhelmed by everything. All of it.

Because there is not much new to say. You know you are scraping the bottom of the blogging barrel when you want to write about how sad you were to recently sell your car. The car that carried your dead baby.

Or how you are still disappointed in friends. Friends that were once great friends. You wonder about those friends. You wonder what they tell people when people ask them about you, if in fact anyone still does ask them about you. What do they say? "Oh Sally. No, I'm no longer friends with her. She went mad with her grief so I abandoned her. I'm better off without her. She's crazy." You wonder, but then most of the time you don't care, as clearly you are better off without them. But to keep talking about that seems pointless. It is old ground. Nothing new there. My disappointment wont ever dissipate. So no need to keep re-hashing it.

Or how you heard about another hospital's birth class that doesn't mention stillbirth. And that it lists the "adverse outcomes" of birth as needing forceps or an epidural. You shake your head, but you realise there is nothing new in that either. These things will probably never change and how long can you really stay mad about this stuff for? It has all been said. It is all getting boring.

Or how how lately, your think about your dead baby more than you almost ever have before. You feed your new live baby in the depths of the night. You look at his sweet little face, and you think about the one lost. You re-live the horror. You almost have to cry yourself back to sleep as you still can't for the life of you imagine how you got here and how this horrible thing ever happened to you. You think back to those glorious nine months carrying her and you STILL shake your head in disbelief that it turned out the way it did. But it has all been said. Time and time again.

Yet, despite the fact I think about her more than ever, I still feel like I'm losing her. All over again.

For years now, I have had a recurring dream about losing my wedding rings. The dream takes on various shapes and forms, but the outcome is always the same. I don't sleep with my rings on and when I have one of these dreams, I inevitably wake startled then clasp on to my ring finger, which is devoid of any jewellery. But then I realise it was that same dream. Again. The rings are on the bench in the bathroom where they always are. They are safe and sound.

It obviously didn't take me much to realise what these dreams were about. They are clearly about my deep-seated fears of losing Simon. Of wondering how on earth I'd go on if this awful fate were to befall me. Little did I know when I started having these dreams that something this awful WOULD happen to me. Not Simon, but our baby, our precious first born baby girl.

But the dream has changed now. It is not my wedding rings I lose when I slip in to my slumber, it is the ring I had made after Hope died. The piece of jewellery I got myself because I didn't get my baby. The consolation prize, as it were.

And really, it is pretty easy to see what this is all about. I fear I am losing her. I think about her so much. I wonder, I ache, I remember, but I fear I am losing her. That with Angus here, I am letting her go.

I don't want to let go of this space. I don't want to lose this community. But most importantly, I don't want to lose her. Not again. Because once was bad enough.