Different

I've been sitting on the edge of 200 posts for a while now. So much time has passed since my last post, I wonder who out there is even reading any more and who cares?

But that's been half the problem. I know there are still a lot of readers out there, and many of them are people I know. People I never really wanted reading in the first place. And because of this, it has made it a hard place for me to visit and vent. Because there are things I'd like to talk about here but can't or wont because I know there are prying, judging eyes out there - eyes belonging to people who really should give me the privacy and respect my grief and I deserve. So instead I get my dose of "community" through reading and commenting on other blogs and connecting with other parents on F.book. And of course there is also the fact that time is precious these days and most of the spare time I have is spent chasing Angus or sleeping, but that doesn't mean I still don't feel that huge gravitational pull to come back here and write every so often. I don't really know why I am writing now though, but I guess I got to the point where enough was enough. So here I am.

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After I lost Hope, I so desperately wanted to feel the same as anyone else I knew who'd had a baby. I shared her birth story with many dear friends who had already made the transition to motherhood in in the hope we could find similarities in our stories and that they would look at me just like one of them. I got pregnant, I carried a baby, I went in to labour, I pushed when I was told, I held my precious baby at the end of it all and I became a mum. I just wanted to be part of that tribe and I wanted to feel like them but from very early on, as early as seeing my dead baby on that ultrasound screen, deep down I knew how different I was.

For starters, I don't have any friends, or family, who have a photo of themselves looking like this holding one of their newborn children (thanks must go to another babyloss blogger for the inspiration and courage to share this photo):

This photo alone, almost impossible for me to look at, makes me so very different from everyone I know and with the more time that passes, I can't help but feel that gap widening. The memories of others fade, but I still nurture my hurt every day, even though they don't realise or acknowledge that. This adds to me feeling more and more isolated and so very different. The few who stand by me and who still ask how I really am now are the precious exception and are few and far between.

I don't try and pretend I am like anyone else now. I don't care if I don't fit in or seem different. I am different. My experiences are not like those of anyone else I know and I hope that gives me a level of understanding, empathy and perspective that I previously probably never had. I have lived through the unthinkable and I've somehow made it to two and a half years past that monumental time in my life with my sanity mostly intact. I'm not the wrecked, sobbing heap I was between the months of September 2008 and February 2009. If some had bothered to stick around that long, they would see that now. The edges have softened and so have I.

In some ways now, I am like everyone else, or I at least look that way. I have a very lovely little boy who keeps me busy like any regular toddler would. But there is that darkness in my past, a darkness that still lingers in my day to day and a darkness that I know will be part of my future, such is the nature of a loss like this. I can't pretend things are all sunshine and roses here with Angus in my life, I'm much more realistic than that, but the joy is there. And it is real.

That joy lives alongside the pain though. The exquisite pain that is moulded in to who I am. It is a part of me as much as the scar on my left shin is or my crooked bottom teeth. The pain and joy in my life walk hand in hand and somehow I am keeping them balanced. I don't really know how, but I am. I walk past other mothers in the street and I know for more reasons than one, I am not like them. And for now, that is ok. That is perfectly ok.

Naturally, more than anything, my greatest wish is still to have her back and to be an ordinary mum juggling two kids without the black shadows and the knowledge of how bad life can get. But that can't be. It will never be and maybe, just maybe, they call that integration. I would not say that I have accepted her death, as I fully admit I am not there yet, but the grief that followed has certainly slotted in to my day to day life now and for the most part, I know how to handle the wild and savage beast that it is.

Those mothers I pass in the streets may or may not notice I walk with a limp, but hey, I'm still walking. And I'm still here. And whoa, 200 posts.