Hello, I haven’t been active on this blog for months really.
Life is moving in and over time my grief is changing. No less keen or strong, but more rounded now, less sharp and more weathered.
I think of my grief like sea glass, it isn’t worn away, but the sharpest edges are blunted and the clarity becomes blurred.
It’s over a year now since we lost Réalta, and it seems a lifetime ago that I was ever pregnant with Emmet. I can’t believe how far away they seem now, and that makes the grief keener.
They should not be far away, they should be here with me, and yet they are not and never will be.
I have in recent months pushed away my grief and thoughts of them both telling myself I should have moved on by now, my cousin is pregnant with two sweet babies and I want to throw myself into happily preparing for new arrivals in the family but I am struggling to make the leap.
Outwardly I am throwing myself into knitting and sewing baby things, but I’ve put up a barrier between my heart and the pending new arrivals.
I can’t dare to let myself get attached, tonight I decided this had to change, it’s not helping me to push away the natural feelings of loss and grief just because life has moved on.
I am allowed to grieve, allowed to miss them.
Tonight for the first time in months I switched on the playlist I made that saw me through my darkest days of grief and I cried.
Hit fat tears that felt like death and freedom all at once.
They are loved, they existed, and I have room in my heart to love and embrace the new life entering our family without my own grief putting up a barrier.
So I’m going to cry, listen to the songs that remind me of my babies, and search Pinterest for knitting patterns for the sweet babies of my cousin and pray for their safe and timely arrival.
The old does not have to give way for the new.
They can coexist.
With each new baby in the family, my own seem further and further away, like mist over the water they sometimes feel like they’re fading away, as the robust form of my now one year old niece shoves a biscuit in my face and bellows with strong lungs.
Our time together was bittersweet, but I will treasure it until I take my last breath, no matter how many babies of my own or others come between.
I would give everything I have for one more second, one more minute with them. To see what they would have looked like, to touch the faces that could have been.
I find my grief is no less keen nearly 3 years later, simply more weathered, and I realise now, more than I ever did, that ‘time heals all wounds’ is the biggest lie anybody ever wrote.
Surviving Miscarriage Together 