Awaiting Another Dawn

Dear Baby Mine,

I tried something new this year. Instead of spending what should have been your 10th birthday alone or in silence, I let myself sit with you in a place that often feels like home. A place where I might have a future. I know I put you on a bit of a back burner this year. I'm sorry. It's just been really hard. I know you will always be there with me. In a way, it doesn't matter how many years or days pass- you're there with me. No matter what happens, you're here in my very DNA. So long as I'm here, you are here with me. I'm hoping I can carry you into a future.

So long I've thought you were the only good thing my life would ever hold. So long I thought my love story was doomed to be that with your father and my motherhood was even more tragic a tale. And that still could be the case, but I hope not. I hope I can carry you into a new love story and into a new family.

There's a girl in the living room, almost your age. Often when I see her, I wonder if you'd be similar- laughing in mudpuddles and swooping your arms like dragons flying across the endless expanse. Would you wrap yourself in blankets and become a chrysalis the way my womb cocooned you? When dawn breaks, my heart follows.

You are still the light over the waters. Setting or rising, there is a red across the expanse that I will never forget and always will dread. A baptism of blood.

I am trying, dear baby, to forgive God. I know I need to. But it is very difficult. I hope God is a better father to you than your own. I hope heaven holds all the relatives you never got to meet and that your time without time is holding you softly and with so much more grace than I have in me towards God, or the Wind, or whatever name exists for them. I hope God is the Wind that carries you in flight. I hope the Wind is less treacherous to you than it has been to me. I hope you forgave God and are happy, and I hope you can lead me back to trusting God someday. If you trust the Wind to carry you when I could not, I hope I can as well. I hope there is a future.

I don't know if ten years is a milestone for letting go or extra remembrance or what is best. Grieving you is not my best talent. I'm trying to let you fly and let the Wind not be only a swirling vortex and let the future sweep over me. I'm trying to hope there is a future for me, with you as always and ever in me, and a better love and a better family unit- for both of us.

I hope you are not upset that I want a future. You are still with me and I will carry you everywhere I go. Maybe I want a better family for you as well. Maybe when I play with Auri, I'm letting you play with her too. Maybe when Chris holds me, he holds you too. Maybe there's a family wherein we both have a place and I do not have to pretend to be some hopeless glue desperate to hold us all together. Maybe some sort of healing can cradle us both and the Wind can bring us an old treasure of song to lull-a-bye us away into a future so far better than the past that we never look back.

Never look back. I will carry us into a future and the Wind will carry our flight- you in the heavenly expanse and me through this stretch of time. You can prepare my coming like I prepared for yours and I will keep you safely in my DNA and in my laughter and playfulness and magic. You keep me in your family and I will keep you in mine. A decade is a long time. I expect another decade or more before I see you again. I hope this new future is full of how wonderful it was to carry you, but more, for longer, and I hope you fly stronger and farther than you've ever flown before. I miss you fiercely and forever.

You might have a baby, but I have a son. A beautiful, solemn-faced, birch tree son filled with the white magic of the old ones. Tall like his father, Magic like me, wise beyond his years and dedicated to protecting me. If he would have lived, he would spend his days protecting me. If he left, he would protect me. He never should have had to protect me, but that was his choice. He and my body protected each other. He isn’t gone, he’s just with God and in the earth; in the proud kestrels and between the tall birch trees and in the heart melting expanse of the sky. He isn’t gone, he’s just part of the eternal magic and I grieve- I will never stop grieving- but I am so proud of him. I am so freaking proud of him. I would not exchange him for any baby in the world. When his sister finds her way into the world, she is going to love visiting him and she will be as proud of him as I am.

I miss you like crazy, little bean, and I love you. And I hear soon you will get to meet your great grandpa. I love him lots, little one, please give him such a big hug from me. He has my smile, one corner turned up, the other down. Would you have had that same beautiful smile? Tell him I love his smile and I carry part of him with me always, just as I carry part of you with me always. Run to him the way I used to and listen as he tells you all about all of your relatives. You’ll see his strength and determination and smell the wood and smoke and flannel every time you hug him. Watch carefully as he quietly observed everyone and finds just the right moment to say something heartfelt or funny. Create stories together. He loves westerns, like your dad does. There has to be a hero in each story. “Every story needs a hero” that’s what he told me. Don’t forget it. Give every story a hero. He is a hero. I know he had his faults, everyone does, but he is a hero to me.

When I sent out my announcement of your little life, he was the first to respond. He sent a little note and in it said the same thing he always said to me “my house is always open to you and your friends.” Return his courtesy, please. Open your heavenly home, your arms, your heart to him. Thank him for acknowledging you when no one else in my life was. He saw you before anyone else in the extended family. He knows loss. He was there taking care of grandma and saw the death of Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack. He knows. And now he will get to see his children and you. And all the lost children along the way. He won’t have to grieve, like we will. Don’t let him. Don’t let him miss us or be sad to be with the family in the Lord’s house. We love him and always will. I admire him and always will. Please, little bean, love and admire him too.

Ask him about the dairy farm and chopping wood and hunting. Do not ask him about the war. He doesn’t talk about it, let it stay at rest, but laugh with him and ask him about the cuckoo clock that grandma loved and the bear and cougar on the mountain on his mantle. Ask about the flowers he planted and what it was like to build a house for himself and his family. Ask him about the Cheerios he and grandma always kept around for us to eat at breakfast, pouring as much sugar as we could on it. Ask about the mints he always kept- the green ones were the best. Ask about the can crusher he got and how he showed us all how to use it. Ask about his cat. Ask him about the time I took Heidi through the Black Hills and he let us stay at his place and he grilled for us on the patio.

Ask him about all the love and all the unspoken words that passed between he and I the last time I saw him. He took my hands in his. I apologized because they were icy. “Cold hands, warm heart” he told me. I will never forget. Hold his hands, dear one, look at all they’ve done, all the people they’ve held, all the work they’ve done, all the lives they’ve saved. Hold them. Hold him. Let him hold you. Meet him at the gate, take his hand, and never let go.

They spoke about how you have to speak up and advocate for your baby at the doctors because no one else will. I feel ashamed. I didn’t know I had to do that. I was alone. I didn’t know what was going on. No one was there. I’m sorry I didn’t stand up for you. I’m sorry I failed you.

Today is the day I remember your loss. It wasn’t really just today- today was the start of it. The miscarriage happened through a stretch of days. But I usually remember you on the 17th of February, when it began.

Luci came over. I don’t know if I ever really talked to you about Luci before, because we weren’t really talking while you were here. I was angry and hurt with her and she was part of the story leading up to your conception. But she was there for me when I told her what was going on and on all the anniversaries after, really. More so than Isabelle or your father, really.

I wanted to watch a sad movie and have a ritual then have a massage, but we watched a YouTube review of a movie Elle Fanning was in and it reminded me that sad movie watching was what your dad and I did last time we tried to remember you and I didn’t want anything to remind me of him, so we didn’t. And I couldn’t find a ritual that seemed appropriate. So we just did the massage.

You lived in me. My body was your home and when you left, my body became the only remainder of your life. I know that I am tasked with the sacred responsibility of carrying you forever through life. My body carries your imprint. My life is the reflection of you.

So self care seemed alright and I felt like my body was so offensive and I didn’t want to feel that. You are not offensive. So we did the massage and Luci’s hands were warm as they guided energy through me and she hovered over my abdomen and I remembered how one night, in pain, I cut myself there, where you should have been growing. Because I hated my body for not holding you better. I blamed it and I expressed my anger with a knife and your dad was horrified.

I am ashamed. Luci massaged my hands and I kept thinking they were little killers and shouldn’t be cared for. But I guess that’s what caused me to self harm in the first place.

We burned incense and the incense burner that I have has a sun on it and hearts. You are my sunshine. You are the light over the waters. I’m trying to heal from your absence and remember you in ways that don’t tear me open and make me want to tear myself open.

But it’s difficult when I’m cramping and bleeding from medical procedures that remind me of going to the obgyn with you. It’s difficult, but I got through the day. I didn’t let myself really get too sunk in the deep dark sorrow, I kept afloat, thanks to Luci and Brittany. The massage was a big part of that.

I hope you can forgive me for not sitting with the sorrow more and not grieving fully or ritualizing the day. I hope you can forgive me for taking care of the body that lost you, but that also carried and remembers you every day. I hope you can forgive me for being ok and not facing grief head on.

I love you so much.

Also, I don’t know if it was you who sent Roland to me, but he has been amazing. He was playing with my obsidian last night (and I think he stole it again) and hasn’t left my side all day. He even curled up next to me while I was having the massage. Just being a protective and comforting presence. Reminding me that he was there. Because I got him around your due date, he reminds me of you. He reminds me that you are there too. He steadies me when I most need it.

I heard from your grandma and uncle, but no one else. I guess after 4 years it’s just not high on their list of remembering or caring. I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to keep your memory alive and active. I hoped more of my friends would reach out. It’s hard not to be disappointed by that. Each year fewer and fewer people reach out or seem to care. It’s discouraging.

But I will never fade away like that. Even without rituals or weeping, I will remember and recognize that you were alive inside me. And you remain a part of me, even when you are gone. Even now you are gone.

I love you my little bean, my Kessie. So much. Please stay by my side as I go through these reproductive health things that remind me of you. Please help me look after me the way I would have looked afte you because you are alive in me and my memory. My body remembers, and so do I. And I love you. To the moon and back. I love you.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve written to you outside of my heart. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do to celebrate your life this year. It’s been kind of difficult lately, but I want to do something.

I mean, I want to hold you.

I was at your aunties house, where she’s living now, and she babysits a young boy who is just about the age you would be. It was difficult not to really feel the weight of that. It was also difficult not to just scoop him up and hold him forever, pretending he was you.

I watched the episode of FMA tonight that Ben warned me about. In the show one of the characters looses their unborn baby and tries to revive them with alchemy, resulting in the mother unable to bear children again afterwards.

I wanted to travel to the faerie lands or heaven or wherever you are to bring you back to me. I still do, but I know better. I think. Your dad stopped me, and knowing that I wouldn’t make the grief go away, I’d just force someone else (my mother) to feel it. I do love you very much, but I couldn’t do that to her.

Even if it meant getting you back, I couldn’t place this on someone else.

Did you see the ornament grandma got for you? It’s another elephant. Gosh I hope you like elephants like I do. They just seem right.

Im still thinking about what I can do to honor your memory, but if you have any ideas, please send them my way. Maybe I’ll try to do a story? What would you like, Kessie?

I miss you, my little bean. And I love you so very much. To the moon and back, to the ends of the earth and back, through faerie lands and heaven and back. Through grief, though there is no turning back.