Missing this little girl today.
It’s almost unbearable. Almost.
longing / september 23, 2012
Sometimes I wish we didn’t feel. Or that at least I could press “pause” on my emotions, and save them for another time & another day.
Such was the case with this morning. I woke up with a lump in my throat. I realized that time has gotten away from me, for tomorrow Amelia would have been four weeks old. Four weeks old. She would have just barely started growing out of her newborn clothes. I would have changed hundreds of soft, tiny diapers by now, and hopefully, had become an accomplished milk-cow. I would be sleep-deprived and exhausted, but from being her mother instead of from grief.
Oh, how things are so different from how I had planned.
It doesn’t really get better with time. Some days are still really, really hard. Some days I just sit on the couch alone and weep. I’ve heard the emptiness I feel is permanent, that this gaping hole in my heart will never go away. What filled it for such a short time is now lost. So I’m learning to function in this permanent, altered sense of normalcy.
I try not to think what my life would have been. Because it wouldn’t have ever been the way I wanted it, with Amelia still here in my arms. That wasn’t the plan God had for us. That little baby girl at church today with wispy white-blonde hair is a stark reminder of what could have been, but wasn’t meant to have been. But why?
I try not to think too hard. Because take it from me: all of these, “why me?”s and “why now?”s will get to you soon enough, and then you’re trapped and suffocating in your own thoughts, unwilling to let things go. It’s an endless circle of doubts and fears and scary, scary things.
getting by / september 18, 2012
Have I mentioned the physical aftermath of losing a baby is a beast? No one prepared me for that, for the physical reminders of being babyless.
I was lucky to gain so little (10 pounds) and then lose it all within days of delivering Amelia, but I’ve still got angry red stretch marks. My stomach is still my-uterus-hasn’t-quite-shrunk-completely loose and flabby, like I’m hiding dozens of extra cookies down there. And yet no stranger will ever look at me with forgiving eyes, saying, “She still looks great for just having had a baby“. I’ll tell ya, it sucks.
And over two weeks later my boobs kept relentlessly producing milk as if I had a baby to feed. Don’t they know I buried her tiny body in the ground?!
My bleeding finally stopped just short of a week ago. So last Monday (two weeks post-delivery), with Jack in his footsie pajamas in the stroller, I ran a mile-and-a-half. And then I began to bleed again, another haunting reminder that yes indeed, I’m not quite physically healed.
But no one knows that but me. And I’ll tell ya, it sucks.
But I’ve been getting by.
And it’s that and nothing more; just barely getting by.
Some days I cry more than other days. Some days I just want to be alone, and some days I want to be surrounded by friends.
Some days I just want to eat, and some days I eat hardly anything. Some days I’m up for playing games with Jack on the ground, and some days I resort to turning on a movie for the two of us. Some days I just fall asleep on the couch altogether and hope for the best.
Sometimes, when Jack is asleep and the house is silent, I look at pictures of her. Tears roll down my cheeks, soaking my shirt, until I remember there’s a box of tissues behind the computer monitor. But the tissues, even the ultra-soft ones, don’t really soothe my soul.
I’m scared I’m beginning to forget. It’s been three weeks and it’s hard to truly remember the feel of her tiny body pressed against mine, or how her head rested perfectly in the palm of my hand. I cry because I know we’ll have more babies, but we won’t have another Amelia. And right now, all I want is Amelia.
wife, mother, designer & lover of a juicy novel on a cloudy afternoon
copyright alie jones 2021