Stand down

We’ve kept the last few months incredibly busy for the girls, hoping to waft them past as much of the rawness of early grief by just keeping them busy.

We’ve done musicals, grading days, gym competitions, holidays, friends, dancing shows, music exams and this weekend more friends, the Festival of History and a ballet exam.

Everything they were working towards when Freddie was expected and born is now done. They’ve done amazingly well and I think it has worked. I think they are more or less whole. I don’t blog about their grief because it feels like a process that should be private to them. That isn’t to say I’m not watching. If the day comes when they read this, wondering if I was only thinking of myself, I want to write here, to them all, that I watched like a hawk and saw each step of their journey that let let me see. I have not been blind to it. It would be easier, honestly, if I could be.

There are memories now that have been made since Freddie. Memories with the memory of Freddie as part of them. Memories of carrying around the sense of not having him. Times where I’ve looked at a space on a tent floor and thought “he’d be lying there now if he was here,” times when we’ve walked and I’ve thought “there should be seven with him in a sling” or even that perhaps had he lived we couldn’t have done that particular day with a healthy, or an ill, Freddie.

I’ve dreamt twice in a few days of him; once that I suddenly realised he’d been alive all this time and we accidentally left him in the hospital because they forgot to tell us he hadn’t died. Sleeping this afternoon I dreamt of a larger Freddie, perhaps the size he should be, suddenly stiffening and sickening and me pleading with him not to die despite an obvious disability that I could see and feel in him. I think the Freddie who would have been, not the one who might have been, is finally trickling into my subconscious. I’m not sure which one I want there really, the perfectly healthy child we deserved, or the poorly one who is better off without that life.

This is just so hard. I am so tired, so desperately, desperately tired, of being sad. I don’t want to be grief-stricken. I don’t want to be functioning on some frighteningly below par level of normality. I don’t want to be crying. I just want to be happy. I wanted one more baby. It was a bit selfish, a bit greedy, but I needed him. I needed to be whole again. This is not fair. Whatever I ever did, I never did it because I only cared about myself. I made one choice to do the best for everyone else and then tried to fix myself, for me, but also for them. I never deserved this. I never deserved having to see all the rest of them make this journey too.