Perceptions

I’m seeing the hospital grief counsellor at the moment; I’m not convinced I really need to, or that it can do me any good, but it isn’t doing me any harm and she’s nice. One of the things she says to me a lot is that I’m very hard on myself and that I don’t give myself much time doing nothing. Whereas I see myself as a constant wallower who is about as lazy as it gets.

I’m not sure which is true. I suspect both.

I stopped crying about Freddie a few weeks ago, crying in the way I did cry. I’m confused about my feelings. I resent my feelings a little. I resent feeling sad and I resent having to let it out, knowing it is draining to hear and wearing to listen to. Most of the time I feel a fraud. I can post in one place but know that while some of those lost baby mamas have no living children, I have 4. Sometimes there is no help but knowing that had I made a different choice a few years ago, we wouldn’t be here now. It feels like retribution to be where we are now, with a history of baggage and a dead child.

I feel bad when I think of Freddie; I don’t want to think of him sometimes. I fell deeply in love with him while I was pregnant and deeply in love with him while I had him. I wished for him, grew him, loved him, fed him and will him on, hoping for a miracle. But he was here so fleetingly that it is hard to miss him exactly, the actual him. I keep saying “I miss the promise of him.” I loved him, my child, but I’d only learned the idea of him, the concept of what I hoped he’d be.

I miss the joy of expecting him. I miss the expectation of having a boy. I miss his little self, choosing his name; I typed something into my URL bar today and nymbler came up, with all our saved baby names still on the page. I miss the excitement of knowing he was coming. I do miss him, I even miss worrying about him but it is hard to quite marry that up with the child who came, not least because he looks like 10 different babies on the handful of pictures I have.

I don’t know if this makes me sound like a harpy, but the worst thing is that hope has just drained out of my life. I had to fight so hard to have him. Even when we finally agreed, I tried for months to get pregnant, then nearly lost him, then worried all the time about him. But with him in there, I had hope that I was fixed, hope that all the pain and sadness and loss of self that had filled the previous few years was at an end. As he grew, so I grew. I found myself again. I found a person who was going to be an older mother, a mother to a boy, a person who had fixed things and got her wish and got her happy ending.

The happy ending has gone. I have this horrible feeling that regardless of what might happen next, happy endings are now out of reach. We might, if lucky, get an epilogue. My happy ending drained away when he came out of my body. I was so, so thrilled to be reaching a place in my life where the threads had drawn together, where I felt fulfilled and happy and content and I’d be able to walk round Tesco again and be joyful when I saw pictures of babies.

I feel enraged that for my entire life, without me knowing, my life was counting down to April 2010 when I would lose my son. And that I have no idea if it is counting up to a place where another baby will be placed in my arms, or if I have to come to terms with my lot now. My lot of lots, I know that. Lots, lots more than many people have. It’s just that I wanted another baby – a baby who became a child. Life is out of control, with a dead child and a body that no long understands about conceiving and which I can exert no influence over at all.

I don’t want Freddie to have brought me pain and anger and frustration. He was supposed to seal our happiness. He was supposed to be our happy ending. He was a person and he was lovely and I miss him, but he was so much more than that too. He was the little light that pulled me from the darkest depths, the thing I begged for, really begged, knowing that life was not tolerable without him. And I got him, but he went. And now I don’t know what to do.