So this is actually happening.
Five and a half years after we first learned we were
pregnant with Hudson. Three-plus years
after Hudson died just as we were planning a sibling for her. A year and a half after our plans for a
sibling for Jackson (and Hudson) were put on hold by a cancer diagnosis and
ensuing treatment.
Finally.
Finally. Our home is about to
have two living siblings in it.
Even as I say that today, at 38 weeks pregnant, when our
daughter could arrive at any time, I am still not entirely sure I have properly
arranged all the necessary facts and emotions in my head to help me grasp that
after all this time, after all these interrupted plans, our family will have
more than one living child. I have begun
writing this post again and again in my head for two months now, and even now,
mere days away from the event, I still find myself befuddled both by the actual
fact of it and by the ever-flowing confusing emotions that accompany it.
Two. Two living children
in our house. All the planning I’ve been
doing over the last few weeks, getting ready for the reality of two. A reality I should have encountered more than
two years ago. Only just now am I
exploring how best to help an older sibling adjust to the birth of a new
baby. Only just now am I figuring out
sleeping arrangements and child safety seats for two children instead of
one. Only just now am I grappling with
how to engage a two-year-old while also meeting the intense needs of a
newborn.
All of this time later, all of this planning for two.
And yet there are three.
It’s nearly impossible to believe that Hudson has been gone
for more than three years. Even harder
still to believe that we are about to welcome yet another child without her
here. The most potent confirmation yet
that no matter how many children we have, our family will never feel
complete. It will never be complete.
I find myself, in these waning days before yet another life
(and lifetime—we have experienced so many in these few short years) begins,
feeling much like I did before Jackson was born. I am waiting, waiting, anxious yet again just
to know what this will feel like. Two
years and some change ago, I just wanted Jackson to get here so that I could
stop imagining what it would be like to parent a living child and a dead child
at the same time. Now, I just want Ada
to get here so I can stop imagining what it will be like to parent two living
children and a dead child at the same time.
And what it will be like to parent a daughter again after having lost my
first so suddenly and so horribly.
One thing I know with absolute and unshakable certainty,
certainty for which I am so very grateful:
the heart’s capacity for love is, indeed, infinitely expansive. Before Jackson was born, I was not sure how I
would be able to love him like I loved his sister who died before he was
born. And although I recognized at the
time that many second-time parents experience this, for me, the feeling was so
loaded with other emotions, the most powerful one being guilt. How could I love him, living, breathing,
alive, without slighting her? How could
I love her, gone but still nearly larger than life, without slighting him? I would never have the opportunity for
“special time” with each of them, at least not in the ways that many parents of
two try to make room for. How would I
ever make Jackson understand what Hudson meant and means to me? How would I ever go on living and loving more
children without feeling like I was leaving Hudson behind?
Quite honestly, I’m not sure I have yet answered the last
two questions. Although Jackson knows
Hudson’s face (and often mistakes it for his own in photos) and calls her his
sister, he’s not yet old enough to know or understand anything else about her,
who she is, where she is, why she isn’t here with us, how very much she is
still part of our family. So I don’t yet
know how we will do at that. And no
matter how much I tell myself differently, it is very hard not to feel like
Hudson is being left behind. Not
necessarily that we are doing the leaving, but that she is being left behind
just the same. I read a blog post
recently from another bereaved mother whose daughter died when she was nineteen
days old. The post was mainly about helping
others understand how hurtful unthinking comments and careless behavior can be
to a parent who has lost a child. But
one thing that stuck with me was this: she said that four years on, she gets up
with the exact same sadness that she felt the day her daughter died—she has
just gotten better at hiding it (her point being that people always asked how
she was in the beginning, but then stopped asking after some time). The exact same sadness. I don’t feel that way. Or at least not what I understand her to
mean, which I could be wrong about. If I
woke every day with the exact same sadness that I felt the day that Hudson
died, or that next day, or the many horrifically dark days after that… Well.
I. Would. Not. Be. Alive. The
only hope I had during those days was that it would not always feel exactly
like that, and if that had turned out to be an unfounded hope, I would not be
here. Truly. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I don’t
still feel Hudson’s loss acutely each and every day—as a friend recently said,
it must be like having an amputated limb, and while I have never had an
amputated limb, I think the metaphor is spot on—of course I feel it. And I feel it in new and surprising ways all
the time. Just when you think you have
encountered all the possible ways that the grief could sneak up on you, you
encounter another, and have to grapple with the ensuing bleeding. But just as I predicted very early on, the
giant hole that Hudson’s death ripped into our lives, while still the same size
absolutely, is smaller relatively, relative to the joy that we are still so
grateful to be able to appreciate in each moment of our lives. As that joy grows, as our lives grow,
everything else gets smaller—not absolutely, but by comparison. This is as it should be in any life, but in
my case, it still can’t help but feel like Hudson is somehow being left behind
in the midst of it all.
But. But. Back to that certainty. I have absolute certainty that my capacity to
love all of my children, here, gone, living, dead, in front of me, in my memory,
is infinitely expansive.
Infinitely. Loving Jackson makes
me love Hudson even more. Loving Hudson
makes me love Jackson even more. Loving
them both makes me love Ada even more, long before she even makes it into my
arms. Loving her makes me love her two
siblings even more. To me, this is the
essence of family, why people create families in the first place, in the
amazing numbers of ways they create families.
We have so much love to share that all we want to do is share it
more. I know that’s how Ed and I have
felt from the very beginning.
Two. Three. Three.
Two.
More. Ever and ever more.
