A good friend commented on a Facebook post I made today and said she missed the blog. I miss it, too. Now that we are back home from a bit of a whirlwind trip to North Carolina, hopefully I will be able to find more time in the daily routine for writing (well, there’s no real routine yet, but hopefully there will be one of these days). I’ve had the inspiration to write on several different occasions in the last few days, but no uninterrupted time to gather those ideas into a coherent post. But for fear of losing important pieces of this journey, I may just have to settle for writing in shorter blocks. Here are a few snippets of this week’s leg of the journey. I am sapped of the mental energy to make it all somehow fit together right now, but it felt important to me to get these things out.
****
Last Friday, on our way down to North Carolina, we had to stop by one of the baby stores to pick up a few things for the trip. I went to the bathroom while I was there, and I heard a mom and her little girl come into the stall next to mine, chatting away. The little girl was saying things like, “There’s the toilet paper,” “Is it magic?” (asking about the flusher, I assume—probably some potty training trick at home, I’m guessing), and “I go potty, Mommy! I a big girl now!” I was washing my hands when they came out of the stall and the mom told the little girl she had to wash her hands. The little girl walked up to one of the sinks and said, “I want this one.” I smiled and asked the mom how old the girl was.
I asked the question, quite certain I already knew the answer.
“Two and a half.”
Two and a half. Exactly the age Hudson would be now.
I went back to the car, where Ed was waiting with a sleeping Jackson, and cried and cried and cried. I’ve said so many times that I can’t imagine anymore what Hudson would be like now, and here was a little girl showing me. And I imagine that Hudson would have been even more verbose, given how advanced her language development was when she died. So I guess I still can’t even imagine what she’d be like. I would give just about anything to be able to talk with her now, to listen to her make conversation, narrating her world in a way that only a two-year-old can.
Again and again, I have to tell myself that she is gone. Again and again, I find I can’t believe it.
****
I wrote last weekend about how hard it was to go back to North Carolina with Jackson for the first time without Hudson. The days of that visit did get better as they went on, partly because they were busy with visitors. But one thing that started to settle in with me for the first time is that this kind of missing her will be constant—it does not rely on the special places we went with her or the special things we did with her for its pathetic existence. It’s just the very thing of being her mother that I miss. I’ve always known that Jackson would never take Hudson’s place. And while having a child in my arms again has absolutely helped with some of the emptiness and has triggered a new process of healing that was not possible before Jackson was born, the act of mothering him also makes me miss her more. Every cry I soothe, every diaper I change, every kiss I give, every nursing session, every twirl around the kitchen with him to music, every piece of clothing I fold, every song I sing, every time I prop him up on my shoulder and rub his back (this especially)—every single one of these acts makes me ache with love for Jackson but also ache with longing for Hudson. I thought that now it would be easier to walk down the baby food aisles in the grocery stores, looking at all the toddler-oriented foods she’d be eating now. I thought it would be easier to pass by the rows and rows of little girl clothes I’d be buying for her now. I thought it would be easier to see kids her age, either the age she was when she died or the age she’d be now. But it isn’t. As much as I love being Jackson’s mother, as much as I am enjoying the physical act of mothering again, it makes me miss mothering my sweet girl more than ever. And I guess it always will. I doubt I will ever be able to walk down those aisles or see those girl clothes or see girls her age and not feel a terrible pang, no matter how many more children I have. Her place is her place and hers alone. Being her mother was different than being any other child’s mother. And I desperately miss being her mother.
****
Almost every baby I know who was born within six months on either side of Hudson now either has a little sibling or will have one within this year. I look at the pictures of these growing, happy, totally intact families and am still just so lost. Of course, I don’t begrudge my dear friends the happiness that their children continue to bring into their lives. Of course I don’t. I love them and their children. It’s just that seeing their families grow, seeing their oldest children starting to turn three, seeing the little siblings get kisses from their big siblings, when our family will always be missing one, when our oldest will never get any older than 17 months, when our poor Jackson will only ever know his sister from what we tell him about her, raises that infernal question of why. I still just don’t understand why this happened to us. I know there is no why, of course. I look back at our lives in early May of last year and am struck by how happy we were. Ed and I had both come through some very dark periods in our lives, having survived our first marriages and the deaths of our mothers at ages far too young (for them and us both). We found each other when neither of us was looking, fell in love, built a beautiful life together, and channeled all of our love into having that amazing child. When I think about how happy we were, and how quickly and cruelly that happiness was shattered, forever, never to be the same again, I just don’t understand why. We didn’t take each other for granted. We didn’t take our happiness for granted. We didn’t take Hudson for granted. We KNEW how lucky we were to have ended up where we did and we told each other all the time (and still do). We were the last people to need a lesson about cherishing life. We DID cherish our lives with each other and with Hudson. So where is our happy, intact family? Why don’t we get that, too? Why doesn’t Jackson get his big sister? What is the freaking point of all of this?
****
And my last snippet is this: Jackson has reshaped my world all over again, a gift for which I am so grateful. I am reminded of a poem a blog reader sent to me (thank you, Allison) that I think of often in this bizarre world I find myself living in.
The Thing Is by Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it,
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, how long can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
“An obesity of grief.” Indeed.
But the thing is, my world has changed forever. Again. And yes, I will take it. I will love it. Again.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Saturday, June 4, 2011
More and More
I didn’t think I could miss her more than I already did, but I do. It never occurred to me that Jackson’s presence could make her absence even more pronounced, but it does.
We are in North Carolina, at Ed’s dad’s house for Jackson’s first trip home to visit his extended family and friends who already love him. Somehow I failed to anticipate how difficult this trip might be for me emotionally, but being here with him, without her, has provoked some of the hardest grieving I’ve done in a long while. Just like that first time I put him on the changing table where a much bigger kid used to be, just like that first time I sat with him in the rocking chair in their room and sang “Hark the Sound” to him, it has been incredibly sad bringing him here and doing all the same things we did here with Hudson when she was this age and later, changing his diapers on the counter in the bathroom where he can look at himself in the mirror, nursing him on the sofa, cuddling him in the guest bed to get him to go to sleep, walking down the long gravel road to the house, listening to frogs and looking at ducks and swans. Not only am I reliving all of these precious memories of Hudson, but I’m also thinking (to the extent my imagination can work this far) about all the things she might be doing if she were here with us today. I suppose I should be grateful for the very vivid reminders of our life with her (that is certainly one of many gifts Jackson’s life has brought to us) and hopefully that will come in time, but today, I am just broken, broken, broken by these memories of all the joy that once was. And I am struck again with absolute disbelief that she is gone.
It really does feel like losing her all over again. And it hurts like hell. And this is before we’ve even gotten to her Poppy’s house.
She feels more gone than ever. And I miss her more than ever.
We are in North Carolina, at Ed’s dad’s house for Jackson’s first trip home to visit his extended family and friends who already love him. Somehow I failed to anticipate how difficult this trip might be for me emotionally, but being here with him, without her, has provoked some of the hardest grieving I’ve done in a long while. Just like that first time I put him on the changing table where a much bigger kid used to be, just like that first time I sat with him in the rocking chair in their room and sang “Hark the Sound” to him, it has been incredibly sad bringing him here and doing all the same things we did here with Hudson when she was this age and later, changing his diapers on the counter in the bathroom where he can look at himself in the mirror, nursing him on the sofa, cuddling him in the guest bed to get him to go to sleep, walking down the long gravel road to the house, listening to frogs and looking at ducks and swans. Not only am I reliving all of these precious memories of Hudson, but I’m also thinking (to the extent my imagination can work this far) about all the things she might be doing if she were here with us today. I suppose I should be grateful for the very vivid reminders of our life with her (that is certainly one of many gifts Jackson’s life has brought to us) and hopefully that will come in time, but today, I am just broken, broken, broken by these memories of all the joy that once was. And I am struck again with absolute disbelief that she is gone.
It really does feel like losing her all over again. And it hurts like hell. And this is before we’ve even gotten to her Poppy’s house.
She feels more gone than ever. And I miss her more than ever.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Bedtime
I just rocked Jackson in the rocking chair in his and Hudson’s room for the first time. It was bedtime, and I sang “Hark the Sound” to him. Looking around the room, it all felt so very familiar. But Hudson wasn’t there.
Oh, how my heart aches from it all.
Oh, how my heart aches from it all.
(Almost) Ten Days of Jackson
I turned around and all of a sudden, it is June. May is over and we lived through it, full as it was with both the deepest sorrow and the deepest joy.
I had forgotten how easily the days slip away with an infant. I had forgotten that feeling of reaching evening and wondering what in the world you’ve spent the day doing. But I’d also forgotten how heavenly it is to spend the day doing nothing but snuggling and ogling this tiny creature that you created with love, so heavenly that you don’t really care whether you did anything else. But I have missed having the time and energy to write. Sometimes I have the time, but not the energy, and others, the energy but not the time. So I look forward to the moments, like now, when I’m gifted both at the same time.
These first (almost) ten days with our boy are practically indescribable. In so many ways, I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, living these days with a newborn again, remembering more and more each day about what Hudson was like at this age, and missing her ever more and more because of it. Each time he does something she did at this stage or does something differently than she did, each time one of “her” songs comes on the iPod and we smile and cry all at the same time, each time I catch a glimpse of him looking so much like her, it’s like someone is taking the knife and twisting it again into my poor heart. And thinking ahead to the many moments in front of us, when he will reach all the same milestones she did, and then one day, when he will start reaching ones she never did—it’s almost too hard to contemplate. Tuesday and Wednesday were particularly hard for some reason—I was overcome with tears almost every time I glanced at a photo or thought about her for longer than a few seconds (which is very often, of course). It is particularly hard given that the world we are living in right now is so very different than it should be, and yet I have no idea what a world with a two-and-a-half-year-old and a newborn would be like. Just as I long ago stopped being able to imagine what Hudson would be like now, I can’t really imagine what our lives would be like if she were here with us during this time. Which makes it an even harder loss to grieve in some ways, I think. As it is, we are at home with a newborn again. We’ve done this before. Obviously, Jackson is a very different baby and does many things his own way, but fundamentally, much of this experience is the same. And being here now, in this world, with this baby, and without my Hudson here, almost makes it seem as though Hudson herself was no more than a very vivid and very wonderful dream. Maybe it is just still too difficult to accept two very incongruous realities—that indeed, she was here, for a glorious 17 months and 12 days, during which she filled us with so much joy and love and laughter and filled the world with light, and yet at the same time, she is now very much gone. It’s almost easier to think that it was just a dream than to accept those realities.
And just as I imagined, although the anxiety has lessened significantly since Jackson was born, since I am no longer the sole person in charge of his well-being, it still persists. We’ve already taken his temperature twice, poor thing (totally normal both times, of course). And I spent the last several days worrying that his breathing was odd (if you know anything about newborns, you know that they breathe fairly irregularly for a while, and generally breathe faster than adults in the first place). I kept counting his respirations and looking for signs that his skin was turning purple, convinced that he was having trouble pumping enough oxygen to his body. He is always falling asleep at the breast, which can be a sign that he is not getting enough oxygen (but of course, he’s still eating and peeing and pooping plenty, and is clearly chunking up). I finally called the pediatrician yesterday just to get her to reassure me that sporadic rapid breathing is totally normal and that we only need to worry if the fast breathing is constant. The worst part about these anxieties is that ultimately, they trigger these PTSD-like responses that I often get in certain circumstances that remind me of Hudson’s illness. In this case, I have so very unfortunately been brought back to those awful moments in the wee hours of May 10 when I was making the decision about whether to take Hudson to the emergency room or wait a few hours for the pediatrician. I’ve had a few of those torturous moments that I haven’t had in a long while, wondering for the millionth time whether I could have saved her life and wishing with all my might for some way to go back in time and fix it somehow. Just like when I was pregnant with Jackson, I fear that I may never fully trust my instincts again. I can only hope that it will start to feel better once Jackson passes out of this very fragile stage of infancy, but who knows.
But then there’s my Jackson. My precious, sweet, beautiful little boy. Just looking at him, smelling that sweet baby smell, touching that softest of baby skin, watching for those little gassy smiles that we like to believe are real—all of these things, piece by piece, lift the weight from my shoulders, even if only for a while. But it is enough. It is probably more than I deserve to ask for. So far, he is just an exceedingly good baby. He fusses only when hungry and when getting his diaper changed and every once in a while when he’s gotten too sleepy and we haven’t let him get to sleep. And wow, can this boy sleep. Obviously the only baby I have to compare him to is Hudson, and she was just so very alert and wanting to be part of the action from the moment she emerged from the womb. She certainly slept a fair amount as an infant, but often times getting her to fall asleep and then stay asleep anywhere other than in someone’s arms was almost impossible. Not so this little boy. He’s easily moveable from arms to the bouncer or co-sleeper most of the time. Sometimes, if we catch him in the right window, he will even fall asleep on his own. In a feat that I still can’t even believe, he’s currently napping, swaddled, in his own crib, having fallen asleep with just the tiniest amount of help. And he sleeps like a champ at night, too, easily sleeping swaddled in the co-sleeper next to me, waking only for feedings every 3-4 hours (and sometimes I have to wake him even for those). Fortunately, like his big sister, he enjoys sleeping in for another two or three hours after the early morning feeding at 6 or 7AM, time I always enjoyed so much with Hudson and am already loving with him. And when he’s awake, he’s mostly content just to snuggle with us or stare wide-eyed at us and everything around him as he takes in the world. He’s an excellent nurser, having latched on with no problem at all only 25 minutes after he was born and it was all downhill from there. By the second or third night at home, we’d already mastered side-lying nursing in the bed, something I didn’t try with Hudson until much, much later, but a trick that helps everyone get so much more sleep. He can’t hold his head up yet (Hudson did this the moment she came out of the womb!), but he can already do half-push ups on his arms and lift and turn his head from side to side when he’s on his tummy. He loves music, just like his big sister, and dancing with Daddy in the kitchen has already become a favorite morning activity. And he loves being outside—at the few times when he has gotten really fussy, all we have to do is take him outside into the warm air with the car noise and the breeze and he quiets immediately. He’s like his big sister that way, too (although since Hudson was born in December, her love for being outside wasn’t revealed until she was a few months old).
All in all, more sunshine than tears. A lot more, as a matter of fact. And in the midst of what could be an overwhelmingly sad time, that is One Good Thing.
Here are some more pictures of these early days with our boy.
I had forgotten how easily the days slip away with an infant. I had forgotten that feeling of reaching evening and wondering what in the world you’ve spent the day doing. But I’d also forgotten how heavenly it is to spend the day doing nothing but snuggling and ogling this tiny creature that you created with love, so heavenly that you don’t really care whether you did anything else. But I have missed having the time and energy to write. Sometimes I have the time, but not the energy, and others, the energy but not the time. So I look forward to the moments, like now, when I’m gifted both at the same time.
These first (almost) ten days with our boy are practically indescribable. In so many ways, I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, living these days with a newborn again, remembering more and more each day about what Hudson was like at this age, and missing her ever more and more because of it. Each time he does something she did at this stage or does something differently than she did, each time one of “her” songs comes on the iPod and we smile and cry all at the same time, each time I catch a glimpse of him looking so much like her, it’s like someone is taking the knife and twisting it again into my poor heart. And thinking ahead to the many moments in front of us, when he will reach all the same milestones she did, and then one day, when he will start reaching ones she never did—it’s almost too hard to contemplate. Tuesday and Wednesday were particularly hard for some reason—I was overcome with tears almost every time I glanced at a photo or thought about her for longer than a few seconds (which is very often, of course). It is particularly hard given that the world we are living in right now is so very different than it should be, and yet I have no idea what a world with a two-and-a-half-year-old and a newborn would be like. Just as I long ago stopped being able to imagine what Hudson would be like now, I can’t really imagine what our lives would be like if she were here with us during this time. Which makes it an even harder loss to grieve in some ways, I think. As it is, we are at home with a newborn again. We’ve done this before. Obviously, Jackson is a very different baby and does many things his own way, but fundamentally, much of this experience is the same. And being here now, in this world, with this baby, and without my Hudson here, almost makes it seem as though Hudson herself was no more than a very vivid and very wonderful dream. Maybe it is just still too difficult to accept two very incongruous realities—that indeed, she was here, for a glorious 17 months and 12 days, during which she filled us with so much joy and love and laughter and filled the world with light, and yet at the same time, she is now very much gone. It’s almost easier to think that it was just a dream than to accept those realities.
And just as I imagined, although the anxiety has lessened significantly since Jackson was born, since I am no longer the sole person in charge of his well-being, it still persists. We’ve already taken his temperature twice, poor thing (totally normal both times, of course). And I spent the last several days worrying that his breathing was odd (if you know anything about newborns, you know that they breathe fairly irregularly for a while, and generally breathe faster than adults in the first place). I kept counting his respirations and looking for signs that his skin was turning purple, convinced that he was having trouble pumping enough oxygen to his body. He is always falling asleep at the breast, which can be a sign that he is not getting enough oxygen (but of course, he’s still eating and peeing and pooping plenty, and is clearly chunking up). I finally called the pediatrician yesterday just to get her to reassure me that sporadic rapid breathing is totally normal and that we only need to worry if the fast breathing is constant. The worst part about these anxieties is that ultimately, they trigger these PTSD-like responses that I often get in certain circumstances that remind me of Hudson’s illness. In this case, I have so very unfortunately been brought back to those awful moments in the wee hours of May 10 when I was making the decision about whether to take Hudson to the emergency room or wait a few hours for the pediatrician. I’ve had a few of those torturous moments that I haven’t had in a long while, wondering for the millionth time whether I could have saved her life and wishing with all my might for some way to go back in time and fix it somehow. Just like when I was pregnant with Jackson, I fear that I may never fully trust my instincts again. I can only hope that it will start to feel better once Jackson passes out of this very fragile stage of infancy, but who knows.
But then there’s my Jackson. My precious, sweet, beautiful little boy. Just looking at him, smelling that sweet baby smell, touching that softest of baby skin, watching for those little gassy smiles that we like to believe are real—all of these things, piece by piece, lift the weight from my shoulders, even if only for a while. But it is enough. It is probably more than I deserve to ask for. So far, he is just an exceedingly good baby. He fusses only when hungry and when getting his diaper changed and every once in a while when he’s gotten too sleepy and we haven’t let him get to sleep. And wow, can this boy sleep. Obviously the only baby I have to compare him to is Hudson, and she was just so very alert and wanting to be part of the action from the moment she emerged from the womb. She certainly slept a fair amount as an infant, but often times getting her to fall asleep and then stay asleep anywhere other than in someone’s arms was almost impossible. Not so this little boy. He’s easily moveable from arms to the bouncer or co-sleeper most of the time. Sometimes, if we catch him in the right window, he will even fall asleep on his own. In a feat that I still can’t even believe, he’s currently napping, swaddled, in his own crib, having fallen asleep with just the tiniest amount of help. And he sleeps like a champ at night, too, easily sleeping swaddled in the co-sleeper next to me, waking only for feedings every 3-4 hours (and sometimes I have to wake him even for those). Fortunately, like his big sister, he enjoys sleeping in for another two or three hours after the early morning feeding at 6 or 7AM, time I always enjoyed so much with Hudson and am already loving with him. And when he’s awake, he’s mostly content just to snuggle with us or stare wide-eyed at us and everything around him as he takes in the world. He’s an excellent nurser, having latched on with no problem at all only 25 minutes after he was born and it was all downhill from there. By the second or third night at home, we’d already mastered side-lying nursing in the bed, something I didn’t try with Hudson until much, much later, but a trick that helps everyone get so much more sleep. He can’t hold his head up yet (Hudson did this the moment she came out of the womb!), but he can already do half-push ups on his arms and lift and turn his head from side to side when he’s on his tummy. He loves music, just like his big sister, and dancing with Daddy in the kitchen has already become a favorite morning activity. And he loves being outside—at the few times when he has gotten really fussy, all we have to do is take him outside into the warm air with the car noise and the breeze and he quiets immediately. He’s like his big sister that way, too (although since Hudson was born in December, her love for being outside wasn’t revealed until she was a few months old).
All in all, more sunshine than tears. A lot more, as a matter of fact. And in the midst of what could be an overwhelmingly sad time, that is One Good Thing.
Here are some more pictures of these early days with our boy.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Here Comes the Sun
I quite honestly don’t even know where to begin. Jackson has been with us for six and a half days, and I still don’t even know where to begin to try to articulate the incredible jumble of emotions my heart is trying to hold right now.
Saturday morning, I was up around 4:00 in the morning and, once again, I heard our crazy neighborhood birds chirping away as if they had no idea it was still dark. Last time I wrote about the birds, I had awoken because my very pregnant body needed to go to the bathroom and afterwards, I couldn’t turn off my brain, thinking about my sweet daughter who died and my sweet son who was yet to be born, so very puzzled as to how to keep mothering them both when I would only have one of them physically with me. I wrote about living in the world in between the very darkest hours of grief, those long ones deep in the middle of the night where the sadness weighs so heavily and keeps you from sleep, and the early morning hours where the sun is on the horizon and the sky is turning pink as a new day is born. That night, I was living in that in-between world. Like those birds, I knew that at least for now, the darkest part of the night was past and that the sun was on its way, even though I could not yet see it. I knew that at any given moment, I could still be yanked back into the dark and yet the promise of the light somehow made that possibility seem less horrible. I knew that one day soon, I would see the pink sky again.
Unlike last time, I heard the birds on this Saturday morning because I was up to feed a beautiful and hungry little boy, a tiny, impossibly soft-skinned, heavenly smelling creature, an incredible manifestation of the love my husband and I have for each other and for our firstborn child who was so cruelly taken from us a year ago. I heard the birds and I smiled, realizing, maybe for the first time, that morning has come again. The sun is peeping from its perch on the edge of the world and telling me it’s time to wake up and live again. When Jackson emerged from my body after those insane final fifteen minutes of my labor with him, when I reached down and pulled him up on to my chest, I felt it instantly. I don’t know that I realized it at the time—I was too overcome with shock and relief and disbelief that it all went so fast and that he was actually here—but in that second, I felt real joy for the very first time since Hudson died. After so many months of being a mother with no living child, of feeling so very useless with no object for all my mothering instincts and skills, after all that, the very weight of that little body on mine, that stunned little cry meant just for me as a sign that I was needed again—the feeling was absolutely exquisite. And in the many moments since then, as I have snuggled this precious little boy close, nursed him for many hours of the day, held him in my arms as he sleeps, rocked him gently to soothe his worries, and looked into his bright eyes, I have finally been able to imagine a future that seems liveable, a future where the joy will never, ever erase the pain, but will at least soften its edges and make it more bearable. Because the fact is, it already has.
And yet, even as I just wrote these words, the tears started to fall again. Because even though I know in my heart that nothing will ever separate me from Hudson, and even though I now know that my heart can hold all the love in the world for her and Jackson and any future children we have, there is also no doubt that my relationship with her has changed. It had to. Just like when she was born, much of my time is now consumed by meeting her little brother’s needs, and I don’t have the leisure of shutting the world out whenever I need to spend some special time with just Hudson, to be alone and cry with her pictures and stuffed animals and books. Of course, my relationship with her would have changed if she were still living, too—certainly I know that. But in that case, I would still get to hug her tight and laugh at her silliness and soothe her tears and teach her how to be a big sister and watch her grow up—we’d just be doing it in a new way. As it is, I still don’t think I’ve fully grasped that I will never get to do those things with her again, that while I will get to mother more children, I will never get to mother Hudson again, only her memory and spirit. Which could never be enough.
Many times during those early months when I was at home with Hudson on maternity leave, moments when I’d be so eager for her to reach a new milestone and start being more interactive, I remember reminding myself that I should cherish this time and stop looking ahead so much, because I would never get this kind of time with an infant again. The next time I had one, I’d have a toddler running around the house, too—still an amazing experience, but a very different one. As she got older, I started really looking forward to this time, knowing that it would mean getting to spend some extra time with her at home while I was on leave, knowing that she’d be able to provide some much-needed fun and comic relief (and certainly no small measure of frustration, too, I’m sure) during these early, rather isolating infant days with her younger sibling. And now here I am, two and a half years later, alone with a newborn again, and no big sister to “help” me take care of him. To an outsider, it looks as though someone just pressed a fast-forward button from December 2008 to May 2011, skipping over everything in between, as though Ed and I are taking strolls in the neighborhood with our firstborn child. And that is hard.
The realization that she is gone, that she will never be here with us, with Jackson, is still hitting me in waves. We took several photos of her with us to the hospital, and Ed carefully placed them throughout the room where I was laboring so that I could look at them when I needed or wanted to, checking each photo with me to be sure I could see it. But within a few minutes after we got there, my contractions got significantly more intense and my body and mind were consumed with the hard work of labor. And then, so very suddenly, Jackson was in my arms, and my body and mind were consumed with falling in love all over again with a tiny baby. It wasn’t until about 30 minutes after he was born, when he was contentedly nursing in my arms, that I looked up and saw, just beyond the foot of the bed, the photo of Hudson in the meadow at the Arboretum, the one where she is just barely smiling with those wise eyes, that it hit me. I remembered. And then my mind and my body were consumed with longing for my girl, full with such sorrow that she will never get to experience the love in that room with us, the love that still burns inside us for her and that now envelops her little brother, too. And I cried, all over my baby boy. A special and very different kind of baptism, I guess—another outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. Hudson sharing herself with her little brother in a way that few other big sisters could. Ed sat beside me and held my hand. Our family of four.
There have been many more sad moments since that first one. Sitting in the postpartum room with Jackson on one side, warm and alive, and Hudson’s photos on the other—photos instead of a rambunctious toddler barreling into the room to see her Mommy only to quiet down in awe and confusion when she saw the tiny creature in Mommy’s lap. Putting Jackson on the changing table for the first time, telling him how tiny he is, and then remembering that the reason he looks so tiny is because the last little person whose diaper I changed there was so much bigger. Listening to the Bob Marley Rock-a-Bye Baby CD in the car and watching it calm him just like it used to calm Hudson immediately. Looking down sometimes while nursing Jackson and doing a double-take because I could almost be looking at Hudson two and a half years ago. I know these are only a few of the many, many more sad moments to come in this lifetime without Hudson.
But here is where those early morning birds come in. Because as sad as all of those moments are, and they are terribly sad, there is joy in them, too, because Jackson is there, bringing life back into our atrophied limbs and broken hearts, melting the places inside that have been so long frozen in grief, shining light into the darkest places in which we have lived for the past year. And even though she is not here in the way I desperately long for her to be, Hudson is here, too, and will always be. Morning is here, tentatively creeping its way into our world again.
Here comes the sun. Thank you, my sweet boy, for bringing it with you.
Saturday morning, I was up around 4:00 in the morning and, once again, I heard our crazy neighborhood birds chirping away as if they had no idea it was still dark. Last time I wrote about the birds, I had awoken because my very pregnant body needed to go to the bathroom and afterwards, I couldn’t turn off my brain, thinking about my sweet daughter who died and my sweet son who was yet to be born, so very puzzled as to how to keep mothering them both when I would only have one of them physically with me. I wrote about living in the world in between the very darkest hours of grief, those long ones deep in the middle of the night where the sadness weighs so heavily and keeps you from sleep, and the early morning hours where the sun is on the horizon and the sky is turning pink as a new day is born. That night, I was living in that in-between world. Like those birds, I knew that at least for now, the darkest part of the night was past and that the sun was on its way, even though I could not yet see it. I knew that at any given moment, I could still be yanked back into the dark and yet the promise of the light somehow made that possibility seem less horrible. I knew that one day soon, I would see the pink sky again.
Unlike last time, I heard the birds on this Saturday morning because I was up to feed a beautiful and hungry little boy, a tiny, impossibly soft-skinned, heavenly smelling creature, an incredible manifestation of the love my husband and I have for each other and for our firstborn child who was so cruelly taken from us a year ago. I heard the birds and I smiled, realizing, maybe for the first time, that morning has come again. The sun is peeping from its perch on the edge of the world and telling me it’s time to wake up and live again. When Jackson emerged from my body after those insane final fifteen minutes of my labor with him, when I reached down and pulled him up on to my chest, I felt it instantly. I don’t know that I realized it at the time—I was too overcome with shock and relief and disbelief that it all went so fast and that he was actually here—but in that second, I felt real joy for the very first time since Hudson died. After so many months of being a mother with no living child, of feeling so very useless with no object for all my mothering instincts and skills, after all that, the very weight of that little body on mine, that stunned little cry meant just for me as a sign that I was needed again—the feeling was absolutely exquisite. And in the many moments since then, as I have snuggled this precious little boy close, nursed him for many hours of the day, held him in my arms as he sleeps, rocked him gently to soothe his worries, and looked into his bright eyes, I have finally been able to imagine a future that seems liveable, a future where the joy will never, ever erase the pain, but will at least soften its edges and make it more bearable. Because the fact is, it already has.
And yet, even as I just wrote these words, the tears started to fall again. Because even though I know in my heart that nothing will ever separate me from Hudson, and even though I now know that my heart can hold all the love in the world for her and Jackson and any future children we have, there is also no doubt that my relationship with her has changed. It had to. Just like when she was born, much of my time is now consumed by meeting her little brother’s needs, and I don’t have the leisure of shutting the world out whenever I need to spend some special time with just Hudson, to be alone and cry with her pictures and stuffed animals and books. Of course, my relationship with her would have changed if she were still living, too—certainly I know that. But in that case, I would still get to hug her tight and laugh at her silliness and soothe her tears and teach her how to be a big sister and watch her grow up—we’d just be doing it in a new way. As it is, I still don’t think I’ve fully grasped that I will never get to do those things with her again, that while I will get to mother more children, I will never get to mother Hudson again, only her memory and spirit. Which could never be enough.
Many times during those early months when I was at home with Hudson on maternity leave, moments when I’d be so eager for her to reach a new milestone and start being more interactive, I remember reminding myself that I should cherish this time and stop looking ahead so much, because I would never get this kind of time with an infant again. The next time I had one, I’d have a toddler running around the house, too—still an amazing experience, but a very different one. As she got older, I started really looking forward to this time, knowing that it would mean getting to spend some extra time with her at home while I was on leave, knowing that she’d be able to provide some much-needed fun and comic relief (and certainly no small measure of frustration, too, I’m sure) during these early, rather isolating infant days with her younger sibling. And now here I am, two and a half years later, alone with a newborn again, and no big sister to “help” me take care of him. To an outsider, it looks as though someone just pressed a fast-forward button from December 2008 to May 2011, skipping over everything in between, as though Ed and I are taking strolls in the neighborhood with our firstborn child. And that is hard.
The realization that she is gone, that she will never be here with us, with Jackson, is still hitting me in waves. We took several photos of her with us to the hospital, and Ed carefully placed them throughout the room where I was laboring so that I could look at them when I needed or wanted to, checking each photo with me to be sure I could see it. But within a few minutes after we got there, my contractions got significantly more intense and my body and mind were consumed with the hard work of labor. And then, so very suddenly, Jackson was in my arms, and my body and mind were consumed with falling in love all over again with a tiny baby. It wasn’t until about 30 minutes after he was born, when he was contentedly nursing in my arms, that I looked up and saw, just beyond the foot of the bed, the photo of Hudson in the meadow at the Arboretum, the one where she is just barely smiling with those wise eyes, that it hit me. I remembered. And then my mind and my body were consumed with longing for my girl, full with such sorrow that she will never get to experience the love in that room with us, the love that still burns inside us for her and that now envelops her little brother, too. And I cried, all over my baby boy. A special and very different kind of baptism, I guess—another outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. Hudson sharing herself with her little brother in a way that few other big sisters could. Ed sat beside me and held my hand. Our family of four.
There have been many more sad moments since that first one. Sitting in the postpartum room with Jackson on one side, warm and alive, and Hudson’s photos on the other—photos instead of a rambunctious toddler barreling into the room to see her Mommy only to quiet down in awe and confusion when she saw the tiny creature in Mommy’s lap. Putting Jackson on the changing table for the first time, telling him how tiny he is, and then remembering that the reason he looks so tiny is because the last little person whose diaper I changed there was so much bigger. Listening to the Bob Marley Rock-a-Bye Baby CD in the car and watching it calm him just like it used to calm Hudson immediately. Looking down sometimes while nursing Jackson and doing a double-take because I could almost be looking at Hudson two and a half years ago. I know these are only a few of the many, many more sad moments to come in this lifetime without Hudson.
But here is where those early morning birds come in. Because as sad as all of those moments are, and they are terribly sad, there is joy in them, too, because Jackson is there, bringing life back into our atrophied limbs and broken hearts, melting the places inside that have been so long frozen in grief, shining light into the darkest places in which we have lived for the past year. And even though she is not here in the way I desperately long for her to be, Hudson is here, too, and will always be. Morning is here, tentatively creeping its way into our world again.
Here comes the sun. Thank you, my sweet boy, for bringing it with you.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Birth Day
I will write much, much more later (there is so very much to say as I try to process the enormous and nearly incomprehensible transition we’ve made over the last 48 hours), but for now I just wanted to let everyone know that our little Penguin, Jackson Edward Hitchcock Chaney, made his entry into the world almost two hours into his due date, at 1:45 AM on May 24, after 9 hours of unmedicated labor (only 3 of which were really hard) and about 5 minutes of total insanity that I will call pushing. It all went very fast and was an incredibly different, but equally powerful, experience from our birth with Hudson. This was a gift in many ways, I guess. Jackson looks so much like his big sister Hudson that it is almost breathtaking. This is most certainly a gift. The hours since he was born have been amazing in so many ways. Certainly I no longer harbor any doubts about the heart’s capacity to love and to grapple with extreme contradictions, even as it struggles to resolve them.
On Sunday night, after I’d finished up organizing and tidying Hudson’s and Jackson’s room, I said to Ed that maybe now Jackson would feel like we were really ready for him to come. Then I said, through my tears, that maybe I was the one who felt that way.
I started having contractions on Monday afternoon, within an hour of writing about my experience with their room.
So very much more to say, but I have a little boy to snuggle with and a little girl to grieve right now. I’ve posted a few photos (mostly from crappy phone cameras) until we can get the good ones uploaded.
And I can’t close this post without saying thank you, again, for everyone’s continued love and support, for loving and remembering our girl and loving and celebrating our boy. I don’t know how we’d be surviving this without you.
Monday, May 23, 2011
The Waiting Is The Hardest Part
My due date is tomorrow and still no sign of Jackson’s arrival yet. I’ve now been pregnant 8.5 days longer than I was with Hudson, who came 9 days early and surprised us all. My poor dad has been here since before Hudson’s remembrance at the Arboretum. We planned for him to just stay here until Jackson was born, both of us thinking it would be within that next week. And here we are, ten days later and no grandbaby. He and Ed have been working hard on all kinds of random repairs on the house (I’m calling it nesting, male-style) so at least lots of things around here look a ton better than they did before.
That’s the thing about waiting around for a baby (which I’ve never had to do before)—idle hands are hard, especially when what you are waiting for, in our case, is an event so very fraught with emotion. I’ve said here and to several others already that aside from my anxiety over Jackson’s well-being, the other main reason I am ready for him to get here is so that I can stop imagining what life is going to be like mothering a living child and a dead child together and just get on with doing it. It’s not that I am dreading becoming Jackson’s mother, not at all. It’s just that I have been wondering what this kind of mothering would be like for a very long year, ever since Hudson died and I was forced to start thinking about it. It is completely impossible to imagine how it will feel to try to embrace so much joy at the same time that I still feel so very much acute pain, so I want to stop trying and just KNOW. As much as I hate it sometimes, that is One Good Thing about life hurling me forward the way that it is, even against my will sometimes—so very often it happens that the living through things is not nearly as hard as the anticipation of living through them. There is a reason that the expression “ripping off the bandaid” has become a cliché.
Case in point, I have been sitting around waiting for so long for Jackson to arrive that I ran out of things to do. I washed all of his little baby things. I prepared several meals for the freezer. I got some sewing projects finished. I got his co-sleeper set up. I dropped off donations at Goodwill. I got the car inspected and got the oil changed. I got my hair cut. I got my toes done. I packed the suitcases for the hospital in the car. I made playlists on my iPod for labor (one soothing, one energizing). I did all kinds of things, until I had mostly run out of things to do.
The one thing I still hadn’t done was tackle Hudson’s (Jackson’s) room. It still lay in the same state of disarray it had been sitting in since I first washed all of Jackson’s clothes about four weeks ago. All the clothes under 12 months size were sorted by size into paper grocery sacks sitting on the floor, and all the bigger clothes were just stacked in a pile on top of a laundry basket full of Hudson’s books that we’d brought upstairs from the playroom a long time ago. The same sheet that Hudson slept on her last night at home was still on the crib mattress and her bears still lay in the crib with one of her blankets tucked over them, the way we’d placed them after we brought them home from the hospital. New gifts of books and wall hangings and stuffed animals sat wherever there was a place for them. The changing pad on the dresser was itself clean and cleared for diaper changes, but the basket next to it was still prepared for changing a toddler’s diapers, and there was barely a path on the floor to get to the changing table itself. On the floor by the dresser was a laundry basket full of newborn clothes that still had no room in any of the drawers because Hudson’s clothes are still in there.
So yesterday, on an impulse, I went in there planning just to deal with the clothes that were strewn about. We recently realized we had a chest outside Hudson’s room that we could put Jackson’s bigger clothes in, so I figured if I could just get those off the floor and get some of the bigger clothes put away somewhere, the room would be a little more accessible for diapering, at least. So I started moving the bags of clothes off the floor and into the chest outside the room. And then, once I started, I figured I would deal with the bigger clothes, too. I sorted them and bagged them, too, pulling out a few more things we were likely to use in the next 3-6 months for laundering, and put the big clothes in the chest. I put the clothes that still needed laundering in the hamper, where the last few outfits and jammies that Hudson ever wore sat, waiting to be cleaned one day. And then there was the question of what to do with the newborn clothes. A simple solution occurred to me. The bottom drawer of Hudson’s dresser was seldom used—usually for things she hardly wore, like a UNC basketball warm-up suit we got as a gift for her and sleep sacks that were too warm for the weather. Emptying that was easy. I put Jackson’s newborn clothes in there and then, instead of taking Hudson’s clothes out of the dresser at all, all I had to do was switch the top drawer, which still has all of Hudson’s things in it, with the bottom drawer, so that Jackson’s clothes could be easily reached. For now, then, as so many of you suggested, my kids can just share the dresser, at least until the time comes that I’m ready to do something else. I took the whole hamper, Hudson’s clothes and all, down to the basement to wash.
Once the clothes were gone, I just kept going. I hadn’t planned to. I just did it. I looked at the top of the dresser where we changed diapers. The basket next to the changing pad was full of the detritus of caring for Hudson for 17 months and 12 days, and especially that final day at home: size four diapers, the same opened package of wipes we were working on last May (amazingly, only the top wipe was dried out), two kinds of diaper cream (we were still trying to figure out which worked best), 2 bottles of antibiotic eye drops from the multiple times Hudson had pink eye, some very old teething tablets and a tube of Orajel (neither of which we ever even used), a stick of California Baby face sunscreen, the baby fingernail clippers I’d used so many times with my sweet girl sitting on my lap, two bulb syringes, an inhaler and spacer that Hudson had needed once for a particularly nasty upper respiratory infection, the thermometer and thermometer covers and KY jelly I’d used every hour or so for most of the last 24 hours she spent at home, the CVS brand acetaminophen I’d bought to treat her nasty fever because all the Tylenol had been recalled, one of those baby medicine spoons, and a spare bottle of Aveeno baby soap and a travel-sized bottle I brought to the hospital after we knew Hudson would not survive and the nurse suggested we could bathe her in the hospital bed. I didn’t linger too much over these things—I knew if I did, I would get sucked into the vortex of the details of that last night at home when we had so little idea how very sick our little monkey was. I went through them matter-of-factly, throwing most everything away except for the clippers, the diaper cream, and the KY jelly. Everything else was either expired or would be replaced when necessary. I put the diapers and the Aveeno soap (we’re trying to switch to all fragrance-free stuff in the house) in a box of other baby things to give away. I put the few newborn-size diapers we had (hand-me-downs—we’re going to use disposables for a bit and then try cloth for the first time) in the basket, and all of a sudden, it was a changing table ready for Jackson.
Next was the crib. I took out Hudson’s bears and arranged them with all the other stuffed animals we’ve received for Jackson (several penguins and turtles and monkeys, as you might imagine) along the top and sides of the crib rail. He won’t be sleeping in there for some time anyway, so I’m not too concerned about them falling in. Once I took out the bears, I noticed a round stain on the crib sheet. Although it was probably just a urine stain that we had somehow missed (Hudson rarely wet through her clothes at night), I couldn’t help but wonder if it was some kind of sign that I had overlooked of how sick she was. Had she thrown up a little bit and I missed it? (On the day before we took Hudson to the doctor, when we were googling about her fever and her swollen eye, Ed had come across meningitis, but dismissed it since except for the fever, Hudson seemed to have none of the other symptoms, one of which is vomiting.) Again, I just couldn’t let my mind stay there—I took the sheet off and put it in the hamper with the other things to be washed. And it was just done.
Once the clothes were gone, all that was left were the books. I had stacks of books that we’ve received for Jackson (again, lots of them about penguins and several classics) and then a big laundry basket of Hudson’s books that used to live in her playroom downstairs. One by one, I tried to make room for them on the bookshelf. I put all of the penguin books on a shelf together. And then I put all of Hudson’s favorite bedtime books on one shelf together, hopefully for Jackson to enjoy, too. After all this, where I finally got tripped up was with this little set of baby-sized Sesame Street board books we’d gotten as a gift for Hudson. They’re about 3 inches by 3 inches, and each one has a different topic—counting, Elmo’s favorite words, big and small, what goes together, colors. I just sat and turned them over and over in my hands, remembering how perfectly they fit into Hudson’s little hands, remembering how much joy we both took from pointing out all the different words she knew.
It wasn’t until then that I cried. I cried all over again for all that we have lost, for all that Hudson is missing, for all that we are missing without her, for all that her little brother will miss without her, for our entire lives that will never be the same, for all the years we will have to spend wishing she were with us and wondering what she would be doing now.
And then it was over. The room looked clean and tidy and ready for a new baby. It looked like I imagine we’d have gotten it looking if Hudson were still alive. And I felt better. It’s now ready for Jackson to use, but Hudson is still very much there. She’s not gone. I had put this off for so long because I so feared that she wouldn’t be there anymore, but she is. She is in every little book her hands ever touched, in every stuffed animal she ever clutched or grinned at, in every tooth mark in the wood on the crib rail, in every glance into the little mirror we keep beside the changing pad for entertainment, in every rock of the rocking chair during a chorus of “Hark the Sound” before bedtime.
She is there. She is here. Always. I needn’t have feared. Just like everything else, the waiting was the hardest part. I know the same will be true once this sweet little boy is in my arms. We just have to get there.
That’s the thing about waiting around for a baby (which I’ve never had to do before)—idle hands are hard, especially when what you are waiting for, in our case, is an event so very fraught with emotion. I’ve said here and to several others already that aside from my anxiety over Jackson’s well-being, the other main reason I am ready for him to get here is so that I can stop imagining what life is going to be like mothering a living child and a dead child together and just get on with doing it. It’s not that I am dreading becoming Jackson’s mother, not at all. It’s just that I have been wondering what this kind of mothering would be like for a very long year, ever since Hudson died and I was forced to start thinking about it. It is completely impossible to imagine how it will feel to try to embrace so much joy at the same time that I still feel so very much acute pain, so I want to stop trying and just KNOW. As much as I hate it sometimes, that is One Good Thing about life hurling me forward the way that it is, even against my will sometimes—so very often it happens that the living through things is not nearly as hard as the anticipation of living through them. There is a reason that the expression “ripping off the bandaid” has become a cliché.
Case in point, I have been sitting around waiting for so long for Jackson to arrive that I ran out of things to do. I washed all of his little baby things. I prepared several meals for the freezer. I got some sewing projects finished. I got his co-sleeper set up. I dropped off donations at Goodwill. I got the car inspected and got the oil changed. I got my hair cut. I got my toes done. I packed the suitcases for the hospital in the car. I made playlists on my iPod for labor (one soothing, one energizing). I did all kinds of things, until I had mostly run out of things to do.
The one thing I still hadn’t done was tackle Hudson’s (Jackson’s) room. It still lay in the same state of disarray it had been sitting in since I first washed all of Jackson’s clothes about four weeks ago. All the clothes under 12 months size were sorted by size into paper grocery sacks sitting on the floor, and all the bigger clothes were just stacked in a pile on top of a laundry basket full of Hudson’s books that we’d brought upstairs from the playroom a long time ago. The same sheet that Hudson slept on her last night at home was still on the crib mattress and her bears still lay in the crib with one of her blankets tucked over them, the way we’d placed them after we brought them home from the hospital. New gifts of books and wall hangings and stuffed animals sat wherever there was a place for them. The changing pad on the dresser was itself clean and cleared for diaper changes, but the basket next to it was still prepared for changing a toddler’s diapers, and there was barely a path on the floor to get to the changing table itself. On the floor by the dresser was a laundry basket full of newborn clothes that still had no room in any of the drawers because Hudson’s clothes are still in there.
So yesterday, on an impulse, I went in there planning just to deal with the clothes that were strewn about. We recently realized we had a chest outside Hudson’s room that we could put Jackson’s bigger clothes in, so I figured if I could just get those off the floor and get some of the bigger clothes put away somewhere, the room would be a little more accessible for diapering, at least. So I started moving the bags of clothes off the floor and into the chest outside the room. And then, once I started, I figured I would deal with the bigger clothes, too. I sorted them and bagged them, too, pulling out a few more things we were likely to use in the next 3-6 months for laundering, and put the big clothes in the chest. I put the clothes that still needed laundering in the hamper, where the last few outfits and jammies that Hudson ever wore sat, waiting to be cleaned one day. And then there was the question of what to do with the newborn clothes. A simple solution occurred to me. The bottom drawer of Hudson’s dresser was seldom used—usually for things she hardly wore, like a UNC basketball warm-up suit we got as a gift for her and sleep sacks that were too warm for the weather. Emptying that was easy. I put Jackson’s newborn clothes in there and then, instead of taking Hudson’s clothes out of the dresser at all, all I had to do was switch the top drawer, which still has all of Hudson’s things in it, with the bottom drawer, so that Jackson’s clothes could be easily reached. For now, then, as so many of you suggested, my kids can just share the dresser, at least until the time comes that I’m ready to do something else. I took the whole hamper, Hudson’s clothes and all, down to the basement to wash.
Once the clothes were gone, I just kept going. I hadn’t planned to. I just did it. I looked at the top of the dresser where we changed diapers. The basket next to the changing pad was full of the detritus of caring for Hudson for 17 months and 12 days, and especially that final day at home: size four diapers, the same opened package of wipes we were working on last May (amazingly, only the top wipe was dried out), two kinds of diaper cream (we were still trying to figure out which worked best), 2 bottles of antibiotic eye drops from the multiple times Hudson had pink eye, some very old teething tablets and a tube of Orajel (neither of which we ever even used), a stick of California Baby face sunscreen, the baby fingernail clippers I’d used so many times with my sweet girl sitting on my lap, two bulb syringes, an inhaler and spacer that Hudson had needed once for a particularly nasty upper respiratory infection, the thermometer and thermometer covers and KY jelly I’d used every hour or so for most of the last 24 hours she spent at home, the CVS brand acetaminophen I’d bought to treat her nasty fever because all the Tylenol had been recalled, one of those baby medicine spoons, and a spare bottle of Aveeno baby soap and a travel-sized bottle I brought to the hospital after we knew Hudson would not survive and the nurse suggested we could bathe her in the hospital bed. I didn’t linger too much over these things—I knew if I did, I would get sucked into the vortex of the details of that last night at home when we had so little idea how very sick our little monkey was. I went through them matter-of-factly, throwing most everything away except for the clippers, the diaper cream, and the KY jelly. Everything else was either expired or would be replaced when necessary. I put the diapers and the Aveeno soap (we’re trying to switch to all fragrance-free stuff in the house) in a box of other baby things to give away. I put the few newborn-size diapers we had (hand-me-downs—we’re going to use disposables for a bit and then try cloth for the first time) in the basket, and all of a sudden, it was a changing table ready for Jackson.
Next was the crib. I took out Hudson’s bears and arranged them with all the other stuffed animals we’ve received for Jackson (several penguins and turtles and monkeys, as you might imagine) along the top and sides of the crib rail. He won’t be sleeping in there for some time anyway, so I’m not too concerned about them falling in. Once I took out the bears, I noticed a round stain on the crib sheet. Although it was probably just a urine stain that we had somehow missed (Hudson rarely wet through her clothes at night), I couldn’t help but wonder if it was some kind of sign that I had overlooked of how sick she was. Had she thrown up a little bit and I missed it? (On the day before we took Hudson to the doctor, when we were googling about her fever and her swollen eye, Ed had come across meningitis, but dismissed it since except for the fever, Hudson seemed to have none of the other symptoms, one of which is vomiting.) Again, I just couldn’t let my mind stay there—I took the sheet off and put it in the hamper with the other things to be washed. And it was just done.
Once the clothes were gone, all that was left were the books. I had stacks of books that we’ve received for Jackson (again, lots of them about penguins and several classics) and then a big laundry basket of Hudson’s books that used to live in her playroom downstairs. One by one, I tried to make room for them on the bookshelf. I put all of the penguin books on a shelf together. And then I put all of Hudson’s favorite bedtime books on one shelf together, hopefully for Jackson to enjoy, too. After all this, where I finally got tripped up was with this little set of baby-sized Sesame Street board books we’d gotten as a gift for Hudson. They’re about 3 inches by 3 inches, and each one has a different topic—counting, Elmo’s favorite words, big and small, what goes together, colors. I just sat and turned them over and over in my hands, remembering how perfectly they fit into Hudson’s little hands, remembering how much joy we both took from pointing out all the different words she knew.
It wasn’t until then that I cried. I cried all over again for all that we have lost, for all that Hudson is missing, for all that we are missing without her, for all that her little brother will miss without her, for our entire lives that will never be the same, for all the years we will have to spend wishing she were with us and wondering what she would be doing now.
And then it was over. The room looked clean and tidy and ready for a new baby. It looked like I imagine we’d have gotten it looking if Hudson were still alive. And I felt better. It’s now ready for Jackson to use, but Hudson is still very much there. She’s not gone. I had put this off for so long because I so feared that she wouldn’t be there anymore, but she is. She is in every little book her hands ever touched, in every stuffed animal she ever clutched or grinned at, in every tooth mark in the wood on the crib rail, in every glance into the little mirror we keep beside the changing pad for entertainment, in every rock of the rocking chair during a chorus of “Hark the Sound” before bedtime.
She is there. She is here. Always. I needn’t have feared. Just like everything else, the waiting was the hardest part. I know the same will be true once this sweet little boy is in my arms. We just have to get there.
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