5 months
My sweet baby, I can’t believe that in two days it’ll be five months since you were born. I dream about you every night. Do you remember how you danced in my belly each evening? Every good, pretty thing reminds me of you. I love you forever and ever, more than I’ve ever loved anything, my beautiful girl. This world is so much brighter since you made your quiet, glimmering entrance. Time moves differently now. Love feels stronger and permanence feels fragile. Maybe that’s what it is to be a mother. Maybe that’s what it is to be a mother whose kid is dead.
I stare at the dimples in your cheeks framed on my nightstand everyday, and instead of taking videos of you giggling at the big world around you, I search the internet for all of the milestones you’d be hitting by now, in the absence of you. I see moms everywhere I go, holding their babies. I wonder what it would’ve felt like to walk through our front door with you in my arms. Would our walls look less grey if you had crossed the threshold in a car seat instead of a wooden box, or were they always this color? I wish I was waking up at 3am to your cries instead of my own. If there’s a version of me somewhere in the universe, walking around town with you in blissful ignorance of this version of me, I hope she knows how lucky she is.
How many photos of you would I have by now? I finally put the book I was reading when you were still alive back on the shelf. I don’t want to know how it ends. I wish the leaves weren’t falling without you here to see them scatter. There’s so much I wish I could’ve shown you. I’m getting outside, feeling the sun on my shoulders and stepping out of bed and I scream and cry when I can’t hold it in and I’m doing all of the things I’m supposed to. Even so, I can’t remember what it feels like to hold the easy, innocent hope of happy endings. I can’t remember what it’s like to wake without having to convince myself you’re still gone.
People keep telling me I’m strong, but I’m learning that courage and strength aren’t the same thing; because one is something you choose in the face of adversity, and the other is what you are when you have no other choice but to be. And they tell me they can’t imagine what I’m going through, but I think what they really mean is they don’t want to imagine what I’m going through. They probably can, everyone has an imagination, but no one wants to imagine what it would feel like to see their baby die. Maybe they couldn’t stand the deafening sound of a silent delivery room, with the joyful echoes of a living baby’s wails one room over. But they didn’t see you, Stella. They don’t know how proud I was when they handed your little body to me, wrapped in that pastel blanket.
We’re healing, your daddy and I. We’re disassembled and messy and scarred, and basking in the warm, sacred memory of you. I wish I could walk back into that hospital room one more time. I think somehow, the arms of the clocks would’ve stopped ticking at exactly 1:41, it would still be that warm summer night. I would sneak in on my tip toes and find you and I forever newborn & 24, still lying there in that bed, frozen in time, collecting dust from the past twenty weeks. You and I are still there. We have to be. That version of myself died with you that night; she had no choice but to, she refused to leave without you. We haunt that room together.
I miss you. We miss you. Happy 5 months, my beautiful, golden girl.
My sweet baby, I can’t believe that in two days it’ll be five months since you were born. I dream about you every night. Do you remember how you danced in my belly each evening? Every good, pretty thing reminds me of you. I love you forever and ever, more than I’ve ever loved anything, my beautiful girl. This world is so much brighter since you made your quiet, glimmering entrance. Time moves differently now. Love feels stronger and permanence feels fragile. Maybe that’s what it is to be a mother. Maybe that’s what it is to be a mother whose kid is dead.
I stare at the dimples in your cheeks framed on my nightstand everyday, and instead of taking videos of you giggling at the big world around you, I search the internet for all of the milestones you’d be hitting by now, in the absence of you. I see moms everywhere I go, holding their babies. I wonder what it would’ve felt like to walk through our front door with you in my arms. Would our walls look less grey if you had crossed the threshold in a car seat instead of a wooden box, or were they always this color? I wish I was waking up at 3am to your cries instead of my own. If there’s a version of me somewhere in the universe, walking around town with you in blissful ignorance of this version of me, I hope she knows how lucky she is.
How many photos of you would I have by now? I finally put the book I was reading when you were still alive back on the shelf. I don’t want to know how it ends. I wish the leaves weren’t falling without you here to see them scatter. There’s so much I wish I could’ve shown you. I’m getting outside, feeling the sun on my shoulders and stepping out of bed and I scream and cry when I can’t hold it in and I’m doing all of the things I’m supposed to. Even so, I can’t remember what it feels like to hold the easy, innocent hope of happy endings. I can’t remember what it’s like to wake without having to convince myself you’re still gone.
People keep telling me I’m strong, but I’m learning that courage and strength aren’t the same thing; because one is something you choose in the face of adversity, and the other is what you are when you have no other choice but to be. And they tell me they can’t imagine what I’m going through, but I think what they really mean is they don’t want to imagine what I’m going through. They probably can, everyone has an imagination, but no one wants to imagine what it would feel like to see their baby die. Maybe they couldn’t stand the deafening sound of a silent delivery room, with the joyful echoes of a living baby’s wails one room over. But they didn’t see you, Stella. They don’t know how proud I was when they handed your little body to me, wrapped in that pastel blanket.
We’re healing, your daddy and I. We’re disassembled and messy and scarred, and basking in the warm, sacred memory of you. I wish I could walk back into that hospital room one more time. I think somehow, the arms of the clocks would’ve stopped ticking at exactly 1:41, it would still be that warm summer night. I would sneak in on my tip toes and find you and I forever newborn & 24, still lying there in that bed, frozen in time, collecting dust from the past twenty weeks. You and I are still there. We have to be. That version of myself died with you that night; she had no choice but to, she refused to leave without you. We haunt that room together.
I miss you. We miss you. Happy 5 months, my beautiful, golden girl.