Three

Dear Kenley,

Happy Birthday, baby girl!   You are three years old today.   Three!  It's so hard to believe so much time has passed since I held you in my arms.  1,095 days.  1,095 times I have woken up with you missing from me.  1,095 times I have gone to bed without having you in my arms.   If I live sixty more years, that will be almost 22,000 more days.   All without you.

What more can I really say at this point that I haven't already said to you?   How many more times can I say I miss you?   How many more times can I tell you how much I wish you were here with us?  How, more than anything, I want to be able to watch my two girls grow up together as the sisters they should be?   

This last year has seemed so much more difficult than the previous two.  I think it's because I'm getting even farther away from you - because the baby I know isn't even remotely the child you should be.  Each day that passes makes you more of a mystery, and it breaks my heart.  What would you enjoy doing?   What would your favorite color be?  Your favorite book?   Would you be talkative like your little sister?  Would you share her love of school buses?   Would your hair have lightened or would you have stayed my raven-haired beauty?   I look for you in the eyes of your sister, but you aren't there.  I look for you in the children at the grocery store, but that's not you either.   You are nowhere and everywhere all at once and it takes all of my strength to keep myself balanced between a world where you never died and the world where I actually live.  

I miss you, my dear little ninja.   My heart skips the beats where you should be, and I am forever out of synch.   No matter how many years pass, my scars will always ache for you, scars that stretch over each other, winding around and across my soul in rivers of pain and hurt.  Every day, they tear and heal and tear and heal as I settle into a life where you are not.  A life where I work so hard to make your death mean something as I try to turn your memory into a legacy.

When I look at all I have done in your name - when I look at all that has been accomplished because of your tiny little life - I am both in awe and in tears.   The more of a difference you make, the more I feel the sting of your absence.  Every award, every accolade, every message of thanks, hurts as much as it heals.   Because they wouldn't exist if you were here, and they are hollow replacements for your beautiful face - for the life you didn't get to have.  

You are gone.  You are not here to celebrate your third birthday.   You will not eat cake.  You will not open presents.   You will not get ice cream all over your shirt and fall asleep in the car.   You will not do any of those things this year or any year.  You will not go to preschool, or kindergarten, or college.   Sometimes, I am selfish and I make your death all about me.   I am a Heartbroken Mother, and it's hard to live a life without your child.  But, honestly, none of this is about me.  The unfairness isn't that I have to live without you - the unfairness is that you never got the chance to live at all.  YOU were the one robbed.  YOU were the one who deserves more. 

This isn't my story - it's yours.   A story of a little girl who wasn't - who was loved so deeply and so fiercely that she still managed to change the world - even if it's just mine.

I will tell it until the day I die. 

I love you, my beautiful girl.  A mother's love is forever, spanning across time and space into eternity.   When I think I have reached the end of my rope, I remember that I love you with the light of all the stars in the universe. - and that my rope, made from stardust, is infinite.  

Starlight, Star bright, you're the star my heart holds tight.

Love,
Mom

 

Let Me Be Sad

By now, you've probably already seen Pixar's Inside Out  and you probably already know how wonderful it is not only as a touching and hilarious movie, but as a great insight into human emotions.   This movie is a thousand shades of deep, and every time I watch it, I find something else that is so very spot-on.    For me, the most poignant scene is the one where Bing-Bong, a long forgotten imaginary friend, is upset.  While Joy wants to distract Bing-Bong and make him forget why he's in pain, Sadness comes and sits with him.   Sadness listens to him.  She doesn't offer advice.  She doesn't try to get him to think of something else.  Sadness lets him be sad.   And, when he's finished being sad, he gets up and goes on with the mission at hand.  Take a minute and refresh your memory with this Youtube clip:

Why is this scene so important to me?  Why am I showing it to you?  Why am I writing a blog post about it?  Because I want you to just let me be sad.   Because I want you to know that it is okay to be sad - that sadness is a part of life and it's not the end of the world.   Sadness heals.  It really does.  

When I am feeling sad, and I let people know I am having a hard time, there are so many wonderful people who just want to make me feel better.   They tell me how strong I am, how amazing I am, how much of a wonderful mother to my girls I am.   They are Joy.   And Joy is wonderful, but it's not always what I need.   See, I know I'm strong.  I don't always want to admit it, but I still know it.  Any woman whose heart continues to beat after her child's ceases is the epitome of strength.   Three years after Kenley's death, I am still alive - and I am busting my ass to give her death a purpose.   I immerse myself in the loss community on a daily basis to make sure she didn't die in vain.  I parent a rainbow in the face of loss and I balance myself on a trembling tightrope stretching between the daughter in my arms and the one in the stars.   I am a fu#@ing warrior.   

And I am exhausted.   Do you know how hard it is to paint a stiff upper lip every day?   Do you know what it's like to carry your child's memory on your back like Atlas?   Sometimes, I just need to be sad.   I need to lay down the Heartbroken Mother mantle, stop being "strong", and allow myself to be weak.   I need to shake with sobs and drown in tears.  I need to coat the world in blues and grays and sink into the sand.   And I need people to sit beside me and say, "Hey, go ahead and be sad.  You don't have to be strong right now.  It's okay."

Because a break in my strength for a little while isn't going to cause my entire armor to crack.  Moments of sadness won't spiral me into a lifetime of hopeless despair.  I cannot be strong all the time.  I cannot fight sadness forever.   There will be times when it overtakes me - and I need to let it.  I need the people around me to let it.    

It is okay to be sad.

I am not depressed.  I am not hopeless.  I am not spiraling into a pit of despair.   I am sad.  I am sad because my child is dead and I miss her.  And I am allowed to be sad.  I am allowed to sit and rest and hold Sadness' hand for a while.  You don't have to try to fix it.   Honestly, by now, do you really think you can?   There is nothing you can do.   Just let me be sad.  Let me rest.  Let me be weak for a little while.  Give me a moment.   Or two.  Or three.

It won't be too long before I dry my eyes and sling her back over my shoulder.   It won't be too long before I'm back to being strong and brave and all those things you tell me I am.   But, for now, especially for now, just let me be sad.  

Dead Baby Guru

Guru: a) a teacher or intellectual guide in matters of fundamental concern.  b) a person with knowledge or expertise.  c) one who is an acknowledged leader or chief proponent.

Dead Baby Guru.  

As blunt and as jarring as it is, every mom who has lost a baby understands that phrase. 

It's what we become to those outside the loss community.   We, simply because we find ourselves in a terrible situation beyond our control, are thrust into this position without our permission or desire.   Clearly, no one wants to lose their child.   No one wants to become an "expert" on child loss either.    And even those of us who are not "experts" are still seen as one and are thrown into that role like a fish thrown at Pike's Place Market.  Here ya go....catch!    

Let me make this perfectly clear.   We do not want to be your Dead Baby Guru.   We do not want to be the first person you think of when you hear of another mother who has or is going through the loss of their baby.   We do not want to be sent every single article about baby loss that comes across your newsfeed.  By the time you send it to us, we've seen it in three support groups already anyway.  We do not want to be tagged in posts of sorrow and grief and infant death.  We hate being associated with this.   We hate opening our email or message folder and seeing someone asking us what to do for their friend who just lost a baby.   It's awful being Grief's Go-to-Gal.

"But, Rebecca," you ask, "I thought you were all about spreading awareness."   

Oh, I am.   I believe in talking about loss openly and without shame.   I believe in fully supporting families who have to face a future without their children.  I believe that a good support system is the foundation of healing from loss, and that my support system is definitely above par.    But, I still hate being your Dead Baby Guru.   With a passion.

Just because I am open about loss doesn't mean I like talking about it.   Just because I welcome new members to this horrible club with open arms doesn't mean I enjoy doing  it.  I had a pretty good weekend in Minneapolis with my sister, but damn if I didn't wish I could have been doing almost anything else in the world.   

You want to know why I do these things then?  Why any of us do? It's because they have to be done.   Because if mothers who lost children didn't talk about it, then no one would.    Every single outspoken friend I have in the loss community is their social circle's Dead Baby Guru, and it is exhausting.   Putting your pain out there for display is difficult.  Talking about loss and the death of your child in a public forum on a regular basis is no bed of roses.   We do it because silence needs to be broken.  We do it because people need to be educated and babies need to be remembered.   However, the price we pay for being vocal is being seen as an "expert", and we become magnets for loss and all things associated.  

We completely understand why people do it.   It's their way of supporting us or trying to understand us.  It's their way of showing us they are thinking about us and our child.   We get it.  If people are thinking of us when they come across articles of loss, we know we have made a difference in their thought pattern.   If we are the first person they think of to give support to another grieving mother, we know our child has made an impact on someone else.  We know our experience makes us a valuable support for moms new to loss and we want to be there for them.  But, we still hate it.  

We hate being your Dead Baby Guru.  We hate being an expert at losing our baby.  We are tired of sharing articles about baby movements or bereavement.   We are tired of going out of our way to educate people about loss and remind them about our children.   Yet, here we are.  Every day - catching those smelly, slippery fish that keep getting chucked at us, sometimes while we still have four other fish in our arms.    

Just remember, even Gurus need a break sometimes.