9 months of loving you while you grew in my belly. Of wonder and wondering and quiet dreaming. Of sitting on the patio and meditating with hands over big round belly where you lived and moved and we talked to each other. Watching the garden and the birds. 26 hours of breathing and mental balancing, of deep muscle pain and no escape, of focus and knowing that it would end in happiness and holding you and rest. Hard hard work, sweat, exhaustion. and then the moment came, you emerged, you made your descent. And we lost you.

Instead of my baby they gave me this basket full of metal objects to carry around everywhere I go. It is very heavy. I drag it behind me. When I wait in line at the post office, when I go to work, when I go to bed. When I get up. Especially when I get up. Rusty, random loveless things instead of you, instead of my soft, beautiful child.

Love Poem

Love Poem

by Donald Hall


When you fall in love,
you jockey your horse
into the flaming barn.
You hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
You tease the black bear.
Reading the Monitor,
you scan the obituaries
looking for your name.

_____________________________________

It is all a glorious risk. I know it's all worth it. Love love love.
Jess

Valentines

Hello darling.

There are so many things I have wanted to say this week. I go back and forth between hope and joy and fear and despair. Sometimes I want to sell everything and live on a yurt. I keep telling people about this yurt and how good it sounds. It's hard to get my mind straight. It's hard to get it quiet. What am I about? I want to get beyond the news and the fear. Every time I'm with people I love and we laugh I remember the point of being human, which is of coarse, to tell jokes. To laugh at things that happen in life, to find humor. There is usually humor around, even in the most dire of situations. My family seems particularly good at finding this, to the point of sacreligion. Yes, I'll coin that, it has a red line under it as I type saying it's not really a word but who cares. I know you are with me, I know you love us, you are just sooo missed. Going to the Y has gotten hard, so many mommies with little babies, so many of them my friends, old high school friends. I have to decide, will I give it a break for a while to just heal up the old heart or just tell myself to deal with it so I can go swimming, not be so surprised every time.

I love your dad. It's valentine's day and I'm trying to be up but I'm just sad. I love him and I'm sad. I am so grateful for him, for our almost 10 years of marriage, for our friendship, for our sharing of you, the knowing together of this love and heartache, and learning to love and be sad. To be sad and make jokes. To be sad with moments of long and deep laughs. Life, I'm here, I might as well see what you've got.

I love you my child.

And just a note to all those we love, and all interested, I just want to share that it's hard to hear the phrase "try again." It's not because we don't want more children or don't want to talk about them, but because Otto was not a try. He is who he is. He is my firstborn, my oldest child, and though I understand that there aren't really other words to use that easily come to mind when asking this question, I'm sure that there are creative ways to ask it without the word "try". We have a son. He isn't here, but he is real and always. And there will be more. My friend Maria asked me the other day in spanish if we were applying. I asked, for what, insurance? And she laughed, and said, no, a baby! I loved it. "Is that really how you say it in spanish?" I asked? And she laughed and said yes. I love the idea of applying for a baby. You just turn in the application to the angels and see what happens.

Happy day of love to everyone. We have each other today. It's a good celebration.

Bitter Blog

 I have something to say about my eyes being opened. I get why people end up drugged out and on welfare and feeling hopeless in life. Did you think it was because they were lazy and just didn't have any dreams?

 Our insurance paid 10 times less than we would have had to pay if we had no insurance. So the people who can't afford it end up in major major major debt.  Debt that takes everything from you. Doesn't matter that our baby died, we would have been liable for $200,000 if we didn't have insurance at that moment.

I take time off work to heal my body, to heal my heart, but the bills keep coming, the expectations don't shift at all for the soft body and heart that is me. That is everyone at some point or another in life. But if you don't have family to support you, to gather round you and help ward off all the craziness, you can get smashed.

It's easy to see how anyone could end up in a desperate situation and just spiral down. There is so little care and protection for people who need time to grieve, recover, feel, get it together. We like to think that we get ahead by being "good". Good people don't commit crimes, don't do drugs, don't act irresponsibly. And with losing our baby, it's so easy for me to see how you can feel crushed by this huge machine of systems that doesn't care if you're there and needing some time to exist in and get used to the alternate reality that is now your life. Instead you get run over by the big riding lawnmower like a little gopher in the grass.

I'm about to write a letter to the credit bureau explaining why a bill was late being paid that a collection company called us for, one of dozens that came separately for all the different shots, x rays, and services Otto was given, because we were trying to figure out which insurance was paying it, if it was billed correctly, all the while having not enough desire to even eat much less pay attention to all this. In this society, it just feels like you get punished for things not going your way. and it's easy to ignore till it happens to you.

That is the only reason I care, I'm guilty of it, because it did happen to me. I now am aware that the little ways I can help someone when they're struggling don't make me a great person, it makes me part of a community, a village. It's part of my job as a human to be there for my fellow humans when they're feeling crushed. I think that must be part of why everything seems to be falling apart right now with our market, our country. Too long fending for ourselves, not looking around at the results. It's a nicer way to live, helping out. It feels better.

This is a rant, a feeling, just like all the others with a hint of anger and disgust. Money is good, it's constructive. Greed and compassion-lessness is gonna rip us up. I can't wait to be done with insurance and bills and credit bureaus, but it's likely to last a couple years. lame.

Rain

It rains outside. Rain that we need.  The air is clean. One daffodil bloomed, bright deep gold against the dark earth and the gray sky.  I think of you all day.  In some ways you seem more real, and I feel more deeply what I have lost. It seems like I should be able to pick you up and kiss you today, like I should hold you and have you so close.  I miss being a mama with her baby. It really hurts. But I have to accept it too, that you are not here, not in body. You are here in some other way, and I imagine you as pure energy, around me, as an angel, as an invisible baby, and I don't know what you are now.  I'm letting myself believe in the times that we will have more babies, and it will be so normal to smell them and kiss them and clean up for them and cook dinner.  In the gym last night a mom with two kids was leaving the locker room as I was going in, having a casual conversation with a stranger she said, "yah, it's a lot of work but it's worth it."  So casual, like it was nothing, just life to have these beautiful children to put yourself into. And I remember the times when I was afraid of the commitment, of the work, of losing myself in children, and now I think, that is such a gift, that work, that time, that sleeplessness, that love.  There is nothing like it.  As I try to recover from the searing burn of letting go of you that last time, from my arms, there is nothing I can think of that would be just as good. So I'll remember my good dream from last night, two children in strollers, one seemed like you, with warm, fat feet, and I touched them and was filled with joy and family.