To Begin

It's been almost 9 months since my daughter was born and died, why start blogging now?
Other baby loss bloggers have noted the significance of 9 months growing their babies and then 9 months grieving them. It's a very painful symmetry of time.

The babies that were conceived around the time that she was born are now coming into the world. Anyone who has experienced the interminableness of pregnancy can appreciate that span of months. 

Really now I am just starting to feel like I can possibly write about what happened. It's taken 9 months to gestate my grief enough to put it out into the world a bit.

I wish that this blog could be beautiful enough to represent her, to be worthy of her, but I don't think I will be capable of that. Saersha deserves graceful and poetic writing, amazing you with wisdom. This will certainly fall short.

She was our so desired and loved daughter. It took us almost two years and 3 early losses before we were blessed with her. Finally things were right with the universe again. We were being reconciled after all the struggles and rewarded with a perfect healthy girl, until the morning that she was born and it all fell away.

I will write about what happened in more detail later, but in the simplest terms, the placenta detached too early and left her without oxygen when labour started. How could things have gone so wrong just on the day she was finally arriving? The pregnancy had really been textbook until that day and its blood and panic. Injustice doesn't begin to describe it.

In the insanity that is immediate loss all I wanted was to be pregnant again. It wasn't something that can be easily described. It was like a primal force. It was my fingernails digging into the cliff. It was the only thing that would help even a little bit.

On the fourth month it happened. Now I am blessed again with a healthy pregnancy and a normal baby so far. This will be Saersha's brother, who will be born almost exactly a year later and who I can sometimes convince myself will actually arrive screaming with life, get to sleep in the crib his sister never saw and share her things and our love.

This is also what has inspired me to write now. For all of the counting down I do to this baby's arrival, I am aware that it is also counting away from her. I yearn to go backwards and forwards at the same time. Only one way is possible of course and that will take its creeping pace, so I need to be present and to remember. Thinking forward and backward for my babies.