As Bereaved Mother's Day passed last weekend and Mother's Day itself approaches this week I have been thinking about how I feel about the title of Mother for myself.
Was I a mother last year? Is this my first year of mothering or my second?
Most of the discourse I have read on this has been mothers asserting that they want to be thought of as such even if they have no living children. I totally respect and support this for them but last year when my close friends or other loss mamas assured me I was still a mother it didn't feel right. It was actually jarring and upsetting for me. Maybe because it painfully reminded me of my losses at a time where I felt very vulnerable. I felt like I wasn't a mother if I had no one to nurture; I wasn't doing the job as I understood it to be defined. It's like calling a widow a wife, an incomplete description. I had that empty arms ache and I wanted motherhood to be something that felt better than excruciating grief. I felt like there needed to be another category that is not lesser or excluded but specific to someone whose only child died before they got a chance to live.
Now I am definitely a mother by any definition but I still feel like I am something else too. I don't know what that is but now I can say that being the mother of a dead baby is a lot harder than being the mother of a live one. Saersha doesn't need me like Stellan does but I hope that I can honour her in my life some how.
Oh, Florine. I understand. Like there is something about being a medusa, a baby lost mama that is different from being the mother of a living child. I feel it, too, and I feel it in a similar way. Like the things that I do - the activities of "mothering" my living child are different from the activities of "mothering" my dead one. How can I mother my dead baby? I can't nurse him or burp him or bathe him. But he does wake me in the middle of the night sometimes, or the absence of him wakes me in the middle of the night. I am always looking for him, the way my eyes have been trained to look for my living boy. My body and the deepest parts of my animal brain are mother to Nathaniel. But he's not here in my arms. So confusing. . .
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