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I get phantom kicks sometimes. Must just be gas, or digestion, but whenever it’s in that one little spot, it’s astonishingly similar to when Avalon was moving around. It never fails to startle me, and then flood me with bittersweet memories.

The last few days I’ve been peeing a lot more, and having more gas in general. This, of course, reminds me of when I was pregnant. It’s too soon (like, scientifically definitely too soon) for me to be having any pregnancy symptoms if my last insem worked, so I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m trying to drink more water. Seriously, I’ve been having to get up twice in the night to pee (and I am very, very tired from working every day). It’s weird and just brings me back to the early days of my pregnancy when every little symptom was so exciting and such an adventure.

I made a travel blog: http://acrosstheneversky.wordpress.com

You can read about all of my adventures, see a few choice photos, and read about my future traveling goals…

“How could you do nothing, and say I’m doing my best
How could you take almost everything
and then come back for the rest
How could you beg me to stay, reach out your hands and plead
And then pack up your eyes and run away
As soon as I agreed…?”

-Ani

So it’s better this way, I said 
Having seen this place before 
Where everything we said and did 
Hurts us all the more 
Its just that we stayed, too long 
In the same old sickly skin 
I’m pulled down by the undertow 
I never thought I could feel so low 
Oh darkness I feel like letting go 
If all of the strength 
And all of the courage 
Come and lift me from this place 
I know I could love you much better than this 
Full of grace 
Full of grace 
My love

-Sarah McLachlan

“I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.”

-Salvador Plascencia

…than a baby nursery with no baby.

From http://therumpus.net/2010/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-44-how-you-get-unstuck/ :

“Don’t listen to those people who suggest you should be “over” your daughter’s death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over any thing. Or at least not any thing that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of those people believe they’re being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it comes to healing the pain of your daughter’s death.

They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died.

It seems to me that you feel like you’re all alone there. You aren’t. There are women reading this right now who have tears in their eyes. There are women who have spent their days chanting daughter, daughter or son, son silently to themselves. Women who have been privately tormented about the things they did or didn’t do that they fear caused the deaths of their babies. You need to find those women, darling. They’re your tribe.”

—-

“You will never stop loving your daughter. You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you.”

 

 

child
I only meant to bring you here
into this courageous form
introduce you to the scents and sensations
of this human world
let you run naked through the lawn in twilight
face ice-cream covered
wash your sticky hands
in the lake

child I did not intend
a life of ativan and alcohol
and mindless search for sleep
your heart sealed in a box
the memory of you rising
like mist into a cold winter sky

child
I wanted to live for you
and through you
and with you
my drug-induced stupor
will take me farther from your ghost
and closer to that time when you
lived safe and whole
nestled in the womb of
a better future.

 

Thank you to Carly Marie at The Seashore of Remembrance for capturing Avalon’s sunset for me. Carly created these memories for grieving families in honor of Christian, the son she lost. I’m forever grateful for this beautiful reminder of my daughter, a name written in the sand before the waves carried her away from me forever.