This is such a bittersweet day. I loved this house. I was so excited to share it, to share my whole world with you. You would have been four months old tomorrow. You died four months ago today.
I’ve never been very worried about the things most people consider dangerous. I’ve deployed to war zones; I’ve gone scuba diving; I’ve shot handguns, rifles, bow and arrow.
I was supposed to start work next week. I was supposed to be home, snuggling a tiny child. I was supposed to have a life different than the one I float through now.
One of the least-talked-about aspects of stillbirth and pregnancy loss is that postpartum bodies still carry weight & produce milk, whether you have a living child or not. This is my journey with my postpartum body after stillbirth.
Crawling out of the early days and fog of grief after the death of my child and rejoining the world is one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life.
After Adrian’s death, I came home from the hospital to a fully furnished nursery and without a living child. I wanted nothing more than to sleep for weeks, but I had to deal with milk, and funeral planning, and all the minutiae of being postpartum without a living child.
The story of how I planned for conception and pregnancy as a single mother by choice (SMC), the process of becoming pregnant, and the sheer joy in looking forward to my son Adrian’s birth.
The city wasn’t originally my choice, but it’s where he was born, and now I’m forever tied to it. The birthplace of my firstborn child; the only place he lived before he died.
Nobody tells you that stillbirth is a possibility. I still remember, even while screaming, that I was thinking about the three other women in that testing room, and how I must have been their shocking introduction to the fact that babies die.
Death has never been my friend. The necessity of her existence is no more comfort than my own. I don’t hate her, but I look at her the way she looks at Disease. We are all harbingers. We all bring Pain.
Today, I put on a pair of pre-pregnancy jeans. They are tight, and my body fills them differently, but they do fit. And this, surprisingly, is also hard for me—as hard as I worked to get here, as much as I thought wearing “normal” clothing would be a cure for at least part of what ails me, I also miss it. I miss being pregnant.
29 October 2017 is the day where I cleaned the last of my things from my house, I found the breast milk that expired before it made it to the bank.
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