Two years since goodbye

Sunday was two years since Elizabeth died.  The jasmine is blooming again.

Like last year, we went to the beach in the afternoon and wrote her name in the sand and then the waves came and washed it away.

 

I felt - for a fleeting moment there on the beach - like she was back to visit for a tiny second and then back out to sea, with the waves.  

I whispered, "Goodbye till next time, sweet girl."

Embrace the Paranoia

The question keeps surfacing in my mind, how is my parenting different as a result of losing Elizabeth?  I think I have an answer, and it has two parts: 

1.  I am calmer.  That is, I am calmer about things that aren't critical.  I've been through hell, so I'm not going to get that upset over spilled milk or a diaper blowout in the car.  Maybe I'm even more fun, because these days with Ginny seems so precious and unlikely and sweet and nostalgic, even as they are happening.

2.  I am WAY more paranoid.  No scary possibility feels impossible.  Ginny always has one, but often two, breathing monitors at night (the Snuza on her diaper and the Angel Care pad under her mattress).  She has all of her immunizations.  We take car seat safety seriously in this house.  When a dangerously bad stomach bug was going around town, we stopped going to play groups for a few weeks.  I've already been reading up on safety education for kids.  The list goes on...

And so here I am, a strange contradiction:  calmer yet paranoid.  Enjoy the bigger picture perspective on life, and embrace the paranoia as well, I say.  Ginny will be blessed with a mom who lets her make a mess and skin her knees and dress herself in mismatched clothes, but keeps her in a leash in crowds until she's 13.  I'm not entirely kidding.  Can you microchip children, like we did for our dog?

Just chill out, mommy.

The charms we wear

I'm not in the blog world much these days - a perfect storm of travel, holidays, houseguests, and now back to teaching and school for the winter quarter.  I'm only away from Ginny two half-days a week and then fit in the rest of my work around the edges, but it doesn't make for much free computer time.  Reading blogs and posting via the phone while nursing is impossible now - Ginny can sense when the iPhone is near and becomes obsessed with getting her hands on it.  To chew on, of course.  So, for at least a bit I won't be here very often.  There is a backlog of things I want to say.

This is Elizabeth's season now - she was here for all of January and February in 2011.  She is all around and profoundly absent.

Like most BLMs I know, I wear charms of my child(ren).  Recently I switched back to wearing the locket with the big "E" on the front and picture of Elizabeth in it, which I wore every time I left the house for so many long months after she died.  Here newborn Ginny is holding it:

I was wearing a different necklace this summer and fall - one with two charms that say "e" and "v" plus a little pearl.  You can see it in this picture:

I ordered this newer necklace when we picked Virginia as a name.  It was a real leap of faith for me to do that.  I brought it to the hospital for Ginny's birth and put it on right after she was born.  It felt right and fair that they would both be there together as sisters, my two daughters.  But my feelings shifted over the holidays and I gravitated back to the locket.  Elizabeth again has her own space instead of sharing it equally, since Ginny is in every part of our lives every second of the day in such a tangible way.  Her little hands play with the locket while she nurses or stands in my lap, and I tell her, "That's sister Elizabeth's necklace." and wonder how long until she starts to understand.  Does she already, in her own way?

Clipped wings

Tomorrow is Elizabeth's second birthday.

One year ago I was almost three months pregnant with Ginny, extremely sick, facing down Elizabeth's first birthday.  Grief and hope and anxiety.  I found comfort in spending her birthday and the holidays alone with just my husband and puppy and our whisper of hope of a rainbow.  That all seems like it happened...one year ago.

Two years ago I was nine months pregnant with Elizabeth, walking along the shore every day to get labor started, decorating and eating Christmas cookies, folding and arranging tiny clothes, focused on our ideal birth plan, anxious to meet our first daughter, completely oblivious to the bomb that was about to detonate in our lives.  Unbereaved.  Innocent.  That all seems like it happened...five years ago? ten years ago? or perhaps just to someone else.

It's cliche to say that losing a child changes you.  Of course it does.  But sometimes the extent of the break takes my breath away.  I cannot connect to huge parts of who I was before.  My memories from two years ago feel like something I saw in a movie instead of my own past.

Lately I've been thinking about another manifestation of this change - kind of a cap on my positive emotions.  I can feel contentment and gratitude and acceptance.  I can smile with my whole face.  I can laugh freely and feel our new kind of happiness with ease.  All of these things came back slowly, in fits and starts, over the past year and a half, and just typing them makes me realize how far I've come.  However, I cannot feel soaring joy, not even in a "new" altered form.  There are moments these days when I know the old me would have felt it - watching my husband and Ginny dance to silly songs, a sunny day at the beach with dolphins playing in the waves and puppy running in mad circles, tiny fingers playing with my hair while we nurse.  In these moments I simply feel... contentment and love and bittersweet happiness, and gratitude for the good things. 

But my emotions never soar, and I wonder - Does losing a child just clip those wings forever? 

The smell of living at Ronald McDonald House

We are at my mom's house in Montana again, for Thanksgiving and also for her to have Ginny-time as she's still healing from breast cancer surgery.  

It's a super harsh climate here compared to SoCal, and I have super needy/dry skin.  I ran through all of my lotion in a few days, then asked mom if I could borrow some from her.  She handed me a fancy locally made one.  The bottle looked slightly familiar - maybe I'd seen it before on her dresser or in a store?  After my shower yesterday I started to use it on my legs.

And it was the smell of living at Ronald McDonald House.
And I was instantly back in the the worst of the worst of the time that we learned Elizabeth was dying.

Apparently mom gave me a bottle of that same lotion when Elizabeth was in the NICU.  I confirmed this with her this morning when I handed it back to her and said, "I can't use this."  Apparently it's the lotion I used after showers when we were living at Ronald McDonald House, every day for weeks.

My eyes didn't remember the look of the bottle and my brain didn't remember the name of the brand, but my nose remembered what was happening the last time I smelled that smell. 

And I never want to smell it again.

Halloween

Blindsided by grief I guess would be a good description.  Sucker punched, perhaps.  "Grief is a roller coaster," everyone says.   Yeah well not the fun kind of roller coaster.

So I reach these long periods of acceptance and peace (see last post) and then something happens.  Like Ginny's first Halloween, also known as Elizabeth's second Halloween, and I flash back to two years ago, when I was 7 months pregnant with Elizabeth and several lifetimes younger and more innocent than I am now, and I saw the most adorable toddler ever dressed as a baby chick on Halloween and I said - "next year baby girl will be too young for that costume, but that's her in two years" - because 7 months into a pregnancy with a perfectly healthy baby girl, whoever thinks, oh no my daughter will be dead by next spring?  Not me.  Not then.

So I cried many many times this Halloween, starting at about 2 am (hello, four month sleep regression).  It was a long and emotional day.  It had been too long since I focused my energy on Elizabeth, and a lot of sadness had built up.

Somehow the evening itself was ok, though.  My husband came home early from work.  We dressed up, visited a little with neighbors, went for a nice walk, handed out some candy, and turned in early for the night.  I do LOVE dressing up a baby in costume, perhaps too much - we bought Ginny four costumes this fall and took any excuse to pull them out.  On the holiday itself she was a ladybug and the rest of us (me, husband, dog) were her supporting cast of flowers.

 
But oh do I miss my little chick.  I think she would have loved Halloween this year.

Checking In

Ginny will be four months old tomorrow!  She is joy and sunshine and smiles and cuddles and sweetness and light, even while crossing time zones and weathering her first cold.

Blogging is tricky for me these days.  We are traveling a lot, both for fun and to help out with some health issues my mom is having, so I don't get much computer or even smartphone time.  I'm very thankful to keep up with some of you on Instagram since you and your babies (here and gone) are in my heart every day.

Passing the 18 month anniversary of Elizabeth's death was a big milestone for me, particularly because the girls are exactly 18 months apart in age.  These things will always ebb and flow of course, but I seem to have reached a new and better level of acceptance of the story of our family so far.

And a little sister has just woken up, so my blogging time is up.