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?
