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I’m taking a little break this week from mourning pages to bring you something a little bit more one-off and current. For the past however many weeks/months I have had two babies in my orbit — one somewhere up there, one coming ever more into form down here. I’ve been reluctant to write about it, and I’ve also struggled not to. Pregnancy after loss is not a taboo subject, but so often the writing I’ve found on the topic is in the case of pregnancy after the loss of pregnancy. Ruby was two and a bit when she died. She lived in my body for nine whole months, and outside of it, alongside it, for more than two years. I can’t speak to pregnancy after pregnancy loss, because it is not something I have experienced, but I imagine the loss of a child who stayed for a few years in the world is decidedly distinct from that.
Children dying is, very sadly, not a rare thing in the rare disease world that I lived in, and continue to inhabit in Ruby’s legacy. I bore painful witness to the passing of at least three children in the CDG community alone in the space of less than a year. These children were older than Ruby, and their parents had long since finished having children. They left behind siblings. By contrast, Ruby was my first, and although she will always be my daughter, and I her mother — I cannot tell you how strange a heartbreak it is having the entirety of the physical manifestation of that role stripped away from you overnight. Being Ruby’s mother was not a job — it was a privilege, but it came with many roles that required very diligent, very hard work from me. Those disappeared with her last breath.
I am certain that losing a child who left siblings behind carries its own kind of upheaval and cruel re-arranging, but again, I can’t speak to that experience directly, and can only imagine from the information those other families would share — which could never be a truly full picture in such a painfully overwhelming and necessarily private time.
My grief counsellor asked me how Ruby would have reacted to meeting her new sibling, had she still been here. I said she would have reacted exactly how any three year old would have reacted — first with fear and then with delight, possibly with some of her own grieving that my attention was now divided. I like to think that attention might multiply when you have your second child, but I just don’t know yet. Motherhood reveals an abundance of superpowers with each child.
My attention is the most divided it has ever been right now. I hold the awareness of a new life growing inside me, getting a sense of them through their first flutters of contact. Contemplating what they’re doing in there, if they’re having a nice time, if they’re comfortable, if they appreciate the fact that I’ve started doing pull ups and back squats again. At the same time, I have Ruby all around us, enveloping us with her omnipotence. In my dreams I see her as one contained form — she looks exactly as she did when she was here, but when I am awake she is nebulous. As I place one hand on the belly that is getting harder and harder to hide, I find myself reaching out to see if I can somehow touch her too. Both are just slightly beyond my reach and my comprehension.
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