National Childloss Week

A dear Colchester friend of mine (you see, I DO have them 😂) posted earlier this week on Instagram about #nationalchildlossweek, something I had not known existed. These platforms didn't exist 10 years ago. So much changes, so much stays the same. 

Earlier this year I was having coffee with a friend who has just had a newborn boy. I was snuggling him and she asked me about my son - she has another boy who is 10.  I smiled. 'It isn't a happy story but it has hope,' I said. So I told her small bits, the bits about his brief time and the bits that make people laugh at black humour. Did you know you don't have to pay for a baby's coffin, just the cremation? Neither did I!

And now I figure it is once again time to to talk my walk, and be candid, and share my sweet boy's story so that people are going through something similar may know they are not alone. I've written about the pregnancy before at  http://fanglet.blogspot.com, but it has been ten years and that brings perspective. I can hold newborns now and not lactate. I can laugh about how huge and ill I was, speak with gratitude about the medical teams that saved my life and gave me two days with my son. 

I had a miscarriage in 2008. I terminated a pregnancy in 2000. My son's death was not my first loss of a child.  I knew childbirth and motherhood were dangerous endeavours from the get-go. My mother had a late term miscarrage when I was 4. She started hemorrhaging whilst making me pancakes.  I thought I had killed the baby...for more than 2 decades, I turned that moment in on myself and carried it. When my son was born blue and unable to gasp for air, whilst I felt blood and life drain out of me, a small part of my brain  just assumed it was Fate, weighing out the balance of my crimes and all of my sins. We don't get to be that fortunate.

The reality was...less of a romantic tragedy. It was simply reality. My son had a rare condition - Noonan's Syndrome - that had caused his internal organs to flip. He had a large, irreparable hole in heart, and brain and kidneys couldn't communicate. He literally never stopped peeing. When I went into labour, it was with an extra 2.5 litres of amniotic fluid and water retention. I still struggle with oedema. He was beautifu. He weighed just over 5 lbs. The first time I held him was when he was dying. He smelled like the sea. I wanted to take him outside - it was a warm sunny day in Bloomsbury and I wanted him to die having felt sunlight on his skin. But that didn't happen. The only person outside of my ex-husband and I who ever saw him was my friend Wendy.  Everything happened so fast and yet so slowly.

The day after my son died, my friend E came to collect me for a trip to our local garden centre. For the first time in 6 months, I could walk more than 30 feet without collapsing in exhaustion. I was still ill - I wouldn't realise just how ill until later that summer - and I was restless. My breasts were heavy with milk and there was no baby to feed. I couldn't donate to milk banks because we weren't sure then what had caused my son's death...the assumption at that point was that it was down to something wrong with me.  It could still very well be the case, that there is a flaw in my DNA coding.

We went for cake and when I came back, I was told the midwife had come by. 'Why bother,' I said, trying to be flippant.  'He's dead. There's no need.'

But of course there was a need. She came back the next day. What were you doing out? You should be resting. 'He's dead,' I said. 'There's no point...I don't have anything to rest for.' What I meant was that I didn't deserve to rest. I had wasn't a mum, I was an abberition, an outcast. I didn't even have the decency to miscarriage, like a 'normal' woman.  I remember a "friend" laughing at me. 'You had to be different, didn't you.' We are not friends anymore.  

A week later, we went to Florence. I do not recommend traveling to Florence if you have just lost a baby. Everywhere I went, I was surrounded of artwork of Mary and Joseph. Everywhere I went, I felt them pitying me, judging me.  I was wasn't feral yet, but I was getting there.

I made plans, made appointments and missed all of them. I would walk to bodies of water and stare into them, through my reflection, to their clear or murky depths.  I walked at night or at dawn so I didn't have to see living people. I woke at night, drenched in milk that would not quit coming for 10 years.  I scratched at my arms sometimes because I itched for lack of sleep and because the scratching reminded me I was still alive. 

I worked with a therapist and really began unpacking my emotional baggage. Yegads...so much baggage. Then one day, I laughed, for no other reason that I was happu. And I heard a song...made for radio and I think it pulled me back, with that one line 'Happiness hit her like a bullet in the back...' and I knew I was going to come out the other side. I didn't know what it would like...but I was going to come out of the other side.

I've heard an addage that once you have kiddos, you're only ever as happy as your unhappiest child. I don't know if it is true, but I do know that I wonder as constantly about my ghost-son as I do about my children on this plane. There is a lulling quality to my time here, always a ear tuned for the cry of a child I have not ever heard. But it doesn't rattle me the way it used to, this loss, this death. I am not alone, nor am I an abberition. I am a statistic, a warning, a walking cautionary tale. I am survival, a marvel of medical science, a take of perseverance.