Sunday 27 March 2016

My baby died.....

I haven't posted in a long while, that's because my baby girl died.

Emma, a beautiful name for my beautiful daughter.  She was born 12 weeks and 1 day early, but she died two days before.

And since worrying about money, work, nothing really matters.  One of the most important people in my life was taken away from me.  No amount of worrying could prevent that from happening.  I could have been poor on the streets, or a rich aristrocrat, nobody could have saved her, medicine was not advanced enough.  No diagnostic test could have prevented it.  She was already gone when I saw the plus on the pregnancy test, when I saw her dancing inside me on the ultrasound, when I felt her kicking me.

It has been two months since I gave birth to her, when I said hello and goodbye at the same time, screaming.  I still miss her.  I still feel a whole in my chest where my heart should be.  The room where she should be sleeping is still empty.  The nights are deathly silent.  My breasts which have long since dried up should be ripe with milk for her to feed off.  I sit here writing this with tears running off my cheeks, listening to sad songs, when I should be in hospital giving birth to her, alive.

I worried about so much.  I worried about what my friends thought of me when I said that thing that nobody took any notice of.  I worried about that headache that ended up being nothing.  I worried what letter could have turned up on my welcome mat, instead it was just takeaway menus and annual statements.  I worried about so much, and nothing happened.  Until I heard that something was wrong with my daughter.

I remember sitting on my balcony at home with my husband, half cut on wine and smoking cigarettes.  Despite still feeling the raw, agonising pain of losing our child only a few days before, I tried to keep my husband and I sane.  I recalled my favourite memories, the water fight with my family and new friends in Turkey, the time we jammed on the train back from Lewisham in 2012, our wedding day, the things that made us laugh.  I tried to remember the joys that life could bring us if we allowed ourselves to be happy, and to lift my husband from the feeling of failure and grief.  We smiled, only it felt wrong.  Was it really wrong?  What I wanted to do was to remind ourselves that, in life, we were happy before this cruel tragedy, and we will be happy again, only it would be without our precious daughter to share those new memories with.

I admit, I worry A LOT.  I worry if my husband's headache is because of a brain tumour, even though its the tension of depression.  I worry if that left pelvic pain is an ectopic pregnancy, when it's not.  I worry whether we will ever have a child.  But when I think back on those stupid things that I worried about before, they meant nothing.  Worrying... Does... Nothing.  Things just happen, and we just have to get through it.

We had to make painful decisions that we hope we, and other parents, would never have to make again.  Painful decisions that we know were the right things to do that will burden us for life, for the sake of the life of our baby.  Worrying did not do that for us, love did.

This blog will not cure you of your anxiety.  Yes, awful things in life happens, but do we waste our life sitting here worrying about anything and everything that COULD happen?  No!  Of course not!  There is a life out there if we grasp it and make the most of what makes up happy.  I look at the photograph of our honeymoon sitting on the bookcase, it's the happiest photograph of us, and that serves as a reminder that we shared such joy that our teeth showed and our faces creased with sun-burned wrinkles.  If we could be that happy then, we can be that happy again.  Our daughter will always be remembered and will always be in our hearts and our thoughts.  And when we are that happy again she will still be with us, in our souls, forever, we will share that happiness with her.

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