(no subject)

[rivka]

It's been a year. (If you're pregnant, please don't click through the link.)

I would have had a six-month-old now. Playing with toys. Maybe sitting up.

If that pregnancy had not ended, I would not have become pregnant with the Niblet who is, at this very moment, trying to batter his way out of my belly with his feet. He would not exist. I will always look at this baby and know that great grief made him possible.

I have no great meaning to extract from what happened to us a year ago. I can only say that you endure what you must because there's no other choice, and eventually it ends. Suffering is finite.

I haven't forgotten; I don't think I could. Who I am has been shaped by what happened a year ago. I can still contact the sadness. But I'm not there anymore.

I survived.

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

you did survive. i am pleased by this. also pleased by the upcoming niblet.

[ckd]

Wholeheartedly agreed.

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Not harrowing grief anymore, just regret. And so many things in my life I changed because of it - who knows where I'd be if things had gone as I was expecting them to go?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

*hug*

I wonder if looking at this baby and thinking about the loss of the other might not be psychologically a good idea, if it might make you think when he pees all the way down the stairs or fails French in Grade 9 that your perfect neverborn baby wouldn't have done that, if that shadow might come between you and the real person he will be. I think you're too sensible for this, once he's really there and solid in your arms.

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

Yeah.

I speak as an only child, an A+ baby born healthy to an O- mother who had already had several failed pregnancies. I have always carried the weight of all those expectations, as well as that of my younger brother whom we lost.

Yes, I'm very strong, perhaps because of all that, perhaps in spite of it. But it's hard. Confusing, painful, and hard. You've had all those feelings so maybe you understand a little....

I would echo this thought: love Niblet for what he is, not for what might have been.

Otherwise, I've never borne a child myself, so all else I can send you is good wishes and *hugs*.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I expressed myself badly, I think, because I'm not actually thinking that Niblet will be shadow-haunted or that he is my magic replacement baby. No. He is himself.

It's not that my prior grief changes how I feel about him; it's that him, and already being in love with him, changes my feelings about my prior grief. He doesn't have to do anything or be anything in particular. (Although it would certainly help if he would promise to stay head-down.) Just the fact that he is makes me feel like I can't look back.

[mizchalmers.livejournal.com]

I read the babylost blogs (because I am, apparently, a ghoul. Or because I feel I need to bear witness. Or, most honestly, to look steadily at my worst fear and make myself believe I could survive it.) This is a really commonly expressed sentiment there. There are no replacement babies. But there are babies who would not have been, at all, were it not for their lost brothers and sisters. It's grief and joy and mystery beyond our understanding.

I, random stranger on the Internet, wept for you this day last year, and am humbled by your grace, and so very glad that you survived.

[acceberskoorb.livejournal.com]

*hug*

[almeda.livejournal.com]

John and I each have an unfinished pregnancy in our sibling-trees -- mine would've been a brother born to my dad and stepmom right after they got married (and therefore older than the sister who is now at Annapolis being a plebe); it was not the right time for a child, for them, so they chose not to have a child. John's was a sister, between him and his living youngest; I think she made it to 18-20weeks and was spontaneously lost.

We call them Secundus and Tertia (from what their birthorder would have been in the family) when we speak about them amongst ourselves (though neither of us has told our respective parents we do this, because it might be squicky). I think of them as our alternate-world siblings. Sometimes I rabbithole a little about what the family might have turned out like ... for one thing, my dad's continuing obsession about A SON!!!! (my father is the firstborn-male of a firstborn-male of a firstborn-male. Umyeah.) would either have abated or made poor Sec's life hell on earth. :->

Whatever might've been down the other trouser-leg of Time, though, these are the families we have here and now.

(edited to rephrase more accurately and gently some things in the first paragraph)

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

When I had my terrible accident during my pregnancy, I worried that I'd always think of Elena as a lightning-baby, as somehow scarred like the scars on my arm..... Her arrival changed that, I think - she is who she is, and that accident is just one (very subtle) facet of her, somehow (though she doesn't even really know about it yet). Niblet will be born, and he'll be himself and who he essentially is, and you will know that he's a wonderful baby. Yes, things could have turned out differently in the alternate timeline. You will always have that grief. But Niblet's wonderfulness will bring you copious amounts of joy.

[kate_nepveu]

You did.

(And, pregnant women, she is *so* not kidding about not clicking. I was and I did back when that was current and I regretted it.)

[shandra.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad. It is nice to get to that place.

I probably wouldn't have my son had my daughter not died 4 days after she was born, and it is absolutely impossible at this point to imagine life without him, just for himself. There is joy after sorrow. Yay.

[ailbhe]

My best friend, growing up, would not have been conceived had her brother lived.

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

I certainly know how this feels, though my miscarriage was not as traumatic as yours was, though it certainly had trauma in its own way.

Anthony would not exist if that first pregnancy had continued. I'd have some other baby, but not my sweet, train obsessed, infuriating, cooking little guy. A real live boy is much more real to me than an abstraction.