This World, Now

I have learned a new adjective yesterday, it is beautiful, useful, and perfectly descriptive: babylost. As in, "From one babylost mother to another". I like it. It works. It was used in an e-mail from Kate, (www.sweetsalty.com) and I just was struck by the ring to it: babylost. That is what I am. Babylost.

There is a website that Kate just started with some others, I'm still learning what it's all about, but you should go and look at it if you are babylost (or curious)... it is called www.glowinthewoods.com. It's this amazing little site that these six women have put together and there's just so much there. I love it.

I was so struck, in reading it, with the support and camraderie that exists out in cyberspace between babylost mothers. It is amazing. I can't even imagine what it would have been like for me to have that sense of "community"-- weird and abstract as it may be to have that on your computer screen. I can imagine that a great deal of my grief might have been moved off of the nursery floor (where I lay for many weeks on end, face imprinted with the pattern of the berber carpet, wet spots throughout the room where my face had touched), to the computer screen (where I can imagine myself sitting, fixed, almost stunned, There are more of me out there. I am not the only one who is babylost.)

Still, I have this reaction: when I read other people's blogs, when I read things that resonate so beautifully for me. Just the other day I read a post of Kate's where she described taking her son's little ziploc bag of hair with her outside, she wanted the sun to shine on him, he had never felt it. This post unleashed a torrent of tears, real and sincere, for Kate, and for myself. There was, in fact, another woman out there with a tiny little bag of hair. She, too, held it in her had, looking at the hair and knowing, this IS my child. This is not a picture, or a likeness of him, or something that touched him, but it is, in fact, him. This amazement, when even all you might be looking at is a tiny bag full of hair. She thinks this, and I think this. My other friends do not.

I don't find myself amazed at the comfort it brings me, however sadly, to know that there are others who are struggling through this journey with me. It makes sense. For the most part of my life I do feel that I fare so well, yet I crave, yearn, long for other people who can talk about this with me, who can sit there and suck up the feeling of sadness in my heart because they have been there and they know what is in my heart. Part of this is because it isn't always what I want to be talking about. How much is there to actually say about how this feels? What it was like? What it's still like? It makes me feel full and content, like a good meal, to imagine that there are women in the world, like me, who would have been the type of women that I would have hoped to befriend anyway, and in them I don't have to search for the words, because they just know.

There was a piece I read in glowinthewoods that caused lots of thought for me... it was a woman saying that Deborah Davis' book Empty Cradle Broken Heart didn't do much for her, because it merely validated what she knew she was already feeling. It really made me take a step back and realize where people can be sitting, now in a world where one can instantly, with a few web searches, find onesself literally surrounded with women who are also babylost. For me, that book was the ONLY thing ANYWHERE that confirmed that what I was feeling was normal. I did not have a single other friend, woman, acquaintance, ANYBODY who could tell me that this was what I was supposed to feel. I loved that book. I craved it, I read it again, and again, and again. (And you? Did you like it, if you are babylost?) This woman on glowinthewoods did not, really. Her post was about a salient point that Davis made, which did resonate with her, but overall she found it not so useful. My guess would be that this is because, unlike me, this woman is not islolated, and this is an amazing thing. This woman has endless acquaintances. Look at this: www.babylossdirectory.blogspot.com. There are literally hundreds of blogs there, that you can connect to in an instant. What a different world this is to be babylost in.

This has also made me think and think about how I want to write a book, and basically, I did want to write a book that served the purpose of exactly the purpose that blogs can now fulfill. I kind of think that the book that I wanted to write, doesn't need to be written anymore. I wanted to write a book that could be a friend to a grieving woman, with many stories, and opinions, and emotions, and that doesn't need to be written anymore, I don't think. So now what should I write? I will have to put some thought into this.

Cause I have lots of time to write a book, what with spending all night here typing on MY blog...