I'm still here, you know. My life whirls beneath my feet, children at all ends, and yet I am still not full. I will never be full. There are days still where I want to lie myself down at their feet, my four children, and let my tears pool around their little toes. I am so grateful for them. I want them with me, around me, on me, and I never want to let go. They are growing and changing and my family is getting bigger and older and I don't want to leave any of this in my past. I want to keep it here with me forever.

 Can I ever make this feeling go away, this desperation for a baby that haunts me every day?

When I was pregnant with Maeve, and Fiona was herself a baby, I felt somehow certain that this was it. I felt full, complete, and done. But that lasted so briefly.  Now that Maeve is growing older, I entertain myself every single day with fantasies of having another baby some day, one day. Not soon, as my life is most definitely full right now and my body and mind do require some break from the intensity of parenting a baby. But some day, some day far down the road, when everyone is in school I could, (couldn't  I?) conceive one, last, only child to quench my thirst for mothering the young. I dream about this every day.

I know part of this is a long standing obsession with having babies and mothering babies, but I also live in constant fear that I will never again love anything as much as I have loved having babies and young children around the house. As I am still in a stage of my life where I could conceivably have another child, I find it so difficult to willingly leave this stage of my life without looking back. What if it never gets any better than this? Would it be possible to extend it?

I could go on, and on, and on. Every day things happen that make me grieve the loss of just having a baby in my home. This is not a loss. I have had a gain. But still I grieve somehow.

In my mind's eye my empty arms are still reaching, reaching for that baby to hold. They still crave just one more, just one more. Foolishly, they think they can regain what was lost. I know they are wrong, but I still can't stop dreaming.

I am at the YMCA.
I see a woman whom I haven't seen in two years. Her son was in preschool with Aoife. She marvels at Fiona and Maeve, their dexterity on the climbing structure, their height, their vocabulary. Last she saw me they were a baby (who could not yet walk) and a big bump. This seemed recent.
And then she says to me, and the older three are at the charter school?
Yes, I say. And I think to myself, did she just say three? But the room is noisy. She must have said two.
How old are they? You have five, right? No, four? Five?
Four, I say, correcting her.
Oh, four, she says. I don't know why I thought it was five.


I do.



(she was one of the few people in my life's history who came to my house and saw something with Charlotte's name on it and asked, with beautiful innocence, "Who's Charlotte?" As I'm leaving the Y, I remember this story with complete clarity. And I am betting that as she left the Y, she also remembered why she imagined me with five.)




P.S. So what is it? Four, or five? What do you say when you are ten years out (almost)?

I don't know. Or, I can't imagine.

I don't know what it feels like to lose a child to a senseless act of violence. I can't imagine being a parent right now to one of those twenty children, the same age as my Aoife, who now lie lifeless somewhere, waiting for their burial the week before Christmas.
But somehow I'm different, even just a little, from most of the other people I know who also can't imagine this. I do feel dizzy, and vaguely sad and confused. But I know this is not my pain to feel.
Because, once, I did walk back into a house and look at things that belonged to a person who used to be alive and wasn't anymore, and I wondered what I should do with those things.
I have unwrapped gifts that were for someone who wasn't alive to open them.
I have lain on a floor on a soft wool rug until the entire room smelled like wet wool, my tears never ending.
I have heard the wails that sounded like an animal coming from my own body. I wondered who could sound that way.
I could not look at my face in a mirror.
Mostly, I just know how in an instant, a world that seemed predictable and fair can suddenly be nothing like it was three minutes ago. How in the beat of a heart, your future can turn from one of joy and everyday rhythms to a bottomless well of grief.
Thinking of those parents whose children were slaughtered on Friday makes Charlotte's little death seem so quiet, so easy. There was nobody to blame. Just a quiet, unknown baby, slipping away.
But she was still my future, and I loved her very much. So there are some things I know.
And the greatest thing I learned from Charlotte I am reminded of again, and it is good to remember this. Any day could be the last. This fact, however, should not invoke fear and reservation, but rather inspire us to love openly, seek out joy, and dearly love the ones in our midst.
I don't pretend that I grieve for those children. Yes, indeed, my heart hurts and aches and pains at the thought of their lives lost. But I would not belittle the pain that their families, friends, and mostly their parents feel by acting as though what I feel is grief. I am sick at heart, I am lonesome for them and what they might have become. But I know how to breathe right now, and those mothers are now struggling to draw a breath. They are willing their hearts to beat, not quite knowing why. This is not me.
Me, I walk down the hall and lie next to each of my children while they sleep. I admit I linger a little bit with Aoife, kissing her soft cheek, watching the shadow of her long, long lashes on her cheek in the glow of the night light. Then, I return to my bed and I lie there and think of the cupboard of Christmas gifts that is in my room, at the ready, and I wonder for how many years those mothers will keep their children's unopened, unreceived gifts for.
 I imagine it might be forever.

Giving Thanks

It's never too late to give thanks. On the morning of Thanksgiving, we ended up at home. A day earlier I had been thinking our trip to my parents might be cancelled. Liam was feeling sick, and Maeve had thrown up in the night. Strangely, and fortunately, everyone rallied. By noontime on Wednesday they were climbing the walls, and when Thanksgiving morning dawned bright and clear, everyone was up and cheerful. This extra window of time at home (we would have left Wednesday afternoon, otherwise) allowed Greg to cross paths with his brother, who was coming to town to have dinner with his parents while we joined my sisters in New Hampshire. H took the kids over for a visit in the morning while I stayed home and cooked myself and Maeve a variety of dairy-free Thanksgiving alternatives so as not to trouble my mother.
Home alone, I had this clear, clear thought, all of the sudden that morning: I'm just so thankful that I survived losing Charlotte, so I could experience all of this. Suddenly I felt as if I had been saved, even though I knew that the person who had saved me was actually myself. For a flicker, I could remember how fast and how painfully I was sinking for a while, how deep the pit seemed to be that surrounded me as I wallowed in the well of my grief. I used to have visuals every single day of myself, down in a shaft with earthen walls, clamoring at the walls but only feeling the dirt pushing higher and higher under my fingernails as I tried, to no avail, to move upwards. I knew with such certainty then that I would be very, very sad for the rest of my life.
What I didn't know was how a person could also be very, very happy at the same time. I didn't know that joy could move in and sit right next to pain, that they could share the same bowl and drink from the same cup very peacefully. I never imagined that while the stark fact of Charlotte's loss would never seem less tragic and awful, that I would be able to carefully package up the details of my pain so that I only felt them when I wanted to. I didn't know how happy my new children would make me. In the beginning, I thought I only wanted Charlotte.
I still can't believe I survived losing her, but I'm very, very glad I did. What my four living children offer me now is indescribable. I never want this part of my life to end. I am truly, gloriously, happy.

Writing has not been something I've made time for lately. My world spins quickly, and it seems that in taking the moments to be there, presently, with all that happens leaves little time for reflection. As the days darken, however, I am seeking to carve that time. I do appreciate being able to document this life as I live it.


A few nights ago, I dreamt of Samantha. She was a woman as if from a dream, who came to me after the birth of Charlotte, probably not more than a week after Charlotte came and went. Our hospital had, then, a wonderful program where one was provided with twenty hours of post-partum home doula care after discharge. I had elected this option before the birth, and was gently informed by my nurse that while I was sadly not going to have a baby to bring home, I was still entitled to my doula. She told me there was one they had in mind, a gentle, quiet woman who was a massage therapist and had once before worked with a family in Oregon whose baby had died. I signed the paper. A few days later, Sam called.
When she first came, all I wanted to hear about was Benjamin. He was the baby before, the other one who had died. I wanted to know about this other mother who had walked in my shoes. I needed some connection, even if it was a second-hand, trans-continental connection through a kind, sweet-faced doula named Sam. She held my hand. She hugged me for a long, long time. She told me the story of Benjamin, and then she listened to me. For five, four hour sessions, she rubbed the pain in my body, kneading the sad, bitter energy through my being, and heard me pour out my soul, my very life. She started on the other couch, her feet tucked up beneath her, her face earnest. She was thirty, four years older than I was. She cried a little. By the end, she was on the couch with me, holding me on her shoulder, stroking my hair. She held me like we had always known each other.
Sam told me that she thought Charlotte had chosen me as a mother, because she knew that I would be able to keep her, even when she couldn't stay. Those words were my life raft for some time.
Sam knew me at a time when I don't remember myself. But I do remember her, and how she held me when my body was about to break into a thousand pieces on the floor, held me with warm, strong arms, and spoke to me softly with a voice like hushed wind.
She told me that her favorite tree was a hazel tree. I had never seen one. She described it to me. Ten days ago, I was making a ropes course with Liam and came across a gangly tree, blooming yellow in early November. A hazel tree, right there in my own front yard. I wanted to call her, to run into her warm arms. To cry again.
And so she came to me in a dream. I saw her, across a lawn, and did run into her arms, and felt her strength as she hugged me close. I was so full of intense joy for having found her, yet when I felt her envelop me with her warmth I was returned to the saddest place I've ever been and I began to cry. Not just weep, or tear up with joy, but cry the mother's cry, the cry of the mother who has lost what she loves most. But I was safe.
I miss that Samantha, and this dream is my call to find her. Off I go.

My friend's baby died, people write to me, at least every few months. It is still happening all around us. They write to me grasping at straws, hoping I will possess the magical formula to make it go away. I do not have any such magic; I do not even have the words to give them to help their friend. We all suffer in isolated pods, each needing something different from the other.
The only thing we all need is that friend, who is the one who has taken the time to write to me, the friend who is trying to figure out what to do. The friend who will hopefully put her hand on that empty-armed mother's shoulder, and say, I am going to be your friend even while you are sad. I am going to sit with you even though you are crying, and I'm going to say your baby's name. This friend's tears will fall onto her pants, leaving wet spots, while she sits silently because she can't find words. This friend will come into the house and humbly put some food or some muffins on the counter, feeling embarrassed that all she could come up with was lasagne or cookies. But it's really all she can do, isn't it?

I am a mixed blend right now, of a mother who really wishes people would mention and ask about my first daughter, and the mother who cannot bear to take herself back to the place where pain surrounded her from all sides. I remain fiercely loyal to Charlotte as my daughter, yet when people bring her up, I find myself feeling closer to an awkward teenager trying to find words than the proud, devoted mother I feel like. Long ago I remember reconciling the fact that there was nothing left to say; the story had been told, the tears had been shed. These days I feel the absence of tears belie the truth of my loss, yet I can't sit well with the discomfort of others all the same. I am a stone-faced survivor, removed almost completely from the truth of the agony of the loss, trying to remember the love for my girl while I try even harder to divorce myself from the terrible pain of her death.

My sister gave birth to my first niece on the ninth of May. She was three days early, and I heaved a sigh of relief that Charlotte's day would remain sacredly hers. Little Eleanor June arrived with a beautiful bellow, and when I went to see her in the hospital, it was love at first sight. I wanted to swallow her whole, to drink in the sweet smell of vernix in her hair, to wrap myself around her tiny, frail, limp newborn body. I spent a lovely few hours with Eleanor and my sister and her dear, dear husband, and I was in heaven with them.

It was only when I was driving home that it flooded back to me, an image I had never actually seen. It was me, looking so much like my sister, slim and freckled with my dark hair tucked behind my ears, but in this image the baby laid limp across my chest, her eyes closed forever.

Was that really what it was like, I thought? Could that moment really have been real, that I was robbed of that beauty of the living baby curled in my arms? It made my stomach boil with a real, acidic nausea to imagine the hand I had actually been dealt. My daughter, born in the second week of May, to a young, healthy mother and devoted, true father, had been robbed of everything. She had, indeed, lain dead in my arms, and today she is not nine years old. She is nothing, and I have nothing left of her but a pregnancy and a day worth of memories.

The sadness stuck with me for quite a while that time.

Now my daughter would be nine, nine long years old.
Long years, long hair, long legs.
I had always envisioned her blonde; but now Maeve has dark, dark hair, so I can't be sure. She has slipped back into the illusion she was once before my younger children outgrew her.

The night of her ninth birthday, Greg said, should we make a nice dinner"
I said no, let's spend hundreds of dollars and order everything we want off the gourmet menu at the best Indian place in town.
So we did, we had two shopping bags full of the best things I've always wanted but been too cheap to order, and we laid it all out on the table with beautiful placemats and candles and ate most of it up.

Liam and Aoife joined us. The babies were in bed already. Halfway through the meal, Aoife regarded me with huge, haunted eyes.

Mimi, she carefully said, Did it make you really, really sad when you had to burn Charlotte's body?

Yes, I said, Yes it did.

Beside me, Liam burst into quiet, sad, tears. Please don't talk about this, he said. It makes me too sad.

I asked, Do you children want to hear the story of the day Charlotte was born? It occurred to me that they didn't really know the story. It seemed part of their family history they ought to know.

Aoife nodded, but Liam continued to cry. It makes me too sad, he said, it's too sad. He leaned into my shoulder and wept.

I told Aoife we could talk about it later, but then when the time came, the moment had passed.

It was the end of a long, cranky day. Nine years into it and what I really wanted was a day alone to count my blessings and beat the dirt for my one huge missing piece. This has been a year of incredible loss to those around me, invoking a feeling of near-guilt for my own grief over my one lost girl.

But she was my very own girl, and I wanted her very much. I am entitled, and I weep for her even surrounded by the eight loving arms I have since grown.

I am so lucky, but still remember.