Wild Geese

My friend, Sarah Bain, posted this on Facebook today and I was flooded by emotion. This poem has always spoken to me so clearly, and I wanted to share it here.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Mary Oliver

It gives me shivers, and reminds me that everywhere, all the time, people are dying, and people are surviving, and the sun rises, and sets, and rises again, and this is what is supposed to happen. I never think that Charlotte was supposed to die, but somehow this Mary Oliver poem reminds me in such a humbling way that death is just a part of life, and that even in our deepest grief we can search ourselves for what we're made of and rise out of the depths. I almost don't want to say too much about what it says to me, because whoever you are, I know it says so much to you, and I want it to be yours. Read it a few times, over and over. Breathe.

When I was giving birth to Aoife, it was a fast and furious labor. Contractions had begun a little after five in the afternoon, and by seven o'clock I was in full, raging labor. She would be born a little before nine o'clock that evening. As true, hard labor set in, somehow, through the drone of my woman's song, as I rocked on a birthing ball and breathed deeply and slowly, those words came to my mind: Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. It became a mantra, in that absolutely out-of-control way that things just become what they will be while you are giving birth. For hours, as each surge hit me like a Mack truck, I would rock slowly and gently, breathing in, and repeating it inside my head: let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. An image would come to me, then, of the flesh around my middle softening, and almost melting, of myself sinking into the ball with relief and delight, and this was how it went. Again and again, I repeated this to myself. Again and again, I was just doing the thing that women do.

Thanks, Sarah, for bringing me back to that beautiful place and also for reminding me to think the words of that whole poem-- perhaps the only one, now, in the world that I can truly recite from memory-- to remind me of my own gentle place in the family of things.

And, as an aside, but slightly related to dear Aoife's birth, I made this for her half birthday today. Absolutely divine, and I recommend it highly.

Miss Clementine with her wings...Why not let the little guy do the work?
On Aoife's first day of school
And on the topic of food, I believe kids should be allowed to have FUN. So when I saw the Fun Dip in the ice cream store? Nostalgically, I bought it immediately. ALL kids should have intermittent access to awful junk food that is this cool.

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I am bringing a speaker to Western Massachusetts the week after next. Cathi Lam.mert, the director of Share, is coming to present "Compassionate Caregiving When A Baby Dies" 3 separate times over the course of 2 days. She will also meet with my group participants and share an evening with them, imparting her wisdom upon them.

I have done everything for this conference absolutely solo this time, because the one remaining person at the local hospital who used to help me out has sadly had to leave on long term sick leave. And so, I trudge forward, absolutely alone, and while the work can be hard, I am also proud to be doing it. So far I have 50 participants for the first session, 22 for the second, and 48 for the third. I'm very pleased and expect to keep getting registrations next week. If you are within driving distance and are interested, I should mention that 3.5 credit hours are available for RNs and LICSWs and the cost is free/minimal (depending on where you work, it's either free or $15).

Today a woman called me, wondering if there was room in one of the sessions. As I began to speak to her I excused myself for a moment to let Aoife know that I was going to be on a work phone call and was not going to be available to answer questions for a few minutes. (Aoife has that typical child's habit of needing me desperately the moment the phone rings, and while I do believe in doting upon her as much as I can, we are working on common courtesy as a rule in our home). When I returned to the phone, Fiona squealing delightedly in the background, the woman on the other end of the phone said, "It must make you feel really happy to have those kids when you're running a conference called Compassionate Caregiving....." Her voice trailed off. It was as if she couldn't even say it, it's that awful. (Which, of course, it is...)

"Oh, yes, I said. I'm missing one here." And I wonder if that somehow didn't register with her, because we began to banter happily about what day she would come, how far it might take her from her small town in southern New Hampshire, and whether or not she would need the CEUs.

Suddenly she said, "It's just wonderful, amazing, that you're doing this. It's so hard to find things like this."

"It's very important to me," I explained. "My baby daughter died in 2003, and I needed this so very much, and I realized what a lack of resources there truly were."

"Oh," she said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to make a flip comment about your other kids a few minutes ago...."

"Please," I reassured her, "Don't worry. You are absolutely right, I do have a different type of appreciation for my living kids as a result of being thrown into this world, and I'm grateful for you to acknowledge that right off the bat."

"Was it your first baby?" she wanted to know, and they all do.

"Yes, she was my first."

There was a pregnant pause, and a breath on the other end of the phone.

"That must be so hard."

And I was the one to take a breath, then, because it is so hard.

I'm so grateful for the work that I do, and I am going to make this organization grow and work and flourish if it's the last thing I do. Somehow I'm going to figure out a way to break even financially so I'm not supporting the organization myself, and somehow, over time, somewhere, somehow, I hope somebody will come out of the woodwork, fiercely determined like I am, and want to throw themselves into the group like I do. This is my greatest wish: that some day I will have an equal partner in this operation; equally willing to push and pull and tug and create space for this in her life, and that I won't only be accepting offers of help, but will be making offers of help to somebody who is wholeheartedly committed to my team.

But for now, the best part about being a one woman show, is that I can smile demurely and say thank you when people say it's an amazing organization. There isn't anyone else I can give credit to, and right now in my life I do flourish on knowing that there is something I created all by myself and that has grown and affected people and will continue to thrive for years to come.

On Change

I remember the paradoxes, and there were so many.

I want time to speed up, I can't stand this pain: but I want time to stop, I don't want to move further away from her.

I want people to care about me! I want them to ask me how I'm doing: I don't want anyone to talk to me.

I don't want to do anything, I just want to sit here and be sad: I need something to do so I don't feel only sadness.

I want everything to change: I want nothing to change.

This was the biggest thing, I think. I can remember this urgency pulling me in two directions with equal force. There was one side of me that wanted everything to stay the same. The little paper with her footprints on it was on the mantlepiece, we had placed it there when we got home from the hospital. It was not to be moved. The nursery was to remain exactly the same. Photos of Charlotte went up around the house, but otherwise things were the same: the same phone I had spoken to the midwife on, the same coffee table I'd put my feet up on while in early labor, the same bed in the same room where my water had broken and it had all began. The same staircase I had thumped down in terror, seized with cramps, running for the bathroom (was that when she died?, I always wonder). Things were static for a while.

But then things began to change. The flowers we had been given, simple, direct ties to our homecoming and to our memorial service, began to die. Our black telephone broke, and the jar of mayonnaise I had opened on the day before she was born was empty. Things I had bought at the grocery store on the last day we'd gone shopping together were beginning to disappear from our shelves. Change was happening, and I couldn't stop it.

This was when the dichotomy began, because there was this small, eager part of me that wanted it. I was so deeply wounded, like a fox who has been freed from a trap but whose leg is still raw and ragged, the bone exposed and flesh weeping, and who is emaciated from weeks in that trap. I could barely peer out from under the blanket of my grief, and under there I tried to cling fiercely to the things that connected me to her, and to that time of the second week of May. But as things did change on me, and I did occasionally peek out from under the blanket, there were parts of me that wanted to try to throw it off and begin again. I wanted to throw off the blanket and begin to run, to run and run and run and not look back. The pain was so engulfing that I felt sure in my heart I could never survive it. Clearly the situation was never going to improve, I reasoned, as every day of my life I would still live with the knowledge of my little dead daughter, and how could that fact ever diminish in its sadness? But many people had told me that the wound heals around the edges, and that over time I would not feel that serrated knife thrusting in and out of my heart with growing intensity. So there was a part of me that was feeling urged to move along, to change things as fast as I could, so I could get to that next place where each breath in and out didn't hurt.

But I knew this was futile: I hadn't done my grief work yet. I knew somehow, even though I'd never done it before, that grief was my job right now, and that in order to come out somewhere that I could carry Charlotte comfortably inside me, like a fond memory, I would have to do this job now, and I'd have to do it well.

As time passed, and I found myself continuing to be torn about whether to embrace or reject change, I began to adopt a new philosophy, one which guides me to this day. And it is that with each step I take, I simply ask myself which direction will feel the most healing for me, myself, personally. Is it going to be more healing for me to leave the May calendar on my wall, so I can reflect on the events that happened that month, or will I feel refreshed by seeing it turn to June? Upon recognizing my first instinct, I would take action, and know that was the right choice for me. Will it feel better for me to stay at home by myself today, or do I want to try to go somewhere out in the open, to call Charlotte's name over a field or stream? Which will feel more comfortable to me at the end of the day? Not, what do the grief books say, or not what do I think my mother would want me to do, or not what do my friends expect me to do, but what will be most healing for me.

And over time, I learned that the things around me that tied me to her weren't actual ties. They were physical reminders, yes, but when they were gone nothing changed between Charlotte and I, and so it became easier for me to make little, and then bigger, and then huge changes around me which felt refreshing and light. By mid summer I was painting my dining room, my living room, and rearranging furniture. I signed up for a horseback riding class because when I was a little girl they had been too expensive and I'd always wanted to learn to ride. And I filled Charlotte's nursery with things that were hers: clothing, diapers, stuffed animals, hospital bracelets, locks of hair, and birth certificates. I went in there every night, without fail. Greg and I would sit on the floor and read each other chapters of Charlotte's Web, we would write letters to her in a journal a friend had given to us, and we'd build with her blocks. We'd sit with her, and became more and more comfortable in this relationship, which was strengthening every day.

I was learning to trust Charlotte, that there was a part of her that could not leave me. She has stuck to me like glue throughout this journey, seven years and four months and seven days of it, keeping my feet rooted in my conviction that I will make the best choice for myself every day to make myself more comfortable and likely to thrive. I grieved long, and I grieved hard, and I still do, in those pockets of time where things are still, and quiet, and a soft piece of music comes on that tears at my heart. Or at the times when my family, my joyous, living family is just loving each other so hard, the grief can sink in quite suddenly, still only seconds from the surface of my being.

But Charlotte is kind to me, she's gentle, and she helps me every day. I do walk hand in hand with her now, knowing how much she has taught me, loving her, and feeling her love. I'm still desperately wishing I could bring her back, but I'm also knowing that I've done well with the rotten lot we got, that her little life inside me was not for nothing.

I carry her with me, I carry her in my heart.

i carry your heart

with me (i carry it

in my heart) i am

never without it

(anywhere i go you go, my dear)

~ee cummings

On Food

There is a major component of my life that has never come up here, probably because it really hasn't been impacted very heavily by my grief or my living children. But I am a lover of food of all kinds, an enthusiastic chef, and a passionate baker. I grew up a picky eater by nature, despite the fact that my mother herself is one of the best cooks I know. While her palate included all varieties of fruits, vegetables, and spices, perhaps it was her pre-motherhood scorn of those parents foolish enough to coddle picky eaters (you know, the whole, if you give it to them, they'll eat it attitude) that landed her with three girls who would spend hours at the dinner table, looking down our noses at everything that was offered to us. This went on to the point that the pediatrician became alarmed at our failure to gain weight and suggested to my mother that perhaps she should feed us things we would actually eat, and worry less about what it was we were eating. She was still conscientious of being healthy, of course, so that meant home made macaroni and cheese, scrambled eggs with cheese, applesauce, cream of wheat, oatmeal, and the occasional banana if we wanted to get really healthy. I can honestly say that as a child I didn't really eat fruit, vegetables, or meat by choice, ever.

And then, somehow, over the years, this began to slowly change. I began to enjoy fruit, first, and then vegetables. I remained a vegetarian until I wanted to go on a trip in the early nineties and do a homestay in New Zealand. The trip coordinator suggested to me, quite politely, that living on a sheep farm in New Zealand is not the best place for a vegetarian. He suggested some other trips that might be more condicive to my diet, and also wondered if my diet was at all flexible. And it was. I was a vegetarian because I didn't like meat, but I wasn't unwilling to try it. Living on a sheep farm it seemed to make sense to eat, well, sheep. So I agreed and was sent off, and while I will never go near a sheep or lamb on my plate ever, ever again, after that experience eating such mild things as chicken or the occasional well-dressed hamburger didn't seem so awful. So as we move along this course, we get to the point where we are now: where I eat everything except blue cheese, olives, and jello. This has transformed my life at home, where I love to cook, and also and especially going out to eat: where I used to have one, or maybe two things available to me on the menu, now that I relish almost everything I have so many amazing choices and I can hardly decide every time.

I am blessed here with an abundance of fabulous local food. We belong to a CSA for all our vegetables, and we have orchards in our town for peaches, apples, cherries and pears, and grow our own blueberries and raspberries. We always buy the milk from our friends' dairy farm, and down the road is a farm where we get our fresh eggs and, just recently for the first time, beef. I have to say that I am not an enthusiastic beef eater by any stretch of the imagination, but as I am not vegetarian and have this source of humanely treated, free roaming, grass fed protein, how could I say no? I'm certain that with enough spices and sauces it will be just great. I'm willing to give anything a try if I can get it right around here and it's grown/raised in a way that is the way nature intended.

Lately, though, it's the sweets that have been getting to me. Being home with my girls all day while Liam and Greg are at school has just upped my sweet tooth, and has gotten me baking up a storm almost every day. My house is always full of ingredients, but I don't ever tend to buy things already made-- e.g. we always make cookies, we snack on veggies or toast, we often make bread. The often complete lack of crackers, cookies, pretzels, granola bars, or other things that one might just grab and snack means that we don't snack often. But it also means that when I really want a snack, and my tummy just really doesn't want an apple or carrot, I am quick to drag out the kitchen aid, put Fiona in the sling, and pull up a chair for Aoife. We have been having so much fun.

I was inspired to write this post after making these chocolate-chip peanut butter oatmeal cookies. I make so many different varieties of cookies and muffins, and last spring I became committed to trying to make varieties that "weren't so bad for you". I cut out a lot of sugar, experimented with varying degrees of whole wheat and white-whole wheat flours, added ground flax, and bran, and millet. I finalized several different new recipes that I liked, and one variety was almost similar to these, which our dear friend Martha Stewart can take credit for. But I love the plethora of peanuts in these and they are so tender and flaky and almost fall apart. I was able to cut the sugar back by a bit (by doing scant cups) but will experiment with a little more the next time. So fibre-full and amazingly delicious, if you are feeling down today you should make a batch right now. The batter is also to die for.

The other thing I have to share is this raspberry ice cream I made. If you have an ice cream maker, the recipe was simply 2 cups milk (and you can substitute up to half of this with cream, if you have it, to make it richer) and about 1/4 cup of maple syrup, and about maybe 2 cups of raspberries which I ran through my food mill. I did dump the seeds and pulp back in afterwards to make it more textured, It was absolutely divine.

Lastly, it's sugar pumpkin season, and I accidentally discovered the most amazing way to make the flesh exactly as beautiful as what comes in a can in wintertime. A few nights ago, after making pizza, I turned down the oven and threw three whole sugar pumpkins on a cookie sheet. I left the oven on at about 375 for an hour, and then turned it off. A few of them were a little hard, but I was going to bed so I just left them in the oven, with the baking stone, as it cooled all night. In the morning I cut the pumpkins open (they sliced like butter) and the flesh was just stunning. Deep orange, dense, and perfectly cooked. Give it a try if you get sugar pumpkins out your way. (sorry Sally, don't mean to be mentioning delicious seasonal things when our seasons are upside down!)

When I think about how I've come to love food, and the preparation of it so much, I realize that much of my own development as a chef and baker has happened in the past seven years-- perhaps an unlikely time period, given the grief and the plethora of small children. But I think my relationship with good food is augmented by the fact that I have become a pleasure seeker in general. Food makes me happy, it tastes good, and hey, you have to eat. So being able to make delicious things soothes me, it brings comfort to me and my family, and perhaps the method and experimentation behind it stimulates my addled housewife's brain.

I feel like perhaps I might develop a habit of sharing interesting things I've come across on this blog. After all, perhaps you like to eat, too.

And by the way? My kids are voracious, enthusiastic eaters. I expected them to be picky, but they eat almost anything. Go figure.

Maybe Charlotte was my picky one.

My New Baby

My new baby isn't new anymore. Oh, my. She's so big, so grown up. But still so cozy, so tiny. I'm still struck, still frozen at times, when my eyes catch that glance of myself cradling Charlotte Amelia in my arms, and I catch myself seeing Charlotte only for the few details of her face that make her look different from her ever-so-similar sister. Shivers run up my spine to imagine that I had this other child, and while there are moments where I can sit and ponder this gigantic concept, most of the time I am moving on, and I see my Fiona Clementine and a rush of warmth flows in to diminish the goosebumps, and I scoop her up.

Fiona Clementine is a baby like all my babies: calm, delighted, highly verbal, and quite sedentary. She's beginning, just only beginning at 10 months of age, to slide around on the floor as she reaches for things. She loves to be carried around, to watch everything that's going on around her, and it's always busy. Drop off time at school is one of her favorite times of the day, she lunges for the floor to sit with the kids, and looks around with this glowing, proud look on her face. It's so early that babies want to be like the big kids.

She's learning new words every week. Ma-ma and Dad-dee have been around for a while, and she uses them both out of necessity and with delight when she greets us. She comments on the dog, the cat, and the ceramic sun on the wall. She can fill in the blanks when we read Goodnight Moon, on the page where there's the old lady whispering...... hush, she says, hush, with a huge, wide grin, her eight little pearls glittering in the lamplight. She waves, and claps, signs for milk, and more, and all done. And she doesn't like to poop in her diapers, so now she goes in the potty, and likes that better. She's figured out how to pee on the potty, too. I guess I better stop looking cross-eyed at people who tout elimination communication. I certainly can't spend my day paying attention to how long it's been since she's last been on the potty, but I've cracked up at my success rate at putting the little potty under her whenever her diaper is dry. One day she used the potty six times in one day.

It's no wonder she usually spends about sixteen out of twenty-four hours sound asleep, there is so much going on in that little brain.

She is turning into a person, and in some ways, I'm trusting her more. I've moved her out of my room at night, which for me is a huge step in trust. That I can sleep without her is very indicative of my own confidence; as if somehow I could keep her going just by being nearby. But still, I examine her little body every day, searching for signs or clues that something might be wrong. Bruises and funny marks of any kind send me reeling. One day I found these two tiny, dark purple blood-blister like marks on her tummy. My heart literally dropped. I was in a hotel room on the way to Ontario and I almost took her to the ER. I was certain this was it, the evidence of leukemia that I had somehow known would present itself at some point. It was only when I looked down, an hour or so later, and realized that the inside of my left arm was covered with the identical bruises from her tiny pincer-grip squeezing my arm as I held her, that I calmed myself down and realized Fiona had pinched herself. It was going to be okay.

I fear for her, and still I am ecstatic at her very existence. I still can't believe I got pregnant after all, that I have this little child who makes me so amazingly joyful all the time. Having a six and four year old rule the roost at most times makes having an eternally-happy ten month old child all the more amazing. To have a child who is always pleased with your decisions, where you go, what you feed her, or what you dress her in is just such a treat.

This is where I just simply can't imagine how to ever tell her how I feel about her. I could never put words to that love.

And so I must stop writing now.

(here's our self-timed photo, Liam as photographer, from this morning)

Windows to the Soul

(p.s.) there is a new post, entitled Violet October, which I wrote yesterday but was holding off on posting pending permission from Violet's mother. Please scroll down below the twelfth and read that post first, if you have not yet.

It seems strange how my story and Violet's intersect, only because of some words I can remember myself saying more than a few times.

It may or may not come as a surprise to you that one thing people say to you, when your baby dies from the act of trying to be born, is that it's a good thing you didn't get to know her. They tell you that it would have been harder if she'd lived for a little while, and then died. That it's probably better this way, and they look at you with deep, sad eyes, as if they've had lots and lots of experience with people whose babies have died both before and after birth, and, believe you me, you got the better end of the deal.

Now, this having been said I do take great comfort, seven years later, in the great peace that surrounded Charlotte's birth. Because she had already died during the labor, and because there was nothing left to do, when she was born it was in some ways a birth like any other birth. There was no panic, no rush, no days of adrenaline and false hope and utter despair, pulling pots of gold out of the air trying to save her. I dream of this scenario, sometimes, only because my mother's brain imagines that perhaps if she had been born alive the days of panic might have rendered a living version of my dead child. But the truth is, had Charlotte survived the clamped cord, and the resulting clotting that occurred in her placenta and her liver, she may well have been born alive only to suffer a massive stroke in the next few days. The heartache surrounding this scenario humbles me; I do sometimes feel as if I was handed some sort of covert gift when she passed away so peacefully inside of me, so that neither she, nor I, had to endure the struggle for life that would end in her death.

This is, however, my story to tell. It is my right, as the mother, to declare that I do feel an element of trauma is added to the stories of my friends who had to watch their babies struggle for their very life, only for them to have to make the choice that the life that remained was not salvageable. I believe this, in my heart, but I do not like to be told it by others. My belief that their struggle runs deeper, that their memories can be more complicated and traumatic, runs simply that far: I do not extend this to say that their babies' deaths were sadder than my own.

Because, after all, is anything more sad to me than the loss of my very own daughter?

But back to Violet October, who for that brief moment, early in her three days between worlds, heard her mother's voice and opened her wide, blue eyes and found her: she found her mother and locked eyes with her, if for only a moment.

This is the moment I wanted, and many times, I can remember myself saying just those words, in response to those who suggested that I was better off having not known her.

Back at home, I would stammer, How could they ever know? Tears choked my every word, my face was soaked, my nose dripping, eyes swollen and red. How could they ever know how much I would give to just have seen life in her eyes, even for just one minute. This is the moment I would return to, again and again, remembering back with near horror at how I had tenderly opened my sweet baby's lids, and had seen the murky, dark blue of her eyes beneath. It was those eyes that separated what she was from the sleeping baby I almost imagined I was holding. There was no life there, and I let them close again, fast. So I imagined this, again and again, this vision of seeing life in her eyes, and I mourned so hard that I had never seen her alive.

Somehow, it seems to me, that Charlotte would seem less imaginary if I had been able to share one experience with her, even if it had been a truly awful and harrowing one.

I am shamed to admit this, because I realize with full consciousness that it is an absurd example of how the grass is always greener on the other side. I do not envy my friends who were forced to make the choice to remove life support. I know that is a choice no parent should ever have to make. But I cannot help but feel some element of awe and admiration, some feeling that they are somehow more real and seasoned parents than I was after the loss of Charlotte. Somehow, just the sight of those flashing blue eyes brings them so much closer.

I am sorry for the pain that those three days brought Violet's family, sorrier than I would ever be able to express. There was little over the course of those days that could ever be called peaceful, at least until the end came. But that little moment when Violet sought out her mother, that was all of the life in her finding her destiny, sealing that bond that would fuel her mother forevermore.

I thank her for it. It was a lovely thing for her to have done.

Today is Violet's birthday, and for the next three days, they are her days.

The Twelfth

Tonight I feel the strength of the anticipation of grief, the anticipation that squeezed you with such force that you can scarcely breathe. I look back on the fear, on the unknown, on not knowing how I can be, or will be, on the day that has ceased to be a day.

It is inevitable that I buy milk, cheese, eggs that expire on the 13th of May, it is almost like a warning: it is coming, it is coming.

Now, these years, I feel it come, and it's warm, salty water washing over me, I'm a diluted form of myself, a film over my eyes for several weeks. I know the dim light will warm, and that the day will bring what it will bring. But still I stagger through the world, amazed that they all schedule doctors appointments and plan to grocery shop on the day that isn't a day for me anymore.

But that first year, it was fear I felt, pure and plain, and the fear was of not being able to stop the day from coming. I was paralyzed by the fear, immobilized by my inability to do anything to make anything better. Could it be that if I stopped the day from coming, that somehow the twelfth of May would morph back into the day I realized she was in peril, and the baby was saved?

It is the only day I could have saved her, and by the time I get to the thirteenth, it is too late. It is too late every time.