This week I want to
talk about something that I experienced in the early months of us realising we
would not be able to have children.
It seems a strange
thing to have thought now, but then, when we are grieving our thoughts are
often different to those we would normally have.
I mentioned a few
weeks ago that we only have photos of our children as embryos. Wow – this is
hard to write about…as I feel a bit ashamed about it (although I tell myself I
shouldn’t.) I used to be jealous of people who had children, of course, but I
also was kind of jealous of people who had had a still born child.
I didn’t, and don’t,
actually wish a still born child on anyone and certainly not on ourselves. I
can’t even begin to know what it would be like to have a child and for them to
have died before they took their first breath.
What I was jealous for
is that they got to hold their baby and have photos with them and show the baby
to their family and perhaps friends too. Their baby, their child, was real.
Ours were just a flicker for a few days and nobody but us and the medical staff
saw them. Our parents couldn’t hold them – we couldn’t say “look at this
beautiful angel that we created.”
Even now my arms are
aching to hold them.
It’s a strange kind of
jealousy – actually I’m not even sure, now, that jealousy is the right word.
Perhaps it’s more that I wished for something more than what we had – even if
it was just to get to hold our child. To have those photos and to see their
faces. I wanted to take every part of them into my memory.
We didn’t get to do
that and sometimes I think that our loss is not even viewed as a loss because
of that. But, we did lose something precious.
It’s impossible to
compare losses and it’s certainly not a competition. What am I trying to say
here? Perhaps that there was nothing for us to hold out and say “see what we
have lost – we created this and we had dreams and hopes for this and we loved
this…and now it’s gone.”
Our pain about our
loss was ours and the pain my friends have felt about their loss was theirs. There’s
no scale to measure which was stronger or bigger or worse – but both losses and
the grieving for our children were, and remain, real.
I feel that this entry
is a bit all over the place, so let me know if any of it doesn’t make sense.
xxx
