Evan:  Mommy, where is the other baby, the baby like Ben?

Kate:  That was Liam, sweets.

Evan:  Is he in the hospital? Can I see him?

Kate:  He’s your spirit-brother and he lives with the stars, and in your heart.

Evan:  I don’t have a heart. I’m a big boy.

Kate:  You do, goose. You are a big, beautiful boy with a big, beautiful heart. Liam watches you all the time and when he does, he’s with you right there in your heart.

Evan:  But I don’t see him. Why can’t I see him?

Kate:  Because he was a sick little baby, and he couldn’t stay with us, so he went up to the stars where they made him all better.

Evan:  Mommy, sometimes I can’t remember Liam.

Kate:  Oh sweetie, that’s okay. Daddy and me will help you remember him.

Evan:  I miss Liam mommy.

Kate:  I know love, we all miss him.

Evan:  What is daddy going to dream about tonight?

Kate:  Mountains. Big mountains with snowy peaks and scraggly trees and black bears all dripping with blueberry juice.

Evan:  What are you going to dream about tonight?

Kate:  Fishotopia, the place where the fish walk around on the land and the people walk around underneath the water and they come out in boats to try and catch us but we’re all too quick.

Evan:  What is Evan going to dream about tonight?

Kate:  Monkeys on ferris wheels.

Evan:  What is Ben going to dream about tonight?

Kate:  Ummm… let me see. How about… friendly tugboats?

Evan:  No mommy. Ben is going to dream about dumpsters and excavators.

Kate:  Oh. Okay.

Evan:  What is Liam going to dream about tonight?

Kate:  You, sweets. Liam dreams about you.

+++++

Justin (whispers to me):  the hook was stuck and then he got hold of it and it was too much time and so we didn't throw it back but I don’t think he knows about l-i-v-e and d-e-a-d and he keeps asking when it’s going to start jumping again and I think he wants to take it into the bath tonight.

Justin (turns to fisherson):  Are you ready to go and get some ice cream?

Evan:  YES.

Justin:  But you have to leave the fish here.

Evan:  NO.

Justin:  But he belongs in the fridge.

Evan:  NO HE DOESN’T. HE WANTS ICE CREAM.

Justin:  But you can’t just walk around everywhere with a fish.

Evan:  OH YES I CAN.

Gravel crunches and spits under the tires as I brake and turn full-circle in the middle of the road, making up my mind. On the way home from the beach I used to stop here, visit yesterday's people on this long-deserted outcropping fenced in on three sides by marsh and on the fourth by the sea.

It’s been too long.

I’m so glad nobody’s left to mow. It’s prettier this way, fitting, somehow. They are reclaimed, and it is peaceful. Weathered, naked stone faces the waves half-sunken, embraced by meadow.

You’re walking on bones, something tells me, and I hesitate. Crunch crunch.

But then something else says they sense your beating heart and they note you, curious.

They are peaceful and not minding me but still ask why are you here? You don’t know us. We are too long dead for even your great-grandparents to know us.

I press my palm through the grasses to the cool mud underneath, through layers of insects and prickles and wildflowers and through that palm I speak back to them because I am of the dead too, and because you have answers I want.

Ahhh, they say. We see.

Then there’s just silence, crashing waves and seagulls, because you can’t get what you want from one dimension to the next. You just can’t. You can only sit cross-legged in front of the gulf, staring at the relentless fog that obscures the other side.

+++++++++++

Just now Evan’s door creaked open and he scrambled into bed next to me bleary-eyed, whispering as he does when he needs me most: hiya nonnie, I cuddle. I wrapped myself around him under thick blankets, cool breeze and a chorus of peeper frogs through the open window, the milky way above our heads as I hummed him back to sleep.

As he breathed in and breathed out the thought came to me one life is one episode in the life of a soul and as I did, a subtle ribbon of light twirled across the black night sky, what I’d call winter’s northern lights if we were north, and if it were winter. Suddenly I could see that it was all alive, breathing in and breathing out. Some just our own flotsam, satellites and jetplanes and junk, but other stuff too, stuff not so easily pegged by the language of quantum physics.

I lust so deeply for magic, I swear sometimes I can will it into existence.

+++++++++++

There’s so much to tell you.

I long for what I can’t have, selfishly.
I feel like I might be on the brink of something.
I want an unchaperoned day pass.
Gym schmym (sigh).

Maybe next time.

Heads up to those with fortitude: Tomorrow night (Wednesday, May 21^st) at 9 PM Eastern, Bon and I will be live on Blog Talk Radio with host Kristen Chase of Motherhood Uncensored. We’ll be talking about cobbling life together again, how friends can support babylost mamas, how life changes post-explosion.

Be not afraid of our snakes. We'll be wrapping lightness around the dark, not intending to go all babyloss on your ass. Then again, we may. I kid. Sort of.

So here's my call to you: leave a comment here telling us what you'd like to see us talk about. Don't be shy--we're open books, for the most part. Do you have questions you'd like answered?  (...and not about the fetish party. Those will have to wait for the C-Section Pooches and Perversion: Can They Co-Exist? podcast)

Click here to listen live, or to check out the archive anytime.

That’s uhh…. all for now. Be umm… k-k-kind, willya?

Me write better than me speak.

I’m here, muddling along.

I haven’t got much to say, but feel the need to bump that last one down the line.

It's been blowing the dog off the chain here lately, literally and figuratively, and I'm dishevelled and turned inside-out. Thank you, huddle. Your words make me feel normal.

+++++++

On May 12, 2007 we lay Liam and Ben side-by-side for the first time—Liam with ventilator tubes and tape obscuring his face, Ben with his oxygen, and we took a picture, terrified, desperate, overwhelmed. Poised to sell our souls.

Hello brave boys. Here we are.

+++++++

Liam calls for me sometimes. And sometimes I call for him, needing him to let me mother him. Needing to carve out some portion of every day to parent each of my children, living and dead.

God, how I despise that word.

Mamas like me work to reclaim it perhaps like bitch or queer, diffusing it by bringing it out in to the open, putting it in front of the word baby.

I understand why. To force people around us to acknowledge, to listen, to remember despite the discomfort. To challenge don’t you dare tell me to get over it. Don’t you dare rush me. Pretending it never happened may work for you, but not for me.

I’m just not quite ready for that word. The pitifully hopeful, whimpering thing inside me bristles, needing to hold out for parallel worlds and pearly gates and cosmic mistakes. Dead is too final, too finite. Lost at least leaves room for reunion.

+++++++

Evan: MOMMY I WANNA COOKIE!
Kate: What do you say?
Evan: MOMMY I WANNA COOKIE NOW!
Kate: What do you say?
Evan: MOMMY I WANNA COOKIE NOW, NO, I WANT TWO!

And then he looks at me grinning, bats his eyelashes and says PWEEZE!

And then Ben projectile-barfs peas and hummus and I don’t get there in time with the bowl and the moment the digestive hose is emptied he cracks himself up, spitty pea-goop dripping off his chin.

Then suddenly there’s this on the radio and Liam waits for me patiently, as he always has, and I run the dripping cloth back and forth across the white plastic with tears in my eyes, wishing I had twice the highchairs, twice the barf.

+++++++

I worked until 3:45 AM this morning on a presentation for a client. Evan climbed into bed with me at 6:30 AM and said

MOMMY!

and I said uuunnnngggghhh and he said

DON’T WORRY MOMMY, I ALWEDDY GOT MY BWEKKFIST

and he curled up next to me under the blankets, munching in a pleased-with-himself sort of way, and I drifted back to sleep. By the time I woke up he’d plowed through four chocolate chip cookies and was nose-to-nose, blinking earnestly and shout-whispering

WHAT DID YOU DWEEM ABOUT MOMMY I DWEEMED ABOUT MONKEYS ON FEWWIS WHEELS MOMMY, MONKEYS ON FEWWIS WHEELS.

+++++++

Now and then I can see peace, a clearing through this claustrophobic tangle, and awash in gratitude I would do it all a hundred times over for the honour of being mother to exactly these children, all three.

Today is their birthday. 

Last night I thought I’m going to look back at those pictures, see just how small Ben was when he was born and was aghast as the rest of the world must have been. Now that I know him beyond the abstractions of the NICU—his giggles and his big brother idolatry and his koala bear hugs—the realization of how close we came to losing him is a vice around my throat.

Last night I realized how everyone else must have seen our doom when we could not. We were too busy doing what we were told, too busy straining to see beyond the wires and the tubes and the swelling, too busy trying to give them love through the portholes of a hot plastic box. Thinking in desperation Liam is just mellow, a patient, old soul. Last night I felt like a fool.

Last night I sought out Liam, mute and still, his limbs and face buried under an impenetrable web of wires and ventilators and sensors, tangled up next to Ben. Pulled magnetically to fish beyond the highly edited flickrstream for the outtakes, searching for something of my son that perhaps I hadn’t seen before. All I am given is undiscovered angles of horror and heartbreak.

Last night it occurred to me just how gravely injured he’d been. Always grimacing as if in pain or at least in purgatory, his face relaxed only when he was in the deepest of medicated sleeps. When his eyes were open his face was screwed up into an expression of frustrated shock as if to say why am I still here?

Last night I hated my body, hated it so much.

Last night I vaguely considered a tattoo for the first time in my life. Earlier in the day I’d opened the sailmaker’s chest to see a few snips of Liam’s hair in a tiny zip-lock bag. It’s darker than I remember and it dawned on me that I was looking at the hair of a dead baby, cut from him after he finally stopped breathing.

Then I looked at Ben who sat in his highchair grinning broadly with one solitary cheerio stuck to the spit on his chin and with Liam’s hair between my fingers I went to the car to get the camera and Oh lili, isn’t this lovely, you’ve never been outside before. It’s sunny and the birds are chirping, and soon the peeper frogs will start to sing, and doesn’t that breeze feel wonderful and I felt pathetic, standing there in the grass holding a zip-lock bag containing all that’s left of my baby, holding it up to the sun so that he could feel that the winter’s grip is gone, that the warmth has come back.

I wonder if they could put his hair into some ink and brand him onto my skin somewhere, somewhere secret, so he would always be with me. I hope it would hurt like a sonofabitch.

Last night I stood in the bathroom with Liam’s ceramic hole-in-heart. It has started, so I’ll put his heart on a new string and I’ll wear it for his six weeks and that will give me something to hold on to but the new string didn’t fit through the hole and I thought well shit, maybe not, and maybe that’s just silly anyway and I put the heart back inside the sailmaker’s chest and went back to bed and just lay there next to Justin’s breathing, goggle-eyed and clipped short like a hunted animal hiding in the dark.

I'm often amazed that you're still here. I'm going to try and be myself again, I am. I've got other stories to tell you, if you care to hear them, about pirates in the forest and 10-foot swells and fetish parties and aliens and past lives and the smell of gunpowder and the deserted farm up the cove that we skulk past, eyeing hungrily with financial hopelessness and unrequited love. But today I have to cry. So thanks for your patience and your presence, strangers and friends.

I’ve never done much for any purpose outside my own needs and impulses.

Tonight, I feel like I’m a hundred feet tall.

When people create something bigger than themselves the analogy is always birth. Labour of love, my baby, gestation. But this was easy. The women, the concept, the plethora of ideas and must-dos and insight and reflection all clicking into place beautifully, as birth has not always done for us.

Go to Glow in the Woods today and wish us a happy birthday, won’t you?

Link to us and subscribe and spread the word. Tell your mama-friends about us—those mamas of lost babies who may need our company, and whose company we need too. Help us reach out through the storm, to bring another inside-out soul some warmth and companionship.

Because if I can pass on just a sliver of the light that you've sent into my darkness in the past year, I will have done a good thing.

For mamas of still babies, tiny babies, lost potential of all kinds.

In the beginning you stagger, disoriented, through this storm.

We want to be a glow through the trees, a golden refuge of log and glass. Stumble up the steps, shake off the snow and the crust and the stiffness, cross the threshold to be encircled by figures welcoming, nodding, easing you to a roaring fire and piping hot tea and wine and whoopie pies and whatever else warms you from the inside out.

Sink into a battered old sofa, tuck your feet under your legs, a woodsmokey quilt around your shoulders, fingers wrapped around a hot mug,

and be with us.