Mother's Day

Today's mother's day which is such a haunting day for me, except when my brain kicks in and rants endlessly about Hallmark manufactured holidays and unrealistic expectations of motherhood and all these things.

Regardless of my attempts at skepticism, all the flowers and cakes and shots of mothers online and stories of mothers get through. Sometimes I can revert to the me of 2003 and think about my own mother, how she's rather messed up but tried anyway and be sad for the things she did that were not good and glad for the things that were good. Sometimes I can think of Carl's mum and marvel at how she can be a great mother in law in many ways but sometimes the way she was a mum in the past peeps through and that isn't all rosegardeny either.

But then it filters down that I'm a mother, but my daughter died and my new baby isn't born yet.

And I feel that really dark place, the one where my own body strangled my baby. That moment that I saw them carrying her over to the crib, limp and grey. The morning of the EEG. I hear her last breaths. I remember what it was like watching her coffin go down into the ground forever.

And I feel that hopeful place where I might have this second child with us soon, living in our bungalow by the lake and being rocked in our rocking chair and, already, being read to in the womb, moving and prodding and changing me and us already.

I'm in a strange place this mother's day, with two children neither of which is actually on the living side of life: one in a grave and the other in a womb. I feel stretched out between them with a foot on either side.