Two Years Gone

Numbing is an art, much like glass blowing or origami.  But instead of making something out of nothing much – I make nothing much out of something. 

And I’m fucking awesome at it.

Tomorrow is two years gone since Will’s heart beat in me like a tiny tympani.  I relished the times I got to hear his heartbeat…that frenetic patter echoing from my belly.  It really never dawned on me that it would stop, until it did.  The empty search for his heartbeat two years ago still haunts me despite my greatest efforts to think of anything else.

I think of food a lot. 

And coffee.

And coupons and the price of diapers.

The cost of milk.

The 5-day weather forecast.

The daily deals on Groupon.

It’s not that I don’t think of William.  Of course I do, a heart that once beats inside you leaves a little nest.  Sometimes, mostly when Abby and Sam are sick or have had a bad dream, I get to fit them nearly as they might back into that nest.  Their heads rising and falling with my own breathing, their fingers tangled around my mine.  I get to bury my nose in their hair and smell baby shampoo and traces of maple syrup  or clementines mixed with their own unique earthy oil.

My ache to do this with William is something that will never wane  no matter how many years pass since he lived in me.

But I cannot function in that ache.  And so I hold it inside, this silent scream, and live in the world seemingly normal:  shopping, driving, working, talking, texting, sleeping, eating.

Grief is more solitary than I imagined.  The world must move on because it must.  I choose to move with it, often off-balance because I have one foot in honoring and remembering and other one busy walking in the present.

It occurred to me that it is altogether easier and dually more difficult at two years out.  I can be perfectly normal most times.  I can talk about Will and my experience in a practically existential manner.

And yet that empty pain for him still burns like new deep within me, and I let it out only once in a while, because…

well, sigh …because.

William, your momma misses you a million times to your star and back.  I am comforted by your precocious twin sister and philosophical big brother, and by the fact that one day I will get to put you back in my arms and hold you again and bury my nose into your hair.

Love and prayer to all the babylost mommas out there tonight.