i would see new babies in the grocery store or in stroller on the street, and i would think to myself, these babies were newly conceived when nathaniel was born. zygotes. embryos. but they had something in common with my boy. they were on this planet, in utero, when nathaniel was on this planet, in utero and out.
this little generation shared the world with my son.
pretty soon, the babies coming into the world and the grocery stores and the strollers will have nothing to do with nathaniel. they will have been conceived after he was gone already. when he was here, they were just eggs and twinkles in eyes and other raw material, but not a unique entity with their one-of-a-kind custom mix of dna.
maybe it's happening already.
i went on-line and calculated gestation time from nathaniel's birth and death date. it's not a perfect science. nathaniel was due on july 8th, but he wasn't born until july 25th. i have a vague idea about when he might have been conceived, but no way to know when the real magic happened of sperm meeting egg.
and then there's this limbo of his due date and his birth date and his death date and the days we learned he probably wouldn't survive outside the womb.
but there's something there. there. in the sliver of this generation, from the children conceived or born starting early october 2010, to the full-term babies coming through birth openings about now. this is nathaniel's generation. children that crackle and burn at the edges when i look at them, with a painful, confused fascination. children that agitate an ancient, animal part of my brain.
they shared the world of gestation with nathaniel. maybe, somehow, they knew my son. know my son. maybe, somehow, they are his friends. would have been his classmates.
my hope and my prayer is that the sharp and pointy existence of this generation softens in time. i know, and love, too many people who have had babies in nathaniel's gestational group. babies i have never met, may never meet. i wish wish wish to cultivate a love for these little beings - an energy of love and lovingkindness that resonates through my heart and being.
i also hope and pray and wish that this new group of little ones, who will soon just start to be born, won't jab at the still-fresh wound that is the absence of nathaniel.
I have been thinking very similarly along these lines as the 9 month anniversary of Eva's death creeps up on me. I was hoping to be pregnant when that anniversary happenned for some of the same reasons that you list here. It doesn't look like that will happen unless we get a miracle (although I don't seem to have a good track record for those). So many triggers and difficulties and all we really want are our children. Sending love to you Suzanne.
ReplyDeleteEm
Thank you, Em. And I hope that your miracle is just around the corner. . .or just around the next cycle of the moon:)
DeleteIt really is hard to see other babies or children and not picture our missing little ones right there with them.
ReplyDeleteI see moms in my neighborhood park with their playgroups often, and I wish so, so much that I could be joining them with my Molly. I love children and I want to rejoice in them, but I find that, at least for the time being, my eyes slide away (the exception being my nephew). It's sort of like looking directly at the sun. I just can't do it. It's painful.
Sending love to you and your raw, exposed nerves, my friend. I know... I know.... xoxo
I KNOW! I see mamas with babes in arms in the coffee shops, nursing their little ones. "Like looking directly at the sun" YES!
DeleteTwo women that I work with had babies the same month as I had my Bea.
ReplyDeleteI still can't look those babies in the eye.
It's like they know too much about the situation.
I have several friends who had babies close to when Nathaniel was born. I have only seen pictures, and on facebook, at that, and it hurts to just look at these.
DeleteI love the image illustrating this post.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really beautiful and interesting piece of writing. Perhaps especially so coming from where I am, losing one of twins. A child that shared a womb with my daughter.
And yes, there is something peculiarly painful about that generation, although I have a living child amongst them. That crackling and burning, I think I feel it too.
Like Sarah, I think I feel they know too much about the situation. One in particular perhaps.
I had not even thought about your little who shared a womb. There's a woman in my city who lost one of her twins recently, and I thought of you, and the unique path for holding and loving a baby who grows while holding and loving a baby in the mind and heart who can never grow.
DeleteThis is very interesting Suzanne. Maybe it's because Spring is here but it feels like everywhere I turn there are mothers pushing their babies in strollers. It especially stings when I see a baby boy around the same age that Liam would be now. It will be 9 months since he passed next week.
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping for the same, that my fresh wounds won't hurt any more than they already do.
Love and peace to you. xx
9 months. Sheesh, we're close on the same timeline. It's terrible that two babies die in the same time frame. But I'm still in shock that babies die at all.
DeleteI've wondered how I'd respond if I ever met a child born on Nathaniel's birthday. I know they exist. But then again, I haven't held a baby since I held my Nathaniel, and I told my husband just tonight that I may never hold a baby again because I'm afraid I might explode. Unless, of course, we're able to have another. And then I would try very hard not to explode.
This post is so interesting, and so are the comments - to think of a generation of babies that gestated together and somehow know each other. It has helped me to see something in the way I view my daughter's role in her 'cohort.' There was a woman at my older daughter's daycare who was due a week after me and a trainer at the gym I go to whose wife was due 3 weeks after me. Both of those babies have been born now. Also, two of my closest friends had their first girls at the same time as I had mine. Then, we were all pregnant at the same time with our seconds. They both had girls, one had twin girls. I had two miscarriages and then a stillborn daughter. I see my daughter as a dark little wisp of a ghost presence amongst all these properly plump and drooling babies. Reading your post and the comments, I suddenly realized that I also have a sense of her (and me, too) having been sacrificed - maybe that is too strong a word - almost martyred - as if there are a certain number of us who have to slip under, into the murky waters of Dead Babydom, where our loss, our grief, floats the island of blissful ignorance on which all those other luckier babies and mothers play and grow. So, instead of feeling like other babies know too much, I feel like they know nothing and that my little ghost baby lets this be so. (I do think this must be different for twins. I know someone who only found out in his 40s that he was a twin. Finding out explained for him so many of his lifelong feelings of something-missing.)
ReplyDeleteCamille and Nathaniel were gestational buddies. She was due July 15h, born June 30th...Our babies would be considered the same age one day. We would not know eachother, our children's death brought us together. Our missing of them and longing for what we see in other people's arms and families...it is us who turn away unable to look but find ourself starring at the shaddow world of our existence...the one we were supposed to have but will never know. hugs
ReplyDeleteOh, nine months was such a hard marker for us too. And you pinpoint it so well - I feel like babies that were gestating at the same time as Z somehow know her - as though they lived in the same in utero country as she did. It does still jab at the grief, but at the same time, where the parents of those babies are good friends and 'get it', I've found amazing comfort in holding them, and getting to know them. Dear friends of ours had a daughter about 8 months after we lost Z, and I went to visit them the day she was born. I held her in my arms and remembered that weight of a new baby girl, and her parents wept with me. And I've always felt a special bond with her since - I used to wear a special brooch for Z, and she would always grab at it.
ReplyDeleteThinking of you as you hit the 9 month mark and hoping there is comfort as well as sadness as you meet more babies of Nathaniel's generation. xxx
Oh babies of the same gestation... so so difficult... My husband's sister had her little girl 10 days before Seamus was born. I wonder if she knows somehow... I'm afraid I haven't been around her much to find out. It's just too much.
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