I avoided Mother's Day this year. Easy to do in a pandemic.
My grief is avoidance. I retreat from the world. I seek some of my old ways -- or they seek me. I find myself reading favorite passages from beloved books, the ones whose spines are cracked and failing. Music I loved as a teen hits in a particular way that I can't explain.
I am a mother to a living child and to two ethereal spirits. In this world their time was brief but their presence is far from fleeting.
The day before the WHO announced a pandemic I suspected I was pregnant. A week later a test confirmed it. I put my head down through the lockdown to get through it, out of sheer necessity. The first trimester is not kind to me.
This spirit passed sometime in the 6th or 7th week -- hard to say. An unscheduled ultrasound ("just to make sure things are going well") at 8 weeks found an empty sac and no heartbeat.
At 10 weeks a kind doctor did what my uterus was refusing to do, and removed the tissue the spirit was supposed to inhabit.
The loss is hitting me in subtle ways.
I drove past the hospital where I should have delivered and my heart dropped.
I looked out in our backyard to the swing set and remembered I had planned to replace the rings, which no kid uses, with a baby swing.
Brian and I read to Reed at bedtime and my heart fluttered, "How sweet this is, all four of us together," before I remembered that we are only three.
No baby. No baby. No baby.
Just spirits.
