Point of demise

I guess this is what they call a bad patch. My last post was a little over dramatic maybe. I'm feeling a bit that way at the minute. I am grateful to this blog as it allows all my outpourings of grief, whilst on my social networking pages I can be more upbeat. I don't want to keep making my status updates all about my loss of Lucy. I am worried people will tire of it and think me self indulgent. So here is where I come to pour out my darker thoughts. I think I'd go mad if I couldn't. I am just dwelling on so many dark things right now. I feel like two people, the happy me on the outside with the dark me bubbling just under the surface.

I am consumed at the minute thinking about when Lucy died. It is haunting me in a bad way. I know exactly when she died. The doctors tried to tell me otherwise, but I am not stupid. I know. I didn't know at the time, because I was uneducated. I was still in that happy land where babies don't die before they are born. I thought she had hiccups, even though they felt different from her normal hiccups. I was grateful to feel her move to be honest. Now I know with hindsight that those fast, repetitive kicks were her dying inside me. That is why they started so frantically, and also why they got weaker and weaker. And why I didn't feel her move again after that. So although the doctors have tried to tell me that she wouldn't have suffered, in my heart I know differently. I do not know that she felt any pain, but I do know that she realised she was in trouble. I have been thinking over and over it lately, and I don't know why. It makes me feel sick to my stomach. I want to be oblivious to when she passed. To know that I felt it but dismissed it as something else makes me feel like the worst mother on earth. I generally think about this happy subject in the middle of the night, when I am feeding Georgia. I am terrified of waking up and finding Georgia dead too. I have morbidly imagined this scenario a few times now. I guess this is a new level of the grief process.

I am also consumed with grief for a new angel daddy. He lost his partner Sara in a terrible accident, and despite attempts to save his unborn daughter Miranda, she also passed. His incredibly moving blog can be found here. It's all I've been able to think about since I came across it. I want to jump on a plane and go and find him, and hold him, and cry with him. It's given me a new perspective on grief. It makes me want to do something to help people. I just don't know what I can do though. I am still thinking on that. I just want to reach out to him, to others, in some way. I feel grief so much more keenly since Lucy. I am definitely more empathetic than I ever was. I find it easier to put myself in peoples shoes, to try and glean a small snap shot of that place they are in, to enable me to connect with them.

Reading back it all sounds a bit twee and jumbled, I am not expressing myself well today.

I guess I just want people to know that I cry with them. My heart bleeds for hundreds of little babies that I have never been able to meet, but who I feel like I already know so well thanks to the loving words of their grieving parents.

Confused state

A jumbled post, so bear with me. My brain is tired from sleep deprivation.


It is hard to carry on life without Lucy. 


I can no longer say "I lost a little girl last year", as time has relentlessly marched on. It takes me further away from my little sleeping beauty. Some days I almost wish I was back in the aftermath when my memories were not hazy, and the house was filled with flowers and cards and it was 'OK' to talk about her non stop.  I am amazed that I made it this far. A friends status made me think, she is also a BM and I'm not sure whether this was her own sentiment or just one she had read and admired but to loosely quote, it said "You'll be surprised to know how far you can go from the point where you thought it was the end". 


I have recently left some of the pregnancy loss boards that I was a member of after she died. I just feel I don't belong there any more, now I have Georgia. They are full of women at a different stage of this journey and I am not sure I was helping them by being there. I am also not sure it was helping me. I am torn between wanting to live in the past so that I am close to Lucy, or moving on with her in my heart. I know it will end up being the latter, as it is expected of me. I expect it of myself. And yet I can't let go at the minute. I find myself wanting to pore over my blog posts from when I lost her, I want to look at her pictures endlessly.  I regret not seeing her again in the hospital chapel. I regret not taking more pictures. 
Some days I want to be pregnant again. In fact some days I ache to be pregnant again, almost as though being pregnant and 'doing it right' this time will heal my heart. I know in my head it won't, I know a million babies won't bring Lucy back, won't undo what is forever written in my history. I think a lot about what Lucy would have been like. And I just feel sad that she lived such a short life. People often speak of feeling the presence of their loved ones, they find hope in butterflies, feathers, birds. I feel sad a lot as I don't have this with Lucy. I am always waiting, hoping, looking for a sign from her that she is OK, and watching over us. But I just don't feel anything, and believe me I have tried so many times to find some tiny signal from her that she is near.


I truly feel alone. I think she has gone forever.

'Count the kicks' - another heartbreaking reminder

Yet again the public eye is on a celebrity pregnancy for the worst conceivable reason.The devastating news of Amanda Holdens loss has touched the hearts of many, myself included, for obvious reasons. However it also provides an opportunity to raise the public profile of baby loss and in doing so may just save lives. 

Chloe's Count the Kicks campaign is working towards empowering expectant mums by giving them the facts and information they need to monitor their babies movements and help keep their baby safe, visit the website here.

God bless baby boy Holden, sleep tight little man, another star in the sky.

Lesson learnt

I was trying to clear my very neglected email account today. Over time my email address has been entered onto all sorts of random websites so I now get spammed every day to within an inch of my life. As I was deleting the majority of the irrelevant rubbish in my account I happened to click into my sent items. Almost immediately one email leapt out at me, mainly because of the date - 22/09/09, the day before Lucy died and two days before she was born. It was to my friend in Scotland, and was entitled 'Why I love pregnancy - NOT!!'.

For about five minutes I sat looking at the subject heading and the date and my heart was pounding in my chest.

An email sent to a pregnant friend, about my pregnancy - the pregnancy where I was carrying Lucy. Did I dare open it?

I knew in my head and heart that it would be better to leave it unopened. It was a relic from a different time, written by a different person as I was then. But like a scab that needs picking I eventually gave in.

A lot of jumble, a lot of rubbish, but then the words that smacked me in the heart, typed by my own fair hand:

"...I am soooooo sick of being pregnant! I want this baby out NOW!!! I have had enough, I should be thankful I've had such an easy pregnancy but to be honest I am bored now - enough already!! This is BORING BORING BORING!"


I have read and re-read that sentence so many times this afternoon. I can't stop reading it. It takes me back to the person I was at that point, I remember so clearly where I was when I typed that.

What a stupid, stupid immature little girl. Selfish. Ungrateful, urgh HOW UNGRATEFUL was I?!? Reading that sentence makes me want to cry (and has several times today) and also makes me want to smash my head into the wall.

Sometimes (a lot of the time actually) I wonder if God was trying to teach me a very hard lesson.