Due Dates & Daydreams

This week we should be celebrating a second birthday.  I should be baking a cake and deciding which much loved Disney character will adorn it.  I should be bestowing birthday kisses, helping to blow out candles and smiling in pride as another milestone in my child's life is reached.  Party photos should be added to the album that houses other precious memories - first steps, first tooth, first hair cut.  My older children should be chasing my younger ones across the garden, hiding behind bushes and waiting to shout "found you".  A small hand should be enclosed in mine.  Bright eyes should twinkle at me.  Two perfect lips should say words my heart aches to hear.  Instead the date will go by like it did last year.  Just another collection of numbers, important only to me.  Remembered only by me.  There will be no party in this house this July, or any other because there was no baby born here in July.  There is only what should have been.

So I will wake on July 27th, the day my fourth baby was due and I will take my cup of tea out to the garden and I will stand with pieces of my heart missing at the spot where my babies are buried and I will breathe.  Sometimes tears come.  Sometimes I get angry.  Sometimes I smile because loss has taken me on the journey to where I am now.  It's so much a part of not only the mother but also the woman that I am.  It colours my days because I know that life is precious.  It's for packing full of laughter.  This week I will hold my precious 8 month old son in my arms and I will love him and his older brother and sister until my heart bursts and my lost babies will be there with us, as we hop and skip and chase in the garden because they are my children and I am their mother and they are in all that I do.

"Golden slumbers fill your eyes,

Smiles await you when you rise,

Sleep pretty darling do not cry,

And I will sing a lullaby".