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Sparkle (0)
After the birth of my son I was thrown into a mess of traumatic events that happened so fast I couldn’t even keep up to process them all at the time. Sort of like being on the highway, head hanging out of the window looking down at the ground. Just a blur of pavement your eyes cant wholly focus on. one long yellow line and gray fuzz.It didn’t happen to me, it came at me.
In the days that followed I grasped to anything I could to find answers. I looked to place a face with a name with a reason for what my son had to bear in his first few moments here.
In such a shitty, bad, big, ugly world your hope for your child is that they have as much fairy tale, mickey mouse, “the world is gracious and good” innocence for them as you can in their first few years. When they are pliable and naïve enough to believe that they are safe. That we can keep them safe. When that is ripped away from them and you are helpless to stop it, it’s a quick reminder that once they have left your body you can no longer control the good and the bad that enters their life. You can guard that gate all you like but even the greatest of protectors fall at the hands of their enemies. There are no guarantees for our children.
As soon as Hendrix was out I craved him. I wanted him back inside me. I mourned the loss of my womb, my only real protection for my baby. I cried tears of joy when I was with him but the moment I left him to go anywhere other than our lil hospital room sanctuary I sobbed. I hated not being able to bring him with me. Within me. I would walk around with my hand placed on my stomach.
An empty apartment.
An abandoned building.
I begged my body to take him back. To protect him just a little longer. I would forget he was no longer a tenant and would suddenly wake from the haze to recall that he had jumped ship. And every time it hit me like a ton of bricks. Knocking the wind out of me.
"You are in my blood. I cant help it. We can't be anywhere except together"
— Weetzie Bat , Francesca Lia Block
A ghost limb he was.
I began to resent my body for purging itself of my baby. I began to blame it, to blame myself. My own body had become the enemy. I fought the urge to run screaming through the halls for help. I was drowning and choking on my own blame game.
The feeling of my missing limb lessens as the days bleed into weeks. I still miss him even when he’s just across the room.
I’m convinced that even into his adulthood I’ll have the faint calling from my body to shrink him down, roll him up, and place him back where he belongs. Safely sleeping, sucking his tiny fingers, inside his mother’s womb. But I’m learning to no longer look for his flutters and jabs in my sleep but to wait for his sighs and whimpers from my bedside. Instead of wrapping my arms around my burgeoning belly I wrap them around his ribcage. Small and fragile, rising and falling with each of his breaths. And it keeps the feeling at bay, just enough for me to get by. And that’s how it goes. My sanity relies on his breaths. Rising and falling.
