Something for These Empty Arms to Hold

From the very moment I handed Jack to Sean for the last time and watched as he passed him to the nurse for the last time I have been terrified.  I have been terrified that I would forget what he felt like in my arms.  I knew that I wouldn’t forget him or my moments holding him, but I worried that the way he felt, physically, would blur in my memory.  I have tried to convince myself whenever the fear becomes overwhelming that if I close my eyes I can remember clear enough to settle, but the dread that almost 9 months later that I don’t really remember.  And that, the thought that he has been gone longer than I was even pregnant with him, just about crushes me beneath the weight of the fact. So when the mail arrived one day last week, I felt a sense of relief that has been lost to me since January 25^th.

In the early days, when I was desperate to find anything that would make me feel like life wasn't over and that a mother could actually survive life without her newborn baby, I came across a list on Pinterest.  It was a list suggesting things that people could give a grieving mother.  I remember thinking to myself, “Can someone give me my baby back?  Because that is all I’ll ever want.”  I knew even then it wasn’t fair, that people would do anything to offer some sort of comfort during times like that.  I looked through and saw a bunch of things you’d expect to see; garden statues, jewelry, things like that.  One gift that caught my eye, I couldn’t get out of my mind for days. 

It was called a Molly Bear.  They are bears made by a not-for-profit group for families that have lost their babies one year or younger.  More than that they are customized to weigh exactly what these children weighed the last time their loved ones held them.  They asked for a twenty dollar donation in order to be placed on their waiting list and there was only one day a month to submit your name and request.  I joined the waiting list on February 28^th, after setting a cellphone reminder for myself weeks earlier.  I didn’t tell anyone I’d done this, afraid I’d be thought of as a “crazy” lady, looking for a doll to cradle like you see in creepy TV movies.  But I did check the list almost religiously to see when my name would show up.  It did about a month later.  I was number 10,045.  That broke my heart.  Not because I would have to wait quite a while since they were only in production for number in the low 9,000 and the group of people making the bears is very small.  It killed me that there were 10,044 other people desperate to “hold” their babies again.

Months went by and I began to worry I’d been scammed out of twenty bucks, that some sicko was preying on the broken hearts of mothers and fathers living without their children.  Sean would nervously ask me when I thought I’d get my bear, probably doubting I ever would.  And then, a few weeks ago I got an email asking me to confirm the information I’d provided months before, as they would begin making our bear soon.  Soon.

Last week Sean and Kennedy surprised me at work one day.  Sean had been watching Kennedy during the days because his mom and step-dad were on Long Island to say goodbye to Bill’s 95-year-old father.  No matter how long a person lives it is never any easier to say goodbye and it broke our hearts to tell Kennedy that Papa Walter has died and, worse still, that she understood what that meant.  So when they came to see me they had a bag with them and Kennedy said I got a present from Papa Walter.  Confused, I reached in the bag to pull out my Molly Bear.  I cried right way.  Hysterically.  I closed my eyes and was right back at CHOP, holding all 4lbs 9oz of my Jack Holden. I cried because I was so sad that this was as good as it was ever going to get for us.  I cried because I was so happy that I really did remember what it felt like to have him in my arms, his tiny weight against my chest.  I cried, relieved that my heart, truly, could never forget any part of him.  I looked over at Sean, with tears in his eyes too, and I loved him.  I loved him for knowing that this couldn’t have waited until I got home; that it was worth ruining yet another face of makeup at work and telling kids I just have really severe allergies.  I passed the bear to Kennedy and we watched our little girl feel how little her brother had been and even laughed that she still said he was heavy.

When I got home that night, our special bear was waiting for me on my bed.  I crawled in and snuggled with Kennedy and the bear, closed my eyes, and let myself imagine for just a moment, that it is what it would have felt like to cuddle both of babies after a long day at work.  And it did my soul a bit of good. 

We also made a trip to Boston over the weekend with my sister and her family to run the Tufts Health Plan 10K for Women with my friend Jen.  We had a great visit, got some great food and photos in, run a kids 1K with our little ones, proud that they were excited to be like their mamas, and had a pretty good run ourselves too.  My feet cramped for a majority of my 6.21 miles and resulted in my having to walk almost a whole mile of it.  I forced Sara to keep running, as she’d been training so hard for her first big race, and Jen and I walked for a bit.  When we had a mile to go I decided, regardless how it hurt, I would run to the finish.  As we approached the home stretch I saw my sister step off the curb and run over to me.  She ran the rest of the way with us to the finish.  When we’d stopped I thanked her for coming back and she told me she didn’t come back, she’d stopped to wait for me to catch up.  She has done that for me over and over again these last nine months. 

I'd like to think the ray of light next to them is Jack :)

No matter how slow I move sometimes because of the pain I may be in, she waits for me so we can cross the lines together.  

*If you are ever looking for a good charity to donate to consider Molly Bears.  While they ask for a $20 donation from each recipient, it costs over $45 to make and send each bear to waiting families.  Click here to donate.

Slaying Giants

There are times when I feel like I am David and my days are Goliath; I’m the tiny little guy up against a brutal giant.  They are the kind of days that by the time I lay my head down at night I am so exhausted and glad that it’s over that it’s a wonder I made it through at all.  It sometimes feels like I’m no match for my life anymore and that I’m playing at a disadvantage.  My team is, very literally, one man down.  It’s just not a fair fight.

I’ve had to do battle with a couple “giants” in the last two weeks.  A few of them were due in part to a tough situation I have been dealing with at work where a very sick little boy is not receiving any where close to the care he should be at home and there is a lot of factors outside of his control that are preventing that from being enforced.  Unfortunately, with this particular child it is not the first time he has been living in bad conditions but it has been the first time since losing Jack that I am dealing with it directly.  It has always broken my heart that this is how life is for this kiddo but now it makes me downright furious.  I think now my heart screams inside my chest, “How can his mother squander the gift she has been given?  How can she dare to not care for this sick baby the way he should be?”  Those are the cries of a broken heart, one that I would give anything to have her boy back to care for him, no matter what condition he came in.  Another came in the form of a harmless Target run with Kennedy this past Thursday night.  We had to get a few (okay 4…don’t judge me) pairs of shoes for her for the cooler weather we’ve finally begun here.  We were wandering around getting other things we didn’t need when she must have spotted a baby.  Loud as can be, she yelled, “Look, Mommy! Their baby didn’t die!”  The mother of this baby gave my exceptionally loud toddler and me a strange look but hurried along, leaving me stunned in silence.  While I fumbled to try and figure out what to say to Kennedy about being appropriate or at least more quiet about those kinds of things, I looked over at her to find her little face in a pout and her quietly asking, “But why did our baby die?”  It doesn’t matter how many times she asks me, it always knocks the wind out of me and adds another tiny crack in my heart.  It’s like she doesn’t feel there is a good enough answer to explain why her baby brother is gone and it seems like he’s the only one.  Well, she isn’t alone there.  So when it came to these “giants”, I was knocked pretty flat on my back and it took a little while for me to get up and go another round.

Luckily, my sister, persistent and just as determined to make an outdoorsy gal of me as she is, convinced me to go on a hike yesterday.  More than that, it was one of the 46 “high peaks” in the Adirondacks, near Lake Placid.  “It will be fun,” she said.  While our idea of fun clearly varies a bit, it was pretty amazing and we did have a great time.  Ironically, the peak we tackled was Giant Mountain in Keene, NY.  It was way tougher than I ever bargained for, and my legs ached worse than they did that time I ran 13.1 miles but the views were incredible and Sara and I laughed harder than I have laughed in a good long while.  We joked about all of the unnecessary crap we’d brought, and the amount of food we’d packed, my stuff in Kennedy's preschool backpack.  We teased about the, clearly, expert hikers that seemed incredibly over dressed and then laughed even harder when it seemed a whole lot colder than the forecast had promised.  We almost went the wrong way from the second we stepped out of the car and asked each other almost the whole hike if we were going the right way any time it seemed like a while since we’d seen a trail marker.  We debated back and forth who would make a better meal for the other if we’d gotten lost and ate all of the food we had brought.  We thought we’d reached the top about 4 different times and took “selfies” with the “selfie stick” our mother bought for Sara each time we fake-summited.   I laughed uncontrollably each time Sara tried to hide her selfie stick as other hikers went by (I would also like to say that my poor computer keeps underlining “selfie” in red as if to plead with me that, “this is not a word, moron” and I am laughing all over again).

When we did reach the top it was amazing.  It was worth it too.  That is, until I remembered that we had to hike the same 3 miles down that we had hiked up.  Down was scary, but equally funny. When we reached the car, we were spent.  We chatted a bit on the ride home, Sara telling me about her ideas for her Christmas card this year and me trying to seem engaged but thinking whether or not I would send one and how you word a Christmas card that is missing a tiny person whose picture and name should appear. She must have read my mind, because suddenly she had my hand in hers and kissed it and it quieted my mind.  Overall, it was the kind of day you need to have every once and a while to recover from a dance with a giant.

You see, the thing that is easy to forget sometimes is that David beat Goliath.  He brought down the giant.  He won.  And I also forget that, when it comes to bad days, I’ve got a 100% track record of surviving them.