I’m honored to share that Literary Mama has published a personal essay I wrote about facing Lorenzo’s due date in Perú last September. It’s called “What More, I Say, What More?” and you can read it here. (Please feel free to share it.)

It’s part of the story I didn’t share here when I told you about Perú. It’s about an effort to understand the immaterial. It’s about peace and how it comes and goes as we try to let go. And, as it always is now, it’s about Lorenzo. Because it’s a true story, it validates something of my form of motherhood.

Máncora, Perú

From the moment we arrived in Máncora, I felt the essay forming, words on the run that I wanted to sift through and pin down. The sign I was looking for and the heart I ended up finding, which would become the very first heart in the chain, felt larger than my power to simply observe them. If I could shape the experience, I wanted to reach out to other parents facing a similar milestone. It’s a horrible in between time—when your baby should still be growing, a part of you, but isn’t. I wrote this essay right after that time drew to a close, when Lorenzo should have been there with us, but wasn’t. That’s the time that goes on forever now.

Next month, we’ll face another September 20. I’m not sure how it will feel, but I don’t think I will need signs in the ways I did last year, when the grief was so new and the guilt so hungry and the future so far away. Then, it was difficult to gather strength from my actions as a mother. Today, I brace myself less. I explain different aspects of the story. Other aspects I no longer feel any need to explain at all. I do, in fact, feel stronger.

 

Moving forward, the day I most identify as Lorenzo’s is June 2, when I saw him with my own eyes, when I looped his fingers over mine. I know now from honoring both of these days that rituals are important, as is stillness, as is remembering, as is feeling the breeze against your eyelids, as is doing something to make someone else happy. It all means what we give it to mean.

I give these words to Lorenzo.