Most of the time, I’m trying it on. Music class. A conversation about sleep training. A spontaneous playdate in our new neighborhood. I am that mom because I have H. When I read “The Grief in Growing Up,” I’ve also “realized that all the photos in the world can never preserve this. I try to write things down and hoard mementos, but there’s no way to bottle the way she feels in my arms,” as Catherine Naja writes of her young daughter. But three years ago Lorenzo died, and I began parenthood as another kind of mother. And that is loss, that is grief, not watching a healthy child grow and achieve. I am still not that mom.
As Lorenzo’s mom I collect hearts and write personal essays and add pages to a memory scrapbook. H. has a scrapbook too, of all the cards she received after she was born and during her first year of holidays and celebrations. How similar my intention—to create a living document for each of them—yet how different the result.
As H.’s mom, we find a farm nearby and point at baby goats. She says “neigh, neigh” as she strides over to the carousel, and I swell with such a common, maternal pride. As her mom, I inhale the warm lavender left in her hair after a bath as we read in the corduroy chair from Santiago. As her mom, I listen for her deep, unlabored breathing in the dark before I go to bed. She is still the happiest person I know. Somehow, after so much was spectacularly broken, she appeared spectacularly whole.
I’ve been reading my friend Sky’s lovely blog. She is writing about her first year as a mom to an adorable baby boy. Her beautiful project will document that boy’s first year of life so he and her husband can always have it as testimony. Her moving intention made me worry I don’t write enough here about H., too much about Lorenzo. I’m not sure that’s necessarily true or that it even matters if it is. I try to protect her here, too.
As impossible as it is to truly preserve, I do want her to have heaps of evidence all her own. To know that I kiss her a hundred times a day, minimum. That she hands me a book, turns and backs up toward me, and plops down in my lap as if that action ignites the story. I am in total blown-away awe of her on an hourly basis. I record that awe in a line-a-day journal Laura Lee, another lovely blogging friend, gave me when I was pregnant with Lorenzo. I wrote about him until late May 2012, and then I didn’t write another line until the day H. was born. The story is in the gaps, too.
I have been writing a whole book for her brother, and she is in it now. For a long time I didn’t think she would be; I didn’t want to end the story with the “rainbow baby” because our culture thrives on the happy ending. Not every loss mom has gotten hers; others may never. And those of us who do are not magically all fixed. But H. is here. The grief goes on alongside her and the wonder she inspires. She is the one teaching me what it means to parent after loss. So they share this book, as siblings. I may not be that mom, but I am their mom, their connection.
On this most recent Lorenzo’s Day, H. looked through her brother’s memory book with me. I’d had it out on the dining room table all week, and her interest in this overflowing, leather-bound volume on high was evident. I helped her climb up, and we turned the pages together. When I asked her where the heart was, she knew every time. “Har,” she even said, pointing.