Jennifer Massoni Pardini

Life Right Now

We are on the cusp. Each of us. The baby inside, due to be born though she is already our second daughter. H., due to become a big sister though she already hugs, talks to, feeds, and plays music for the baby. Ryan and I, due to be changed again by meeting one of our children.

The cusp is also in the air. Between winter and spring, and snow’s progress back to rain. An occasional burst of sun and stiff wind.

We take stock in these moments, ask ourselves, “What do I want to remember about life right now?”

I want to remember all of H.’s little sayings as her language fits her world together: “Hand to walk,” she insists, even if she only requires escort to the other side of the room. “I need help,” a reminder that despite how large she looms in my view, she is indeed “weaker, slower, and shorter than everyone else,” (Harvey Karp, M.D., The Happiest Toddler on the Block). “Closer me,” to be scooted up to the table. “Ruby want the paci/the bubbles/the peanut butter cracker?” and her other toddler ways of asserting what is hers.

I want to remember all that she tries to carry, around the house, out and about, and even to bedtime. These days, naps require big puppy, little puppy, her music box, her orange egg, Elmo, and one of her books. Bedtime is a revolving door for: toothbrushes, toy coffee pots, washcloths, purses, her red baseball cap, and whatever else has captured her imagination so fiercely that day she can’t bear to let go, and I can’t bear to hinder these props of her dreams.

I want to remember that she insists on wearing either her pink crocks or her purple snow boots. No exceptions.

I want to remember how relatively down pat we have things right now: a 24-hour schedule which more or less includes a decent night’s sleep for all of us, Ruby walks, a lot of play and books and music and friends and tantrums and evidence of my child’s imagination at work by what she strews across the room, my few hours to work while she sleeps, dinner as a family, our ritual snuggle before night-night. On the eve of a blessed upheaval, I want to remember that it took months and months to get here and to be patient as I get my bearings once again, to let the beautiful chaos of it all just be.

As only children, Ryan and I are in awe that H. is due to meet a living sibling—something we can give them that we didn’t ourselves have. (That is a rare feat in our privilege.) We are also aware of how this will shift our parenting. Already, we are trying not to compare them. They are each independent, as Ryan and I grew up feeling, and I want to foster that awareness as much as I want to nurture the special bond possible between sisters. I want to remember that parenthood goal.

I also want to remember that right now I feel brave. Emotionally, this pregnancy has been challenging. People see me as an active mom now, as they should, but I am also still and always a loss mom, and with that comes a certain kind of anxiety, often exasperated by “standard” prenatal care that covers the basics but doesn’t necessarily account for all we carry along with our babies.

In order to center myself I remember that right now, me and Baby P are on this journey together. We are helping each other through in ways no one else actually can. I had a dream about her the other night. Flashes, really. Sunlight streaming in over her skin so new, the crease in her chubby arms. Reaching out to bring her little curl of a body to my right shoulder, where H. used to fit. As it all gets closer, I’ve been nervous when I wake in the night, and the dream was calming. Maybe she sent it. Maybe she already knows what it’s like to be someone’s sister because Lorenzo is teaching her. Maybe Lorenzo taught H., too, and that’s why she is already so loving. Maybe, in that way, they will all teach me.

Love Letters

Valentine’s week. Hearts are everywhere to find and collect in Lorenzo’s honor. Back-t0-back birthdays for me and Ryan, turning the age we’ll be when another one of our children is born. One week closer to meeting the owner of the new heart growing inside.

I’m humbled and honored that this particular Valentine’s I was also asked to write a love letter to the women I rarely get to meet face to face, but am pulling for with all my might: PAL Mamas.

(You may read the full letter here.)

I’ve been writing for Pregnancy After Loss Support since the very month I learned I was pregnant again. PALS is an amazing resource for moms on a part of the journey that can be particularly complicated to traverse. Because:

We are thrilled to be pregnant again; we are terrified to lose again.

We want to bond; we are still and always will be grieving.

We hope this time will be different; we don’t have hard, true evidence that it will—and neither do you.

We are running a marathon: endorphin-propelled, exhausted, somehow trusting we will make it to the end, which is another beginning.

Like H. when she tries to leave the house with some seventeen things, it’s hard for one person with two hands and one broken yet beating heart to manage it all. On top of that, our culture here in the U.S. pushes at all costs positivity, silver linings, looking on the bright side, and everything working out in the end. This rhetoric undermines our very real fears that are not based in theoretical worry, but are in fact grounded in profound, experienced loss or losses.

The complexity doesn’t mean I’m not also excited and grateful and daring to decorate a nursery. It simply means I’m not only those things. It means those things are erected over fear and heartache, and the ground beneath it all can give way rather easily. It’s a lot like a sandcastle we rebuild each day with a heck of a lot of courage. Despite those waves and winds, we embrace the sun beating down in the present moment. We build up our hope a little higher than the last time. Here, pregnant, preparing my daughter to be a big sister, there is no denying it is a beautiful day. But that does not mean we don’t remember the terror of the storm, that we don’t sometimes feel like we occupy it still even when the day is lovely.

So, while I am able, I rebuild the castle, its own form of a love letter. I watch H. play in her little sister’s room with many of her old baby things, new to her again. She grabs a book we used to read and crawls up onto the “big chair” with me and we snuggle. I dream, how I dream, of snuggling two here. It is big enough for all of us—our bodies, our range of emotions, our beating hearts, as well as this ache for what the ocean took back from us, yet also somehow gives.

Snow Days

We have some snow here in the East. As it began to fall on Friday, the streets became so quiet that a plane going by overhead, one of the last before the brunt of the storm, roared louder than I’ve heard since we moved in last year. The deck started turning white, and soon the rest of our little swath of the world did, too. These weather events force us off the roads and into our homes. They ask for stillness so that we stay and keep others safe. They come no matter our plans—in our case, a second birthday party for H. As I ran around stocking up before the storm (that means four stores for a gallon of milk), I also picked up H.’s cream cheese-frosted carrot cake and a four-foot inflated Elmo balloon. Because ten toddlers or not, there would still be a party.

Any disappointment was all mine. H. wouldn’t know the difference; I was the one who wanted her to get to play with her friends as they pinned the nose on Elmo and got frosting on their faces. Of course, it matters most that they are all safe inside. There will be other times to get together and celebrate, as we did on Wednesday, her real birthday. As we lunched and she walked around the mall like such a big girl and played with new toys and ended the evening in a cardboard box on a skateboard, giggles in her wake as Ryan pushed her down the hall. All is well. A possibly derailed party is nothing like a problem. It is simply a want: for H. to have a big bash all about her. Her sister is coming and the family dynamic will shift again. We are ever grateful and hopeful that it will.

Last week, we had a scare. A possible complication that could lead to possible others. Days of waiting. The PTSD fished so easily to the surface. A second test and then a third. Ultimately, I am fine, which means the baby is fine. I got to see her to be sure, another chance I wasn’t going to get otherwise. I exhaled in that way I only can when I hear her heartbeat and see the flicker of her across the screen, something I hadn’t witnessed with my own eyes for two months, something that ceased so suddenly twice before and that I never went more than two weeks without seeing of H. So there is relief here in this quiet stillness. There is security under this temporary roof with my family as it grows. As the snow gathered, something else became clear—how much H. loves the snow. Outside, she wanted! So we bundled. Ryan turned his snowboard into a sled (Target sold out days ago) and Ruby followed. And I watched as my family circled the yard. Before this moment, I’d forgotten about the glee in a snow day, no matter our age. More than a decade ago, when I lived in New York City, I got snowed in at a friend’s house downtown. A place like Manhattan became still, too, and the next day we walked down the middle of Broadway.

Yesterday, we woke up to two feet and as more steadily fell, we turned to celebrating. It was still all about H. She won’t remember it but for the pictures… of the cake and the Elmo balloon, of the hats we wore and the whistles we blew in her honor, of her best friend whose family braved a blizzard walk down the street. Of the epic-ness of the day outside that stopped time, freezing this moment of her turning two. It’s not every day that an historic storm rolls in, that you see your child fall in love with an aspect of the natural world. And so arrives acceptance. It’s no longer about forecasts or holding out hope it will pass by. Whatever it is is simply here. It’s barreling down. There is nothing left to do but stay safe and keep warm, and, luckily for us, eat a lot of leftover cake.

Happy Birthday, H. I love you beyond. You are two! You are telling things to “come here” and taking our “hand” and “walking” us to wherever it is you want to go. You do not hesitate to ask for what you want, and use all the words you have. When those fail, you flop your entire body face first onto the floor. I admire that about you. You are polite beyond your years, too, if I say so myself, saying “Thank you, Mama” and “Welcome” and “Bless you” when we sneeze and the sweetest smile of an “OK” when I successfully decipher your want. You love our baby, hugging and kissing her belly home and playing your music. You give her a bottle sometimes (which is the cooking spray). Every single night, after bath and books and the bottle of your own, we snuggle in the chair I found in a Santiago antiques warehouse when I was just about as pregnant with you as I am now with your sister. Such hope in purchasing this chair, and all the hugs we have had in it since. You know this regular snuggle time and announce it, too. I burrow my face into yours and your tired laugh escapes. I hold close you and whatever collection of things you have selected for bed this night. No one tried and true companion for you. Instead, you pick the bin of lemons and tambourine you’ve also carried around all day, or three purses and a hat, or a cash register you hug as you fall asleep. Here at two, you are already so YOU. I am in awe of every square inch as you move through this weathered world. I am honored to bear witness and keep you as safe as is ever possible.

Today the sun is bright overhead and overground, reflected in heaps of shimmering white. The storm, as they say, has passed. It’s time to dig ourselves out and take it all in.

Lorenzo’s New Clothes

The month before Lorenzo died, we—he and I—traveled home to California. We did laps in my mom’s pool. We had a picnic in my friend Emily’s backyard as her older daughter played on the swing set and her younger, just a baby then, peddled her legs in the air. We were outside because there would soon be a solar eclipse, and we didn’t want to miss something so special. But so much special was happening right there on earth, down on the blanket, as Emily’s baby kicked the air and my first baby kicked inside me.

I also had three baby showers. I know. Too soon. Too many. But I was innocent, remember? I lived abroad in Chile, and it was the best time for me to fly before the baby was born. Plus, most of the people I loved were in California; it felt right to celebrate with them. Looking back, I’m glad that we did. It means I have photos where I am pregnant and happy and surrounded by love for me and my boy. It’s taken a long time to be able to look at them as I do now.

At the airport back in Santiago, I got pulled aside while my luggage was inspected. I had so many new baby clothes and toys that I might have been illegally importing them to resell in Chile (the same clothes are double the price there). But I pointed to my belly, and said, See? I am five months pregnant. Almost six.

Estoy embarazada.

Over that next weekend, I washed all those clothes and put them away in what would be Lorenzo’s closet.

On Monday, we learned about his heart.

On Saturday, I delivered him stillborn.

“In the days and weeks and months that followed, I told these details over and over to anyone who would listen. Repeating them made the story, which seemed unbelievable still, real. It was as if by repeating the details I could somehow understand them, understand what had happened…”

—Ann Hood, COMFORT

Back home, I closed the door to that room that was becoming his nursery. Over time, I opened that door and then the closet doors and went through all of his things, folding and refolding, organizing and re-organizing—nesting gone haywire. My hope was that another baby of ours would wear them one day. A couple of months later, I urgently remembered that there was a “Born in 2012” onesie amongst his things. My cousin Ginger had had a baby boy in May, while I was home. My mom and I had held him at the hospital. Ginger and I had reveled in becoming mothers the same year. But I wouldn’t be. I was certainly a mother, but, as I’ve written, not in the way anyone dreams about. So I mailed her the onesie. I felt that someone—some boy—had to wear it while it was still his year. It probably no longer fit, but Ginger told me it did.

So began a tradition of sorts, a way of honoring. When a friend has a boy, I often send along an item or two of Lorenzo’s washed, unworn clothing: an outfit, a hat, a bib, a blanket. I wasn’t sure how their mothers, my friends, would respond. Even though this act of sharing and passing along is one of the most traditional things to do among mothers. But the response has been beautiful. So far, I’ve sent his things to babies in California, Missouri, Wyoming, Connecticut, Washington D.C., and Canada. While we were still in Santiago, I gave several to a friend adopting two boys from the DRC. She took some of the clothing to the orphanage there—Lorenzo’s reach continues to astound me.

Each time a boy is born, it gives me an opportunity to go through his things, to unfold and refold. I try to find something that represents the family I’m sending to… a pup, a sentiment about mommy or daddy. It is incredibly hard to let go. Sometimes, I can’t. I go through everything and can’t find a single item I’m ready to part with. It might change the next day; it might not. But once I do, I haven’t regretted it.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to let them all go even though I know now—nearly and gratefully six months along with another daughter—that it’s unlikely that we will have another boy. It’s another moment of convergence, as it was when I told you all we were expecting H. Again, it’s the same week of the pregnancy that we found out about Lorenzo’s heart, but this time we already know her heart is whole, that she is hopefully just as healthy as her big sister, whose outgrown clothes I have already sorted for her. Lorenzo has two little sisters now—WOW.

So why do I think I’ll still save the clothes? Because you have very little to hold on to after a baby dies. Because they were given with love to him, and when I can, I pass some of them on with that same love. Maybe my daughters will have sons who can wear their uncle’s vintage duds. Who ever really knows? For now, here are a few pictures of the healthy baby boys who have breathed life and joy into Lorenzo’s things. Clockwise from top left, please meet Fletcher, Parker, James, and Cormac.

H. has, too. Here she is in one of her brother’s outfits, passed along from Emily, on a blanket made from the fabric I bought in a Santiago barrio to decorate his room. Most of those toys were meant for him as well. How on my knees with gratitude I am that she has given them life, that she has breathed such joy into our hearts and homes (three now since she’s been born).

So, yes, I am still going over the details. I trust that many of you still listening also know why. Three-and-a-half years later, I am writing about Lorenzo’s baby showers.

“Writing about Grace, losing her, loving her, anything at all, is not linear either. Readers want a writer to be able to connect the dots. But these dots don’t connect. One day I think about how knitting saved my life, and I write about that. But how do I connect it to other parts of my grief? Grief doesn’t have a plot. It isn’t smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.”

—Ann Hood, COMFORT

Comfort may be the most beautiful book I’ve read on the grief of losing a child. Like it’s taken me all this time to go through these photos, I sat down with the book recently. I had to find it now, I think, all these disconnected dots of my own later, to see how true that really is. To me, however, their very telling allows me to connect—to my son, to you, to my daughter sitting on my lap and drawing as I type, to my other daughter inside, kicking.

Play It As It Lays

A common Ryan refrain in our house is: “I don’t know why you let her play with that.” He means well and isn’t talking about anything outright dangerous. Usually, it’s just a little risky… to me. For instance, my wallet, which H. likes to comb through, extracting every card and receipt until it’s empty and she can file everything “all back in,” as she would say. It buys me 15 uninterrupted minutes, easy, but he has a point. After one wallet episode, she “lost” my driver’s license for a week. We turned the house inside out until I discovered it wedged between two business cards… in the actual wallet. We’d had it all along.

H. seems drawn to the meaning of a thing: the clay heart box Laura and Katie gave me in Mexico after Kendra’s wedding, the white seashell we found at Bethany Beach, the jewelry box with the twirling ballerina. Sometimes, she won’t nap until she can tuck a wooden music box under each arm. One is a little slanted now, but it works. The song plays, the three Pinocchio figurines move round and round. But the beauty is in that slant—H. has left her mark because she lives, she explores, she holds and beholds. The lesson is that I don’t want her to be scared to break things, to get messy, to leave things a little out of order because she passed through. I am teaching her to play respectfully, too. But if the glass heart now has a chip in it, if there will always be blue ink on her white table, if the three silver charms that sit in that white seashell were once on beaded bracelets that only broke after she wore them with such fierce commitment, then I love the thing even more. Perhaps because a pristine world now, after loss, feels like an un-lived one.

As a child, I lived in a nice home with nice things, my mom’s reaction to not having much to call nice about her own upbringing. (Life cycles in these patterns and inversions, doesn’t it?) As I grew up, my mom gave me everything she didn’t have, from an intense mother/daughter bond to horseback-riding lessons and pink cowboy boots. I loved those summers on horseback, but the sparkly boots embarrassed me. I was more comfortable in my white lace-up Keds. I got a new pair before the start of each school year, but I’d keep them in their box in the closet, saving them for when my current pair officially gave out. It was hard to let go of that old pair—stained beige from kicking down dry California paths all summer, holed by each big toe’s push against that soft canvas, the blue logo on each heel long ago picked clean off. I was fancy-free in those things, unworried about what grime got added to the mix. When I put on the new pair I’d saved and saved, I got anxious about that first streak of oil from my bike chain. It was so visible now against that bright white. But eventually, that new pair faded too, back into the old one.

I worried a lot as a kid, and not just about my shoes. I don’t want H. to worry about such little things. She doesn’t seem to, as she smears hummus in her hair, wipes her hands down the front of her shirt, and explores the “jungle” out back, caking her new shoes in a healthy layer of yard. So what I really don’t want is for her to lose that impulse. I want the spirit of exploration to come first. Play is one of our very first teachers, after all. I hope amongst everything else, it teaches her some of all this. I know that the way she plays—so at ease in her world and the interesting things it contains—is teaching me.

I am honored to share a bond with her that feels like the one I was taught is possible between a parent and a child, and to see Ryan share that with her, too. Our daughter doesn’t want for anything right now, and I will be sure to teach her how privileged that also makes her. For fun, there are even a pair of magenta cowboy boots propped up on the floor of her closet. My mom sent them, an inside joke spanning generations now. Knowing H., she will wear them with gusto, as she tromps down unknown paths ahead. It’s simply up to her to decide.