Heads up to those with fortitude: Tomorrow night (Wednesday, May 21^st) at 9 PM Eastern, Bon and I will be live on Blog Talk Radio with host Kristen Chase of Motherhood Uncensored. We’ll be talking about cobbling life together again, how friends can support babylost mamas, how life changes post-explosion.

Be not afraid of our snakes. We'll be wrapping lightness around the dark, not intending to go all babyloss on your ass. Then again, we may. I kid. Sort of.

So here's my call to you: leave a comment here telling us what you'd like to see us talk about. Don't be shy--we're open books, for the most part. Do you have questions you'd like answered?  (...and not about the fetish party. Those will have to wait for the C-Section Pooches and Perversion: Can They Co-Exist? podcast)

Click here to listen live, or to check out the archive anytime.

That’s uhh…. all for now. Be umm… k-k-kind, willya?

Me write better than me speak.

I’m here, muddling along.

I haven’t got much to say, but feel the need to bump that last one down the line.

It's been blowing the dog off the chain here lately, literally and figuratively, and I'm dishevelled and turned inside-out. Thank you, huddle. Your words make me feel normal.

+++++++

On May 12, 2007 we lay Liam and Ben side-by-side for the first time—Liam with ventilator tubes and tape obscuring his face, Ben with his oxygen, and we took a picture, terrified, desperate, overwhelmed. Poised to sell our souls.

Hello brave boys. Here we are.

+++++++

Liam calls for me sometimes. And sometimes I call for him, needing him to let me mother him. Needing to carve out some portion of every day to parent each of my children, living and dead.

God, how I despise that word.

Mamas like me work to reclaim it perhaps like bitch or queer, diffusing it by bringing it out in to the open, putting it in front of the word baby.

I understand why. To force people around us to acknowledge, to listen, to remember despite the discomfort. To challenge don’t you dare tell me to get over it. Don’t you dare rush me. Pretending it never happened may work for you, but not for me.

I’m just not quite ready for that word. The pitifully hopeful, whimpering thing inside me bristles, needing to hold out for parallel worlds and pearly gates and cosmic mistakes. Dead is too final, too finite. Lost at least leaves room for reunion.

+++++++

Evan: MOMMY I WANNA COOKIE!
Kate: What do you say?
Evan: MOMMY I WANNA COOKIE NOW!
Kate: What do you say?
Evan: MOMMY I WANNA COOKIE NOW, NO, I WANT TWO!

And then he looks at me grinning, bats his eyelashes and says PWEEZE!

And then Ben projectile-barfs peas and hummus and I don’t get there in time with the bowl and the moment the digestive hose is emptied he cracks himself up, spitty pea-goop dripping off his chin.

Then suddenly there’s this on the radio and Liam waits for me patiently, as he always has, and I run the dripping cloth back and forth across the white plastic with tears in my eyes, wishing I had twice the highchairs, twice the barf.

+++++++

I worked until 3:45 AM this morning on a presentation for a client. Evan climbed into bed with me at 6:30 AM and said

MOMMY!

and I said uuunnnngggghhh and he said

DON’T WORRY MOMMY, I ALWEDDY GOT MY BWEKKFIST

and he curled up next to me under the blankets, munching in a pleased-with-himself sort of way, and I drifted back to sleep. By the time I woke up he’d plowed through four chocolate chip cookies and was nose-to-nose, blinking earnestly and shout-whispering

WHAT DID YOU DWEEM ABOUT MOMMY I DWEEMED ABOUT MONKEYS ON FEWWIS WHEELS MOMMY, MONKEYS ON FEWWIS WHEELS.

+++++++

Now and then I can see peace, a clearing through this claustrophobic tangle, and awash in gratitude I would do it all a hundred times over for the honour of being mother to exactly these children, all three.

Today is their birthday. 

Last night I thought I’m going to look back at those pictures, see just how small Ben was when he was born and was aghast as the rest of the world must have been. Now that I know him beyond the abstractions of the NICU—his giggles and his big brother idolatry and his koala bear hugs—the realization of how close we came to losing him is a vice around my throat.

Last night I realized how everyone else must have seen our doom when we could not. We were too busy doing what we were told, too busy straining to see beyond the wires and the tubes and the swelling, too busy trying to give them love through the portholes of a hot plastic box. Thinking in desperation Liam is just mellow, a patient, old soul. Last night I felt like a fool.

Last night I sought out Liam, mute and still, his limbs and face buried under an impenetrable web of wires and ventilators and sensors, tangled up next to Ben. Pulled magnetically to fish beyond the highly edited flickrstream for the outtakes, searching for something of my son that perhaps I hadn’t seen before. All I am given is undiscovered angles of horror and heartbreak.

Last night it occurred to me just how gravely injured he’d been. Always grimacing as if in pain or at least in purgatory, his face relaxed only when he was in the deepest of medicated sleeps. When his eyes were open his face was screwed up into an expression of frustrated shock as if to say why am I still here?

Last night I hated my body, hated it so much.

Last night I vaguely considered a tattoo for the first time in my life. Earlier in the day I’d opened the sailmaker’s chest to see a few snips of Liam’s hair in a tiny zip-lock bag. It’s darker than I remember and it dawned on me that I was looking at the hair of a dead baby, cut from him after he finally stopped breathing.

Then I looked at Ben who sat in his highchair grinning broadly with one solitary cheerio stuck to the spit on his chin and with Liam’s hair between my fingers I went to the car to get the camera and Oh lili, isn’t this lovely, you’ve never been outside before. It’s sunny and the birds are chirping, and soon the peeper frogs will start to sing, and doesn’t that breeze feel wonderful and I felt pathetic, standing there in the grass holding a zip-lock bag containing all that’s left of my baby, holding it up to the sun so that he could feel that the winter’s grip is gone, that the warmth has come back.

I wonder if they could put his hair into some ink and brand him onto my skin somewhere, somewhere secret, so he would always be with me. I hope it would hurt like a sonofabitch.

Last night I stood in the bathroom with Liam’s ceramic hole-in-heart. It has started, so I’ll put his heart on a new string and I’ll wear it for his six weeks and that will give me something to hold on to but the new string didn’t fit through the hole and I thought well shit, maybe not, and maybe that’s just silly anyway and I put the heart back inside the sailmaker’s chest and went back to bed and just lay there next to Justin’s breathing, goggle-eyed and clipped short like a hunted animal hiding in the dark.

I'm often amazed that you're still here. I'm going to try and be myself again, I am. I've got other stories to tell you, if you care to hear them, about pirates in the forest and 10-foot swells and fetish parties and aliens and past lives and the smell of gunpowder and the deserted farm up the cove that we skulk past, eyeing hungrily with financial hopelessness and unrequited love. But today I have to cry. So thanks for your patience and your presence, strangers and friends.

I’ve never done much for any purpose outside my own needs and impulses.

Tonight, I feel like I’m a hundred feet tall.

When people create something bigger than themselves the analogy is always birth. Labour of love, my baby, gestation. But this was easy. The women, the concept, the plethora of ideas and must-dos and insight and reflection all clicking into place beautifully, as birth has not always done for us.

Go to Glow in the Woods today and wish us a happy birthday, won’t you?

Link to us and subscribe and spread the word. Tell your mama-friends about us—those mamas of lost babies who may need our company, and whose company we need too. Help us reach out through the storm, to bring another inside-out soul some warmth and companionship.

Because if I can pass on just a sliver of the light that you've sent into my darkness in the past year, I will have done a good thing.

For mamas of still babies, tiny babies, lost potential of all kinds.

In the beginning you stagger, disoriented, through this storm.

We want to be a glow through the trees, a golden refuge of log and glass. Stumble up the steps, shake off the snow and the crust and the stiffness, cross the threshold to be encircled by figures welcoming, nodding, easing you to a roaring fire and piping hot tea and wine and whoopie pies and whatever else warms you from the inside out.

Sink into a battered old sofa, tuck your feet under your legs, a woodsmokey quilt around your shoulders, fingers wrapped around a hot mug,

and be with us.

Mamas of lost babies see them coming and duck into alleys, slam the front door, take cover until they pass.

All pudgy cheeks and weeble-wobbling and snotty-nosed playground scrambling, they are the shadow babies—the fruit of neighbouring wombs. Gestational acquaintances and nearly-cousins and almost-playdates whose ages echo our should-have-beens, our phantom children who itch like lost limbs beyond the stump.

Despite the fingers in our ears they broadcast through the channels of souls in magically amplified singsong nonnie nonnie nonnie, I am here, I’m my mommy mommy mommy’s darling dear.

Their existence is proof that life tends to chug along uneventfully for 99% of the rest of the world: ordinary babies for ordinary mothers in ordinary ways. From our bunkers we spy on them covetously through slivers of blackout cloth, directing muttered profanities at them and at ourselves.

Split neatly down the centre, I am cast out of both camps. One baby died, one baby lived. Furiously bitter among the usual folk, sheepish and humbled among the medusas.

He is my blessing baby and my shadow baby. He saved my life by filling my arms, calling for me in the no-man’s-land between midnight and dawn for contraband giggles, drinking my milk like a dog with a bone as I sobbed.

As Liam left this world he called to Ben mirror-brother, shine bright. Shine so bright you blind mama’s blackness.

And so he does.

+++++

During random laptop housekeeping I see this

and step back a few feet from the screen, transplanting myself into some parallel universe where I chuckle oh, that’s okay, no one can tell them apart but me… the one on the left’s Ben, and the one on the right’s Liam, silly goose. They’re going to be up to so many tricks this summer, I’m going to need to grow two more arms.

+++++

The love affair with Ben has magnified the gravity of Liam’s absence. His snaggletoothed delight both lightens and darkens, rescuing me while serving as evidence of the sort of third boy we might have had.

Broadcasting to me through the channels of souls in magically amplified singsong the voices of Liam and Ben ring out in a tangle

nonnie nonnie nonnie, we are here, we’re our mommy mommy mommy’s darling dears.

(6:21 PM. Justin opens door, walks in with armfuls of work stuff and groceries, closes door behind him and places the toes of one foot across threshold)

Kate: OHMYGOD the clock has been moving one minute ahead and two minutes back all day and I can’t get anything done and he won’t pee but he needs to pee so he’s been running around squealing and holding onto his crotch and he was tearing books and yelling at me so I called him a bossy boiler and then he grabbed onto my leg and wouldn’t let go for three frigging hours and then he was running rampant all over the Kiwi and he doesn’t listen to a thing I say and I think he’s from another planet and he keeps taking his pants off and all he’s eaten is three crackers and two brownies and he kind of stinks and I’m not sure why and JEEBUS, all he did was whine and complain, like, ALL DAY.

Justin: Gee. I wonder where he gets that?

+++++++

I am a porcupine, prickly in advance of the next unknown, of this first anniversary of gains and losses.

I don’t know how I’ll feel, what I’ll do with myself. I hesitate to make plans, promises. The only instinct I have is to avoid company, curl into a ball in a dark room and drink myself into oblivion for six weeks until it’s over.

I’m kind of kidding, but kind of not. I did it once, you know. It worked like a charm.

It was my last day working for a software company with $37,500 in annual revenues despite $10 million in venture capital. The inevitable implosion landed me pink-slipped, but only after three months of the kind of trickle-down angst that brings out the very worst in people.

No, I wasn’t by myself (point for being social: Kate). Yes, I was the only person getting drunk (point for being a spectacle: rum). It was some random Tuesday after I arrived home and declared, “I just lost my job, and I’m about to get completely plastered. Feel free to join me if you like.” (point for hospitality: Kate). Justin and his brother and his brother’s eventual wife spent the night watching me become increasingly self-entertaining, for which I still feel sheepish (point for finding myself hilarious as crickets chirp: rum).

I remember hearing a knock on the bathroom door and muffled whispers asking from the other side if I was, you know, umm, okay.

The door opened a crack and through the steam she would have seen me passed out in the bath with my clothes on, head tilted back, underwater except for a breathing hole, the lower half of my face forming an island of what I’m sure was boozy, open-mouthed snoring through a fjord of suds.

Are you BLIND? I remember thinking in some distant corner of a brain newly occupied by two orangutans picking nits from each others’ fur. I am PERFECT.

An entire evening of precisely orchestrated stress relief culminating in horizontal, zero-gravity, amnesiatic, thoroughly medicated heat?

I woke up hungover, embarrassed and COMPLETELY CURED.

+++++++

On their birthday I may be all cupcakes and dancing, lightened with blessings, or maybe not. Ben was saved but the Liam that might have been was lost, the day he was flooded and then died and then was born and then brought back to linger for us for as long as he could.

This first year, I don't know if I've got it in me to pretend that May 5th wasn’t the most catastrophic day of our lives.

I want to wake up to a kick in the head from my three-year-old as per usual and tap my barometer and make the calls to say “Why don’t you just come over for some tea and something sweet and I might even have some little candles in the junk drawer and we’ll see…”

Or maybe nothing but a walk in the woods with the boys. Maybe I need to be alone or send Liam a letter or leave him a piece of cake somewhere secret or just be angry without an audience, promising to myself and concerned family that I won’t be this way next year. That Ben won’t remember me sobbing over a bowl of chocolate batter, left with the impression he’s half of a whole.

This first year, I just don’t know. I won’t know until that kick in the head.

+++++++

Why Husbands Should Not Provide Running Commentary of Magnum P.I. Episodes During Post Composition, exhibit #14-d

Justin: (enviously) That’s one hell of a moustache. Only Tom Selleck can pull off a moustache like that.

Justin: (ten minutes later) Christ. Check out that package.

Justin: (five minutes later) Seriously. Did you see that? He’s got a cow’s knuckle in his pants.

Justin: (three minutes later) Look at those SHORTS! How is it possible that his junk doesn’t dangle out the bottom?

Justin: (ten seconds later) They are pretty tight, I guess. It wouldn’t so much dangle as it would be squashed out the crack of his leghole like a balloon animal.

A few of you have written to say that Google Reader (among others) isn't picking up the feed from www.sweetsalty.com correctly. If you're having trouble subscribing, click on the orange Subscribe button near the top of the sidebar.

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(I know, I know... not as graceful as I'd hoped. It's a long story)

Or write to me to heckle my woefully intermediate internets skillz.

(self-portrait '26 weeks with twins', 12 days before crash c-section. April 23, 2007)

Last night I dreamed my babies were born too soon. They were from another planet. They had acorns for knees, and elastic legs, and didn’t cry. I stared at them and they stared at me with the giant, almond-shaped eyes widely reported by abductees.

They knew everything there is to know.

Then I woke up.

Kate:  (from kitchen, through screen door)  Eeeeee-vaaan, where aaaaaare yooooou?
(silence)
Kate:  Eeee-vaaan! Answer me please, where aaaaare yoooou?
(silence)
Kate:  (to self)  Shit.
(silence)
Kate:  (opens screen door, looks outside)  EVAN!
Evan:  (from backyard, out-of-sight)  I’M OKAAAAY!
Kate:  What are you doing?
(silence)
Kate:  Evan, what are you doing?
Evan:  My jigger needed some FRESH AIR!

+++++

Justin:  Ben kinda looks like Rick Moranis this morning.
Kate:  uhh… what?
Justin:  You know, after Rick Moranis gets bitten by the demon dog in Ghostbusters. He looks like that.

(…as though having a kid who looks like Dozer the Keymaster is, like, TOTALLY cool.)

I write this moments before I call GoDaddy with my tail between my legs, asking some disembodied voice in Illinois or Arkansas or some other such random industrial park to HELP. ME.

So writing here "I'm live, YAY!" may well be a jinx—the last task in all this, fixing links within posts—can't be completed until the www.sweetsalty.com domain is remapped. And that may take days. What happens to anyone who types www.sweetsalty.com in the meantime is anyone's guess.

The water looks cold but if I don't jump now, I never will.

In the words of Simple Minds, Don't You Forget About Me.  Fix yo' faves, fix yo' bloglines, fix yo' link love. Pwetty pwetty pweeze!

And bear with me.

The floors in this house need two more coats of varnish, and the windows are still shrink-wrapped, and the sound of hammering may well drive you nuts.

Now: a moment of silence for the reviled inglisea... inlisheas.. ingliseast dot type... errr... whatever that was.