Anthony Bourdain will eat everything short of monkey brain. I'll write about everything short of this.

Then I think this is a part of post-Liam life, and I have sisters out there, sisters in loss who are steps ahead, and shared experience dilutes the isolation of one.

So here is my challenge: write about what is sacred, what is off-limits. Acknowledge the woman who has been cut, and traumatized, and lost, and figure out why she can't just dress up for Halloween and have a few beer without being overwhelmed with wrongness.

I can't heal without cataloguing, without putting this mess in its place on the shelf, neatly tied with string alongside all the rest. Without you — the ether — as clerk, rubber stamp and inkpad in hand, ready to press with that satisfying thunk RECEIVED.

+++++++++

Late at night I stay up long after I should, stalling and not sure why.

I am no longer female. I'm something else: limbo, hiatus, sexless. Evenings are spent with laptop in lap, television on, food at hand — doubling and tripling up of distraction, isolation.

It's just easier, I tell him. If we're together I'll wake you up, and I won't be able to relax because I'll be too conscious of you. Week after week we sleep separately under the guise of breastfeeding — a guise not because of untruth but because I rely on it for protective solitude. On those nights overdue for closeness or conversation I linger with Ben as he snores on my chest, plugged into the iPod. Midnight becomes 2 AM and I think he'll be up in another hour anyway, so I'll just stay here.

Then I blink and the day begins, husband and wife wordless for each other aside from the mechanics of laundry and playgrounds and dirty bums.

The worst part — the part that makes me want to shrink into nothing out of shame — is the relief. I got through another night, and after all Ben was sort of unsettled, that much is true, so I may as well have just been there with him, and we've all got colds, and Justin was thick in neo-citran sleep, and he wouldn't have even known if I went to bed anyway.

Phewph.

Why the phewph? Why? I cling to this thing, this toxic wall that is costing me, costing both of us.

I don't know how to be a woman and a wife anymore, having lost a baby.

To revel in this failed body feels inappropriate. Not sensible, I know. This is how it feels to try and wear this grief at the same time as joy and release: shallow, callous, cleavage at a funeral.

Mourning is my link to Liam, and many days I feel as though I'm not solemn enough. I can be an outwardly unaffected mother for my kids (I must be) but can't seem to also be an outwardly unaffected wife for my husband. Fumbling in the darkness my hands trip over the scar and I am transported back to catastrophic beige.

To think otherwise is delusion: best-friendship is the slow burn, but sex is the glue. Not even mere sex, but physical intimacy.

To fall asleep spooning, neverminding the sweat, the way we used to.

I still watch him, genuinely amazed that he's mine. Watch the curve of the back of his leg, the strength of his shoulder, the way the light hits his back. Then repression. I've got myself trained like a monk reaching some sort of elevated humanity atop silent mountains, denying the baser part of myself in some search for peace.

But I don't want to be a monk. I want to be base. I want to be a punk with bright blue hair and combat boots and a beer in hand, and I want to bust a move on the dance floor with Justin, Lambda Lambda Lambda nerd, neverminding anything except the mob scene at the bar when it's refill time.

Until now I'd been shrugging it off, this black hole of zest. Postpartum. Age. Breastfeeding hormones. Two kids amplifying everything, exhaustion included. Twinskin. Sinus congestion.

But now I know: it is some of that, and a lot of Liam.

Mmm, monkey brain. Tastes like chicken.

+++++++++

Bon says of her lost baby I no longer feel the same urgent, deep connection to him. Which of course, I assume I will never feel again, and my breath catches in my throat even as I type that. I don't know if there's another way, and that, in itself, I grieve, but am also trying to accept. My understanding is that it's natural, if not easy, to gradually move from something like mourning to something more like honouring. And that it is normal to mourn the move.

She knows where I am. Liam is becoming less urgent, a doused fire that has finally stopped roaring and cracking and spitting. Things need to begin growing around the burnt-out ruin now, living things, tall grasses and whispering trees and wildflowers. It will always be a sacred place, but more peaceful now that the smoke is clearing.

I resent the living things trying to reclaim him because in doing so, they cover him up. I still want to feel the scorch from that fire on my skin because it’s all that I have of him. I both crave and reject the overtaking peace, the winding and enriching and soothing green smothering the charred black.

For now, anyway. Until time and love push me forward.