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.

Or tell your reader to direct itself to http://www.sweetsalty.com/sweetsalty

(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.

On the long, winding descent of the country road I would gear up, invigorated. I’d fly by farms and cattle, ending up on the edge of the city at the software company I worked for to start the day feeling righteous and substantial—for a marketer, anyway.

On this hill was a manhole, the halfway point. For a year's worth of days it was my ritual to ride over its cover with that satisfying kathunk-thunk.

One morning, the familiar dark circle came up fast.

At the last second I startled at the sudden presence of my grandmother, a cyclist until her eighties who had died a few years back. Not a voice exactly but I knew it to be her, and two urgent words:

TURN. NOW.

I heeded the warning, thinking to myself why not? and swerved, missing the manhole by inches, looking down to prove my own silliness as I passed at the speed of a car.

It was uncovered, unmarked.

The gaping hole would have swallowed the front end of my mountain bike, pitching my face and neck into the asphalt edge at a high velocity.

Squeezing the brake levers hard I slowed, jumped off and walked back, gaped at what might have been my doom and rode the rest of the way to work to call the municipal road crew, thoroughly rattled.

++++++

I lay in bed awake and it came to me as it sometimes does: I still can’t believe I had twins, that they came early, that I have this scar, that my babies were in incubators, fed through tubes, cut open by surgeons, that one of them died in my arms.

The dark bit that feeds off the sadness says look at what happened, look and amplifies the memory of a lifeless Liam on my lap, forces me to replay and recoil and wrap myself around the ache.

But last night a soft, affectionate voice cut through like the ringing of a bell.

Stop it, mom.

I hesitated, toyed with pretending it was real. The voice said again, firmly:

No, mom. Not tonight. Just sleep.

and the unwelcome vision was blocked as though a figure stood in front of it with arms crossed.

Sometimes he is a grown man and he walks with me, full of patience. Or he is Ben’s parallel, gurgling and sighing contentedly, letting me know he rests without words. Or he is a teenager, lanky and full of promise. Sighing affectedly, newly sure of himself, protective beyond his years as he was last night.

He comes to me as everything he should have been. Or sometimes he doesn’t come at all and there is just silence and memory, and I am shaken, scolding myself for being hopelessly romantic.

But when I do hear him, I listen. Why not?

“So, shall we talk about Liam now?” he says casually.

“Sure,” I reply, standing at the counter in the physio room, mixing lunch for Ben.

“When I cut into the brain…” he begins.

And I’m thinking WOAH. Slow down there, cowboy. A preamble would be nice. A ‘Before I get into details, I want you to know we did the right thing’ would be nice.

I look at his hands as the words When I cut… reverberate through the room.

“…it became clear that there wasn’t much left,” he continues. “It was just gone, huge chunks of it. Much of it was just an outer film, empty on the inside. We still don’t know if it was the bleed, or the oxygen deprivation at birth, or the hydrocephalus—but what brain was there was highly compromised (translation: mush), and the rest of what should have been there… wasn’t.”

Standing before him as he discusses the autopsy of my son, I recall this same doctor marvelling at the birth of neonatology at Coney Island, a medical sideshow of FETUSES OUTSIDE THE WOMB! and it comes back to me, what it was like to talk to these doctors.

Your baby makes for an interesting day at work. As a ski patroller Justin would come home invigorated at having evacuated the woman who snowboarded into a tree and literally left half her face and part of her jaw stuck to the cedar bark. Horrible for her, but (looks over both shoulders) totally COOL.

This is the wild west, and your baby is Billy the Kid. There is very little in the way of prognosis or explanation, but plenty of “Hey! Look at that. Geez. Let’s try… eeeny meany miney mo… THIS STUFF, and see what happens.” as they add chemical goo #43-161 to his central line.

This doctor in particular is as human as he can be. But like the rest of his kind he must be evasive, preemies being all about speculation and speculation being all about unscientific guesswork. Which leaves them sympathetic but muzzled in the face of desperate parents who sob please tell us everything will be alright despite every indication that no, everything will not be alright.

Standing there with a bowl of pureed carrot in my hand I remembered that resignation, the realization that my child amounted to a freak show, a curiosity with applause and collective gasps, and now dissection.

With words like that crackling in the air I try to remember that I love him still, that there is such a thing as souls, that he didn't need that worn out shell, that he doesn't hurt anymore.

He was so beautiful.

+++++++++

At eleven months old, Benjamin Button sits steadfastly at the 3^rd percentile for weight. 97% of all eight-month-old babies (his adjusted age) are bigger than him. Try adding butter to his cereal, suggests the nutritionist, and I laugh and ask her if she’s serious.

Teensy in weight, not bad in height (25th percentile) and a surefire Pulitzer Prize winner in head circumference (95th percentile). And through two hours of developmental testing he and his big, shiny blues knocked it out of the park.

+++++++++

I look at Ben and imagine him with half his brain missing, wheelchair-bound and blind and seizing and wearing a diaper all his life and never speaking and my heart blows a fuse, and everything just shuts down.

Every time I think of Liam, the first thing that I speak, aloud or in-mind, is I’m sorry. I’m sorry my body did this to you. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you safe. I’m so sorry. My Liam and my guilt are forever bound.

I almost never voice this in conversation with loved ones because it’s too frustrating for them. Why do you torture yourself? It wasn’t your fault. Don’t be ridiculous they say, because they love me, and it hurts them to see, as they see it, me choosing to hurt myself.

My head knows it’s ridiculous, of course, and knows the TTTS was a random sniper. But my heart still craves the torture.

I was going to write that when your body betrays your baby the result is the world’s most intense mind-fuck — but I’ve changed my mind. Your body’s betrayal of your baby is the world’s most intense heart-fuck.

Love and apology, forever bound.