I am not good enough for him, and I don’t say this fishing to be convinced otherwise. It’s the plain truth.

He is a living Old Spice commercial, all impeccable goodness. He kills bugs on-demand and airplanes our son until his legs ache and smells like woodsmoke and knows how to whistle grass and stays out until he collapses building rock walls, restoring clapboard, painting, pruning the roses, refinishing the tiller of a neighbour’s sailboat.

He takes Evan down to the shore for a paddle, sheparding a contrary two-year-old with a 17-foot long canoe on his shoulders. A canoe that he stripped and rebuilt, stretching new canvas over the vintage frame and rubbing it with his palms until it shone. I like that it’s got my skin in it, he says. That I made it like that with my own hands, that it gave me calluses, like a sculpture.

He passes me in the kitchen, pauses for a moment, suspiciously silent behind my back as I chop and simmer. "Hey there, little lady," he says. I turn around and he sports an ear-to-ear grin, hands on his hips. A zucchini is zipped perpendicular into the fly of his pants.

This ten-year-old joke never fails, even though he’s far from the first man to do it. With a carrot. Or a parsnip. Or a Japanese eggplant, best accompanied with an interpretive dance.

This is Justin. The most annoying thing about him: his incessant perfection. Those of you who know him in real-life know exactly what I mean.

Meanwhile, I have a waterbed belly and don’t eat my crusts and look and behave like this in the morning:

How is he doing, you ask? He is still himself. That I mention him rarely here doesn’t reflect the indescribable gorgeousness that is him as my babies' dada. He was born in the wrong era, and thinks computers not much good for anything but wasting time and mooring dinghys.

All this ticky-tapping, you, these never-met friends, unnerve him a bit. It was foreign to him before, but he smiled at it. But now that I’m writing through such potent trauma I’m taking liberties, sharing our intimate life. I’ve kept him under this radar a little, not wanting him to feel any more spotlit than he already does.

He is steady and unfailing, as he has always been. He is my better three-quarters.

Next week we go to rest our son, our Liam, among a watery everglade that is heaven to us both. Just the two of us in the mist at sunrise, in the canoe. I dread it, fear accidentally seeing what’s inside the urn. I don’t feel strong enough to live through that moment without falling into pieces, throwing myself into the depths after him.

You can close your eyes, he says, holding my hand. I’ll do it for both of us.

He is my love. That’s all.

My mama is a birth warrior says the tiny t-shirt, one of two. Sent with love from one ever-healing birther to another to say be proud.

But a while back, several days before we lost Liam, it felt fraudulent to be on the receiving end of such a sentiment.

Birth warrior. I was unconscious, for chrissake. Strapped down and knocked out amid frantic yells. One boy transfused and weak, the other lifeless despite nine minutes of chest compressions. I was dissected, an hour of my life sucked into a void of anesthetized nothingness.

There’s no way this applies to me. I couldn’t decide to cry or laugh.

I tucked them back into the box and placed them on the shelf above Liam, shaken. But for the rest of the day they called to me, those tiny tees, as did their patroness. A gentle challenge.

The message camped out in a corner of my brain as I cuddled, enclosed in the boys. Birth warrior. I shuffled down the hall, sat in the pumping room, stood hands through their portholes. It persisted, hands on its hips. Deal with me, it said. I’ll wait, but you have to deal with me. I’m not letting you rest until you do.

The words have a new shape now, rounded up to this.

Birth: to see them safe.
Warrior: to match them in bravery.

It fits all of us, mothers and fathers pressed through trauma into the out-of-womb gestation of the NICU. Whether our babies stay with us or not we work up the nerve to handle them, be witness for them, stand tall among the doctors. Safe doesn't always mean the outcome we'd prefer, but we accompany them to it with fierce love, nonetheless. We cobble together the broken pieces to be whole for our other children, present and future. We have the odd breakdown-free day, and heal, and type one-handed while pumping. <ahem>

All this deserves immense pride, despite our births being not the domain of goddesses but of blue scrubs and crash carts.

Ben is with us, and Liam is gone. My mama is a birth warrior.

I’ll get there.

++++++++

Ben squeaks and gulps at the mama-trough as we sit with one of his primary nurses. How emotional all this must be for you, for you steady souls, our nurse-mothers, I reflect to her. They are mentors to both babies and parents, keeping us all afloat in this disorienting tangle.

After a lengthy pause she looks at me and says softly, "I was there, you know, when they were born."

She’s been at our bedsides from the beginning, cheerful and brisk. I’m suddenly curious. She’d never mentioned this until now. I hadn’t been looking at faces, only blurred figures, before it all went black.

Perhaps it’s just too much to look someone in the eye and tell them you’ve seen their guts, their heart and hopes spilled open, their catastrophe, while they lay unknowing.

"What was it like?" I ask her, unable to resist.

She looks at me earnestly and replies without hesitating: "It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen."

My heart emits the soft, squelchy pop of validation, of shared experience. Shared even though I was only conscious for the preamble and the aftershocks.

The scariest thing ever.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way.

I’ve had to relay the same facts, the same update so many times now I can do it sleepwalking.

Yes, it’s been a rough go. We’re drained but we’re okay. The more we find out about just how injured he was, the more we can reconcile that he couldn’t stay with us. We’re just trying to focus on Ben, and Evan, and thank goodness we’re busy. I don’t know what we’d do if we weren’t busy.

A strange feeling, this claustrophobic paranoia. People we know spot us and instantly think, there they are, the ones whose baby died. Imagined or not, I see it in their eyes.

I spent much of Liam's life wandering hospital hallways and deserted utility closets and unoccupied pumping rooms puffy and red-eyed, with rat's nest hair. More tears, terror, depression and panic than I've ever felt in what I now know was our excessively fortunate life.

Now he's gone and I am tapped of grief, exhausted for the time being. Shoulders unclench to music in the car, laughing at a joke, and I am instantly ashamed. In ordinary conversation I slip into recalling the clinical highlights of the most difficult night of our lives, which happened just over a week ago. Then I walk away feeling callous and cheap.

Alone, my eyes close and I am flooded with memories of the first night we lost him, when they were born. And the second night we lost him, six weeks later. I relive it all, all-senses snapshots. The smell of antiseptic, the chilling squirt of morphine at the point of their beginning and at his end.

I’m filled with horror as though contemplating some unimaginable trauma that happened to someone else. How can they bear it without falling apart?

That’s when I realize it: I am numb.

++++++++++

Our nurse gave it to us as she took his body away. A ceramic heart on a string with a cutout — a hole in the heart — and the missing piece to stay with Liam. So we’d always be connected, she said. So we’d always know the other half is with him.

It felt spontaneous and intensely personal. I’ve had it around my neck every since, shortened so that the heart rests in the same spot where Liam’s head was, that night.

Searching for shared experience tonight with Bon, my eyes rested on a photo of her Finn’s urn. I stopped, startled with recognition, looked closer. Around the neck of the urn rests a little heart — the centre of the empty one given to her the night he died.

It’s like walking in on a lover with another woman. It dawns on me: I’ve simply been cycled through the steps the hospital takes when a mother loses a baby.

Who am I to say it's any less genuine because it's protocol? Our nurse is a wonderful person, just doing her job. And doing it so well, as they all do, that we’re deeply moved and grateful.

But now I am an idiot, fingering this bureaucratic trinket every time I'm sad for Liam. In some boardroom they decided that this ceramic hole-in-heart would be line item number twelve on the Infant Mortality Response Strategy.

Suddenly I want to take it off. Struck that a trinket will not make me sane, or calm, or fulfilled. Nor connected in any physical way to my lost son. Pissed off that it can't. Resentful, feeling positively curd-headed for falling for it. But then panicking as the spell evaporates and the man behind the curtain is revealed.

F--k! If this heart thing was just a contrivance, what am I going to do if I take it off? How will I have Liam with me, if it's not this?

All over again, it’s true. He is gone. My stomach turns, rattled.

Desperate for something to grasp onto when I feel like I'm drowning, but not wanting it to be line item number twelve from the gift shop next to the Tim Horton’s in the lobby of the building where he died.

++++++++++

Some threads, tugged on, don't amount to much, don't compromise the whole. Others, without warning, leave me an instantly unravelled heap on the floor.

I've thought about this now, this trinket. It's not so much a link to Liam. It's a token of sisterhood, a communion of lost babies. A link to other mamas who fell into and climbed out of this pit.

This is me now. Branded like all the others before me, living with a hole in the heart. But nonetheless living.

Pictures show what I couldn’t see in front of me. He bloomed as he graduated from the vent, looking almost plump in his stability. But then, a few days later, he began to falter.

I can see that now, tentatively venturing into the ancient past of two weeks ago.

Yes… there. His face, that grimace, the shape of his head, the pallor of his skin. He was lost. But even as they wheeled him away for the shunt surgery, the accelerant, I hadn’t considered the possibility that he would take a turn. I was stupidly placated by rosy cheeks, by the fact that he looked so much better than he had at birth. Daring to hope that he may not only survive but be unscathed. Almost like a healthy baby.

Our purpose is to bear witness for our children. Graceful or clumsy we walk beside them, hold their hands as far as we’re able. Even when we despair in futility at their path, it is our soul’s contract to accompany them.

Blessing them, loving them as they intentionally or unintentionally break our hearts.

This is the labour of parenting.

+++++++++++

Earlier today the nurse said to me with great authority and the best of intentions, "Don’t expect him to actually feed. He won’t. He’s too little yet. Just let him have a sniff, and that’s great. Let me know if you need anything."

Ben and I cooed conspiratorially to each other as she swished away to her other charges. Let's show 'er, shall we sweets?

Fifteen minutes later she pulled back the curtains to find Ben, eyes blissfully drooping as he demonstrated the fine art of suck-swallow-breathe, making the contented squeaks and burps that could only mean one thing: milk moustache.

(An admirable feat given that the object of his newfound affection is twice the size of his head.)

Later, back at home, Evan’s voice echoed in the gurgling empty of post-bath: "I show mama!"

He careens around the corner, freshly toweled and dangling. "MAMA!" He yells, puppy-dogging like he hasn’t seen me in weeks. Leaps into my lap and throws his pudgy arms around my neck, warm and steaming-fresh. "I have BUSY DAY! I see FWIENDS. I pway in pwaygwound, a-big TWAINS! A-dis way, mama. I jammies. Cuddle, pweeze!"

These two boys are pure joy. They help me to know for sure: despite this hole in my heart, grief will not define us. Love will. Very hallmark, but very true.

+++++++++++

People at a loss for words say this: Your story makes me realize how easy we’ve got it / how insignificant our problems are / how lucky I am. I think my life has gone to shit, but then I think of you.

For a flash I’m tempted to take you by the shoulders, pull you close and swiftly knee you in the groin. But then… it’s how I would feel. Come to think of it, it is how I feel. Beauty all around.

Being drenched in perspective has made my heart a hundred times the size of average. My chest may burst from this expansion in the same way my belly felt it might from pregnancy, impossibly stretched.

I was a cynic, a pessimist, a heckler. Not terribly generous. Maddeningly impatient. Now despite moments of the heaviest sadness I’ve ever felt, there is love: more love than I’ve ever felt. Not specific love towards one person or another but magic, sparkle, gratitude swirling all around us.

I wonder if Liam's peace will stick… or if it will be a month or two before I'll be cursing at people in traffic again. I'd like to think he's made me a more peaceful person.

I'd like to be worthy of him.

The mountain forests of British Columbia are like cathedrals, sacred and ancient. Thousand year-old hallways and altars and grand columns that rise from rich, deep moss-velvet. You walk in this place humbled, a guest of the gods.

The place that became us is so vastly foreign to the place that birthed us.

Full circle in Nova Scotia, land of pirates and rum-runners and a meat grinder sea. The woods here are a shag carpet of stunted and unassuming gnarliness. Legions of black spruce stand like matchsticks in comparison, more hardy and honest than show-stoppingly glorious.

We drove home today from the hospital, from one boy to another, and I rested my head against the car window, stared out at this land-borne ocean of brackish green.

And suddenly there he was: my Liam, the blur whizzing past him, full of amazement.

I had told him, you see, during that long night as we lay through spells of breathing, and spells of not: rest now but come back whenever you like, sweet boy. Come back and pour yourself into my ear, and sit down cross-legged in front of my eyeballs. And I’ll move my head back and forth and take you places, and show you the most wonderful things.

A wall of threadbare jacks, weed trees thick in a bog. But look, my boy! Ahh, look. How straight they stand, stripped bare and spindly but proud of their prickly tuft. Stubborn through the winter, up to mischief with the crows. Aren’t they just perfect, just as they are.

There’s another of Liam’s gifts. His soul is inside me again, the way he started. And so I’ll take note of the world for him. Beauty and nourishment, through my eyes and all my senses.

Look, sweet son. How you would have loved all this.

++++++++++

Evan watches me earnestly as I pump, eyes fixed on the drip- drip- drip.

"Mama make a-boobie milk," he declares. "Aaahhh… (as if deciding) …a dis one for Ben, a dis one for Leee-am."

I decide it may as well be now.

"Evan sweetie, Liam doesn’t need mama’s milk anymore. He’s a star now, watching over you, strong and brave. He’s okay, he’s a happy baby now."

He scrunches his forehead in disapproval.

"No mama, dis one’s for Leee-am. Dat one’s for Ben. Dis one for Leee-am. Leee-am! Ahhh… Thomas. James. Skarloey. Misser Toppem Hat. Twubblesome twucks. GORDON!"

And he huffs off importantly to arrange his trains into lines of orderly submission.

My throat swells again at the loss he can’t yet grasp. An almost gravitational withdrawl pulls me into sorrow, to immersion in what Liam should have been, at the expense of all others.

But instead, thanks to his big brother, I smile at how rich we are. As rich as Rockefeller.

When it was all over, when he was gone, he said to me: Look, mama. Can you see? I’m better now. This sick little boy lying on your lap, this poor boy, he’s not me. Not anymore. Look, and see.

That’s when I knew he was finally safe, whole and calm. Resting.

Liam died this morning, our sweet and miraculous son. It was all just too much, the doctors tell us. Birth asphyxiation, the bleed, hydrocephalus, the shunt, a collapsed lung. During the operation they had a chance to look at his brain, and realized the damage was much worse than even the worst of ultrasounds. He was breaking down.

That’s the doctor’s story. Here’s mine.

He died in my belly six weeks ago. They brought him back when he was born, aggressively, ten minutes of frantic work to get him to register an apgar score of one. That’s when my old-soul son said to himself:

Well, this is strange. I was there, and now here. Why? I’ll stay then, for a little while. For my mama, my dada, my brother, my twin. To show them how strong I would have been, how inventive, how patient. To give them smiles, to help them to know me. Once I do all that, then I can go. Not in an operating room, cold and surrounded by strangers. On my mama’s heart, surrounded by peace and light and love.

And so it was.

Shhh, lili. You don’t need to try so hard anymore. Please rest, sweets. Go to sleep, go back to that place you already know, and wait for us. Be high in the sky, be the stars and the trees and the loons waking us in the morning, and watch over your brothers, and wait. When I am old and grey, fates willing, I’ll find you and come to you. I promise. Even if I’m a hundred-and-one I’ll use my mama magic to turn back into this Me, right now, and we’ll pick up where we left off and I’ll feed you and hold you and we’ll cuddle forever. I promise. So please lili, please go. Please, for mama and for dada.

We held him, all of us naked, for twelve hours through the night. As it was meant for him, if not in my belly, the way his soul wanted to go.

Now we need to take his last gift, I think: permission to feel relief. Liam gave us peace by finding his own.

This morning on the way home we looked in on Ben, suddenly robust in comparison. As he passed through Liam stopped at Ben’s bedside, curled up beside him and whispered to him of patience and promise and inherited hopes and dreams. Then he was gone, and Ben lies with rosy cheeks, belly full, nasal prongs wrestled free, chest rising and falling in deep contentment, blanket kicked off and toes twitching languorously, ready for life to begin.

Then we left the hospital to recharge, to find our way back to being parents of two, to give our sons everything we have left.

Later today I stood at the ocean wearing two-day-old clothes, clothes I’d put on when my son was still alive. And I felt Liam in the sky, brushing my cheeks with breeze and crashing spray. A sapphire sky peeking out through portholes in the fog. I put my right hand over my belly where his naked, warm rump lay throughout that endless night, and my left hand over my heart, where he let go.

And I stood with him, remembering, just being his mama.

Peace, light, love for Liam, our son.

He is out. Bandaged and flailing a bit, surely feeling like he's been put back together backwards. I remember how that feels, if even a little bit.

Intubated again, back on the ventilator for a few days while he comes to. I'm told it went well. Now I go to sit with him, give him fingertips to grip, hope he can sense that I'm there.

Then off to Ben for skin-to-skin therapy. This morning, I need it more than he does.

Reading blogs like this are like slowing down for a car crash..

True. It's nice to just read about someone normal…

I know what you mean. I was like you, once.

I'd love to tell you about how Evan makes fart noises underwater now, in the bath, with a squeezy toy. And then looks up, beaming, to declare: "Dat's RUDE!"

I wish that's all I had to say.

But those reports are trumped by what else is going on. At this moment, 12:33 AM, a neurosurgeon is putting in a shunt to relieve pressure on Liam’s brain from excess fluid caused by hydrocephalus.

Taken away again to the operating room by a faceless crew of masked blue people. I appreciate and resent them, all at once. Or perhaps better put: resenting what they stand for, the fact that we have to be here at all.

As a healthy wound bleeds cleanly, free flowing, the zombie state of new mamahood is the way it's supposed to be. Awestruck but sleep-deprived, unkempt, squinting at the rest of the world for its sparkling unencumbrance. Shuffling along uneventfully towards contentedness. All along wondering, will I ever be just a woman again? Will I ever not smell of sour milk?

Above and beyond the mandatory shuffling, there’s a heavy sort of solemnness pressing down, smothering the me I'd otherwise expect to return to. After all this, I don’t even know if she'll exist anymore. Not as she was.

I wish I could stop time-travelling. The last time I saw this person, I wasn’t even pregnant yet. Or in this picture, I was a few days pregnant but didn’t know it. Or the last time I was here, I was pregnant, and the boys were whole and safe. None of this had happened yet, and I was still just myself.

It makes my stomach turn with longing, this unrelenting wistfulness.

Every morning I wake steeped in forgetful sleep, a gift for the first ten seconds before opening my eyes. Then the weight of the boys and their uncertain future presses down on me and I think dammit, it’s done, and it’s true.

Every new mom doubts that she'll ever resurface from the hibernation. That she'll ever regain the time or self-acceptance to relish in herself. Deliciously impractical clothes (or anything not smeared with offspring snot). Girly shoes, wine, yoga. Unhurried conversations. Spring-in-your-step stuff. Any food other than that which is formed into bite-sized crocodiles.

The prospect of waiting to see where Liam lands on 'The Spectrum' — and to see that Ben is clear of it, simply by virtue of being a preemie — already exhausts us both. The pursuit of past-life sparkle is hopelessly distant, shallow in comparison to what's at stake.

But that doesn't stop me wanting it. To enjoy life again without the fresh sting of feeling betrayed by it.

++++++++++++

Today I walked into Liam and Ben's new home, the transitional care nursery, to find the nurse on break.

They’ve graduated not because their release is imminent, but because they’ve been upgraded from 'The #1 and #2 Sickest and Smallest Babies East of Toronto' to 'Very Small But Somewhat Less Complicated Babies Who Are No Longer Dire Enough To Require a $65,000 Bed In Critical Care'.

Progress.

Dropped my bag in the cubby, peered and whispered at both of them in greeting. Liam welcomed me with a fruitful grunt. Looked over both shoulders, wondering: is it okay if I just go ahead and change his diaper?

I feel like I'm shoplifting. Opening the greenhouse wall and taking liberties without asking permission, without a guide.

I want to get it right, this balance between mama and nurses. It's my baby, but it's their turf. I respect their work immensely, their sheparding of our mechanical wombs. I hear them when they think they're unobserved, hands through the portholes, working deftly while cooing at someone else’s tiny daughter or son. Oh! You little scrapper you. There you go, shoosh, shoosh. Goodness gracious, that’s some set of lungs. You’ll be full of beans, won’t you? Here now mister man, let’s get you all nested.

Meanwhile, I'm a bull in a china shop. I can never find the wipes and get tangled up in the wires and can only flip them back-to-front, not front-to-back. But I'm getting there. Today, all three of us strapped together skin-to-skin like kangaroos, Liam’s deep sleep stalled into several apneas, momentary lapses in which he forgets to breathe.

The alarms go off and I look up, assessing his heart rate on the monitors. I wait a moment, see if he'll come back on his own. Tap my fingers on his cheek, rub his back. By the time the nurse pokes her head around the curtain, all is well.

Satisfaction.

++++++++++++

Justin: Would you like some toast with your butter?
Kate: Hardy har.
Justin: I hope you don't put that much butter on anything Evan eats. His face will start beading in the rain like a freshly weather-treated windshield.
Kate: <hairy eyeball>
Justin: It looks like the Exxon Valdez collided with your toast.
Kate: <sigh>

It's moments like these that make me feel like things may get back to normal around here someday. You'd never heckle someone in the midst of lasting melancholy.

Especially before breakfast.

One month down. Two months to go, as the optimist flies. I am on auto-pilot in the NICU, a blur of meetings and rounds and charts and highway driving and fluorescent lights and insatiable boob-sucking robots that tractor-beam me from one end of the hallway to the other, wheeshing FEED-ME-SEYMOUR! in-and-out.

We sweat bullets in front of a dozen –ologists, grasping for a prognosis on Liam where none exists. Talking odds and desperately picking apart words like 'delayed' and 'affected'. The short of it: from now on, we watch and wait. Years of it.

The critical aftermath was easier than this, this nothingness of time during which worst-case scenarios spin in front of us, all possible.

We’re so drained. Our skin still smokes and hisses, fresh from the brand of tragedy, to the point where I wonder if we’ll ever be ourselves again. The only respite is holding them, eyes closed and head completely empty, just clammy and breathing. When we all come to, shifting and murmuring, I put them back and straighten myself. Go to pump and POUF! the baby-spell breaks and the bloody perfect storm of possibilities slams down on my shoulders once more and I am filled again with despair and rage.

Ahh, screw it.

They’re both rearing up on four pounds now, almost twice their birth size. The nurses are already speculating about transitional care and open cots. They have explosive poops and they squirm and grunt and hum and sing. They think I’m terribly clumsy, but they like how I smell. They know each other, heart rates and oxygen sats matching, face-to-face.

They are wide-eyed and shut-tight, cranky and peace.

So am I, for that matter.

I’m sick of it all, this dreary, institutional beige. The world is the colour of overcooked porridge. I hope that goes away, lets us laugh again someday. Right now we’re too solemn for everything — even the panty raid scene in 'Revenge of the Nerds' on late-night cable. That's how you know it for sure: you are a humourless zombie.

Crap

Here comes the Lact-Eze 3000

Noooo, not already

It’s got me

I am be  *&@$%)(&*%^*#%$

<END>