And it feels like a lifetime ago, but some parts feel like yesterday. Sometimes it feels like a nightmare that I’ve yet to wake up from. Is this real? Is this my new normal? Am I a mother? Where is my baby?

My new normal is hardly normal at all. I am a stranger to myself these days. I don’t feel joy anymore and I don’t look forward to much. The only thing I look forward to is seeing your dad because he is my greatest source of comfort in all this. I love him very much and he is the reason why I get out of bed and push myself to attempt to function as a fraction of the normal human being I once was.

I still wake up in a panic. You’re still my first thought when I wake up, I think of you and then I remember you’re gone and I feel the pain all over again. Actually, I never stop feeling the pain. Though sometimes I feel numb and I don’t cry, that’s been happening more often lately. Like yesterday.

Your daddy and I went to see a therapist together to help us cope with the grief. I told her your story, and for the first time talking about you, I didn’t cry. I feel guilty and sad for that because I want to cry, because crying makes me feel close and connected with you. If I’m not crying over you, I can’t feel you as close to me in my heart and that makes me very sad. My greatest fear is that one day I’ll just be talking about you as if you were another person’s sad story, and that’s not who you are to me at all. You are the most special part of me and I want to keep your memory alive forever. I want to always remember our time together like it was just yesterday. I never want you to become a distant memory even though there is so much pain that comes with remembering you. The pain is worth it because I love you so much. They say numbness is part of the grieving process, maybe that is what I was experiencing yesterday.

But most of the time, I find that I am re-living moments from our time together, and the times before that, like when I was pregnant with you. I still can’t believe I held you for just 18 hours, it felt like only minutes, it went by way too fast. I wish I could focus on my memories of our time together, but sometimes I have intrusive flashbacks of the moment when I found out your heart wasn’t beating anymore. I try to work through those difficult memories and I try not to push them out when they invade my thoughts. I don’t want to live in fear of those memories because they are never going to go away, I will always have them and I know I need to accept them. So I let them in, and I deal with them, and then I move on to the memories I have of you after you were delivered. Those memories are painful too, but they also bring me immense joy. How could they not? Remembering the details of your cute little face, remembering the bond I felt to you, oh it’s priceless!

I love you, Noa.