Hi Baby. It’s been 5 weeks and a day since I delivered and met you. Today I’d be 32 weeks 1 day pregnant with you. Unbelievable.  Lately, as in the past week or maybe even two, I have felt numb most of the time, and also in shock and utter disbelief. My grief is definitely changing, though not in the way I expected. I have moved from a very deep sadness and emptiness to a strangely familiar feeling, almost as if I am looking at myself from outside my body, like I am an outsider to my own soul. I can’t help but think that the change is a direct result of the increase in medication. It certainly has made coping with your loss easier in the sense that I am no longer paralyzed by my sadness, but it is also disturbingly numbing. Now, I can get through a day and function, and I’m not sure if that’s because I have moved through some of my grief, or if the medication is just literally numbing my pain, thereby allowing me to function as a human in society again. I can get out and go for walks. I can make myself meals. I can clean up after myself. I can get out of bed. These are big changes. But with them comes a different kind of emptiness, because I truly feel numb. I honestly do miss the days when I would cry all day, deep and gutteral, for you. In those moments, I felt you close to me. Now, it seems like it was all just a crazy, horribly cruel nightmare. There is nothing like meeting your firstborn baby, having been previously a stranger to the unique love that forms between mom and baby, then knowing this for the first time, and not being able to take you home? Empty arms.

I just feel a distance now, and often I can’t believe what happened. It just seems unreal that I held you inside me for 26 weeks and 6 days without even the slightest notion that something so horrific could happen. I had an innocence then that I will never get back. There will never be anything that even remotely comes close to what it was like to be pregnant with you. Pregnant with you I was mostly care-free. My biggest fears were getting sick after finishing breakfast. Pregnancy now evokes feelings of fear and dread. I can’t imagine doing it again, and yet, I feel such a long to do it again. I miss carrying you so much. I am such a different person now, and maybe that is where part of the distance I feel between my former self and myself now lies. Maybe I am just trying to figure out who I am now, after. Now, there is only before and after. Two completely different lives, two completely different people.