Pregnancy Loss Awareness Day (Children Mentioned)

If you keep blogging long enough, you pass the same dates, the same remembrance days, the same terraversaries and celebrations and birthdays and holidays. Last year for Pregnancy Loss Awareness Day, we lit the candle with the Wolvog and ChickieNob. And last year, I thought we would do this every year together.

And then October rolled around again and there came a moment in the food store when my daughter was telling a woman trying to buy yogurt about the pantiliner she saw in my panties that morning. And where she was chirping along freely to strangers about the ng tube that once fed her and the cricket that jumped in my hair and all the other bits of family lore that spill out to people who are trying to walk their dog or check out books at the library. She loves to engage people and tell them about us.

And this is the scene I imagined:

We would be purchasing a bag of romaine lettuce hearts and my daughter would turn to the elderly man next to us and say, “there are a lot of babies who aren’t here. My mommy waited a long time for me. Before I came into her belly, there was Zoe and November and February and March and my triplet. Where are they? I don’t know. Where are they, Mommy? We lit a candle. But it wasn’t Shabbat…”

And the elderly man would be massively confused and probably distinctly uncomfortable. And I would not know how to bridge that conversation; how to explain the ChickieNob without inviting this man further and further into my life.

As she has aged, as she has started repeating everything she hears to every person she meets, I have pulled back. Because frankly, she (and obviously the Wolvog) is my time away from thinking about what came before her and what has come after her. If she introduces pregnancy loss into heavy rotation along with stories about my pantiliners, crickets, and her ng tube, I will lose that space.

We will light our candle by ourselves on Monday night.

After all, it is more our story that theirs. They will build their own story and they will know our story, but some things just can’t be shared entirely with the people who come afterwards. And I’m thankful that it’s not a memory that anyone else needs to carry, especially not the ChickieNob and Wolvog.

Instead, I will give you the song that the ChickieNob inspired when she explained how babies are made a few months ago and I wrote a song to remember all of those babies who didn’t grow even though we worked really hard on that garden and wanted them very badly.