Grieving for Ember

This week has been hard. I was blaming it on some frustrations with the end-of-year performance I have to put on with my music class, but last night I realized, that's not really it. It's Ember. I'm grieving for her. Today marks one year since she slipped out of my life. Yesterday was hard because I miscarried on a Wednesday. I spent the day in a fog, not aware of being sad, just numb. It wasn't until the end of the day that I figured out why I couldn't function.

Finally, this morning, the tears came. At home, and later at therapy, I cried my heart out. I miss my baby. Ember is the only one of my angles that I spent enough time really imagining for the ghostly presence of her loss to really haunt me. It was her phantom pregnancy that I mentally tracked all last year, and she is the one I imagine when I think of the baby I might have had by now. She would be 4 months old. I cannot forget that, but that's not the whole story.

Losing Ember was bad enough, but that miscarriage was the turning point. My whole life shifted course that day. I couldn't see it at the time, but now I do. It wasn't just the death of my baby, it was the death of so many of my hopes and dreams and plans. I have changed my very view of the world and myself, not to mention changes in diet, lifestyle, etc. This past year has been full of transitions and paradigm shifts and internal earthquakes. I have made choices that feel very close to selling out on my previous values. I have learned to better accept my powerlessness to chose my fate. Certain things are irrevocably outside my control.

I have also learned that I do not want to be bitter and angry forever. I have learned that hope is stubborn and keeps returning. I have learned that I can choose to feed either bitterness or hope. I am trying to learn to feed hope. I want to embrace my present life, and reach for my future through hope. I want to find a way to fully live again.

I think that Ember would not want me to become stuck in her memory, in the phantom image of what might have been. I will always miss her and all she symbolizes, but pining over lost hopes will only make me bitter. Although the smooth pregnancy and easy home birth I anticipated will probably never happen for me, I do have a very good chance of having a full term pregnancy with the help of modern medicine. I will take that chance and use it to feed my hope that someday I will have a living child to call me "Mama".

Today, though, I am torn between grief and hope, and I need to give the grief some space to come through. I know it won't drown me. So I will let myself grieve, and then I will move on.