Taking stock.

It has been four months and two days.

My body.

I have lost 25 pounds, with 9 to go.

I have had three cycles.

I started shedding a lot of hair last week.

My mind.

I have attended three support group meetings, had many more sessions with my therapist, and had many, many more heart-to-hearts with friends.

I have written 22 blog posts.  The blog has received 1,467 visits and 5,166 pageviews.  Mila's birth story has been read 364 times, and her life story 214 times.  Each time the blog gets a new visitor, I feel happy that one more person knows her.

I cry much more easily than I ever did before.  A song, a news story, an article will brush up against the wrong place and I'll well up.  I never used to cry.  D can tell you.

But I also feel more "normal" than I would have expected.  Not the same as before - I don't think I will ever feel quite the same - but I can navigate the world in a way that I couldn't three, eight, even twelve weeks out.

I feel vulnerable, but I don't mind.  Let the world see the scar, and let them feel something.  Let me be a changed person.  I lost my daughter, how could that not change me?  This is who I am.

My heart.

There are a few physical objects that we have to remember Mila.

There is her memory box from the hospital, which contains a lock of her hair tied up in pink ribbon, her hand- and footprints, her hospital hat and knit blanket, and the clothes she wore.  I like that her clothes look worn, in a way that the never-used clothes in her dresser don't.  They are rumpled and bear a few smears of dried newborn goo.  Inside the folds of the hood, a few of her stray clipped hairs cling to the terry cloth.  The smell has faded, but is still there.  No one else will be allowed to wear them.

There is a soft little otter lovie from Monterey Bay Aquarium, the first thing I ever bought her - before I was showing, before we knew she was a girl, before anyone besides D and me knew she even existed.  That's her otter, and hers alone.

There are her ultrasound pictures from 30 weeks, with which I made a small framed collage that we keep in our room.  She will always be our first baby and a part of our family, so I wanted her picture to be among our family pictures.

There is her urn.  I hate urns that look like urns.  But hers is sweet, made in the shape of a sleeping silver crescent moon.  If I were to pick it up and rotate it gently, you could hear her tiny bone fragments clanking softly against the metal.  But I don’t do that, because it seems rude.

There is the little rose gold m I wear around my neck, which D gave me a few days after she was born and that I have worn ever since.

But mostly, she lives in a safe place in my and D's hearts.

Four months.

Happy four month birthday, Nuggsy.  We love you.

Keep running.

I'm having a bad day, guys.

A year ago this April my hometown of Boston was attacked.  D and I had been living in SF for eight months and I was sad to be missing the marathon for the first time in a long time.  We used to live on the course at mile 23, and hosted a viewing party every year.  I was at work when I got a text from my sister.  Miss your marathon parties. :(  I texted back, Me too :(

Almost an hour later, she texted again.  Explosions at the finish line.  Is everyone you know who ran it ok??

I spent the rest of the day Googling and following the news.  The confusion quickly gave way to horror.  We waited anxiously to hear from D’s brother and our friends who were there.  At home, I switched on the TV and familiar places lit up the screen.  I watched that downtown stretch of Boylston Street, a scene of celebration and personal victory, a scene I knew so well, explode into chaos.  People screaming.  Blood all over the sidewalk.  Body parts littering the street.  I watched it over and over and over.  I could not stop crying.

Three nights later, news of a shooting at MIT flickered across the screen.  Then a carjacking in Allston.  A car chase into the suburbs.  The MIT police officer pronounced dead.  A firefight in the middle of Watertown.  The entire city of Boston and surrounding towns going into lockdown.  I remember wondering if the world were about to end.  Somewhere in all this, it became clear that these were the activities of the marathon bombers.  We spent hours glued to the TV and the internet, getting annoyed as CNN mispronounced the names of familiar towns and streets.  The lockdown stretched into the next day, a Friday.  I spent the workday following the events, unable to think of anything else.  Shortly after 5:30PM Pacific time, the suspect was apprehended and taken into custody.

After four harrowing days, I exhaled.  The city of Boston exhaled.  And then there was celebration.  Crowds came pouring out of their homes in the middle of the night and gathered at the finish line and in Boston Common to pay tribute to the people who had been injured and killed, the heroes who came to their aid, the medical professionals who cared for them, and the police who captured the bombers.  D and I and some friends visiting from Boston had a big drink and celebrated along with them from SF.

That was the weekend Mila was conceived.  A week later, I went home and visited the finish line myself, as her cells divided secretly inside me.  I chose to think of her conception as a sign of hope.  A light in the darkness.  Good triumphing over evil.

Now it's a year later, an April later.  Boston is gearing up for the marathon again.  Mila should be 3 months old.  But Mila is gone, and it is so, so dark.

This morning I made the mistake of looking through old pictures on my phone.  I saw months and months of belly pictures scroll by, and I actually smiled.  After the very last belly picture, which showed me standing in our kitchen and smiling on December 22nd, the belly pictures suddenly gave way to a screenshot of a list of funeral homes.  I’d forgotten that was there.

I wanted to throw my phone across the room.  These last few weeks, I thought I was doing okay.  I’ve been downright cheerful.  But watching her life end like that on the tiny screen of my phone made me realize I still, still cannot believe she is dead.  She is supposed to be here.  This wasn't supposed to happen.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I want our lives to look like in a year, and have been thinking about ways to make my work schedule more accommodating of a family in the near future.  It’s scary, thinking about making choices that are not career-maximizing.  I’ve never made those choices before.  Today that started to get to me.  What am I doing, looking for working mom hours, when I don’t even have a baby to look after?  It’s hard not to feel very, very bad about myself.  Lame.  Unambitious.  Stupid.  Can't hack it, can’t do anything right.

This afternoon I was sitting in my parked car and came across this photography/film project to honor the one-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15.  The photographer, Robert Fogarty, photographed and filmed the survivors coming back to the finish line.  I read some of the interview quotes; they were beautiful.

My message is “Still Standing.” I wrote still standing because the bombers hurt me—they took my legs—but I can still stand on them. 

I’m still standing. 

This is the first time that I was back at the finish line. I had never been back, and this was about reclaiming it. That finish line has been a negative space since the marathon. This was about reclaiming that space in a positive way. I chose to be there. I took back control. I chose to do this and the heck with everybody else.  Celeste Corcoran

*****

I think that the experience of losing my leg has made me become more compassionate, so I may have less of a leg now, but I think my heart is bigger because of it.  Heather Abbott

*****

We have deformities to our bodies, but I think it makes us stronger to be so open with it. I think it’s part of our therapy to get through what happened to us.  Roseann Sdoia

*****

I read a quote, and it said “Never be ashamed of a scar. That it only means you are stronger than what tried to hurt you.” And it really resonated with me. I am strong, and this is just a little token.  Lee Ann Yanni

*****

“Love this life” has been my motto since the bombing. I spent a lot of time prior to the bombing always seeking out the next thing in my career and putting the majority of my focus on finding the right career for myself and on school. I didn’t always take time to focus on those around me —my family and friends, the ones who I’d want to spend my last days with. Since the bombing, I’ve decided to spend each day as if it were my last. This to me means focusing on and acting more graciously to all of those around me. It also means spending as much time with friends and family as possible and viewing those I love as the center of my universe.  Brittany Loring

I started the video, and as I watched it, I sat in the car and cried.

Keep running.  Boston Strong.

Dear World, a love letter from Boston marathon bombing survivors. from Dear World on Vimeo.

The real shit.

I hate that we’re so emotionally constipated as a society when it comes to loss and grief.  As if as long as we don’t acknowledge loss, it will never visit us.  As if as long as we don’t look directly at grief, it doesn't exist.

Because there's no place for sadness in public life, it's a dead weight dropped into a conversation.  Something private, not to be discussed in polite company.  As honest as I try to be in this blog, I find myself feeling apologetic when I have to look someone new in the face and explain what happened to Mila.  Their faces fall, they stutter, they run away.  Sorry for making you feel awkward for a minute of your life.

I hate that I feel that way.  It's stupid.  Why is the burden on me and D to do this?  What is there to feel squeamish about?  I don’t think I have anything to be ashamed of.  I’m certainly not ashamed of my daughter.  I don't think she's taboo.  What do I have to apologize for?  What do I have to hide?

There’s a funny-sad Louis CK bit that I saw again recently, where he explains to Conan O'Brien why he won't let his kids have smartphones.  I've always loved it, but even more so now.  He says that smartphones are toxic because they allow us to distract ourselves from how sad life can be, from the Forever Empty that is there underneath everything - but that distraction ultimately prevents us from feeling anything at all.

Most of the time we can ignore that uneasiness, but sadness and grief in other people reminds us of it.  And as a society we’re so poorly equipped to deal with it, that the reminder is so profoundly uncomfortable that we stigmatize the people experiencing it.  Certainly I tried not to think about it too much, but when we lost Mila for no reason at all, the abyss that surfaced was too huge to be ignored.

I think we would be better humans if we could learn to acknowledge it; if we could look straight into the abyss, and just let ourselves feel the sadness; if we took it out from hiding, from others and from ourselves; if we treated the open expression of it as something normal and natural.  Because if we don't, we can't connect with other people about something real.  Because if we don't, we can't appreciate what we have.  Because if we don’t, “you never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die.”  Because on the other side of the sadness is some kind of joy; because right now, we have each other, and we’re alive.

Here’s the bit.

On balance.

Things continue go up and down.  I laugh, I cry, I sit quietly.  I think about Mila, but I also think about what to make for dinner, my friends’ love lives, work, and what shoes to buy.  Sometimes I talk about Mila at length and am completely composed; other times I talk and I realize, too late, that my own words are bringing on tears.  The balance of happy and sad fluctuates; but for the first time there are moments when I am, on balance, cheerful.

Mila is always, always on my mind, but this week the sadness only bubbled up to the surface with very specific triggers.  Coming across D’s race shirt from last December while folding the laundry.  Seeing Mila’s tiny, unworn Converses in the back of the closet.  Talking about her with someone new.  Reading through Dr. R’s angry letter to my insurance company (as validating as that also felt).

But other times, I see beauty in the world, I think of her, and rather than feeling broken, I smile.  Wednesday, it rained briefly in San Francisco.  After the rain stopped, the sun lit up the thinning cloud cover and bathed the city in a post-rain glow.  The air smelled clean.  I thought of her, and I smiled.  Friday, I sat on patios drinking wine with friends in the sunshine, flowers spilled out onto the sidewalks, and dogwalkers and their packs of dogs roamed the trails.  I thought of her, and I smiled.  Today, I stood in the sun at the very end of the city, at the end of the world.  The wind blew and I watched the sailboats in the bay beneath the Golden Gate.  I thought of her, and I smiled.

Enough.

I’m trying to find ways to be more authentic.  For my whole life, I’ve had the sense that it isn’t good enough to be myself - or at least, not just myself.  I have to be more.  More interesting, more brilliant, more witty, more pretty, more outgoing, more ambitious, more articulate, more confident, more ruthless.  Less interested in silly things like flowers and stationery and Pinterest and baby clothes and more interested in things like The Future of Digital and Leaning In and How Women Can Get Ahead At Work.

I kept myself awake one night a few weeks before Mila was born, worrying about waiting lists and lead times for full-time infant daycare.  I thought about my sweet little girl, sleeping innocently in my belly - and about how within a few short months she’d be unceremoniously expelled from her safe haven and deposited at some daycare with a 1:3 caretaker ratio, never to see me except on weekends and for a few hours on weekdays, while I went off to Lean In.  And I fucking lost my shit.

Losing Mila broke something in me.  I don’t think I can keep living like that, trying to project something that’s not quite me.  It’s hard enough being someone who carries around the memory of her baby daughter; who is trying to take care of and grow her family; who really just likes flowers, stationery, Pinterest, and baby clothes.  That is enough.  I’m not sure who I was trying to prove something to in the first place, but I feel less and less like I have to prove it.  I know that there are things that I have to do, as a person who lives in the world and pays rent and feeds herself.  But I’m making an effort to recognize that they are secondary, and I am trying to limit my emotional and temporal investment accordingly.  I have to save up for the important things.