Second birthday.

Happy birthday, my little Mila love.

Two years out from her death and birth, I'd like to say something beautiful, but real life is not a novel so not everything can be profound. The first year after her stillbirth took shape in a poetic way, beginning in an abyss of grief and ending with our Patagonian backpacking trip to commemorate Mila's first birthday, where Isla's little light first sparked. But life keeps on going. There is a second anniversary, and a third, and a fourth, on and on and on, and not every one can be a grand capstone. So I find myself wondering how to grieve her, celebrate her, and remember her on all the anniversaries to come, as December 23rd becomes (and how is this even possible?) gradually more mundane.

Although the place where I was two years ago is harder to access now, I still remember. That little empty place in my heart is still there, covered over with layers of scar tissue, the original edges of the wound obscured. I remember how big that emptiness once yawned, how loud the silence was, how blindingly bright the world and how jagged and unbearable its edges. What it was like to look at the motionless ultrasound image. What the ceiling looked like as I lay on the table, feeling dead myself. What it was like to watch Mila emerge without a sound. What she smelled like, and what it was like to kiss her little face as it grew cold. What it was like to see D cry, which I had not seen before and have not seen since. What it was like to visit the funeral home the day after Christmas, three days postpartum, and sit in that echoless room discussing urns while my milk came in with no one to drink it. Horror. The darkest horror I'd never imagined. I can't believe I survived it.

So I am grateful for the mundanity. It means we've come to some kind of peace. I know the pain and anger will never be gone, but it's become easier to bear. I live in a world now where on the same day that I buy Mila's yahrzeit candle, I can continue on to browse the bookshop; enjoy my lunch; play with the dog; and celebrate, with real happiness, Isla's gorgeous, miraculous first laugh.

Recently Isla and I went on a playdate with what D likes to call the Increasingly Less Sad Moms Club (formerly just the straight-up Sad Moms Club). We are four moms who all lost our first children within three months of each other, either in utero at term or shortly after birth; and who all had healthy second babies this year. M observed that we must look like a normal playgroup from the outside; who would suspect the dark place we all share? But in a sense, we are a normal playgroup too. In addition to sharing the experience of losing a child, we are also now all moms who have made it through the subsequent pregnancy and are learning the ropes for the first time, enjoying the first milestones, struggling with the challenges that most first-time moms have. We have both of those experiences now. I'll never be the same person that I was before, but that's okay. Children are supposed to change you, and both Mila and Isla continue to make their marks indelibly on me (and not just figuratively). For that I am grateful.

So how to remember Mila on her second birthday? Well, D and I lit her candle, and we will have some family time with Isla and Schmorgy. And I would like to repost the story of Mila's Life, to celebrate the short time that she was with us. And, there's no getting around it, we will miss her so, so much, and wonder what she would have been like, and wish we could have both our girls with us. And tomorrow morning when we get up and the candle has burned out, we will look at it and feel sad and still a little empty. And then we'll continue on with our day, because both Isla and Schmorgy will demand breakfast and play. And I guess it's fine that not every one of Mila's birthdays will have some kind of grand poetry, because in the course of writing this blog post, I've realized I remember her every day, just by being alive.

Anyway. Since I don't have something profound to say today, I'd like to borrow some thoughts from Aaron Freeman, which are very much in line with how I have come to think about Mila and the way in which she is now a part of the everything that there is. Here they are, emphasis mine.

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got. 

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever. 

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives. 

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen.

December.

I'm having so much fun watching Isla grow, but it's December now so I inevitably think of Mila. I dress Isla in "her" pjs, swaddle her in "her" blankies, ask her if she likes looking in "her" play mirror, but it's hard to use many of her things -- brand new though they are -- without remembering with some pain that they used to belong to someone else. There are some really cute pennant banner-print pjs that I particularly treasure because I used to imagine Mila in them, and I love to see them on Isla, but in some ways it might be easier on me as Isla continues to grow out of Mila's old things.

Mila will have been two years old on the 23rd. Babies born around the time she died are having their second birthday parties, and I see their pictures -- all cheeks, long curly hair, baby teeth, and cake frosting. Big girls and boys.

Mila will always be a baby now, but it strikes me that the idea of who she would have been will keep growing every year until one day I will be thinking to myself, She would be 12... She would be 17... She would be 25... on and on, a grown woman that I won't get to know. The thought makes me ache.

I have some other scattered thoughts, but they'll have to wait because I can hear Isla waking up from her nap.

Photobomb!

Photobomb!

If Mila had lived, I don't think either of these two would be a part of our family right now. Something terrible happened and our family is now somehow simultaneously lesser and fuller than it might otherwise have been. The thought makes me sad, confused, scared, and grateful all at once.

Waves.

I really thought, up until three weeks ago, that the grief had been permanently softened. I hadn't cried about it in a long time. But now that Isla's here and we're truly in the next chapter of our lives, it comes back in ways I didn't expect. Is this what people mean when they say grief is like a series of waves?

I dismantled my Nuggsy's diaper cake today, the one our friends made for her shower, so Isla can use the diapers and we can pop the champagne hidden inside at some point that feels right. It had been sitting on the dresser untouched for almost two years. Taking it apart feels like acknowledging, again, that she's really gone.

Two years ago, and today.

Their roads diverged.

It's a strange new world; the lights are bright and, like Isla, I'm still adjusting my eyes.

It was so surreal to leave the hospital in the opposite direction, outgoing, with the Nut in my arms. I'd gotten so accustomed to being incoming, arriving at triage full of fear, the hospital a place of anxiety, mystery, and ultimately reassurance, but never of joy. A nurse wheeled me out, retracing the same path we had taken in three days earlier, but everything looked different and unrecognizable to me. We emerged into the bright sunlight and drove home through SF streets that looked distantly familiar. I felt like I had been gone on a long, long trip.

I marvel at Isla's perfect face and find it unbelievable that something so sweet was inside me just days ago. I think of my pregnancy with her, until now the only part of motherhood that I knew, and it now feels unreal. The daily walks with Schmorgy to the park, the countless doctor's appointments, the weekly and then daily antenatal testing, the panicked trips to triage, the twice-daily kick counts, the big belly that I protected but was too afraid to think much about even as it grew and grew and became a casual topic of conversation for the outside world. That whole time, I was walking around with this little girl growing inside me. Now she is out and shared with the rest of the world, no longer just mine. I felt her hiccup on the inside, and now all can see her hiccup on the outside. People buy her soothing baby toys that play simulated heartbeat sounds and I think, that's my heartbeat they're trying to replicate for her. The practice breaths I watched her draw via ultrasound on the inside, her diaphragm moving up and down, I now hear as sweet, tiny heaves as she lies on my chest. The regular, liquidy thuds of her heartbeat that I listened to on countless fetal monitors now happen outside of my body, beyond my hearing.

I wish I could have enjoyed that time more, the time when she belonged wholly to me.

The first night in the hospital after she was born, I held her to my chest as she slept, her head nestled just under the right side of my chin. The room was dark and quiet, and D was asleep on the couch. I realized I was holding Isla much the same way I'd held Mila on her first and only night, and I cried.

Mila and Isla don't look entirely alike, but they share many features. Their hair, eyelashes, and little lips. Even their birth weights were the same. For the first couple of days, Isla's every gesture and grimace reminded me anew and in vivid detail what was lost for Mila. I'm so happy for what we have, but it still hurts to think of what my first sweet girl was denied. It's not fair.

On my left forearm there is a scab from my IV from Isla's delivery and, just inches from that, a faint white dot, the scar from my IV from Mila's.

In our living room, the remainder of Mila's one-year yahrzeit candle sits on the same shelf as a photo of Isla at one day old. They're both flanked by plush llamas from our Chile/Argentina trip for Mila's first birthday, during which Isla was most likely conceived.

It's still confusing to me, how things were so much alike and yet so different. Their roads diverged.

Isla's birth story.

Isla's birth story is straightforward, and blessedly without surprises -- just as I wanted it.

As if we were heading to SFO, on the morning of September 7th D and I packed methodically, cleaned out the fridge, and called an Uber. We assured the driver that it was not an emergency. He was a cheerful guy and cracked the "labor on Labor Day" joke, and when he apologized for the cliche, I told him I still thought it was funny. It was a quiet morning with minimal traffic, the city sleeping in after their Labor Day beers and BBQs the day before. We rode, unimpeded, along the route we'd driven ourselves countless times in various states of mind -- anticipation, anxiety, panic -- since February of this year. It was a surreal ride.

We checked in at 10AM, leisurely. Our nurse got us settled into a large, clean room and went over a bunch of paperwork with us. Then it was just waiting. I skimmed a book and texted pictures of the L&D suite to M to pass the time. The doctors started me on misoprostol and told me they'd give me up to four doses, four hours apart. The first dose came at 1PM. I waited expectantly, remembering how quickly things had started moving with Mila, but the few contractions I felt were sparse and fizzled out. At 5:30PM I took the second dose. I stared at the clock; I'd thought I'd be in labor by that time, but I felt only the gentlest, most tentative of tightenings. By the time I took my third dose at 10PM, I was losing patience and worrying about what would happen if the induction didn't take.

I needn't have worried. At 10:30PM I finally felt something. An upset stomach, I thought at first, but the pains were too regular and rhythmic. Eventually the contractions were unmistakable on the monitor screen. I was 3cm dilated, and the doctors left me to progress on my own.

Things really started to hurt. I hunched over the bed to relieve the growing pressure on my back. The sound of the fetal heartbeat monitor through the gathering haze was distant but reassuring. I inquired about pain relief but everyone seemed to think it was too soon for an epidural, and the nurse offered me a couple of doses of pain relief via IV. They took the edge off for a little while, but remembering how quickly things went with Mila, I insisted it was time to pull out the big guns. And not a minute too soon -- I found out later that the anesthesiologist was called into a c-section right after she saw me, and even as she prepped me, the pain began to snowball in a way that felt familiar.

Once the epidural was in, I slept for a couple of hours, until it began to wear off on my left side. Not long after that, I felt what seemed like a head bearing down. I remembered the sensation from Mila's birth. I called the nurse and things started happening quickly after that. Pushing took about twenty minutes, and as Isla advanced, the docs started setting up the table for the baby, spreading plastic under me, and calling in the attending doctor. He arrived a few pushes from the end, in time to say Congrats, you did it! and rush out to his next birth just as Isla's head was emerging.

The doctors maneuvered her body through, and Isla emerged, as grey and slimy as Mila had been. But unlike Mila, as she tumbled out onto the plastic sheet, she squalled -- and then, just like that, we were in wholly new territory. I cried and cried as they plopped her on my chest and turned their attention to the afterbirth, but as far as I could see, D was all smiles.

Isla.

D and I are so happy to welcome Isla Frances, also known to us as the Nut. She was born on Tuesday, September 8, 2015 at 6:06AM at UCSF Mission Bay, weighing in at 6 pounds 14 ounces and measuring 20 inches long.

She has D's eyebrows, long eyelashes, and nose; and my hair color, eyes, hands, and weird big toe. Her full lips, one of her most noteworthy features, are still of indeterminate origin.

She is a daughter, granddaughter, niece, cousin, and precious little sister to a beloved big sister. But most of all, she is her own sweet self.

Welcome, Isla. We love you.