Please be advised.

My baby daughter, Mila Nalin, was born on December 23rd in San Francisco at 37 weeks after a happy and uneventful pregnancy. She was completely healthy and normal, except that she wasn't alive. She would have been 2 months old by now.  This blog is the story of her life, her death, her birth, and of what comes after.  I hope it will eventually become the story of how her dad and I come to terms with losing her, and the story of her younger sisters and/or brothers.  I believe it will have a happy ending.

Why am I blogging about this now?

In the beginning, I didn’t want to write.  It was hard enough just to feel everything.  To wring words out of the feelings would have been too much to ask, and I was already so tired.

Now, suddenly, I have the words.  Many, many words, and I want to say all of them.  I’m not sure what changed.  I think it has something to do with where I am in my grief - at over two months out, I’m now closer to the point where I’m expected to be “normal” again than I am to Mila’s birth and death.  But I don’t feel normal, still, so the gradually increasing expectation that I act normal is stifling.  I go to work; people say “How are you?”; I say, absurdly, “Good!”; we go about our daily lives.  People don’t ask about her because they don’t want me to be sad (or maybe some just don’t care), and I don’t talk about her because I don’t want them to feel awkward.  So nobody talks about her at all.

The silence is oppressive.

The feeling of oppression grew so great this week that, after a two-month blackout silence on Facebook, and a lot of fear about whether Facebook was an “appropriate” venue, I finally posted about what had happened to her publicly.  It was driving me crazy to say nothing, and to know that there were still people in the world who knew me, but didn’t know about her.  I just wanted every single person to know that I had a baby daughter, her name was Mila Nalin, she was perfect, and she died - and now, that is indelibly a part of me.  That is my baseline.  For the rest of my life, that is the framework in which I am operating.  Please be advised.