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.