Play.

When I say I am doing all right, it is not a lie.  I am no longer in the featureless, unnavigable fog of early grief.  I get on.  I feel a certain happiness layered over the continuous dull ache.  The acute hurts are little pinpricks of pain in skin that is gradually growing thicker.  They are mostly small or otherwise manageable.

But in my weaker moments, each holds the potential to go straight to the heart.  Songs, places, or moments that take me back to last year.  Pregnant women and pregnancy announcements.  Talk of childrearing or birth stories with happier endings than mine.  Young women complaining prattily, brattily, about their kids or their husbands, totally unaware of how lucky they are.  Oblivious older women rustling out of the office early to pick up their school-aged children, saying to me with an eyeroll, "When you have kids..."  They say it to me knowingly, patronizingly, like elder stateswomen to a young naïf; I smile in response but I think, bitterly, You know nothing.  A part of me is now very, very old.

While other adults sometimes unknowingly cause hurt, I'm surprised to realize that babies and kids often don't.  When babies smile at me, I feel wistful, but I like their open faces and bright eyes.  In Boston this past weekend, I was playing with our friends' four-year-old daughter; during a pause in our play, I leaned in to hear her better, and my pendant swung forward towards her and hung from my neck, swinging.  Her eyes focused on it, her words trailed off, and she unselfconsciously reached out (my heart jumped into my throat) and cupped the little m in her little palm.  And I liked it.  She admired it for a beat, and then asked if I wanted to see her necklace collection - which, of course, I did.  She marched me to her room to tell me about each of her necklaces in turn before leaving them in a shiny tangle on the floor, because next it was time to play going-to-school or bubble fight.  I liked that, too.  Play is good.