Learning to Walk......

During these past sixteen months, one thing is for certain: I have been thrust into a whole new reality, a reality that very few can experience through the eyes of a mother who has lost her child. A reality that nobody can feel exactly as I do. And for these reasons, it has been very isolating much of the time. It has come between me and my friends and family at certain points. It has changed every realtionship in my life - sometimes in good ways, and sometimes not so good.

At first I felt so alone. It seemed like I was the only person in the world who had experienced the horrific loss of my baby daughter. Until a woman in my community reached out and called me one day to share her experience of losing her infant son at birth to congenital diaphragmatic hernia. We cried together as she listened to my many hours of sorrow on the phone. She has been one of the only people who I know I can be truly open and honest with, and I know that she honestly *gets* it and sympathizes with me because she's felt all the same things through her loss.

I've definately grown up alot in these past months. For many months after losing Freja, I frantically searched for someone who would magically take away the pain. I longed for somebody to say something that would help. And I was disappointed time and time again, when I realized over and over that there was no magical solution. There were no magical words that would make this all better. And in many cases, there wasn't even a whole lot of sympathy that anyone could provide me.

I've felt angry alot that my extended family hasn't seemed to understand the depth of what having my daughter die in my arms did to me. The whole world just seemed to move on without me, and I was left standing alone in a cloud of dust for all those many, many months.

I'm beginning realize that honoring Freja isn't necessarily the duty of others. I am learning (although struggling,) to accept that as long as I am doing what I need to do to keep her memory alive, that is all that matters. She is MY daughter. I am HER mother. Nobody can take that away from me. Every day I ask for the strength to allow myself not to harbour bitterness towards others for not being supportive in the ways I need them to be. I am constantly trying to remind myself that all those 'innocent' people in my life who have not experienced the loss of a child (and even some who have but have dealt with it very differently than I have,) do not understand the depth of such a loss and why I am the way I am.

It's a slow journey to acceptance of this... Some days I am proud of how far I've come, but other days I still struggle with leaving the house. If there's one thing I'm learning, it's how to stand on my own two feet and not rely on others so much. My feet are the only feet that are guaranteed to be there to catch me when I think I might fall, and the only two feet that will lift me back up after I hit the ground time and time again, so I'm trying to make the most of them.