Survival

I am no longer employed. It sounds scary, doesn’t it? I thought it would. But for me, it is the most at peace I have felt in a very long time.

After spending nine months on maternity leave without my baby, you might think there could be nothing harder to live with than that. And in many ways, that’s true. But with that loss comes so much more.

I no longer feel safe in my own body. The world feels different. I am a different person.

Following my maternity leave, I was signed off work for a further six months. Some may think that nine months away from work should have been enough time. But in reality, that first year was never about healing or living.

It was about survival.

About simply getting up each day.

And I didn’t even manage that every day. Leaving the house on my own became more and more difficult. So many things became difficult.

I couldn’t understand why losing our son had affected the simplest, day to day tasks. Folding the laundry, I would hear my own voice in my head saying, “What are you doing that for? Your baby died.”

As if completing something so mundane was wrong.
As if I didn’t deserve to carry on.
As if how dare I.

But the laundry still needed folding. I still needed to get up and take my eldest son to school. I still needed to live for other people, even when I didn’t feel that I should, or that I deserved to.

The amount of guilt I was filled with and still am is immense. It has been seventeen months since Farren was born. It has been seventeen months since Farren died.

Have I moved on? Would you?
No, I haven’t. And I never will. Nor would I ever want to.

What I am doing, however, is learning to live a slightly calmer life within my nervous system.

I read something the other day that said - After a sudden death, a child will try to take care of their parent. Not because they are strong, but because they are scared. They believe that if they protect you, you won’t disappear too.

I felt that in every fibre of my body. Because that is exactly what my eleven year old did and what my now thirteen year old continues to do. 

I carry the guilt of that too. He took care of me when he needed me to take care of him.

Forever