Capture Your Grief - Day 14. Express Your Heart

This is the day in month where you can say whatever it is on your heart that you would like. Is there anything that you were hoping would be in this month of subjects that wasn’t? I am sure there is a bunch of things! This is your chance to share it. Find your voice. What is it that you want to express. If you are lost for words a subject that you could write about is grief myths. What does grief look like for you?

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This month, especially, I need to find balance in my grief and creating space to safely welcome a new baby into our lives and hearts. How to separate the two. It seems nearly impossible. 

How can I return to the same hospital where Simone was born and not be preoccupied by the way our lives so drastically changed that day? How can I give this baby and myself an entirely different birthing experience without separating myself from Simone's birth? 

I feel so guilty and sad, like I am trying to push away the feelings and experience surrounding Simone's birth. Of course I don't want this experience to be anything like the last. But that makes me feel like I am somehow ashamed of my daughter's birth, like I am dishonoring her and her memory. 

My dear brother in law told me I'm not pushing her away. I'm just tucking her in for a little bit, like putting her down for a nap, and I'll be back. I really liked how he described it. 

I need to give myself emotional space  not only to accept this birth, but to welcome it with open heart and arms, visualizing my healthy, strong baby alive in my arms. I need to permit myself to believe that this much loved and anticipated baby will in fact come home with us, swaddled in our arms. That I will enjoy the bonding skin to skin contact and actually nurse my baby girl with the milk my body will make, no matter what the outcome. 

It's so scary to let myself go there because I know how swiftly all those things can be so violently snatched away. I want to believe it will all be okay like everyone says it will. But how can they say that? They don't know. 

So, my heart struggles with finding the right space for both these baby girls right now. I need to protect myself and this new baby from something I have been trying so hard these last eighteen months to own without shame, to honor as my story. It's a tricky, tricky balance.