I will never regret having our daughter, Emily, so soon after losing Aiden. I was pregnant with her only four months after losing him. After we lost Aiden I was in a very dark, horrible place. If it was not for her and the hope, joy and life she breathed back into me, I honestly don’t know where I would be today. Whatever healing I have been able to do, it is in a large part thanks to her and the sweet, wonderful little spirit she is. However, having another child so soon after losing Aiden, definitely interrupted the grief work required to process and work through the devastation of losing a child.
Once we learned that we were pregnant with Emily, my thoughts were constantly distracted and pulled towards worries about my pregnancy with her. Was she ok? Would she be ok? What will I do if something happens to her? Is it even possible for me to survive another loss if something happens to her? We had several complications with Emily’s pregnancy and delivery, and with our nerves already on high alert, it was almost enough to do me in. We are beyond grateful that in the end she was born healthy and has been thriving ever since.
But then we had a newborn, who was not fond of sleeping, liked to nurse constantly and preferred being in my arms over anything else. I was completely fine with all of these things, I felt so lucky and blessed to have this beautiful baby girl in my arms, but they did leave me physically and emotionally exhausted. I had little time or energy left to continue my grief work. As we all know, grief work is hard work. It is physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually exhausting. Without realizing it, I was putting my grief on hold in so many ways. Of course I still grieved for Aiden and missed him deeply, but the actual work of grief, allowing myself to feel the emotions, breathing into the pain and beginning to process them so I could open my heart and truly begin to heal got put on hold. I was just too exhausted to do it.
The intense newborn stage passed, and we moved on to Emily’s babyhood, where she still didn’t sleep and although life wasn’t as demanding as it was in the beginning, it was still busy. Then came the toddler years and we began facing new challenges (all while she STILL wasn’t sleeping through the night!) and life was still busy. And somehow that grief work got pushed further and further back.
Our daughter is now two and a half years old, and I don’t know what has changed, but something has. I am finding now that I can’t push the grief away anymore. I can no longer ignore the work that needs to be done. It is confronting me in ways that make me have to acknowledge it. But strangely enough I feel relieved. For too long I have avoided the really hard, raw emotions of my grief because I was afraid. Afraid that if I opened my heart to them, I wouldn’t be able to close it again. I wouldn’t be able to protect myself and protect my daughter from these dark, painful emotions. I worried if I allowed myself to feel those emotions again I would fall apart and then how would I still manage to see to the daily needs of my daughter. I worried that opening up to these emotions would expose my daughter to the dark, horrible places that grief had taken me and I never want those kinds of feelings to touch her, let alone surround her through me. As with most things that are difficult, it was fear that was holding me back. On top of all the fear, I felt guilt about not fully honouring Aiden when I kept pushing my grief away in an attempt to survive on a daily basis.
I know that after losing my child, my journey through grief will never be done or finished. It will always be there and I will always need to keep working through it. But I had pushed it away for so long, it needed some attention. To my surprise (and as is often the case with things we fear), allowing myself to continue working through my grief has not been as scary as I worried it would be. Although facing my grief again was overwhelming at first, it has made me realize that this pain and this grief aren’t something I should fear or try to avoid. They have made me who I am and deserve to be acknowledged and respected.
As I begin walking onto new, unknown paths of my grief journey, I am nervous about how I will negotiate the intensity of grief work with the realities of parenting a toddler. But I also feel ready to let go of the effort it was taking to push my grief away. I feel ready to embrace the grief and open my heart to allow myself the time, space and energy to continue to heal.
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