I got to hold you for just one night.
In exchange, I got a lifetime of sleeping with your blanket under my pillow.
I guess I could have held you longer. A few more hours, minutes even.
Sometimes I think maybe I was in a rush.
As if I was keeping everyone and not being a proper hostess to our midwives in our home birth. Mamá does need to be polite…
Why did I want to hand your body over?
Maybe I was scared the daylight would come. The soft shadows, amber light of our living-room where you were born… I might have been scared they would become harsh, the day hot, the hours busy.
I never thought about this much, because I was scared that maybe I rushed myself, not wanting to be the rude mother that hogs her dead baby. But then I saw the macaque mama (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2625525/A-mothers-sorrow-Macaque-monkey-spends-days-carrying-dead-newborn-baby-heartbreaking-display-grief.html). She held her baby for days. I felt small and over-civilized and I wish I had gnarled my teeth like that to defend my baby.
She became my reference for what a good mom should be, for how a loving mother acts when other monkeys mess with her baby, mess with her grief.
I wish I was more like the macaque mama.
And then today we got a salt lamp for our bedroom. It gives off a very soft, warm light. Against the burgundy red of our walls, everything was a soft glow, warm and quiet. I pulled your blanket from under the pillows and I buried my face in it. It doesn’t have your smell, it never did. There is no “your smell” for me.
But there is the light. Warm light from candles and amber, shadowy lamps, that brings me back to the night of your birth.
So maybe I wasn’t being cowardly and proper. Maybe it wasn’t that I was trying to let people get on with it and rushed myself. Maybe I was protecting our moment. Maybe I knew that when the sun came up, the warm amber light would be gone. And I would be holding your empty body, so tiny, with so so many extra folds, the empty look in your eyes, the extra liquid that would not let your lungs expand.
I held you for a few short hours.
And now I have the light.
When it is just dark enough, with candles and salt lamps, sometimes, haphazardly, the light is like it was in our cocoon, when it was warm and we were naked and it was birth and death and life and love.
This might be me, trying to rationalize the guilt of not giving myself more time with you. Which is not really guilt, but sadness and regret at having had to let you go at all.
But maybe, just maybe, I am more macaque than I thought.
{Your Thoughts}