“I want to take your baby from you and ask you how it feels!”
WHAT? I know, right? Yes, this is exactly how I felt in the early months after losing Matthew! I wanted to go to the hospital nursery and take ALL of the precious new babies and then go and ask their mamas how they felt!
HOW COULD I FEEL THAT? HOW COULD I EVEN ADMIT THAT?
This was a question I asked myself many times, even after I didn’t feel like this anymore! I would never take someone’s baby; much less want them to hurt the way I did. (At least, not now.) In the complexity of emotions and grief, maybe I wanted to know that there was another mother feeling like I did. Hindsight now, I believe I was looking for someone to tell me it was okay to feel like this and to validate how I was feeling in my heart.
I remember hating to see anything that was baby blue. I hated seeing a mother holding her baby boy. I hated seeing baby boys, anywhere or anytime. And I could not control my response to this either. I just felt like a monster sometimes when all I really longed to be was a mommy again. I could not understand why or how I could be like this. Irrational was a word I was all too familiar with. Irrational, probably a good word to use to describe my state of being at the time.
Seeing baby girls didn’t bother me… nor did little pink blankets make my skin crawl, but show me anything in the shade of baby blue and I was done. To be totally honest, my heart was so cold toward baby boys. If one was crying in the store I was in, I didn’t care. (Please note that before Matthew passed, if I saw ANY baby crying anywhere at any time, my heart would hurt and I would want to soothe them or help them to stop crying.) Well, at this time, the opposite was true. Are you gasping yet at me or shaking your head because you understand?
I felt like that for a very long time… 14 months to be exact… from the moment I kissed Matthew goodbye to the moment that Will was placed into my arms.
When I said goodbye to Matthew, I held him tightly to my chest and snuggled his face close to mine. I vividly remember how cold he was as I placed his cheek on mine in our final moments together. I didn’t know that 14 months later, I would hold a baby boy again… I would hold MY baby boy!
The first time I held Will, I snuggled him tightly to my chest, just like I held Matthew, and I uttered these words as tears engulfed my face, “He’s so warm!” With that same breath, all of the love came rolling back. The hardness was gone! The horrible “grief monster” that I had become went away, the mommy I dreamed of being again was back… and let me tell you, baby blue had never looked better!
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