Wondering

I have been carrying around three little candles today, wondering where to set up an altar to light them for the Wave of Light as we remember those lost babies and children on Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. My living child doesn’t want to stray too far away from the tractor he wants to perch on all day, but I don’t want to place them there. I want to go up the hill at our new house, find a clearing and watch as the sunlight throws copper on the trees and the barn and wonder what it would be like to have a newly five-year-old or an almost four-and-a-half year old beeping the tractor horn at our living child, or even an almost three-year-old twirling around in the pasture with the dog. These ages have hit me hard again this year, especially as I look at pictures of when I was pregnant five years ago and remember the years of suffering between the end of that pregnancy and the birth of our living child. I don’t want to grow stiff with those bitter memories. I want to wander in and out of wondering. 

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day is a day to wander in and out of wondering. I have no memories of what my babies were like, though I do have genetic information on two of them, because they were gone before I knew the color of their hair or the smell of their skin. I have only lost possibilities. And wonder. 

So many of us are grieving lost possibilities whether that’s in the face of death or job loss or relationships changing. Grief isolates us. Just this summer, I found myself longing for more in-person support groups because even though I know I am not alone, and even though I am grateful so many in my immediate community have not struggled with as many miscarriages or as arduous a journey of infertility as we have had, I still felt like my body was a unique kind of failure. I felt stuck in the memories of suffering. Wondering can feel different. It can feel like a breaking free of the quicksand of suffering into flights of imagination. 

Wondering allows me to acknowledge what we lost without staying there. I think we could get stuck  in wondering too, but for me these other worlds bring up too many other questions that I don’t want to answer. I just want to visit. To peek in and see more little blond boys with their hair darkening as they age reading and running and laughing. To imagine a little girl with short dark hair who still looks more like her father than seems fair. I lost these children, yes. I miss them every day. I think sometimes I am a better parent because of the love I have for them, and sometimes I think I’m a worse parent because of how much I resent not having them alive. They are a part of me, and this struggle between bitterness and wonder is a part of me. So I give myself grace. Allow myself to wander. And hope that wandering leads to a bit of wonder.