Think Speak Run

I went into town with Ella a week and a half ago – on Saturday 11th Feb. We had a lovely lovely lovely day together. We both had eye tests; I needed new glasses; Ella didn’t. She was a little bit gutted! We sat across one of the benches in the shopping centre and ate our sandwiches – dairylea with some cucumber chunks separately. Then a Jacobs orange club each. And water. We walked past the castle, and she said, “Look! It’s my castle, Mummy!” She’s in Castle house at school. I said how I took her there by myself on her first birthday. I love her so much. We had a special drink in Starbucks up the castle end of the street, before we came home. Ella had a hot chocolate with whipped cream on top – I have some fun photos! Also some which made me want to cry. I held her close and hugged her, and then thought why should I hide my tears from her? She said, “Are you crying Mummy?” I nodded, and she said, “But they’re the happy tears.” I said yes. I know God has changed a lot recently, and she and I are getting on better. But Saturday was lush. Just close, and special. I love her. I asked the Starbucks girl what the song was that had just played. She couldn’t remember the name of it, but said it was by someone called Ed Sheeran, and it was from an album called Plus, but where it’s just the + sign. It was that song that got in deep, when Ella was sitting across the tiny circular table from me. I have a beautiful picture of her using the long wooden stirrer to try and get the last of the chocolate out of the bottom of her mug. She is absorbed in what she is doing. She isn’t smiling; she isn’t self-conscious, or aware that I’m taking a photo of her. She is so beautiful.

Well, a few days ago I looked Ed Sheeran up on the internet. I got more than I was expecting. It turns out, listening to the cd now, that it was his first debut song called The A Team that I think I heard with Ella in Starbucks a week and a half ago. But it’s the song Small Bump that has got me all chewed up.

Maybe if you read it or hear it, it will make the same imprint on your heart that it made on mine. Or maybe that would only happen if you had lost so many of your children, in so many ways, as I have.

She was my one and only from the moment I saw her, and then we were ripped apart. But before that, I thought my bump, my Oyster, was Joshua. I have not met my son. I know he is in Heaven with Jesus. Joshua: the LORD saves. And I have not met the six-year-old Joshua who is also in Heaven with Jesus, who was the very precious dear darling son of the potential adoptive couple. Why did he die? Is he my Joshua? Are they one and the same? I know what my Joshua looks like; God showed me. He looks like Joshua * when he was littler. He looks like the Joshua at my parents’ church, whose Mum is *. I went to his dedication. Maybe God is letting me see him at each age and stage? I don’t know. The loss started before I ever gave birth.

Then there is Faith. There is Hope. There is Grace. My three girls. In Heaven with Jesus.

I often thought of Ella as my one and only. But like I just said, that was once she was born. I really had no idea it would be her. I think of her now as my Oyster, but she never was until birth. Because I was having Joshua. Maybe that’s the point; that she was the pearl of great price, to be birthed, lost, loved, given life through such pain. No pearl, whatever its value, is comfortable or painless for the one that creates and bears it, and reveals it. God, I miss her. God I miss her. God I miss that I ever had to miss any part of her. That I ever had to miss a day, a night, a whisper, a breath, a moment with her. I never speak of regret because it feels forbidden; I cannot speak in those terms in case Ella misunderstands me. In case someone thinks I regret having her. Which I do not. But I regret giving her. I regret being forced by invisible forces. I regret ever thinking about abortion. I regret ever having time without her. It’s as if I have turned the knife on myself, and must live with the pain I caused myself. I have no-one else to accuse. And I didn’t want to give Joshua, but I thought he would be best looked after like that. I thought that’s what You wanted God. What did You want? And You knew how risky it was for me to have a child in my family, without a husband or a father for the baby. I couldn’t have them do to my baby what they did to me. Somehow with my tied hands I have stabbed my self in my own heart. In my own womb. In my spirit. Is it any wonder I died on the inside a long long time ago?

All the good I have tried to instil in Ella is useless because I cannot get past the wrong I have done her. I can never undo what I have done. You are not supposed to live if you have been separated from your child. Bereft of purpose. Bereft of purpose. So how am I still here? I do not want to be so strong. I want to weep for the loss of my child. It seems voyeuristic or tempting fate – she lives, and I don’t want to change that. So how can I mourn her loss? She is right here, with me every day.

I don’t know how to describe or express this pain. I’ve written about the pain before. But what is so impossible is living with it. As it fades – if it ever fades – how do I keep living forwards when I died back then. I want to lose the pain. Drop it off in a vast ocean and never feel it again. Have it lost as deeply as it is buried inside me. So deep I cannot feel it. Covered over by I don’t know what. I do not know what could ever force it to cease hurting me. I don’t know how you get that deep in a person. I need God to go in and unknot the knots. Untie me. Untie me so I can slip down from this standard that I am constantly held to. I am chained nailed tied up to this horrible massive crushing weight oak beam that won’t let me go. How the hell do I ever get freed?

Am I betraying her by having *?

I have not felt that I have betrayed Joshua by having the boys. I know he is in Heaven and I am ok with that. But she is not dead – thank You Lord – so I fear I will be betraying her by having a girl I never am away from; whom I never give up for any reason – to anyone but God. So how can I live forward? I believe we’re meant to have *. But I need to be able to live without shame fear regret reproach guilt.

It’s like the way I didn’t feel allowed to leave ‘Birth Mother’ untitled, because it sounded like a death poem, but she was still alive. But get this people: I LOST HER.

She was dead to me. Let me grieve. And let me have my new daughter.

Am I allowed to wear my ring? Is that holding on? Or is that getting into grief so I can come out of it too? I don’t know Lord. I truly thought I would never see her again. I was going to have a closed adoption. I would never have known anything unless she’d contacted me as an adult, or if they’d contacted me if she’d died. This was so much more than some easily-reversible decision. This was not something I drifted into. I had thought and prayed and planned. It was intentional. However much I was conditioned, I had also thought about the safety of my child. I couldn’t have a baby in my family without the extremely high likelihood or possibility of them too being abused. I had to deny myself my own child, as I thought forever, to preserve and protect their life. And I thought it would be my son Joshua but it wasn’t; it was my daughter Ella. And so I trod in the path I had already bled out ahead of me, with my tears, prayers, horrible choices you didn’t know you ever could, or would have to make, against your own self, through the previous nine months.

I thought I would never see her again. That is why it ripped such a large hole in my heart when my mum said she’d wanted to give her one more hug. And I kept on crying over and over, “Why didn’t you say? Why didn’t you say?” My mum said she’d just have to wait and give her a cuddle in Heaven. Imagine how painful that was. I didn’t know if, separated from me, she would be saved. I said they HAD to be practising Christians, but I knew that could not guarantee her salvation. Neither would staying with me, but it was of utmost importance to me. So when Mummy said she’d have to wait to give Ella a cuddle in Heaven, it just tore me apart. I couldn’t guarantee that, and I couldn’t get my girly back to have a cuddle with the only grandmother she ever had, again. However dangerous my family is or are and were, they are still my family, and still the only blood family she has because his family are not connected to us because he is not. And my mum was the only grandmother there at that time, when Ella was born. I know she has Jjajja now, but I did not know then that that would ever happen. It wasn’t just me who lost her. All my family did. I don’t think I ever gave them credit for that; for their own loss. They lost her too. Maybe they suggested adoption to protect her? Maybe they knew themselves better than they let on, or subconsciously so? But whichever way, I never let them grieve. They did anyway, but I don’t know how that was for them. And I don’t know how they feel now, having lost her again. And all their grandsons – our two sons. They’ve not even met C. They’ve seen his scan photos from the first scan, because they watched M while we went to the scan, and things were not great, but ok. I don’t know how they feel, finally losing me in actual reality, not just in the many different separations that happened through my childhood and adolescence.

So I don’t know if they miss me.

I do know that losing your child is exceedingly painful. I question whether any of this could have happened another way? Maybe if I hadn’t lost Ella, they wouldn’t have lost me and us now? I don’t know. There was still all the screwed up stuff from before. “Be sure your sin will find you out.”

I think that’s all I can say for now. There’ll be more tomorrow.

Grief, loss and sorrow.

Dark blue eyes, dark wavy hair.

Perfect lips.

Little eyes that stared up at me, up at me.

a cry; little donkey-noise.

My baby needs a feed, needs to be held, needs to never be let go.

She cries because she is not with me.

She knows my voice. She knows the rhythm of my walk;

it was her lullaby.

She learns my face. She knows my smell. She fits my puzzle pieces together

as I fall apart.

She cries for a feed. My body responds. She does not know.

I need to hold her. I miss my lost baby.

I do not miss days, nights, with my sons; we live them forward.

I just miss her.

The hour on hour of my desolation.

Never to be got back.