To Abi,
It’s suddenly your 24th birthday and each year it hits me a bit different. This year, I realised that you are now the same age I was when I had you. It’s been hard to balance that fact in my mind. At once I am transported back to those heady, happy days of new marriage and our first baby on the way. I believed I had finally ‘made it’ – I’d overcome the traumas of my childhood, come out of all that to be blessed with a loving husband and starting my own family. To make all things new.
So on your birthday my grief feels double-pronged – as though I have a spear in each side. One that represents the heartwrenching grief of losing you, the other represents me losing part of myself.
You see I believed, in having you, that I could turn things around and that my past, filled with poverty, abuses and emotional distress, would somehow melt away. I thought that God had finally seen me, so imagine my shock at watching you die aged just 12 and wondering what hope I could possibly have left. It was like being given a beautiful gift by someone before they smashed it in front of me.
On this birthday, I don’t feel happy, or desperately sad – just numb as I am forced to face what was and is. We have wrestled a bit with what to do to mark the day, should I make a cake? I probably ‘should’ – but I didn’t. It didn’t feel right. We have done it before and sung a happy birthday to you, but this year I just couldn’t do it. The pain of it was still too raw.
I know you don’t see my tears. I know you don’t mind that I didn’t get you a cake or visit your grave, because you’re in your heavenly home. The guilt is all my own making.
We talked about you between ourselves in bits and pieces, never too deep but always a chatter as though you have simply moved abroad. Your 8-year-old sister, who you’ve never met, sang you a happy birthday – she’s like you in many ways, loves a party!
I wonder what you’d be doing now if you had lived. 24 is an age these days when children start finding their feet – in jobs, new homes and with partners. I wonder what you would have been. But that, too, is futile and I don’t dwell on the what ifs too long.
The grief has changed me and how I interact with people, yet I’m still here, working, living, parenting as best I can… My life is busy and that helps, and of course we have happy times within it all, but it mostly feels like I’m just biding my time until it’s my turn to join you. It’s not your fault darling, that’s just how grief is.
On your birthday this year, I choose to remember you as the gift given to me 24 years ago. A gift I got to keep for 12 wonderful years. I miss you – we all do.
Mum x
Chasing Dragonflies 