Nathan's Day

I hate September, it's a bit childish to hate a month, but I dread it and every year right on cue it comes round and there is no escaping it or the welling of painful memories and emotions that inevitably come along with it.  Today is the day when our dream of having a child together officially ended. Today was the day that Nathan came into and went out of our lives... Can you say was born? Does someone who never had any chance of survival count as being born?

I ask myself why his loss, one out of so many, should be the one that hurts so much and why so many years later this day should still hold so much pain? Maybe it's because his loss really was the end of our road, even if we didn't allow ourselves to believe it, or rather I didn't want to believe it, but it was, the infection after losing Nathan really did put paid to any further attempts, I just couldn't accept that then.

Maybe it's because he was the only one I thought was going to make it, when you get to the magical 12 weeks you start to think 'yes! We're ok! Danger zone past!'  By 16 weeks you're telling people and beginning to plan and becoming attached to the little person in there, so the blow is all the harder to take when it comes.

I hadn't really let myself get attached with the others, more so after Nathan, by then I had realised there was no 'out of the woods' point in a pregnancy for me, it was always going to be an exercise in terror and I should accept it, but with Nathan I was already enraptured, he had a name, I knew he was a 'he' and we already had that connection, that bond, that love. Or at least I did, who knows what he felt.

Maybe in Nathan how I feel is accumulation of emotion surrounding all the miscarriages, maybe it's the tangible experience I had, perhaps this grief is for all of them, just he is the one with a name, he is the one that I wasn't alone for. He is the one we got to sit and hold and cry together over.

The last few weeks have been difficult for me, its not that the ache of loss ever goes away, it doesn't, but most of the time I absolutely refuse to let it rule me. I don't want to be defined by the losses, the pain or the sadness. But once a year I let myself feel it because if I don't I feel that the depth of these emotions will drown me and I couldn't fight my way back again.  Like a release valve on a pressure cooker. 

I was feeling so low last week I took myself off to the cinema alone,  I purposely picked what I thought would be a sad movie, Anna Karenina, I thought I can sit under the cover of darkness and cry and no one will question it. Didn't work,  film was not very good, I shed no tears, no release was had but I did cry all the way home in the car listening to sad songs.  So thats a lesson for me... Just sit in the car next year and listen to Tracy Chapman.

So today is Nathan's Day, today is the day I grieve and mourn the dream that never was and tomorrow I will dry my eyes, lock away the pain and get on with the business of living... Until next year.