Happy Birthday

Dear Nora,

For months I looked out over the water from three huge picture windows in the Air BnB. I held you, wiggling and stretching inside, from the outside of my overstretched belly. I rubbed and poked at you and I looked at the water. I watched beautiful sunrises and sets, storms blow in and out, and fighter jets circle for landing. I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner looking out over that water. I made lists, drew up plans, and had dreams about the time we would get together. We made memories with you in the snow, danced in the kitchen, baked chocolate chip cookies together and cozied up near the fire. We celebrated you and mourned you at your wake in those same spaces. So many positive and painful memories alike all swirled up within one house. Still, I feel you when I look at the water. I’m sure it helps that we spread your ashes there too.

One year later and the happiness and the pain still can’t be separated from one another. Joy that you were ours and joy in seeing all the light you brought to a world you never took a breath in. Sadness that you’re gone and knowing that you had so much more light in the possibility of your life.

I miss you still, each and every day with a longing heart that only a mother without her baby knows. I hate that we missed out on everything. We missed seeing the color of your eyes, hearing the sound of your laughter, and watching as you took your first, brave steps. We lost the opportunity to see you smile, hold you while you slept and wipe away your crocodile tears. Sometimes it feels so cruel a world in which you don’t exist. Sometimes I feel cheated. Other times I see the blessings. The things none of us had to endure. The peace and love you existed in. The pain you didn’t ever experience. For those things I’m extremely grateful. Still, I wish you could be running around with your sisters who miss you so. I wish you could’ve blown out the candle on your first ever birthday cake. I wish we were just starting to get to know you.

It seems like a year has passed in a blur of secret agony. I don’t always understand how the movement of time feels so different in each situation and each stage we’re in. This last year has felt like that of any other baby’s first year. The days were often long while the year itself seemed short. There were tears, laughter, sleepless nights and early mornings. There were moments where I felt both joyful and bitter towards the happiness of others I love. Any time I felt that way, guilt very quickly followed. I saw you and your milestones in the children of our friends. I saw the ways your sisters would’ve loved you and the ways you would have pushed their buttons. I often felt inadequate to be your mother. I also often knew that there was no one better. As we now move beyond measuring time in days, weeks, and months and into years the only thing I know for certain is that you will be both always missing and always here.

I see you in robins and eagles and especially in the movements of the snow geese. I feel you near the water and in the chill of the night air. I still sleep with your blanket snuggled up against me and there are times I swear I smell you in the air.

I didn’t know what to expect as we approached your first birthday. The one I wanted to be pulling out the silly hat I made both your sisters wear, but instead was trying to decide how to best celebrate a birthday without a birthday girl. The one I would’ve inevitably made foods into the shape of a 1 all day for even though you wouldn’t have cared. The birthday that said, “We did it! We made it an entire year together!” How do you approach what should be such a beautiful end to one thing and start to another when it turns out to just be more of the same emptiness on the horizon instead? I wasn’t sure, but what I knew was that we weren’t letting the day just pass. We weren’t going to be simply crying the day away, nor were we going to be avoiding it. We were going to celebrate the perfect, beautiful, wonderful you. We ate cinnamon rolls and cheesy eggs for breakfast. We took a picnic to the water and ate in the freezing wind so we could all be together. We played and hiked and took deep breaths of fresh air. I made a toddler favorite, pasta, for dinner and served it in the polish pottery I bought while first dreaming of who you would be. We sang happy birthday, blew out one candle and all shared cake. We laughed, we were silly, we all took a nap and in many moments we cried. We missed you and we celebrated you. We felt love for you from everywhere. It was, as each day of the last year has been, perfectly beautiful and sad and complex. While my heart aches for you and will never truly be whole again, it’s so full knowing you’re ours. Even though my words aren’t perfect and feel incomplete, I know you were with us to witness all the ways we celebrated and loved you on your special day.

Happy First Birthday Nora.

Love,

Mommy