Dear Nora,
This week I wrote my name and number on a piece of paper to give to another mom. As is seemingly customary here in Germany I followed it with, “Mama von” I put your sisters’ names and their ages and I froze. It’s definitely not customary to put your dead baby’s name on a piece of paper and hand it over to a blissfully ignorant stranger with a “call me!” and a hair flip. How do I not write your name? I am, in fact, the Mama von Nora too.
I still struggle with that a lot when meeting new people or trying to make friends. I feel like such an awkward fraud when someone doesn’t know about you. Like they don’t know who I really am because I’m not just Corrie, Mama von Ellie, Rose und Mia. I’m Corrie, broken, awkward and weird Mama von Ellie, Rose, Nora und Mia. It’s also not an easy thing to bring up, talk about, or to be received by others. So I get stuck in this strange place where I don’t write my dead baby’s name on the piece of paper and feel like somehow I’m lying or hiding something or at the very least leaving you out and leaving you behind. Which I could never do. Then when the mom doesn’t call or text like she said she would, I feel like it’s because she can tell I’m so awkward. There’s something off or missing about me, don’t want to make friends with that… even if I am the only other native English speaking parent at the school.
It’s the same when people ask how many kids I have or if we want to try for number four to see if we’d have a boy. Do I say, “we have four, but one is dead… No it’s okay, it was three years ago and we knew she would die because she had a really bad heart defect. I mean it’s not okay, but you know what I mean!” Or do I say, “no, we have four already, our third died, she was girl too though. Pretty sure we can only make girls!” I’m pretty sure neither of those answers would be well received. Typically, I just say that we have three, confirm that they’re all girls and reassure them that, no we were never trying for a boy nor will we be.
I guess the long and short of it is that grief is a long game and making new friends is hard. I love you and I miss you all the time.
Love,
Mommy
Originally written to Nora in October of 2024
Dear Nora 