Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette

 

Finally, I started writing the depths that had been rolling through me like an endless succession of tsunamis, and they surged forth, unstoppable. I was their conduit to freedom.

 

After, I felt scrubbed raw and clean and vulnerable. For the first time since Elijah’s death, I had said something I deeply needed to say, spoken my most sacred and shattering truths, and started to purge the wrenching agony of the pain that had been my constant companion.

 

I took a deep breath and questioned myself before I hit send. It ‘s still difficult, even years later, to lay bare my soul this way.

 

That was a time drenched and soaking with grief, and grief is the dominant feature of those days after the unthinkable and inexplicable came to alter the course of our lives.

 

Blogging was catharsis. My intended audience was no less than the universe. I needed to express the sorrow and loss that were a part of every breath and heartbeat. I needed it with the same desperate, instinctive hunger that would drive us to try to conceive again as soon as we were cleared to resume our sex life.

 

I needed to think that, somewhere out there, someone might read them, and understand.

 

There was solace in writing and sharing what came from the pit of my darkest despair. The writing helped me claw my way to a place where I could see distant sunshine, hear birdsong, and feel the faint, whispered caress of a fresh breeze alive with the fecund, earthy, frost-tinged scents of early fall. …

 

I wrote about dates, in that first post. Later, I wrote about cleaning a closet filled with tiny baby boy things Elijah never wore, pretending it was just another routine household chore. I wrote about my co-worker’s son, born three days after Elijah, who grew strong and capable, and who became a willing surrogate for my need to hold and love a newborn.

 

I wrote a few posts – and then, there is a gap of six years before the blog resumes, quite suddenly, to chronicle our journey, as a family of four, into unschooling.

 

There are things I need to write about while they are happening….and there are things I can’t. How, after those grieving mother-of-a-dead-baby posts, could I express the paradoxical joy and panic of being pregnant again? Of being told that we would have a daughter if she could, with several high-risk factors, remain in utero long enough to be considered “viable”?

 

How then to write of the exquisite joy and terror of her birth day, and that, after all the worry and the trying not to worry, the only complication she had was a moderate case of jaundice.? Or the fear that, she, too, might die, which lingered until after her first birthday….?

 

Some things need to be written and shared; others must be borne and processed privately.

 

And both are my truth.

 

My first blog post can be found at http://memismommy.blogspot.com/2003/09/dates.html . When originally posted, I could not add a photo; that was added this year.