i was not prepared for the reminders of grief.
there were some things i think my husband and i knew instinctively would be too painful to have around. my husband quietly returned the brand new doona i was so excited about that everyone kept telling me was a gamechanger a few days after i got home from the hospital. we put away a few baby toys we'd left out.
but then there are things that always seem to blindside me. i still haven't unpacked my hospital bag. it's sitting in my bedroom right where i dropped it before curling up into a ball on my bed. after my other kids unpacking a hospital bag was just one of those things - like laundry. just a chore to be done. now somehow it feels like if i put my hoodie back in the drawer, the last vestiges of my connection to menucha disappear. the last memories of the brief time we were together. and i guess it feels like i am burying a more innocent self, too - the person i used to be, who never packed a bag for labor and delivery imagining she would come home without a baby.
it gets stranger. for the last few weeks i have had a bag of broccoli in my fridge i was unable to throw away. cleaning that broccoli was the last thing i did before finally giving in to my fear and calling the doctor, the call that began the most horrible night of my life. i had meant to cook the broccoli for shabbos. but i couldn't cook it. and i couldn't throw it out. it just stared at me for days and weeks every time i opened the fridge. but part of me really felt like, maybe if i don't cook the broccoli, it can transport me back to the "before" time, when it was just another thursday night before shabbos and there were just a few more days to go until i could meet my baby at last.
there are a thousand other little things. first it was milk that expired on my due date. the first day of camp - the day I joked I'd drop my kids off and then head to labor and delivery, except instead I headed home to an empty house and wept. going to the farmer's market alone - ever since i learned that i'd deliver in the summer, i had envisioned these blissful little excursions to the farmer's market, wearing my baby or pushing her in the doona, just me and her. would it ever have happened that way? maybe not. i'll never know.
the closet full of maternity/nursing dresses i imagined wearing all summer. i hunt through them for clothes that fit that aren't maternity - i have no baby to prove it, but i was still pregnant for 9 months, and it shows. but the last thing i want to look right now is pregnant.
the empty room i hustled my two year old out of so we could put the baby's crib there, which now just feels like a black hole.
the 20 week ultrasound photos on my dresser that i must have casually tossed there after an appointment, never thinking it would be the last time i saw my baby alive.
and there is the most bittersweet reminder of all: my new niece. my brother's wife and i were due within two weeks of each other; she ended up giving birth two days after my due date to a beautiful little girl, the exact same size and weight as my own. for the rest of my niece's life, i will always know exactly what developmental age menucha would have been, what a life with a little girl exactly her age might have looked like...but never will for my family.
and that is very hard.