"what are you doing in here?" my husband asks. "torturing yourself?"
i am sitting on the floor of our third bedroom. it is the smallest of the three, really only large enough for a crib, a rocking chair and a changing table. so when my third child was born, we began to think of it as "the baby room": the older children sleep in the bigger room, and we'd put the baby in this little room, so his or her frequent night feedings don't wake the other kids.
i have so many memories in this room. falling asleep in the glider while nursing; falling asleep on the floor, trying to convince an older baby to lie down. lots of midnight snuggles. laying a baby down on the changing table in his hooded towel after his bath to rub lotion into his little legs and feet.
the room has been a source of anxiety, too. my two-year-old is what they call a spirited child. the childproof lock has not been invented that could thwart him. as our youngest, he was the most recent occupant of the baby room, but we had slowly emptied it of most of its furniture in an attempt to prevent him from breaking it or himself. we joked that it was a padded cell; he slept on a mattress on the floor, with stuffed toys and his cars and nothing else in the room.
in the months leading up to the birth of our fourth child, my husband and i debated endlessly when and how to transition him to the other bedroom, the big kids' room. we didn't want him to feel "replaced" by the new baby; we had wanted to move him a few weeks before the baby's birth, so he didn't perceive her as "taking" the room that had been his all his life.
but we were nervous about having him in the big kids' room. he still woke up many times during the night, creating all kinds of chaos. our bigger kids had finally started to sleep more soundly. if we moved our two-year-old in, would any of them ever sleep again? would our two-year-old destroy their beds and dressers and curtains and books the way he had his own things? (someone tell me this is normal).
we meant to move him, but we kept putting it off. and then came the nightmare, and suddenly it didn't matter anymore.
the night i came home from the hospital, one of the first things my husband said to me was, "go upstairs and look at the kids. look how they're sleeping."
my sister had been staying with them while my husband left to bring me home. when i opened the door of the big kids' room a crack, i was amazed to find all three of them and my sister asleep there: the two big ones in their beds, my two-year-old on his mattress in a corner, snuggled in my sister's arms. "he wanted to be with them," she'd tell me later. "he wouldn't go to sleep without you otherwise."
i couldn't believe it. somehow, my sister had achieved in one night what i hadn't been able to accomplish in months. my two-year-old has slept in the big kids' room ever since. and the baby room, the room we had been so nervous about moving him out of to make room for his sister, is vacant.
"i can't stand looking at it," my husband told me after a few nights. we closed the door.
but i was oddly drawn to the room. i think of it almost like the way your tongue keeps probing the empty space after you have a tooth pulled. without my son's things there, it was completely empty: just the soft blue carpet. in the first few weeks after my baby's death, whenever the pain was most intense, especially if my children were awake and i didn't want them to see me weeping, i'd curl up in a ball on the floor of the room and sob. i would sob in this horrible black hole that should have been filled with the scent and the warmth and the sounds of our baby, but lay, instead, as empty as i was.
when we received the pictures of our baby from the hospital, i hugged them to my chest in the room and wept. when i found the ultrasound pictures on my dresser, i held them and cried in the room, too.
a week or so after that, i began to move things back.
for a long time, the glider and the changing table had been crammed uncomfortably into our bedroom - again, to keep them safe from my son, and my son safe from them. we had assumed we'd move them back after the baby's birth, and her death left that assumption and all others in limbo. but why not? why should the glider be the first thing i saw every morning when i woke up? why shouldn't we get our room back?
so i carried them back myself while my husband was at work. and i began to spend more and more time in the room.
i would stack my books on emunah and my books on grief up next to me beside the glider while my kids were at camp, and i would rock in the glider and pore over them, searching for comfort, for some way to find meaning or understanding.
i began bringing my computer up here, too, to sit and write this blog, something my husband also didn't understand. "why that room out of the whole house?" he said.
i told him: "i don't want this room to become haunted. i don't want it to be a space of just pain. it was supposed to be the baby's room. maybe it can be the place where i learn how to heal from her death, instead."
recently, my husband and i bought new beds (long overdue...we'd bought our old ones when we got married and moved them across the country with us 6 years ago when we left new york). we were trying to decide what to do with our old frames and mattresses when i said to him: "why not move them into the third bedroom? we can make it a guest room."
he stared at me. "you want to make that room a guest room?" he said.
i shrugged. i was not as confident as i sounded, but i said, "why not? why should your sister have to sleep in the basement every time she visits us when we have an empty bedroom that no one's using?"
"but i don't think we want that space to be a guest room long term," he said.
"no," i agreed. that thought was almost too painful. "but it can be a guest room for now."
so my husband moved my old bed and mattress into the third bedroom, next to the glider and changing table. and for now, the baby room is a guest room.
every time i pass the doorway, i look in, and i am seized by how strange it all is. one month after my due date, the baby room is a guest room. i'd never dreamed this room would look like this. it is not something i ever wanted for the room.
i sent this picture of the room to a volunteer at a support organization and wrote, "it was my decision to make this room a guest room. so why does it still hurt so much to look at it?"
"because it makes it more real that you don't have a baby right now," she wrote back.
and yet...
it's not as empty as it was in those first weeks after menucha's death. it is, again, a room that looks toward the future, even if it isn't the future i hoped for. it is a room with a purpose.
and that is something.