It's been five weeks since we found out, and the very next day I began a project to celebrate my precious, longed-for pregnancy and commemorate it with appropriate ritual and symbolism.
Ritual and symbolism have always been important to me, as sources of comfort and as means of making sense of things I don't understand. I think that's what draws me occasionally to organised religion, although that sort of exploration inevitably ends with me realising - again - that I can never reconcile my intellectual life with codified faith.
Aaanyway...
This project would be a knitted blanket for my beautiful new baby; a blanket knitted one line every day of my pregnancy, the colour of the sky that day - a blanket of blues and greys and whites that would keep my tiny baby warm with all the colours that I watched overhead as she grew inside me.
The sky in Hobart is different every day. There are some days when the white clouds are so sharp and bright that the purity of them hurts your eyes. There are some days that are thin and pale with a washed-out blue that you can almost see through. There are some days when the Matisse blue is as fresh and clear as the sky in the pictures of treasured childhood storybooks, and some days when the grey rolls in, heavy and cold and comfortable all at once. Every day is different, and every day is beautiful.
These are the lines of the sky that I have knitted.
These are the only lines I will knit.
My baby has died.
The sky has fallen in. The colours are all gone. I know that things will get better, but they are not better yet.
I don't want to write about my loss. This is not the place to do that. But I'm not ready, either, to carry on as before. I just can't do that yet. So I'm not going to write here anymore, at least, not for a long while. I'm going to let this blog lie fallow, and try to focus on putting my world back together.
Thanks for reading.
