“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
On the things that differentiate the baby in our mind, the baby in our body and the baby in our arms
This week I attended a beautiful talk by Jennie Agg and Tamarin Norwood on grief, motherhood and writing (I can wholeheartedly recommend both of their deeply moving books, Life Almost and The Song of the Whole Wide World). There is something so comforting about being in the belly of a bookstore in an area of London that is distantly familiar. Tinged with a pang of nostalgia for my training days, that increasingly feel like a fading memory.
In fact, travelling back into London feels ever more nostalgic these days. We are a few months shy of four years of coastal living, which somehow feels like a lifetime already.
Time.
I often wonder if time would have the same elasticity if it didn’t exist within the shadow of loss, as well as the years of pandemic uncertainty and isolation.
Almost eight years on from Orla’s death, I continue to be surprised by the ways in which my understanding of her fleeting physical existence is challenged. You can think that you have worked through it all: the trauma, the grief, the learning to integrate this into your continued existence. And then someone says something that makes you rethink it all.
During the talk this week, Tamarin tenderly described her son as her “inside baby”. This delicate description landed softly on me. Featherlike. Warm. Comforting. New and yet somehow familiar.
I have never related to the idea of an ‘angel baby’ or anything associated with religious or spiritual language to explain who, or what, Orla is now. I have sometimes longed for something I could hook into and grasp onto. This lack of words has left me with a hole in my vocabulary. One that can only be brutally described as dead baby shaped.
But an inside baby. This fits.
Bringing the inside baby out
Subsequently, this week my mind has meandered down a path of wondering when - and how - we begin to develop the idea of an ‘outside baby’. What are the rituals that we engage in that start to bring the concept of our baby one-day existing outside of us, in the big wide world?