When the midwives put Arthur on my belly, I didn’t recognize him. So there he was, the baby we had been waiting for, whose arrival I had prepared without preparing myself, putting at a distance the attachment I could feel. I was afraid.

He was there, and I felt nothing.

It took two weeks for me to finally recognize him.

It was a dream that opened my eyes.

I’m in a country at war. The hill on which we have a wooden house is lit by small fires. Night envelops us. Soldiers are coming to what I think is our village. They are coming up the path towards us. I feel the anguish of being caught, of seeing them arrive in my house. I am alone with Arthur. He’s in a wooden cradle. A yellow woollen vest is wrapped around him. He looks at me with his almond-shaped, piercing eyes, strange for his age as a baby. I take him in my arms. I know I have to hide him because if the soldiers find him, they’ll kill him. I prepare a bottle of milk that I slip into a bag and I put Arthur behind a curtain with his little bag and bottle. And then the pain, the sadness, the tears of having to let him go overwhelm me. How can I leave him like that, while he looks at me with his adorable little face. So much love overwhelms me, so much love jostles me and brings me to my knees. Yet I have to leave him and go to the soldiers so they can’t find him.

And all I can think of is his look and his beautiful face.

I cry in bed. I cry in the night and I wake up with a shock. I can’t calm down. I get up abruptly and rush to Arthur’s crib. There he is… asleep. A great relief overwhelms me. He’s there, I can touch him, hold him, rock him, my baby…

There’s no war, no soldiers, no noise in the house. There’s just me and the terror of losing him, me and this tsunami of love never felt before.

*

He arrived on January 28th.

I think he was expected.

Well, yes… or no… maybe I was actually pretending to be waiting for him. He was hovering over the “first” child, the one we’re waiting for, the one who puts stars in the eyes of family and friends. I really think we were waiting for him. Looking for a name, imagining his future, making plans about why his education would be like this and not otherwise. Already trapping him between what we adults think is right and what is wrong.

Yes, we had it all figured out.

It was present in my belly of immense circumference, everything was ready. The bedroom, the bed, the changing table, the clothes. Everything was ready. Everything was ready. Except for me. Except for me, unable to watch my belly move, unable to touch it for fear of that baby leaving again.

Those who follow me on this blog, those who cross my path and hear me talk about my projects know that for the beginning of autumn will come out this famous book, the one in which I tried to deal with the subject of perinatal mourning. The one that I am dragging along and from which I must free myself. Because before Arthur, there was another baby in my belly and this one I really wanted to forget.

As soon as Arthur was born, I knew he was different. I’d watched our friends’ children grow up and evolve, and Arthur… well, he was evolving in a different way. There was something wounded in him. Something I couldn’t quite figure out. I couldn’t understand why a child who had everything to be happy could also be so sad and filled with moments of despair, hungry for love and attention, as if terrified of being forgotten. He was two years old and not once did I make the connection with the little girl I lost before him. For me, there was no connection. Besides, I didn’t want to think about her. After all, I had a beautiful, living son, and I didn’t like to dwell on that moment. It brings me to the edge of a precipice that attracts me and frightens me. Arthur’s birth triggered a panicky fear of heights… is that related? Fear of falling endlessly, fear of losing me, of losing him? Fear of tipping over… I don’t know. Maybe there’s a simple scientific explanation that I haven’t had yet.

It took a moment of intense anguish and despair for me to realise that Arthur’s hurt was very deep.

And it was during our meeting with the wonderful gentle psychologist who took care of Arthur that the veil was lifted.

There was a silence when she asked me if Arthur was my first child. As always, when I was asked the question, I answered yes. He is my first child, the one I heard screaming and who was put on my belly. The one I love viscerally since that awful dream when I had to abandon him.

She must have felt something, because she insisted. And then my throat tightened. I didn’t even know why, but talking about my medical interruption of pregnancy seemed impossible. For me it wasn’t painful. It was just impossible. Putting words to it and verbalizing the experience, while I was doing everything I could to forget it, to silence it, seemed insurmountable to me. And yet, with Arthur playing cars on the office carpet, we had to talk about it. And as always, I can’t talk about it without crying. It’s incomprehensible to me, I don’t feel any pain, but it’s as if my body is talking, betraying me, really revealing what comes out of this experience, while my mind is constantly trying to struggle to put things into perspective and keep me afloat.

When she saw me crying in the silence of the office, with Arthur beside me, she said this sentence which is at the origin of this book I wrote:

“Your son is not an elder. ”

I never would have thought of that. The idea seemed a thousand miles away from me. How could Arthur have felt the presence of his dead little sister? How could he feel that I had been unable to grieve the loss?

And then I thought about it and I realised that everything in Arthur’s coming depended on that first experience. From the way I experienced my pregnancy, to my difficult attachment to him, from my terrible anguish at every ultrasound scan, to the fact that it was impossible for me to caress my belly or to imagine him in my arms. This terrible fear of losing him took me away from him and I guess he must have felt all of that.

I can’t count the number of times he told me that he was lost, that he had no place, that he was there to fix things, that the sky is full of children… in his mouth these words reveal more than what he might want to tell me. His child’s heart speaks to my mother’s heart and I understand the depths of his thoughts.

I have since done a lot of research on what we call “rainbow babies”, these children born after the loss of a baby,

and I’ve done a lot of work on myself to finally accept this experience. However, I had to wait for the birth of my second son before I could go to the city hall to declare their elder sister and give her an existence. A way to acknowledge and make peace with this moment, and to allow my two boys to know their place in the family.

*

For a long time, I felt guilty that I couldn’t welcome Arthur in the best conditions as a mother who had lived through a wonderful first pregnancy without anguish, without negative thoughts, could welcome this moment of happiness. But I had already been a mother and I was not aware of all that floated as residues of this experience and of what had repercussions on him.

It was after much reflection and after reading testimonies that I realized on the one hand that I was not alone in feeling these emotions and on the other hand that a literary desert covers the subject of perinatal mourning.

Why am I sharing all this with you?

Well because soon I will publish my novel Dust of You on Perinatal Grief. I decided to write this book last year. It was time for me to put down the words and share the emotions that all those moms went through. It was an intense and delicate work, and I keep asking myself if this book is up to the task. Yet the book is finished, corrected, so it’s time for me to share it with you soon.

Thank you for your reading!

Lily