Dear Avery

Hello my sweet boy.

18 months.  18 months since you came here, without making it here at all.  How can 18 months have gone by already.  It seems like a lifetime ago, and yet, was only yesterday.

Some days it feels like it happened to someone else.  Almost as though I have looked at other people’s photos and absorbed their memories to be mere pictures in my mind. Surreal and unfocussed.

And yet, other days are much more real.  Acute and painful, complete clarity and no fuzzy edges.  Some days I need to pinch myself to wake from the intensity of each moment.

I have had a tough month, I admit it.  Perhaps that is why I am writing to you now.  In fact, the last couple of months.  With the teeth abscessing, and the pain I was in…  then Christmas and New Year.  Organising travel and doctors and everything to do with Tara, it is just crazy.

Finally your Uncle David got to meet you though.  I am so so glad he finally got a chance to see you – even if it is just you in a box.  He touched your hand prints, and saw your clothes and your blanket.  He got to inhale your essence.  At last.  It was magical but oh so painful too.

And then of course my latest stint in hospital on the anniversary of losing Colt.  I got out of hospital, curled up in bed at the end of the day and the moment my body relaxed the tears came.  I think a lot was to do with the pain in my stomach, but there was grief mixed into that.  I talked about you lots in hospital – your bear helps break the silence around you and the words just flow.

So, hospital.  Clever old me managed to (probably) tear a muscle/ligament/adhesion around my uterus.  Putting my leg into my trousers and “pop”… I felt the pain.  And then it stopped and then radiated across my abdomen.  Right where my scars are.  I am not afraid to admit that my first thought was rupture.  But then the pain eased and I was just left with tenderness.  Figured I just hurt a little.  That was until the next day – when the pain got worse… and worse… and worse.  So off to hospital we went and I spent the night in observation and having some scans.  All was good and I was released the next day.

It brought a lot up though.  Especially about you and Colt. And Tara and just – well everything.

We are so close to getting this baby home, the denial is getting lesser and lesser.  And then some nasty voice in the back of my mind will tell me that we almost got you home too.  But FawnChild is a different baby, a different pregnancy…  and will be a different outcome.  Has to be.

Does not stop me from catching in my throat when Tara uses phrases like “When this baby is born – if it does not die….”

But I know I think it too.  She just has the strength of a child to say what she thinks without a filter.

I am going to be sad to leave my Mum. We have been holidaying here for a while.  Will miss friends and family.  Though I am going to be happy to get back to Sydney and start the preparation for this baby to arrive.  It will be a way to focus, to calm, to try and connect to this baby…

I still feel the confusion often between this pregnancy and yours.  I catch myself thinking it is you swirling around in my belly – though this one moves differently to you.  Has very distinct movements.  Still, my belly looks like it was when I carried you, big and round.  The stretch marks you gave me are popping out again, blue and purple and silvery. Tiger Stripes of a Warrior woman.

For so long I have felt as though I failed you.  Failed myself. But I feel a shift in my psyche and there are certain things becoming more and more clear to me.  One of them is that I was Brave. And I fought.  Hard.  You were so wanted.  I might get around to writing these thoughts out soon.  Not yet, but soon.

I have had to give myself a bit more of a wide berth from photos of children your age.  18 months feels like such a milestone.  On the cusp of baby and toddler and child.  All three at once.  In photos I can see personalities of the children and it is getting to a point where I can no longer see you within them.  You are stuck, lost in infant world – long left behind by the walking toddlers you will never catch up to.

And soon, your sibling will over take you and will become your little-big-sibling.  Younger and Older all at once.  It is so hard to get my head around that.  In fact, I think my head is firmly stuck in the denial bucket when it comes to those thoughts.

Life just keeps moving forward and it seems like, in some respects, you are being left behind.  Because you are memories and photos and ashes in a box.

I miss you terribly my sweet sweet boy.  I just wish so much that you were here with us.  That you were part of us.  That I could hold you and kiss you and snuggle into your hair.  Chase you around a playground and sing you to sleep each night.

Sweet boy.  I miss you xx