in your face, world

a few weeks before my due date, i ordered my birth kit. it had all kinds of stuff: mucous syringe, pads, squeeze bottle, herb soaks. i opened the box when it came, and there, above the plastic blue pad backings, was a tiny off-white baby cap. it made me think of the birth- something i was so excited, nervous, and curious about. i studied some midwifery in college and was so sad about the c-section i had the first time around. i wanted to experience birth and she was my partner. and there, before me, was the actual beanie she would be wearing when we met.

while i was in the hospital after she died, husband and friends dismantled the birth pool at home. i instructed my midwife to also take the birth kit. what the f*ck would i do with it?? she had plenty of women who were lined up to birth LIVE babies. i wonder if it was a girl or boy who wore p@ige's cap. i wish i told husband to take it out of the box.

my midwife called last week to ask me if i would be ok with the recipients sending me a check for the kit. i said i was...hey, there's always something to use $65 bucks for.

i used it to buy a little 3-line plaque for p@ige. it will be added to a big wooden wall plaque on the labor and delivery floor where she was born. i almost feel like it's my own personal joke...putting my dead baby's name and birth date on a plaque surrounded by "welcome to the world sweet benjamin!" and shit like that.

really, though, my time in the hospital was special to me; as special as it can get when your dead child was pulled out of you just days before. it was the most normal i've felt since it happened...laying there, not fit for the tasks of regular life. being a patient, being a victim of circumstance. i didn't have to fake it when i was there. i was a dead baby's mother. period.

p@ige francesca mcnamara

september 9, 2oo7

thank you, mary pat

(mary pat, my special nurse)

so there, world of crying babies born alive. SO THERE!