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this is definitely one of the drawbacks of having living children before a dead one. now, i may as well just say upfront that i feel like an asshole even pointing that out, knowing others who lost their first baby will want to vomit. but this is the shit of it, the other side of the same hellish coin.p@ige looked exactly like @eva. this is me with @eva at four months. this should have been me, today, with p@ige. my fingers are wobbling and i can barely hit the right keys.
i don't know what made me think of looking at their old pictures, to compare, to get a glimpse of what it would have looked like...but i fear i've just added a new level of hell; i won't be able to stop. five months, six, seven...what will stop me, even at a year? at sixteen years?
this isn't fair to @eva, either. i've already looked at her countless times in real life and pretended it was p@ige. this isn't right. but i can't stop. how can i stop this???????
11 comments:
I sometimes appreciate how fortunate (only someone in deadbabyland could be saying that word in this sentence) I am to not really know what I'm missing, not to have children already.
Not until I have another baby, one that I get to bring home, will I truly understand. Then my grief will probably kick back in all over again.
Your daughter is beautiful and you know even if P@ige was alive you would still be making the comparisons, and maybe you'd still feel that wasn't fair. I think you just feel worse because you are comparing @eva to your dead daughter and not a living P@ige. My brother and I were always compared to each other, actually he was always compared to me which was not fair.
but i fear i've just added a new level of hell; i won't be able to stop. five months, six, seven...what will stop me, even at a year? at sixteen years?
I think we're all always going to be doing this. Comparing, to the children we already have or to the ones we may have. I think we'll be doing this till the day we die.
This is some sh*t we have to live with.
We can't stop it. I want to. Believe me, I've tried to will it over and over and over again.
I see pictures of my daughter and I am surprised at how similar she and C@llum looked. The obvious difference is that she was alive. It's hard to compare the two, wondering whether he would look more like his brother or sister when he got older. I guess I will always wonder and I know my heart will always break at the thought of going on without him.
The torture of looking at photos and comparing is only a fragment of the torture we feel. I feel so sad, charmedgirl. So very sad you have to compare rather than experience. XO.
You can't. I STILL can't look at Bella's baby pix pre February because I just sit and wonder what Maddy would look like. The shit for me is that Bella looks just like her dad, and Maddy looked like me. I feel like I've lost my future soul or something. All those comments about "wow, she looks just like her dad" REALLY feel like crap now; no one says "Wow, the dead baby looks just like you! Look! Your nose!" And then there's the whole "Am I a big sister?" thing, and on and on. It all sucks. I'm so sorry, that SHOULD be you today. Mine should be learning to walk.
I have to say that this is one thing that I never feel. That I never even thought of feeling. Maybe it's because I never saw the twins and have no pictures of them, so they've remained kind of abstractions for me.
Not that it helps -- but I can only imagine how exquisitely painful this must be.
You know what, I was just thinking what Coggy wrote. I have no idea what it would be like to have a living kid, so I don't really know what I missed out on. If that makes sense?
I feel the pain in your words though. The torture that you must feel. It really sounds like a new level of hell, to me too, even from where I sit. I have no idea what to tell you, and how to stop it. I mean I have much in common with you, but not this.
I, too, haven't bought home a living baby yet and can only imagine the different levels of hell that would bring with it - as it is Christmas was hell for us as I saw my cousins children who are the same age as mine would be, the comparisons were constant....
Perhaps you could think of your comparisons as a way of remembering P@ige. You will always wonder what if. . .
Don't beat yourself up for comparing her with @eva. Remember her, and if looking at @eva helps you do that, I think it can be good.
For me I wish I had someone to compare her to..My first two being for a previous relationship looked completely different from Micah...I can only wait and see..and then like Coggy says maybe my grief will kick back in all over again...
I lost my first child but I do the same thing sometimes when I look at Bubba. One of my first thoughts when he was born was that he looked very much like Hope. And sometimes I look at Bubba and think "this is what Hope would have looked like when she was this old."
Please try not to be so hard on yourself. I think it's perfectly normal that you would have these thoughts...and I think they will lessen as time goes on. I know that doesn't make you feel better now, but it's all I've got...
I think what you are doing/feeling is normal. At least I hope so, because I look at baby A and wonder things all the time. Is this how M would have looked at 3 weeks? Would we have struggled with breastfeeding? And on and on...the pictures get me too.
I feel the exact same way you do. I look at my daughter now and get sick thinking that I will never get to experience the things that I have gotten to experience with her with my twins. I hate the fact that I will never get to see how Ava would have been with them, how she would have been as a big sister. God willing someday I may be able to find out.
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