Secret garden meeting October

This month's meeting (well, last month's now... I'm a bit slow) is about where we are at in our grief.

Where are you at in your grief. Has it been years or just weeks since you lost your baby. How are you feeling. How do you hope you will feel in the future. Have you found any peace at all?

It's been 10 months since I let my baby boy slip away from us when I was 35 weeks pregnant. I don't really know where I am. I have mostly good days. I'm a happy person. But I still look back; still feel terribly guilty about letting Luca die; and I really really miss him.

My friend was throwing her smiling baby up in the air last night and said to me 'Isn't six months just the best age?'. And I don't know if I even answered. That sums it up really. I should have a baby and I don't. I should be able to answer that question.

The other babies born around the same time as Luca are starting to have their first birthdays. They are adorable. Full of life. Their mums have expressions of joy and pride on their faces when they play with them. Nurturing, caring. I have a rather unattractive urn with some ashes in it. There is almost no part of my life that is not tinged with sadness. Steve and I went away on the weekend for our 6 year wedding anniversary. We had a great weekend but some of the only photos I have of me during Luca's pregnancy from our weekend away last year. I couldn't help but remember that a year ago we were looking forward to welcoming our little boy into our family.

Hope for the future? I'm 17 weeks pregnant so I do have a lot of hope pinned on this baby. Depends which day you ask me. A little three year old friend asked me yesterday if this baby will die too. And the best I could manage was 'I hope not'. Because that's all there is really. I had a maternal condition with Luca that I also had with our first and will probably get again. And even without that, the certainty of a live baby is lost forever to me now. And the future will never be completely right - I will always have one child missing and will always have the burden of knowing that I failed him and our family.

I don't think I've found peace. I think I've found acceptance. Sort of. But not peace. I hope that in the future I can let go of some of the guilt I feel. I hope I don't have to continually regret things I did and didn't do during Luca's pregnancy. I try to remind myself that there is no other evidence that I'm a bad mum. That I would have loved him more and more; that I love my daughter and am a good mother to her. I hope I don't always feel like a failure.