birth certificate

Through the thick safety glass the woman with the dark rimmed glasses and white hair that was cut in a short bob stared at me for a good five seconds without saying anything.  I watched her as she watched me with a look of complete incomprehension.  I briefly wondered how long this contest could go on.  Five seconds is not long but it is an eternity when you say something like this,

The woman at window three told me to come here and talk to you about getting my son's birth certificate. He died the same day he was born.  She said you don't have those records but you must because he was a live birth so he has to have a birth certificate.

After the seconds-seeming-hours of staring stopped she knitted her eyebrows together and asked me to repeat his name and birthdate as she scrawled it across a scrap of paper.  Then she proceeded to clack away at her computer until she apparently came to a dead end (ahem, no pun intended) and had to call for her supervisor.

You can't hear much behind safety glass when people make it a point not to speak into the microphone.   So I just watched their mimed conversation from the other side of the counter wondering to myself why this was such a difficult request for them to fulfill.  Surely in a city as large as Los Angeles babies die right after they are born not infrequently and I can't be the only one who has wanted the birth certificate of her dead baby.

I saw one of them shrug and shake her head and then she asked me to have a seat.  They would call me back in a few minutes.

It was at this point that I started to chew on my bottom lip to keep the tears that were hanging around in the corner of my eyes from spilling out onto my cheeks.  I had not been looking forward to this errand, which had been nearly two years in the making, but I did not expect that it would be such an ordeal.  Waiting in line for an hour, explaining to not one but two separate people exactly how long George lived (as if it mattered- one minute or one hour or one day...he was born alive and should have a damn birth certificate), and then initially being told that I'd have to request those records from the state directly.

The woman behind the counter beckoned me with her cotton candy colored nails.

"This all we have," she said, and swung the computer screen so that I could see it.  The word "DECEASED" printed in block letters was all I could see through the semi-clouded with age safety glass.

That's fine.  Give me that.

Two minutes later I was sitting in my car staring at George's birth certificate.  Male, Singleton, Date of Birth 03/31/2010, Time of Birth 1559, Mother's Name Brianna, Father's Name Leif (spelled Leith, WTF?), Date of Death 03/31/2010.  In the box where either Leif or I should have signed the form there was the signature of someone I did not recognize.

No George Ellsworth.  It was blank where his name should have been.

And, of course, things started to make sense, as I sat in my car sobbing.  We were never asked to fill out his birth certificate at the hospital.  Was it a kindness, they thought?  Instead some stranger filled it out as best they could for us.  They never asked his name and that is what makes me the saddest.  To whoever it was who filled out that form for us he was an anonymous dead baby.

They should have asked us if we wanted to fill it out ourselves.  We would have said yes.

around the bend

There is a point during my drive to work where I come around a soft bend in the road to find that the dark asphalt of the freeway has turned into a river of gold and the horizon ahead is ablaze with yellow and white, bursting through the soft clouds in shards of light.  Simultaneously every car, van, and truck slows down, blinded by the light, but also I'd guess gobsmacked by the brilliance of what is filling up their vision.  I imagine the wheels of stress and everyday worry that continuously grind away in all our minds slow and for an instant there is some clarity.

This is where the idea of heaven comes from, I am certain.  Even I, a skeptic and unbeliever to my core, have a brief moment where I can almost see him in the after image the sun burns into my eyes.  Not the baby I held in my arms, or the tow-headed and befreckled boy who occasionally visits me on the banks of my imagination.  I see him.  All of him.  His sum total and the perfection in his human imperfection.  Whatever it is that makes us who we are...that's what I see.  It is a fleeting vision that seems to fill up every atom in my body and one I wish I could follow into the horizon when it recedes back into the soup of life.

The angle of the sun only aligns itself with me at this time of year.  Every other month it is just a freeway, just an ordinary morning sun and just another day in an ordinary life.  But for a few brief weeks during Spring I know he is waiting for me, just up ahead and around the soft bend.

when your nose hates your face

We are a house infected.  A festering pool of nefarious germs, plotting their next victim.  If the iPhone had an app for Electron Microscope, Oh the horror that would be seen.

We are a family of dominoes.  Clio went first, then me, then Leif.

The passage of my cold is punctuated by the honk of a nose blowing thick mucus into a piece of tissue.  Claims are made that this is the tissue of choice to prevent a painful nose.  Surely it is softer than the other type of tissue often used in times of nasal drainage desperation but it is hardly the merciful cloth of healing zen it claims to be.

As I get older I become less tolerant of a runny nose and sinus pressure.
Good Gawd eyes, please remain in your sockets.  I wave the white flag comprised of used and crusted tissues.  My red, chapped nose whimpers.  I surrender and swallow two sudafed.

So I lay flat on my back on the couch, with a wad of zen tissue stuffed up whichever current nostril flows forth with the goo, which is a result of my body battling it out against the millions, nay zillions, of viral particles my body is host to.  I can almost see them in my stuffy stupor: an assembly-line of rhomboid shaped robots injecting my helpless cells with their own evil genetic material.  My mind wanders to that scene in Alien when the Chestburster makes its debut*.  Yeah, like that, I think, only on a teeny tiny cellular level.  

This is what happens in the midst of sleep deprivation for seven nights in a row.  Cracks begin to shine through in the defenses.  Hallucinations of tiny Facehugger alien viruses attacking my cells float above my eyes. Every coherent thought other than the near obscene desire to have a real and true night's sleep seems to have vacated completely.  Lost to the dead ends of disrupted synapses.

All this because one wee baby girl had rivulets of snot, impossible to clean up fast enough, trailing from her nose and this mother's inability to refrain from still kiss-attacking her face.  It's 2:30 am, I'm writing this on my phone, and the epic battle between my immune system and the Alien virus rages on inside.  As shitty as I feel I don't regret it though.  I will gladly pay this price everyday for the continued chance to give kisses and snuggles to the daughter who sleeps soundly, recently filled up on my milk, in her crib down the hall.

*My thoughts often wander towards Alien or Aliens.  They are my favorite movies.  Also, beware that link above goes to a graphic scene in the movie.

thank you

Thank you every one who responded to my pity party the other day. I appreciate all your thoughtful comments and emails. They provided me with a lot to think about. I'll be deleting that post now.

Clio is still not sleeping. Last night was the fourth night in a row where Leif and I have barely been able to cobble together 4 hours of sleep each. It has been rough on us both. I think once I'm able to get some good sleep and once I feel safer knowing Clio is more comfortable this won't look as bleak as they have this week.

All your support has made things feel a little less desperate and like there may be something better for me out there. I'm not sure what is next other than Leif and I have a lot to discuss and I've got quite a bit of soul-searching to do.

Yesterday I finished a busy day of work with my head held a bit higher and I was greeted with this scene. I'm no believer in signs but it made me smile. Even when life is grey, there is beauty to be found too.

Thank you.

foolish

When I was pregnant with George I used to go to one particular vintage clothing shop and comb through the racks of baby clothes looking for things to dress him up in.  Over two years later I was there again today.  This time shopping with a friend visiting the mainland from Hawaii with her three kids.  This time combing through the racks for Clio.

I found this.

I did something foolish.

I bought it.

And for no other reason than I didn't want another George baby to ever wear it.
It never goes away.  Not ever.

Auggie

I wrote this back in September about a beautiful little boy, Auggie, and his equally beautiful parents.

He's gone now at five months old.

There are some things in life that just can't adequately be described in words.  I'm heartbroken by his death and struck frozen, once again, by the sheer cruelness that the universe is capable of.

Should you want to give his parents your condolences, you can do so here or here or in this post's comments section and I will send them on to Auggie's mother.

He is so very missed.

banker's box

While I was still in the hospital after George died, Leif packed up all the baby stuff and sent it back with my parents at my request.  When I got home it was very surreal to have everything just gone as if he had never even existed.  I regretted sending everything away almost immediately. All that was left were a couple of blankets that I ended up sleeping with for a while.  I thought over time we had recovered all of the boxes that had been sent away but yesterday I was doing some cleaning around the house and pulled out a white banker's box, scrawled with my father's nearly illegible print, "George's stuff and misc."

It was a weird experience, almost two years after his death, to randomly find a box of his "belongings" amongst a pile of other nearly identical boxes containing mundane items from life- wrapping paper, old yearbooks, sandpaper.  Really, as if anything could have ever "belonged" to a child who lived for only twenty-four minutes.  Most of the stuff inside was hand-me-down clothes that I had been collecting for him during the earlier months of my pregnancy when everything still seemed so sure and perfect.   Amidst all the green and blue sleepers and onsies I ended up finding a tiny blue hat that I had bought for his homecoming- I had almost completely forgot about it as I thought it had been lost during those early days of frantic packing and removing.  There is was.  Still tiny.  Still blue.   Still with tags on it and still unworn.  The tag says, "angel dear" and although the term "angel" always makes me squirm in relation to dead babies the irony did not escape me upon seeing it for the first time since before he died.

When things like this happen it is like finding shards of my previous life preserved in golden amber.  I smelled the hat, even though George had never worn it, and I could almost feel like that woman I once was- purely optimistic about life and so very certain about my future.  Oh but that woman hasn't lived in my skin for a long time now.  All the grieving and all the tears these last two years have not been for George alone.  They have been for that woman and that life too.

I removed all the contents of the box and shifted them around to new homes- Clio's closet, the garbage, the pile of stuff to take to the Goodwill.  The hat is in George's box with the rest of his "belongings" that still have sentimental value.  Then that white banker's box got new inhabitants.  I crossed out "George's stuff and misc" and wrote in fat sharpie marker, "Baby clothes 0-3m."

Sometimes I feel like every little trace of George is slowly being removed from life.  It is so hard to keep the memory of a dead baby alive in the shadow of a baby who lives.

Poor George, he deserved so much more than what he was given.