Another due date coming and going. I should be doing something else this weekend but it passes as any other summer day.
Image by Art and Ghosts
I read this a couple of nights ago and it has stuck with me. I have often spoke of feeling haunted by children who aren't here after my miscarriages and this passage finally put it into words for me.
""You have children--not in the world inhabited by other people but in the private world of your heart--you have children you will never get to mother. They are secret children, like those children you read about, confined to an attic or a closet. No one but you recognizes their existence, you yourself don't even know their form, their genders, the shape of their noses, the color of their eyes, and yet the strength of their souls flutter inside your heart like a caged bird's wings. As a mother, it is your job to get them out into the world, but you have failed them hopelessly, and so they haunt you, inhabiting a hyper-reality that, in the middle of the night, feels truer and more real than any reality you have ever known. They are your children, and you are their mother. Yet you do not stop your life for them. Instead, you go on."""
------Helen Schulman
