FuoriBorgo

eleven years later

Eleven years later, I cast on again.  After our first baby was stillborn one February day eleven years ago, and the little striped white & blue baby outfit that I'd been knitting got put away, I realized that I couldn't pick up my needles again, and found a new passion in crochet (I've written about this chapter of our life a few times in the past, here and here).

At the dinner table not long ago, I was lamenting the fact that I'd searched every single store in our area, in vain, for a black wool cardigan, but people don't seem to be using wool any more (how do they keep warm?).  My elder boy shrugged the problem off, and stated the obvious: "Why don't you make one?!"  Ouch ...!  Isn't ironic when your own lifestyle is thrown back at you?  But my boy was right:  why didn't I crochet one?  

I didn't because I've already made a crochet cardigan for myself, the Chevron Lace Cardigan by Milobo which I love, and I didn't want a second one.  Plus my recent looking around and searching the internet didn't turn up a pattern that suited me.  In fact, while there are tons of patterns for doilies, lacy things and granny-squares, there seem to be very few patterns around for more simply-textured crochet sweaters:  just a practical garment to keep warm.  Truth is, if you limit yourself to crochet alone, the options aren't too great, or at any rate, not as ample as for knitting.

So, why didn't I make a cardigan?  There are tons of knitting patterns out there, and I can knit, but I don't knit, or I haven't knitted for eleven years ...

But, eleven years later, there's something I have understood: I will never come to terms with our losses, I will never accept them, and certainly, I will never "get over" them.  How can a mother give birth to three stillborn babies, and then lose two more pregnancies, and accept and forget and "get over" it?  What I understood in eleven years is that those losses aren't something that I need to get over: those losses are part of me, they're part of the person I am now.  And eleven years later I haven't gotten over them, but I've learned to live with them -- to live with this heartache and this melancholy, which with the joys & sorrows, the high & lows, the beauty & tragedy of all life experiences, all make up who I am.

Eleven years later, I also realized that not knitting is a statement that I don't need to make.  So, when my boy said "Make one!", I followed his advice.  I picked up knitting needles, and cast on.

striped knit sweater, 2002-2011

I continue cruising around our house, doing spring cleaning, which means finding new arrangements and solutions that match the needs of our family of five.  This little house of ours has undergone many remakes over the years: family life - as I've finally come to see - is all about fluidity.  Whatever solution or rhythm we find, in fact, only works for a brief time.  Then children grow, needs change, interests evolve.  All the while the seasons are cycling past, too.  The house of a growing family reflects all these changes.

During my sorting and cleaning, I came across a sweater I made for Jeremy when he was three years old.  I knew it was there somewhere, but I had been in no hurry to dig it out, even though Rebecca is now the right size to wear it.

I still vividly remember buying that yarn, on a cold winter morning back in 2002.  First, I'd chosen yarns in white and a nice shade of baby-blue, for a little striped newborn outfit.  Then I picked some very different colors, red and browns and cream, for a sweater - also striped - for the smaller of my two toddlers, who was soon going to become a big brother.

I knitted the striped toddler sweater first, but I never completed the baby-blue and white newborn outfit (here).  And when the newborn didn't come, I never picked up my knitting needles again.  In fact, all the time that Jeremy wore it, I had mixed feelings about that striped sweater.

I've had those same mixed feelings again as Rebecca has worn it the last few days.  Feelings of anticipation never met, of grief and sorrow.  Feelings of love as I was handmaking something for my child.  A part of me and of our family life that will always be there.  Feelings and family life knitted inside a striped sweater.

Third child

She's not just our third child.  She's also the child who completed our family after many years of waiting, and the sadness and tensions of pregnancy loss.  As a result, there's a big difference in age between Rebecca and her brothers - Nicholas is 9½ years older than Rebecca, and Jeremy almost 8 years older.  An unplanned age gap that we've often wondered about.  How will it affect the relationship between our children?

I don't know what would have happened if our family history had unfolded differently.  As it happened, Nicholas and Jeremy lived through the loss of their three still-born siblings, and the high risk pregnancy and premature birth of their sister.  Years filled with trips to ER, and hospital stays for me and their sister.  It wasn't the peaceful, serene and unworried childhood that parents dream about for their children.  

Rebecca turning four in a few days is a celebration for her, but also for our whole family.  Because all of us made it happen - all five of us working together.  And this is the core feeling I get when I look back, and then I look forward, and wonder about this big age gap between our children, how it will affect our family.

Remember the beat-up bicycle that Nicholas and Jeremy fixed up for their sister (here)?  Remember how she couldn't grasp the fundamentals of pedaling (here)?  Well, now she can ride that bicycle really well.  It was her brothers, old enough to calmly, patiently teach her, that got her in balance and pedaling away.

So when I look back and see the tears and the joyful moments, and then I look forward, I see that we all together are making it happen.

Wishing you all a peaceful weekend!

What I made four years ago

 

I made this lacy table runner four years ago as a gift to my mom.  Since then I've taken photos of it on many visit to my parents, thinking I'd post about it, but never found the right words.  And again, on this visit (I'm away again!), I photographed it.

While pregnant with Rebecca, I spent many hours on the sofa, lying on my left side - as per doctor's orders - crocheting away on this project.  Many hours trying to keep my hands busy and my mind empty, trying not to think whether the baby was moving or not, and whether that kick I'd just felt was weaker than the one before. 

And all along, wondering whether I was finally going to finish this lace, or whether, like the previous times, I would eventually unravel my work in tears (here).  

In the end, I finished it.  And after Rebecca was born, I gave it to my mother as a gift.  

My hands have made many things.  Some didn't turn out well, some are just ordinary, some I've been very pleased about.  But every one has a piece of my life embedded in it.

On All Souls' Day

How do you tell children about death?  How do you teach them that life and death are part of one experience?

We had a problem with this when Nicholas was 3, and my grandmother died at the age of 94, after a good and long life.  To be honest, we weren't sure how to break the news to him (Jeremy was only one and a half at the time).  So we decided to explain the facts in a very gentle way.  After our explanation, though, he'd understood that, at age 94, people die.  He started obsessively memorizing birth dates and questioning people about their ages, to see how long they had left.

When the new little brother we were expecting was stillborn a year an half later, he wouldn't accept it: this wasn't possible, the baby had not been 94!  There were no facts that we could tell him.  We took him to the window instead, showed him the clear winter night sky, and pointed to the most beautiful and brightest star.  We told him that was the soul of his little brother sparkling for him and for us from far away, but close enough for us to see him.

As our night sky filled with a few more stars (here), we realized how important it is to be able to speak to the soul, especially to the soul of a child facing the occurrence of death.  Sometimes the facts really aren't enough.

Share

The day the baby in my womb stopped moving, I was with the boys, visiting my parents.  Days later, when I left the hospital and returned to my parents' house, the little blue and white knitted outfit I'd almost finished was gone, put away, out of sight. 

I've never picked up my knitting needles again, and through the years and my history of stillbirths and pregnancy loss (here), I learned that most people - relatives, friends, even medical staff - don't know how to respond to pregnancy loss appropriately.  They often react by putting it "out of sight."

Not so those parents who have actually been through pregnancy loss.  In the days, and weeks, and months that followed the birth of our first stillborn baby, the phone was silent and not many words of comfort came.  Then I received something in the mail from the US, from someone totally unconnected to me, who was herself a bereaved mother.

What came in the mail was a fat manila envelope containing the Share Pregnancy & Infant Loss Support, Inc information and support packet which a friend of friends in the US had asked Share to send me.  Share gives support to parents and professionals; their mission is to "provide families with a positive resolution to their grief."  The package that came in the mail that day from over the Atlantic was a helping hand reaching out to me across an ocean of loneliness. 

I've added a logo and a link to Share to my sidebar (it is not sponsorship), because I noticed from the stats that this post is getting a few hits; in case some readers are bereaved parents, I want to help them get in touch with Share. 

When a small community gathers (around a broken heart)

This post took a surprising turn ... quite unexpected, really, but here you go ... a piece of my heart, of my "true self".

When we moved to this isolated village years ago, neither Tom nor I had ever lived anywhere but in large cities.  We came here looking for a life in the country for our growing family.  In the years to come, though, an unexpected thing happened.  We found that the biggest lesson we were learning wasn't about nature but about people - not about life in harmony with nature, but about life in a small rural community.

The other night we gathered together for the neighborhood festa, a little street party celebrated here every year.  We sit on simple wooden planks set on plastic crates along the walls of a quiet lane, and pass around food prepared that afternoon by some of the village women, together with wine from the local cellars.  People chat and laugh, kids run around in the darkness of the surrounding fields, which flicker with fireflies this time of year.

Most of our neighbors were born here, or married into the village from a short distance away.  They've lived their entire lives farming these isolated hillsides, and few have traveled.  Many stopped formal education early in grade-school: they've learned the lessons of life and wisdom not from books, but from eking out a living from the land, barely enough to sustain a family. 

It was they, our neighbors, who knocked at our door one cold day in February a few years ago to bring me pansies, and sat with me in the kitchen when all I could give them was my tears. They came with pansies at a time when nobody else had even called me.  They sat with me, and I told them about our little stillborn baby.

And a year later, at a time when the phone remained silent, and people on street in the nearby coastal town would look away when they saw me coming, a woman holding hands with two little boys, a woman whose belly had been big a few days earlier and was now empty, though she had no little bundle in her arms.  That time, too, my neighbors came knocking at our door, to bring us the new wine they'd just finished making.

And a year after that, when by now I knew not to expect any phone calls or any words, they came knocking at our door, and hugged me.  Was there anything more precious to bring to a woman who'd just given birth to her third stillborn baby?

They never knew about the fourth little baby, whose heart had stopped beating at the beginning of the second trimester, and nobody learned about the tiny one that I miscarried alone in my house.

These are our neighbors, farmers for generations, with whom we sat together the other night on improvised benches, and shared a meal while the sun set behind the mountain.