I guess when other people think of us (if at all), they think of us with our three dead children, and that's it. A couple, Craig & I, without children.
And much as I hate it, that is it. The only children in our lives are dead.
Unlike other people who have had three children, we spend our time alone. We don't complain about lack of sleep. We don't plan child-friendly holidays. We don't complain about naughty children. We don't spend our money on clothes, shoes, etc. We don't wait around for school holidays, and then complain our children are driving us mad. No. It's just us.
:::
FB is driving me mad again.
Nothing has changed. It's still the same. I just get more pissed some days than others about how parents of living children have nothing better to talk about than their children. And they are so completely insensitive to others. It is so amazing, that on a social network like FB, where the whole purpose is to connect with other people, it's so bloody obvious how selfish people are.
Someone recently put the following cartoon on FB, and I was horrified. It was a baby-lost mum who posted it too.
I couldn't help myself. In the comment section, I wrote "well, I must be a really, really bad mother than". The BLM poster did not respond! Unbelievably!!
And that's the crux of it really.
I've kept my FB page fairly de-cluttered of "pretend" friends. Those people who I haven't heard from or seen for 20 years.
I want to be able to be myself on my FB page. It is one of my primary social outlets. I live on the other side of the world, in a country which is not (and never will be) my home. All my old so-called friends have long deserted me.
I count on FB to give me contact with people who know what I've gone through, why I am the way I am.
But I've forgotten. Or rather, my FB friends have forgotten. They've forgotten what it's like to have only dead children - to the extent that that the cartoon above seems funny to them. Ha. Nearly all of them have living children now. And the simple fact that their child/ren is/are alive means that they cannot know how we child-lost parents live our lives. In fact, it is impossible for them to know, because the fact that they are parenting living children means that their paths have significantly differed from ours.
:::
I still want a living child. Very simple fact. Just because all my children died, doesn't mean that I have stopped wanting that. Accepting that my 3 children are dead doesn't mean that I accept that I will never see a child of mine live longer than 7 weeks, go to school, read a book, ride a bike, and all the things that go with that.
Even though I'm 43 and 11 months old. Even though my period seems to have disappeared and I have no idea where it's gone.
Craig wants us to have another child of our own. A child with our genes. A child which would face the same risks as our Freyja, Kees & Jet. A child who might die for the same reasons our three did, whatever those reasons are.
Just because my children are all dead, doesn't mean I don't want another one.
Just because I know I can never have Freyja, Kees & Jet back, doesn't mean I don't want a fourth.
