a void
I try to stay out of what would have been the babies’ room. It’s the second smallest room in the house and the only one with new windows with new glass, which show the trees and the neighbors’ houses without a single distorting ripple. When I used to work at home it was my study and my desk was pushed against the one unslanted wall.
More recently, it’s been the junk room, with no defined purpose, where all the books no-one wanted to read and all the papers I needed to file ended up. When I found out I was pregnant, I planned how I would position the cribs and debated what color I should paint the walls. I even collected a few of those sample cards that they give out at the hardware store and held them up, trying to visualize how certain blues or greens would look in the light at different times of day. I started to clean out the shelves and the closet, but, luckily, did nothing else.
So, it’s still the junk room, just a little more empty than it used to be. And, though I don't like to go in, the other day I heard music and, standing in the doorway, watched L sitting on the bed, experimenting with chords on his guitar, oblivious to the nursery’s ghosts.
14 comments:
It has to be hard to keep from going back when you are trying to move forward...or is it that you have to go back to move ahead?
Wish there was something I could do but listen but maybe that is all that is needed Niobe. I can't help but feel sadness over the nursery ghosts.
"nursery's ghosts"
oh. sigh.
that's all i've got.
Ah, nursery ghosts, many of us understand that feeling all too well. I dedicated a dresser to Pooter after we lost him/her. I am just not brave enough to use an entire room. I have lost a lot of the courage and spunk I once had. Seems to be replaced by bitterness.
Yeah, it almost makes me we don't have an extra room for a nursery - just a corner of a big room. I try to pretend the armoir was really always meant to store junk and that object under my bed is not the attachment that makes it a changing table.
There's a room in my house like that. Full of ghosts. I rarely go in there. My husband has turned into an office for himself. I don't understand how he can can there at all.
We used to use the room downstairs as our bedroom. The plan was that it would become the nursery, and the adjacent room--which we had been using as a family room--would become our master suite.
A month or so after we lost William I woke up and couldn't stand another night in bed in what was supposed to be his nursery. We moved our bedroom upstairs, to a room that had been used as Mr. C's office. Now the entire downstairs is Mr. C's office/studio. The "nursery" holds a sofa and tv--used as a viewing room for his film projects and a place to play X-box. I almost never go down there.
The would-be nursuries seem to trigger sadness and grief over the loss experienced. And that is dealt with behaviorally by avoiding those places where one might be reminded again of the loss. So the grief cycle plays over and over like an eight track player until.....?
Maybe he wasn't so oblivious to the ghosts? Just responding to them in a different way?
We were in the midst of adding another bedroom to our house in anticipation of two more children, when we lost them. Suddenly we had one more bedroom than we needed and we actually had no idea where anyone should be. Our oldest son still wanted his new room, so we let him move in there. But that meant an empty room down the hall from us. It was hard. My heart feels your sorrow and emptiness.
Now that room is full again. But sometimes when the light is dim, and I am feeling sentimental, I will close my eyes and picture that room with two cribs, instead of one. A tiny piece of that nursery will always be theirs.
I, too, avoid the would-be babies' room like the plague... it once held such potential, such hope, now it's just a spare room for guests to sleep in.
beautiful...
I know what you mean. We bought a house while I was pregnant the second time and it's so hard not to think about what our plans were for the different rooms.
I may write a whole separate post about or baby room some day. It was Monkey's first room, and there's just no way to trick myself into not thinking about what it is. It's a hard place for me, and I have cried and cried in there. But now, on occasion, I can actually smile at it.
It's one of the things I had a tough time with when we moved from our old house seven years ago to a new house -- leaving behind the memories and the ghost of a child I never got to meet.
This is another one I'm responding to from my experience of temporary loss--during my NICU-mom time, one corner of our room was the pumping corner. I used it until Z. no longer needed mamamilk at school, but because I started while she was gone from us, pumping was always sad, rather than functional. The rocking chair was there, but I almost never nursed her in it.
The corner was full of junk for a year, until Z.'s bed finally moved next to one of the walls that forms the corner. Now it's where her stuffed animals live, but I still feel the presence of the rocker and collection bottles.
Sometimes I experience Z. as the child who came after the baby who was taken from me.
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