Face jealousy and ashes

My darling Bookish Girl had her baby, a boy. We are specially attached to this one. We were there a few days before he arrived in this crazy world. We felt him kick before he came out. (I was terrified with every kick. Is he being careful of his cord? Is he all tangled in there? Calm down, baby boy, I thought to myself. Then I thought, I must be INSANE. )

No surprise. Losing a child makes you a little insane.

I mean, I was terrified to even visit. What if we brought the curse with us? Please, please let this pregnancy be OK, I willed silently.

Again, insane.

So we're joyous, and yet I have a strange detachment. And it comes down to this, and Bookish Girl is such a fearless pragmatist that she probably knows this already: I am in love with this new baby boy and yet embarrassingly, awkwardly jealous at the same time.

I've been attending church lately. It's Lent. (I'm one of those progressive Catholic, or at least would like to be. So I have a skeptical eye toward the whole endeavor and yet love it dearly. There's a special beauty in Lent, time to give something up or do something good for others.)

Last year, at Ash Wednesday, Lent's big kickoff, I was doubled over when the priest traced ash on my forehead, and mumbled the words about our return to dust in death. This was 5 months after losing Grace. It was the physical force of a blow - Grace is dust. That's all I'm left with when it comes to this baby. It was too, too much.

This year, Ash Wednesday's punch was less forceful. But last Sunday's reading about the 10 commandments - coveting your neighbor's stuff - hit me with a similar force. THAT IS ME. I want what someone else has - just not the thing people usually think of.

Frustratingly, the Bible just tells us to stop. Cold turkey. No more coveting. That's it. No gentle guidance. No instruction manual.

So here I am, buying baby clothes for this boy. I love boy baby clothes - I like to dress them up as if they were in hunting jackets at the manor, sweaters, corderoys, elbow patches. They are practically smoking pipes after I've had my way dressing them up. So I'm thrilled about that.

But this is a new me, who will never get Grace back. So now what? How do you stop -- not just wanting what you DON'T have, but wanting what other people DO have? And will I uncover that purely joyful part ever again? Or has that ship sailed?

Find new words and images to make sense of it all

I'm exploring alternative medicine - acupuncture, herbs, ways to boost my mood and energy after a year of feeling lost.

As I was sitting here drinking a terrible tasting mix of roots and herb tea for my spleen, waiting for my next period to arrive, I'm left to wonder: what story does my acupuncturist, a lovely, quiet, serious, middle-aged Chinese man, bring to my story? What do stillbirth and cord accidents mean in traditional Chinese medicine? Do they mean anything? Was my energy blocked? Was it just misfortune and chance?

I didn't find my answer yet, but just ran across this book and put in my order right away:

Finding Hope When a Child Dies By Sukie Miller and Doris Ober.

In the little taste I got from the preview, I latched on to the little snippets of the rituals across cultures. In Indonesia, she says, there is a culture that says the souls of dead babies are in forest, in the water and rain on the leaves of the trees.

There are dragonflies and angels and fairies and souls and heaven.

In my daughter's case, Grace hangs out with baby angels.

In my case, Grace is in the wind, as she arrived the night she was born, and comes and goes with the storms and breeze.

This means that she can come up and surprise me anywhere.

Once, I was caught off guard driving past the park, confronted with homemade pinwheels covering a small rolling hill, a project of a local artist and dozens of school children.

I stopped the car and got out. I had to believe that Grace was there in some way for me then, and I climbed the hill in the rain and cried and cried.

All this used to sound crazy. More than a year out, it's a lifeline.