The Alchemy of Grief: Rainbow Shower for Baby Jack

Monday, July 16, 2012

Rainbow Shower for Baby Jack

My wonderful mother, my sister Jessica, and friends Amber, Stephanie and Liz threw and amazing and very special rainbow baby shower for Jack this past weekend. Thank you to those friends and family that showed up to celebrate Jack with Marc and I, it really meant a lot to me and was very important to me to have a shower for Jack. This whole pregnancy I have tried to do all the things I did while pregnant with Marc with Jack as well. It was so hard in the beginning to take belly pictures and get excited about my pregnancy. So many emotions that you don't expect come up when you are pregnant after losing a child. One thing I have never been able to fully explain is feeling foolish when I say things like "when this baby comes home" or "in this many days I will be holding my baby." I said all those things with Marc and they did not happen so it has been so hard to imagine those things actually coming. I have felt like I will be pregnant forever and never bring a living baby home. I think I have done myself a big favor in forcing myself to do things I did with Marc and say positive things like that because I am finally just now after nearly ten months of pregnancy starting to truly believe that I will hold my living child Jack in my arms and get to take him home.
One thing I had not done was open drawers of baby clothes and things in Marc's room. I could not bring myself to integrate Jacks things into the things I had bought for baby Marc. Mainly because I didn't know what kind of emotional state looking through all these things that I bought for Marc that he never got to wear would put me in. My mom and Stephanie stayed after the shower to help me do this as I now had a bunch of things specifically for Jack to put into these drawers. We sat on the floor and pulled out the clothes from all the drawers and I immediately started crying. It was hard but with a little pep talk from my mom we managed to smile and mix Jack's things into Marc's things....which are now Jack's things. I kept a few items for Marc's memory box and left the rest for Jack. The room is still a mess as I try to reorganize some things but I am hoping to be done with that this week. Here is our celebration of baby Jack in photos. Before the baby shower Marc and I made a belly cast of my belly with Jack as we did for Marc so I included those pictures as well.