Capture Your Grief: Before Loss Self Portrait

This October for Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, Carly Marie is hosting CAPTURE YOUR GRIEF 2012.  If you have lost a baby or child you probably know her as the awesome baby loss mom who has made it her mission to help other grieving mamas by writing babies names in the sand. 

Go to Carly's Page

So I probably won’t do every day but I will do the ones that speak to me. I would have done day one which is sunrise but it was cloudy here and even though I was up at dawn there was nothing to take a photo of. 

Day2: Before Loss Self Portrait

Today’s prompt is really hard for me because as far as I have come in my grief journey over the past year it is still really painful to look at photos while I was pregnant with Marc. I look back on that woman and she is such a different person than I am today. I picked these especially because I look at them and think about how peaceful and confident I felt. How wonderfully naive I was then and I think about how great it would be to be that person still.  Part of our grief as baby loss moms is not only the loss of a lifetime of memories with our child(ren) but also the loss of our former selves. While I can sit here and say without a doubt I am a better person because Marc lived and because of the lessons I have learned because he died I won’t pretend that I don’t grieve for who I used to be.

Part of healing is accepting your loss, the loss of your child and the loss of who you used to be.

I love that I took tons of photos and made videos of while I was pregnant with Marc. Someday I know that I will be able to look at them and smile but right now I still look at them and feel the sharp stinging pain. We have this short little video that Marc took and it is actually of the dogs but I am in it spraying them. I cannot help but watch my belly in the video and I want to cry. The video was taken sometime in June so just a few weeks before he died. I cannot help but think that he is alive in there and he probably could have survived had he been taken out. I feel like I hardly know that person playing, having fun with her family, expecting to be holding and taking care of the baby boy in her tummy in just a few weeks. I want to warn her.