Capture Your Grief: After Loss Self Portrait

October for Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month CAPTURE YOUR GRIEF 2012.  
Day 3: After Loss Self Portrait

These photos were taken at the end of September last year almost three months after we lost baby Marc. When I went looking for a photo for this prompt I came across these and looking at them now I think wow I look really happy. It got me thinking about how you really never know just by looking at someone what they are going through. The picture of me at the state fair especially points that out because I look so happy but I remember being really sad that day. Everyone had their children and babies at the fair and I kept thinking I should be carrying Marc around today.
It also had me thinking about how proud I am of myself and of Marc for having the strength to smile and find happiness where we could in those early days. I cannot say that I thought I would never smile or laugh again when I was in those early stages of grief. I actually remember laughing at America’s Funniest Home Videos a lot. I actually watched every episode they had on hulu in the first week or two after Marc died. I used it to distract myself from the crushing weight of everything that I was trying to process. I can say I wondered if I would ever smile and laugh out of genuine happiness and fulfillment.  Now 15 months later I know that I can. I can genuinely be happy and laugh and love and enjoy life while missing my baby boy. That pain is always there but I know that baby Marc would want his mommy to go on living. As I have said many times before, I want my life to be better because he lived and not be defined by his death. 

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.