Healing the natural way...

Well so, here I am, healing - yes, slowly healing.

It's an odd process, healing emotionally from such a deep wound. You really have to work on stitching it up. It's nothing like the breakup of a relationship at all, where hurt can occur, of course, but which is a lot easier on the whole to figure out mentally than this, no matter what. If breaking up is like having your heart smashed on the ground, this feels like your heart has been tortured in the most horrendous way for years, and all that torture has been crammed into a single day somehow, and there you are, suddenly released and blinking in the light, completely bewildered. It's as though you've been turned inside out and dragged along a stony incline by a great big evil demon until there's nothing left of you. Then, you're expected to get on with life. Boy, I tell you, when I said before that you have to rebuild yourself from scratch, I wasn't kidding on little bit.

It's so confusing. It's like being reborn. You're a newborn again, staring at the world through new eyes. You know absolutely nothing about it anymore and for the longest time, you can't remember anything properly from before the event - nothing at all. That time, it seemed, was so good, it can't have been real. For the longest time I felt my entire life before Josie, with H and the children, had been a beautiful dream from which I had just awoken into a living nightmare. Not a nightmare with monsters in it, though - a more base kind of nightmare. The kind of living hell writers muse on, the kind of alien place you're only supposed to find yourself in if you deserve it. It's like being thrown with great force onto the surface of Mars, wearing only a white jumpsuit and equipped with a couple of granola bars and a vague map.

Now I look back a little bit, and can see how far I've come. I have moments though, where I am still there, in that strange landscape, wondering what the hell I'm doing. I had one yesterday where I had to work with a terribly nice pregnant girl for six hours. It was her first child and I felt unable to tell her anything at all about Josie because I was afraid of completely frightening her. I expect she'll find out eventually, but that whole fact upset me because it cast me again into the land of nothingness - childloss - a lost mama instead of a living mama among other mamas. I wanted to suggest herbal remedies to her, this pregnant girl - to nurture her like a mother would, and at the same time I felt ill qualified somehow, to do that without her first knowing my situation. As though I come with a catch - my care, comes with an intangible catch.

Of course, that isn't the case. But I almost hope she doesn't find out what happened to Josie until I am pregnant with a new life again, because then I can be totally candid about my daughter and provide a vulnerable first time mother with a happier ending than I can now. I don't know if that makes sense. It was a very, very sad six hours for me though, and I was often on the verge of tears throughout. I did find myself wishing I could be pregnant as well as her, too. Envious, I know I was. Not jealous, but envious.

With that in mind, I need to make sure I am strong this month, because we are going for it. I am ready. Healing is never really completely done - it's like life, a constant work in progress and I am sitting at that train station still, waiting for the next part of my journey to come upon me and carry me off into the distance, so that I can see what the distance looks like close up. I will carry Josie with me. We want another life, all of us. H, and I, and the space between us that contains our daughter.

A lovely lady, C, came to me today crying because she couldn't bring herself to attend Josie's funeral and felt terrible about it and so sorry that she didn't go. She'd just lost her eight year old nephew, and had felt it was too much for her all in one go. I felt so sad for her - and I hugged her back and told her it was okay. All in all, life can be very hard. She had to say sorry, and had to hear that it was okay, and it was okay. That was a very sweet conversation.

So, I am continuing my daily herbal ritual with Chaste Tree Berry and False Unicorn Root, and my Red Raspberry Leaf and Nettle and Alfalfa... All good tonics. All good for the body and the soul. Plus of course, I've been inundating my body with vitamins of various types for months, and they have been doing me an awful lot of good. Our bodies are wondrous things! They heal so remarkably. I am in awe of my body. For the first time in months - I really, lucidly respect myself again.