Unintentional Poet

Those among you kind enough to have stuck with reading my blog over the years, will know that I like to write something, every year, to commemorate the birthday of Grace, our tiny girl, who didn't make it into this world, as she should have done. You can read previous years' posts here , here , here  and here if you want to! This year, I've experimented with a different form of writing, not with the aim of eliciting sympathy from everyone who reads, but more to show the long term impact of this sort of loss. I think those of us who have lost babies can sometimes minimise our own pain, playing it down, because we never really 'met' our babies, or knew them. But the trauma is real and the pain long-lasting. Everything I've written is real and true, although I've framed it in the form of a story. I hope it provides a bit of an insight into the long journey to healing that baby loss involves.   Nine years on, it's different again. I'm grateful...

This year, I had the privilege of contributing a piece to a fantastic collection of pieces of writing about Advent and Christmas, published by the Association of Christian Writers .  It is an impressive collection, with over eighty contributors of pieces that range from reflections to stories and poems.  If you want to get yourself in a Christmassy mood, it's not too late to buy a copy on Kindle - follow this link to find out more! Here is what I contributed: Light of the World     Christmas doesn’t always deliver what the big-budget advertisements promise – wholeness, togetherness, peace. Worse, if it delivers trauma, sadness and loss, it can be hard, in the years that follow, to raise any festive cheer at all. I swell the ranks of the Christmas trauma-sufferers; my baby was born, without life or breath, in the season of sparkly lights and festive joy. Then, and in the years that have followed, it has been hard to rekindle a love for this incongr...

Christmas is stressful. There – I’ve said it!   I know there are some staunch Christmas lovers out there, who jump for joy when the merest touch of tinsel begins to adorn the shop displays, and for them, I am glad.   But, for many, it is a challenging season to face, one that demands levels of energy and jollity that sometimes feel impossible to summon. It can be especially hard if, like me, you’ve faced something hard over a Christmas past, or are facing something as you enter this one.   Singing and celebrating and socialising can sit uncomfortably beside the pain you are trying to process and live through.   It’s 9 years, now, since we lost our baby daughter, at 25 weeks of pregnancy, over the Christmas period.   I have learned a lot and come a long way since that first, traumatic Christmas, so I thought I would gather my thoughts and write a ‘things that have helped me’ blog post, in the hope that it might help others too and give them some ideas for thin...