Doors close; doors open

Last weekend I attended a baby shower for my brother's wife, who is expecting their first child next month.  This is a big event for our family.  All our children's cousins (all on my husband's side) are grown up, and live in the South Island.  They adore them, of course, and there are advantages to having big cousins, but the idea of having a baby cousin that they can see more often than once a year (or less) is particularly thrilling. 

The excitement for me is that its my only sibling's child;  a little boy that will be able to carry on our family's name; someone besides my own children to hope and dream about.

The baby shower was delightful - silly games sit alongside the beginning of the induction of a new member to a special part of society.  A number of the party were mothers themselves, and were able to reminisce about birthing their babies, and their experiences of early motherhood.  We partook in the important social ritual of giving gifts, and admiring those that others had given.  The mother-to-be could try to comprehend that these clothes and cuddly blankets are for a real person - the person currently curled up inside her, but soon to be in her arms.

On the drive home, I had the time and distance to reflect on the experience - the joy, the anticipation, the laughter.  And then I cried.

I cried for my mother and how she threw this experience away.  Although she found social experiences awkward, particularly with people she didn't know, she would have come to this gathering.  She might have sat quietly, observing.  She would have chatted with the Oma (Grandma)-to-be, she would have had a cup of tea and ate cake and had a lovely time in her own, low key-way. 

Mum absolutely loved babies.  In her extensive writing, she includes touching diary entries about times she has cared for my children as babies, describing things like a baby falling asleep in your arms as being one of the best feelings in the world.   It does bring me to understand the depth of her desire to leave.  My brother and his wife got married in March 2010.  Mum knew how determined my sister-in-law was to have a baby, and soon.  If she knew all this - knew that there were more grandchildren in her future, more babies to rock to sleep - yet still needed to go, it is clear to us that she was suffering a despair deep enough that she felt no other way out.

I don't cry for my little unborn nephew.  He will have an Oma and Opa.  He will have uncles and aunts and cousins to love him.  So I'm not angry at Mum for leaving him before he existed, before he could even meet and know her...just incredibly sad for her. 

My last post - and the one before that, too - were an study in self-pity and melancholy.  I was in a loop of self-absorbed self-consciousness, and it had to stop.  After the realisation that I had dwelled on these feelings for so long, I pulled myself up by my figurative bootstraps and began to think about life beyond being worried about my appearance and beyond being a Mum of small children.  My youngest child will start school in February and I'll no longer have a pre-schooler.   I have begun thinking about a new career and what steps I might have to take to begin on that road.

Some doors are closing, but others are opening.  After a time of incredible devastation for our family, my unborn nephew is a sign of a rebalancing.    

He is hope.  He is love.  He is a new beginning.