It's been a while between posts, mostly because I haven't really had anything to write about. Everything has just been... the same. This is the new normal for me and for us.

I started this blog because I wanted to share our story, to go some way to lifting the secrecy surrounding stillbirth and miscarriage and to offer up an account of living with grief. Not just of the immediacy of the loss and not as a reflection. I wanted to write it all, as it was happening and share some of the myriad thoughts and emotions that happen after a baby dies. I wanted it to continue on past the first couple of months to provide a picture of lives resuming after unimaginable pain and loss. I find I have less to write now though, because I've already said it. I expect that there will continue to be dips and peaks of emotion. The last dip (for the month surrounding Kat's due date) took me by surprise as I thought I had already reached a stage where bad times would be measured in days and not weeks. Now I won't be surprised if that happens again. But nor would I be surprised if it doesn't. I just don't know. What I do know is that every day I miss her. Every day I wish she could have stayed with us. I don't expect that to ever stop or change.

Being pregnant again DOES NOT ease the pain. It does not offer up new hope. That is far too much responsibility to place on the shoulders of a tiny baby. This baby is here for his or her own purpose and is wanted for his or her own sake. It will not bear the burden of healing its parents pain or giving us hope. One of the things we heard repeatedly after Kat died was "you will have another baby one day and that will go some way to healing this pain". But it's not like that at all. I didn't expect it to be and I didn't want it to be - and it's not.

We often see people with prams and say "that will be us soon" and then remember and add "it was supposed to be us now". It's a strange co-existence - that feeling again of having our feet straddling two different worlds.

I think about Kat every day. Sometimes I look at her hand and foot prints or I open the box of her things and gently look at them. Sometimes I remember some of the lovely things people said and did after she died. Mostly I just miss her and I feel *her* - the experience of her - nestled deep in my bones. I haven't been measuring time as closely as I had been. In fact it only just occurred to me that today's the 20th. I don't keep track of how old she would have been, although I don't consider her "age" to be from the date she was delivered; rather if I think about it I think of the time she would have been born if she (and I before her) had never gotten sick. I saw a baby in the shops the other day who looked about the right age to have been born in late February/early March and had a moment of thinking "that would be where we were up to with Kat". It was sad and there was longing, but I also actually enjoyed seeing that baby with her mum.

I don't suppose there's really much point to this post. Just a few reflections five months on.