Do You Even Remember?

       After my first baby came home from the NICU, my  husband and I visited our hometown with new baby in tow. We stopped to say hello and show her off at my aunt and uncle's house, smiling as they cradled the wrinkly pink thing we called our little Fish. I watched her get passed around the room, nervous as a new mom always is for the simple reasons but because she was early and small, I was anxious about sharing her too much for her immune system and because she did not bottle feed well.
       My aunt chatted me up, putting me at ease with a banter about life, our jobs and home and checking to see how new parenthood was treating us. She asked, "Do you even remember what life was like before you had her?" The question struck me as such an odd one. Of course I remembered that life, barely a few months before, my daughter wasn't here and I knew nothing of motherhood. As a matter of fact, my daughter having been born two months early and spending her first month in the hospital, I had felt little like her mother at all. The NICU seemed like a very expensive daycare where I would visit this tiny alien, leaving her in the capable but very restricted confines of her incubator. Nurses would mill about feeding her, allowing me to change a diaper and check a temperature and attempt to put her to breast at times. When I was given the privilege of dressing my own baby, of holding her close, I never felt able to call her by her given name, seeing as she wasn't really mine yet. Even in that holding her I was estranged, watching the clock lest I keep her too long for the nurses' comfort, always putting her back where she was meant to be- under lock and key in the safety of that monitored room.
       As a new mom, I left the hospital without my daughter less than two days after she was born. I woke to pump milk for her, set an alarm for every three hours to train my brain to be on "baby time" for when she came home. I readied an area in our bedroom for her, packed a seat in our car to transport her into our lives even. And when the day finally came to bring her home with us, we took her on a tour, showing her the place she'd be living, the rooms we knew would soon be filled with her noises and mess and love. Soon enough, that came to pass:our lives filled with her love and mess and imperceptible squeaks and squeals.
       But I remembered the 'before' motherhood days easily. The sleep, the shopping sans baby in car seat with apnea monitor, the clothes I fit into, the brain that never forgot. My life is very much like that now. I vaguely remember those long ago days, the ones before my first baby came home and to be honest I have never really missed them.

       What I find that I miss and all too clearly remember is the life I had before I lost my son. These days are supposed to be filled with craziness, a summer of learning how to manage four kids at home, aged six and under. My mind is supposed to be crammed full, sleep deprived from nights up with a breastfeeding infant and forgetting what bills I have paid and which are still due. My laundry is supposed to be overrun with poopy diapers and potty-training panties and muddy swimsuits and 3-6month onesies. I remember the dream of that life all too clearly now and the weeks leading up to Griffin's birth when the hope and my belly had swelled so large. I remember my life before Grief and I miss it.