Dear baby

Last night I dreamt that I was sitting on a wooden bench opposite Adrianne Lenker. On a bench telling her about my tattoo of the words she sings to me every other day, marked now on my upper arm. I got the tattoo for you, because I knew I needed you to be outside of my skin somewhere. And now, today, I think it’s funny that it says I will not give you to the tide. Because, now, today, all I feel is that you are ready to go to the tide. And I have to let you, don’t I?

But maybe I knew that all along. I keep thinking about Al Green as much as I am thinking about the water. I am thinking about the songs I ask him to sing me when I am trying to let something go the most. Because he makes a whole night, he makes one more whole night for the good times. Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together. I just learnt when I googled to check the lyrics that Al Green didn’t write them or sing them the first time - but he sings them to me. It was Kris Kristofferson. Just FYI. So it’s his voice now and I am walking to the end of something. You feel it don’t you?

I have one more day on my pregnancy yoga course. And I thought at the time that I was signing up because being pregnant made me realise how interesting this work is. But I wonder now if I signed up so that I could stay with you. And for these weekends on Zoom I’ve been able to put my hands on my belly and the teacher says breathe into your baby - so I do. Even though you were gone from there. But it’s interesting to me that I got my period on all three weekends of the course - even though it was 5 days early, but it came each time so the dull ache of my womb could remind me of you. So now I know tomorrow is the last night I will talk to you like that - tomorrow is that last day to pretend I’m still with you because you’re ready to go now aren’t you. And I’m bleeding.

You’ve been so close, but I can feel your tide is trying to take you further into the sea. And I can feel the grace that I am trying to muster from inside of my possession to let you go. I know how to dig my nails into my hands and I know how to cling with all of my teeth. Is that why my jaw aches in the morning because I’m grinding them. But can you help me open my fingers and let you slip because you’re ready to go. It feels actually like that is what it is, you came here because we had something to let go of together.

I found a song this week that someone wrote for an imagined baby. A man wrote for a baby he didn’t know was real or not real. And I can’t stop playing the line that it is funnier that I would miss you. That’s how it is as I knew it would be when I had you. I knew you weren’t staying and I knew I would miss you even though it was me that took the pills that would make you leave. I pray for you though - you know that I will always pray for you. And - I’m proud of you. You know that I will always be proud of you. At night I often look through my phone at pictures taken when I was pregnant and didn’t know, and pictures I took when i was pregnant and did know. And I love to think you were then, you were with me, and wasn’t I beautiful?

You’re proud of me too aren’t you? At the end of yoga today, we had to imagine the hands of our mother on our shoulders and her mother’s on her and her mothers on hers. And there we were in a line - and there you were ahead of me, just in different colours. Just in a different form. And I think of all of us in that line and I think how I’ll always hold your space. Even though. Even though.

Dad told me about something he heard on the radio, you know how he is always saying about something he heard on the radio. But this piece was from a jazz musician talking about his father’s music. It was about the sadness of wisdom. It was about the grief of knowing. And I can’t know what he meant and what his father meant, but I know it exactly. I know exactly something now, around the back of life - so close to life and so close to death. We went there didn’t we.

Anyway, we let each other go when you left my body. When we went inside a vortex together for enough hours for you to leave as you did. And I wonder if I had let you grow to nine months you would have left my body the same way and I would have spent our lifetimes trying to let you go in another way - wouldn’t I? But we weren’t ready for that. So now, it feels like you’re asking me to do what any good mother must do. Like you are asking me to let you go where you are meant to go. So I know there is something about tomorrow and the end of this road, there is a goodbye.

And I wanted to write to you and so much I thought I need to read this to you. And I had to go to the water today, I had to hold my head under there and see the top layer of the water from behind. And it will always be the most beautiful place on earth, the underside of water. I had to go to the water because all I can think about is the water today. All I can think about is what the tide brings in. And all I can think about is what the tide claims back. And all I can think about is how the only way to be in the ocean is to surrender. And all I can think is that the only way to love is let go.

So go.