Making Art as a Baby Loss Mum
For and with my children
A special Mother’s Day UK post… thinking of all the brilliant loss mums out there and our children, always in our hearts.
Starting to rebuild a life last summer, I was very worried that people wouldn’t want to make friends with me because I had lost so many children and carried so much pain. I knew that I also carried so much happiness and more love, and was a more wonderful individual than before, meaning exactly that: meaning full of wonder.
I want to make creative work that honours my children. I want to spend my life as their mother. Not only because I love them. But because they have made me feel at home in the world.
I was reading Andrea Gibson’s new years’ piece on how cancer gave her a “wide, open heart”. Having my children, and losing them too, has made me soften and open and understand. I understand what life is, having seen the edges of it. I get why it’s important, I know the shape of hurt, and I get what’s important about living for me. I feel like, for the first time, how to live is very clear to me.
I would not be without my children, because they are my favourite people. I would not be without my children, because I always wanted them. I would not be without my children, because of the love we made together that still exists in my heart, and that caused a young woman I was encouraging in her creative work to say to me on a dance floor, “I knew you were a mother. Joy and love is radiating from you.”
Sometimes it is very difficult to make art for them and sometimes it is easy. The difficult comes with overwhelming, surging feelings of love and loss; the ease comes with the calm in my heart in the peace of their presence.
Here are some of the things I have made that I consider art for/made with my children:
-a jigsaw puzzle they bought me; Moomin’s tea party in the woods
-a mosaic tile coaster we made at a wellbeing workshop at a local church
-crocheted clothes for their Little Sib(s) to borrow
-little memory books of thoughts, pregnancy symptoms, walks we took
If I can’t make, I also consider lighting a candle a creative act that draws them near me, that shines for them.
Happy Mother's Day!