For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to start a series of posts that delves into my experiences as a loss mama with a living child. In one respect, finding the time to write has been challenging when I can barely cobble together the time to eat and shower each day. But with so many thoughts, emotions, and questions running through my mind at any given time, it has been equally challenging to know exactly where to begin.

Then, in the midst of another beautifully chaotic morning filled with crying, cooing, and cluster feedings, I took this photo:

I had placed Callum down on the bed for a moment while taking a sip of my morning coffee (which also serves as my “breakfast” these days more often than I would care to admit). My husband came into the bedroom and started playfully prodding at our boy with his usual cheery candor. My heart swelled as I saw them smiling at each other, and I quickly reached for my phone to capture the tender moment unfolding before me.

Hours later, I found myself laughing joyfully at the photo, overcome with love for my little family. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, my entire train of thought changed. I was suddenly inundated with the image of a dark-haired toddler girl, giggling away with her daddy and brother in the upper-left corner of the photo. In the blink of an eye, my laughter turned to tears.

I had long expected that Leah’s absence would be felt during notable family occasions such as birthdays, Halloween nights, and Christmas mornings. But more often than not, I am finding that it also confronts me unexpectedly in the otherwise unremarkable bustle of day-to-day life.

Indeed, it seems that I am continuously haunted by the other life that I would be leading if Leah was here, whether she had been one of the lucky babies to survive and thrive after her fetomaternal hemorrhage, or if I had somehow gone into labour closer to my due date, before any complications began at all.

These reflections often take me down two distinct trajectories. Since it is unlikely (although not impossible) that Leah and Callum would have come to exist at the same time in the same universe, I most often envision myself as the mother of a fifteen-month-old girl in a completed family of three. Not knowing the trauma of child loss, each day I share photos and videos of Leah on social media with carefree abandon, unaware that such images may be painfully triggering for others who are less fortunate than I. I am also still blissfully ignorant enough to believe that God’s personal protection guaranteed Leah’s safe arrival into the world, despite the fact that thousands of other children are lost needlessly to miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant death each year. All in all, there is an innocence and insularity to this other life, wherein I happily pass from one day to the next with my growing daughter in tow.

In the other imagined trajectory, the one that makes my heart ache with indescribable longing, most of these factors remain—except that, somehow, Callum and Leah are both here with me. Of course, this cosmic arrangement would have required an unplanned pregnancy at five months postpartum, which would have undoubtedly brought with it a host of mental, physical, and financial stresses. But since it is not completely beyond the realm of possibility, I occasionally allow myself to indulge in this glorious alternate universe, wherein I am able to hold, kiss, and care for both of the children who shared my body for nine months.

I often feel compelled to talk myself down from these imaginings, which is what I did today. In these moments I rationalize that there is no way Callum would be here if Leah was alive, so what good is it to pine for what could never be? But at the same time, I know that nothing can change the fact that I am now a mother of two and part of a family of four. Unlikely as it is that my son and daughter would have ever appeared in a photo together, Leah’s absence must always be felt in a family that will always be incomplete.