Día de los muertos

You were conceived during the celebrations in Oaxaca. Zócolo full of marigold altars, sand sculptures, music, and an undulating parade through the street. I was just beginning to relax into the rhythm of my new home. A dream growing in my belly, transforming me. I called you Aurora because you were the dawn of a new day for me. A new cycle. A new beginning. You made the loss of my old life worth while. Gave it all meaning. A new role to play in the world. A new husband. A new country. A new language.

Yet you were gone before February set in.

I lost more than a baby back then. More than my hopes for the future. I lost who I might have become and who I had been. I stopped believing in signs. Stopped inhabiting the world beneath the surface that made everything rich and plump, dripping with meaning and symbolism. Everything became flat and two dimensional. All my road posts were gone.

I was alone when you were "born." Sent unceremoniously from my womb turned tomb with a cough. I'm the only one who saw your body fully formed, chest round and proud but painfully still. Sometimes I wonder if I might numb myself from feeling the intensity of joy in the details of living because of the fear of its reflection. Terrified to ever feel the way I did then staring into the emptiness, the excruciating pain of you ripped from my world before we ever shared the same air. It was then that you became my "Angelito."

Now I stand eight years later tears flowing fresh and cold down my cheeks before a simple alter whispering a prayer to you huddled with my arms around my family who give me strength but also stir up a faint sense that I am betraying you by loving them. My heart is heavy, my stomach constricts, and the questions explode. Where are you? Why did you leave me? I don't think I'll ever shake the sense of being an abandoned mother. Staring alone at my unborn child. The insecurity of that. The sense of rejection and helplessness. The hole remains no matter how much happiness wraps layer upon layer on top. Pain hides beneath the skin. The slightest scratch can release it like a bomb. And I am blindsided.

Angelito, are you watching us? Do you see your little brother and sister growing up in our arms and miss us like we do you? I wonder sometimes what wisdom you would have passed down to them. What kind of mother you would have molded me into. I feel less of a person for not knowing you. And the world seems less real without you here. But this is the real betrayal.

The words of Kahlil Gibran reveal the deception in these waves upon waves of feelings and doubts: "Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that it's heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain." I know that it is precisely this pain that has fertilized the soil and made me the mother I am today. So you are molding me even as I write, and I know that I must honor your sacrifice, celebrate the role you played on earth to create the masterpiece that I am living today. This is the wisdom that will be passed down to your brother and sister. If I don't acknowledge your loss, I will never be able to fully enjoy the wealth that surrounds me allowing the love to penetrate the pain and make it more bearable.