Unconditional Love

name: Melissa

date entered: 27/02/2007

country: Australia

story:

During my first pregnancy I started spotting at 14 weeks and was booked in immediately for a scan. The radiologist wouldn’t tell me what was wrong insisting that I had to wait to see my gynaecologist, but I could see for myself that my little baby was as still as a rock. I felt numb. No one would talk to me, and all the staff kept a wide berth. When I finally got an appointment with my gynaecologist I sat down and he said “Well I suppose you know by now your baby is dead”. It was the coldest, most inhumane experience I have ever had. I went home and lay on the nursery floor crying into a softly knitted baby dress a friend had knitted. I cried like I had never cried before or have ever cried since – the pain of expected joy and birth turning to death felt as if the ground had truly opened up and swallowed me.

It was a dark time as I waited for my hospital appointment – my baby had to be removed by curette. It was a time of seeking understanding in the darkness. In my diary I wrote: “Perhaps you have something to teach me. I have dreamed dreams and had great hopes for you. In subtle ways that only I can know – I wanted in you, what I really wanted for myself. I release my expectations of you – may you have clear space, an empty canvas where you may paint your own brilliant picture, write your own music. I love you.” This was my greatest insight at this time – that our children are really never our own. We cannot project on to them all our expectations – they are with us for a while, we are their caretakers, our task is to assist them to grow into who they will be, not to shape them into the children we desire. True love is unconditional.

With these thoughts I lay in my hospital bed after the operation, and there came a moment when the room was filled with light, it was a dark and rainy day outside, and yet it was if the sun had come out from out behind a cloud and filled the room. In that moment I felt utterly at peace – as if my child was communicating to me – there was a presence asking for my attention and the message was: “All is as it is meant to be”. There are great mysteries in life – I believe every human being has a soul – and we cannot always know these great mysteries of the soul – why my child chose not to be born at that time I will never know, but I do know without doubt, that my child completed something it needed to do, and was able to share with me a moment of utter unconditional love beyond the boundaries of the senses of this life.

A year later a relative called me on the phone – in a low and sympathetic voice: “How are you today, are you OK?”. “Of course” I replied “what’s wrong?”. “Well, it’s the anniversary of your miscarriage”. I had totally forgotten, and I had no sense of sadness at all. I had transformed by pain, I had grown and found insight. It hadn’t come all at once, on returning home I still had to confront the emptiness and pain I felt within, but I did find peace, and gentle wisdom.

I now have two beautiful girls aged 8 and 6 years old – and what I have learnt as the mother from my first pregnancy is with me still – I am a caretaker only, my task is to assist my children to grow fully into the human beings they came here to be. Their life is a blank canvas on which they will paint their own masterpiece – or not.

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