There is a building site near where I live and I realised recently it’s nearly finished. It’s been being used as a site for materials years and I really noticed it in the early months I was grieving. As I ventured out of the safety of home, I found that I noticed as parts out were being moved around and new materials were being delivered over time. I really felt connected to this random bit of land that seemed to be a storage area for bricks for the best part of a year.

When Astrid died I felt so utterly lost, my life no longer felt familiar or lie, something I recognised. If my life before being a mother was a house, it felt like I had knocked it down when I went on maternity leave. I was embracing being a new mum and so so ready. I put lots of things behind me to leave room for my new identity and had started to build this new lovely home, one that had taken years to prepare for and was finally in reaching distance. I was there, and settling in just waiting for our new girl. I lived in that home for a while, it wasn’t what I expected as we were in hospital and had a poorly child but we were there, parents in our new life and it was all I wanted, unexpected complications and all.

Then, all of a sudden I wasn’t allowed to be in that home anymore, that house was also knocked down in an instant when our daughter passed away. I was left with two piles of ruins, two former homes that I loved in their own ways but somehow now neither were places I could be. If I couldn’t be in my new one, I wanted my old one back, yet that was a pile of bricks too, I’d left it behind when building my new one.

I felt so unbelievably lost and emotionally without a safe ‘home’. I didn’t know what my life looked like now or in the future, I saw myself, standing between two huge mounds of bricks and everyone around me were safely in their homes.

I realised somehow that neither of those homes could ever be rebuilt, there was simply no way of making them as they were again. I needed to take the bits I could from each and build something new. I probably even needed to get new materials because of how the new and old parts fit together.

I think over the past year that’s what I’ve been doing as I’ve tried parts of my old life again and prepared for the motherhood I still want again, but there are new parts that I didn’t plan for that come along with grieving a child and parenting them in unexpected ways. It’s a home that is unrecognisable to one that I’ve ever been in before and probably not one that I would have ever dreamt of, but like the building site near me, it’s getting there. The pallets of materials are getting used up, the deliveries are slowing down and the mess is being cleared away. Passers by see a house being built, not always knowing what was there before. Some see the old bits, some the new and others see it for what it is, something entirely fit for purpose and mine.

I’m glad I was able to start building the home I’m in now when I was, while I wasn’t happy about needing to build something new, it was better than remaining without one. There were so many parts of my ‘motherhood home’ that I wanted to pull out of the rubble and bring into my new one, but it wasn’t possible. This was the same with my old one, work and friends were impossible at one point but work is well established again and friends are something I’m working on. There were others bits, of my dream home, right there in reaching distance, that took effort and bravery to pick up but are now parts I can bring in. To me these look like making things for my girl, making her part of celebrations and everyday things in ways that make sense to our family. These aren’t things I need to lose, and they don’t make up for the things I’ve lost but they are something I get to have.

It’s easy to think you need to lose it all and I think our time in hospital with our girl taught me that it doesn’t have to be one way or the other. Just because she was ill we didn’t stop loving or attending to her, or enjoying the fun moments we did, just because we couldn’t have the typical newborn experience. Instead, it was natural to hold onto everything we could, even if it looked different, and that has stayed through after she died, holding onto what we can even when the reality looks different to what we hoped.

Like any doer-upper, maybe one day we’ll have a sunlit kitchen extension and I’ll pull more and more parts from our previous homes and configure them into something I can’t see right now. I don’t know which parts of my old life will come into our new one or if my motherhood house will look like it did at one point, but for now I’ll keep searching for materials that are in reach and fit into the one I’m building, and know one day it will be beautiful, if always a work in progress.