Pride flags and empty milestones
Saturday, Jun. 29, 2024 - 11:49 am.

Today was the first day since having-and-losing our child that I woke up with an empty schedule and a clear mind. It felt good, though it also left room for me to feel deep sadness.

It was Pride Day yesterday. A great day in the city: the rainbow flag went up in my uni, in the regional hospital and in the mayor's office. I'm not supposed to be working during my leave (tell that to the hamster wheel of academia), but I attended the flag event at my uni, which was a Pride fair too. My lab had a stand there, next to the freshly created queer students association. I was proud of myself for knowing some of those queer students, we've met and talked about things we could do to improve the gender and sexuality approaches in campus.

Since I wasn't at the fair to work, I kept company for a while to -and got coffee for- the other two current members of my lab: my PhD student and a former Master's students of mine who graduated and went on to work at uni but remains involved in my lab while she makes her way to her PhD. They've held the lab fort while I've been away this month. They've conducted a few sexual and gender diversity workshops (which I don't offer, not my strength) in and out of uni, making a name for themselves as experts while representing the lab. I'm grateful for and proud of them.

Andrew and I have been seeing more people this week. We're preparing to return to work next Friday. We saw a lot of colleagues yesterday at the Pride fair. Most of them knew the whole story, one didn't and when she saw Andrew (I wasn't around, thankfully) she congratulated him on becoming a father. I'm afraid we'll have to endure some of that as we go back to work, and I must work on a script for that, one that is brief and vague, because I'm prone to give long explanations. Just look at this diary.

Andrew and I skipped the city's Pride march this year. We wanted to go, but we found out the day before that it was yesterday -Friday- at 5 pm. It was rush hour, the march had a weird route, and it was the middle of winter when the sun sets at 5 and the temperature drops below 10 degrees C. We were discouraged and we felt we'd had enough gayness at the uni Pride fair. That night I saw some videos on social media and I sort of regretted not going. However, someone had shouted hateful words at the march and thrown a rock that hit somebody from their apartment window. Jesus Fucking Christ.

Anyway, our alternative wasn't bad either. We drank wine and watched "Priscilla, queen of the desert". Having read nothing about it in advance, it was surprisingly sensible and beautiful.

But I'm still hitting milestones that I thought I'd celebrate with my son. Pride was one of those. I never got too far with a scrapbook we were making for him, but we'd gotten as far as including a photo of Andrew and me at a Pride event in Sheffield, in a page in which we both came out to him. I just wanted him to know that we'd love him for who he was. I wanted him to have kindness, empathy and solidarity for himself and others.

So I still cried yesterday. I keep observing dates, "one month since", like the 22nd when we met him, the 24th when he came home, the following 5th when we desisted. Plus the winter solstice, Pride, the 20th when he adds a new month to his age, the places we go to that I thought we'd go with him. Let's not think about Christmas just yet.

Yesterday I felt empty. Andrew and I have switched rooms. We have three bedrooms, one to sleep in, and two for our home offices (of course one of those rooms was going to be our child's). Andrew had the bigger room with the best view -a wall-to-wall window-, now I do, and with a bigger desk. He celebrates that I write and draw and like to own (and read!) books, and he said I needed the space more than he did.

My new office is very roomy, but it also hit me hard. We had to clean up our rooms to switch them up, and I felt that's something we should've done for our kid's stuff. Then I had all this space for me and I thought, this wasn't supposed to be this way. I was ready to give up my space and my time to raise our son. I'm not supposed to have all this.

I have a similar feeling with money. I've saved a lot over the years*, and suddenly I had this stupid feeling of not knowing what to do with all that money. I won't throw it away, of course, it may come in handy in an emergency. I'm not so much into luxuries, and I don't want much at the moment. We've eyed a couple of foundations, one of which is the one that supports foster families like the one that is caring for my son**... and who might go on to become his forever family if all goes well. But it still breaks my heart just to hear its name, because I associate it with the excitement of having a child.

*I'm not a millionarie... well, if you look at this currency I look like one, but it's just inflation. I don't have ridiculous amounts is what I mean, but I've always had the privilege to be able to save a bit, and over the last year and a half, I had a sound salary from an academic insertion project that earned me a grant. As it turns out, however, a university fuck-up might leave me jobless this weekend. That grant makes the government research agency pay my uni to hire me for three years, and in exchange the uni has to put me on tenure track. I wrote the project (when actually someone else should have as I'm just the "beneficiary") and I've hit all my academic goals so far, but the uni, I learned two weeks ago, did not hold their end of the deal about the tenure. So the agency may cancel the grant. I'll learn what happens on Monday or Tuesday. At the moment I'm still too mournful to care about that.

**I know I don't have a son anymore, but I can't yet let go of thinking about him this way. Sometimes I think of the first time I saw him, and since then I couldn't believe someone had chosen me to be his mom. Someone thought I could be his mom. I'm fully aware that every day that goes by, he becomes less and less the little person I fantasized about. The baby I met and that stayed in my heart will have nothing to do with the person he goes on to become. Yet I think I'll always feel like have a son out there.

It's all so stupid, isn't it? I waited for him for eight years, and he was with me for 12 days. It's hard for me to feel any sense of Pride at the moment.

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