I am the experience that no one wants to hear. I’m the arms that no one wants to hold them. I’m the well wishes that are better not said and the congratulations they hear and think ‘I’m not like you, thank god.”

I never know whether to wish people luck as they journey into labour. Who wants to hear the my voice and remember that I pushed silence into the world? Foreboding swells within me as large as a growing child when I hear the odds stacking up and the telling signs of trouble totting up and taking the reins. Who wants to hear me scream ‘for gods sake, go and be where they can help if you need it?’

Sometimes I foresee disaster and sometimes I wonder if in seeing it, I ill wish it.

Two years and three months ago I didn’t want to hear women like me either.

I heard, when we were deep into trying to conceive, that you should not keep death in a room where you try to make life. I wondered, but didn’t have the heart to carry it through, if we should have moved Freddie’s ashes to somewhere other than our bedroom. I didn’t – don’t – want him further away from our hearts than the secret place where he sleeps. After all, how could it be true? How could he make life fail to start just by being there?

Sometimes I think I’m the ashes in any community. Sometimes I think I’m the spectral ghostly shadow. I never know whether, by being that woman to whom it happened, I make it less likely to occur again in any group, or more. Am I the inoculation or am I the germ?

I hear people shift on their seats if I speak of the things about Freddie’s birth and life and death I consider to be good. I guess, especially now Ben has come, we are into the territory of moving on. Enough now lady, stop telling us his birth was good. You have another now, stop clinging to the past. Stop pretending any of it was worthwhile or meaningful or tainted with anything other than failure.

I guess they think it is a deceit.

I never know, honestly, if it’s okay to refer to his birth, or what we learned while we loved him, as things which were good, or meaningful in any way. Does it sound like nothing more than a reason to say his name, progressively more tenuous and tactless?

I wonder now that I have Ben, if I’m still allowed to be proud of Freddie. I wonder if finding any joy or love or meaning in his life is acceptable any more.

He’s so far away now. So confused and distant and the edges of his little self are ragged and bedraggled in my mind. I always thought that dead people were ghosts because they tried to stay. I didn’t realise we made them ghosts because we let them drift to the edges of our memory, failing eventually to hold tight enough to the feel of them to keep them bright and real.

I thought that spectres were ghouls that came to frighten and horrify. I never knew I could be one, hovering on the edge of joy, offering love and support but being the one thing everyone wants to fail to see.

Here I am, my smile mistaken for a ghoulish grimace, my love mistaken for a faltering howl, my little shadow boy mistaken for an ill fortune.