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If you are my silver lining, my check in, my 'Happy Birthday Charlie' my 'sending you love,' my sender of flowers, cards and chocolates, my 'let's get you out of the house,' my turn up with an esky of drinks, my gratitude for you is as vast as my pain, as my love. I love that Charlie did that. I have such immense Mumma Bear pride; that my little forever two week old has managed to leave little footprints on so many different hearts.

It's the first time I've noticed joy, the real kind, the dance unfiltered across your kitchen kind, and allowed it to linger. It's also the first time, I've felt still enough to hold up myself and observe it quietly in the moment. To recognise there is discomfort in that. To be gentle on myself for dipping my toes in. For tasting something that is so unrecognisable in this self of mine.

All hope of sleep gone, I turn to the only thing that can help me make sense of all this. Slowing the thoughts down a little, to address them one by one as the collisions slow enough to make it across the page.

I was talking with a close friend of mine the other day. She was with us when Charlie was born and has had to deal with the trauma and the grief of his birth and death from a geographical distance to us. We opened up about triggers. 'Sometimes it's not even a thing.' I said. 'Sometimes it's just a sudden rush of a feeling that makes me think of him and his birth and death.' Except a lot of the time it's a thing. And it can be the things you don't expect.

This December took me by surprise. I'd forgotten how incredibly taxing Christmas can be, normally, and was completely underprepared for the storm of emotions that I would feel entering the festive season without Charlie.

I just really also want to be able to hold up my baby at his big sister's swimming lessons and say, 'Look, Gracie. Your baby is watching you.' I want to be able to tell her she's going to be a big sister again. But it turns out this journey is going to test our patience a little more; let us sit for awhile longer, as a family of four. And we must keep holding on to the hope, that it will be all the more precious, when we get to finally hold Charlie and Gracie's baby brother

Your grief always remains but the box, life, grows around it and the ball, as time goes on, hits the side less and less but is still just as painful when it does. It made sense but it didn't make sense until Nepal. I finally began to feel it for myself. Nepal blew that box so much bigger and made me realise that life can still be interesting, challenging, fascinating, beautiful.

This post feels representative of my state today. Scattered, tired, lacking lustre, creativity. It just sits alongside my quiet sadness. I miss him. I hate that I had to dust his photo frames, that I must wipe the cobwebs from his plaque in his garden, that his name on his painted rocks is flaking off. I hate that today, the grief seems to want to simmer quietly because in some ways it felt easier when it screamed inside my body and there was no option but to let it out.

I can celebrate the fact that we've made it nine months of life after baby loss and I've achieved and completed some things that the pre-Charlie Lauren wouldn't have dreamed of. But that's the thing. The idea that time is still creeping by, that life does go on and yet his didn't is a grating thought day in, day out.

And here's the thing. So many people see running a marathon as the strength. And even though I'm proud of my achievement, there's a little niggly thought that's attaching itself. I hate that my completing a marathon, perpetuates the idea that when we grieve, we must march on with solidarity. We must pick goals and chase them and achieve them.

I'm not really sure I'm clear on my thoughts yet on this one. Maybe, the hand sanitiser is just driving me to expel the pent up emotion. It just seems absurd in my mind, how Charlie had twelve days on this earth and went and Grandma has had 83 years on this earth and is going and we don't get choice over it. We are blessed if we live a whole life and yet what do we leave with?

I remember finding out the news that Charlie was going to die. My biggest panic, and almost my first thought was, 'how am I going to tell Gracie?' How do you explain to your other baby, your first born, the most precious little being in your life, that the baby that they've (mostly) patiently waited for, for 8 months, the one that they've spent hours upon hours bonding with through the tummy window, the one that they had so many plans for, is going to die.

It's my endeavour to begin breaking down the rules in my own mind about what a grieving mother looks like. She doesn't have to look sad constantly, she doesn't have to reject intimacy or to light a candle every night. It's ok to live simultaneously with those things. It's not about giving Charlie up to live life. It's about loving him through living life

This moment. How to describe it. A sudden rush of grief that slams me out of nowhere. I know the feeling now. It's like slamming into a brick wall, knowing that you are going to make contact, knowing it'll floor you, that it's kind of inevitable and necessary that you will end up a crumpled mess at the base and that in the next few hours, days, however long it takes to pass, you will need to muster the energy to somehow pick yourself back up and continue on.

For almost six months, I fought to find her again, the old Lauren. I had in my mind that I needed to try and find her again. That I needed to get the old me back but I've realised that I can't because to do so would be to pretend that Charlie, his love, his grief, never happened and that would be to treat his life and death as if it was a little blip, a minor inconvenience.

Travelling as a family without Charlie, to me, is a reminder of what we could have had. I found myself the other day, six months postpartum, alone, slowly pulling out the nappy rash cream, the spare nappies, the little outfit from the nappy bag. It suddenly struck me that I should be packing his things into the bag, preparing to go away together as a family and here I was, the quiet around me achingly empty.

How has it been six months? Half a year! But then again, how has it only been six months!? How is there still a lifetime left to feel his absence?

What if....he was and is a part of nature, that came to highlight to us the absolute fragility and blessing of life? What if...he taught us not to take life for granted, in a way that people that have experienced significant loss feel? What if...I can hold him close to my heart, my whole life and love him infinitely?

Life sometimes feels monotonous, bigger than us and maybe it is. Maybe we are here to observe the beauty of it and to fully realise the miracles that we are. The fragility of life is a terrifying prospect but also a deeply beautiful one too. You're my inspiration, my little miracle boy.

Grief isn't just the loss of Charlie. I miss him every minute of every day, I do. It's the loss of the world that I lived in. I'm here, everything goes on as if nothing's changed. And yet, everything has changed because the way I see the world, others and myself has been overhauled. I grieve that. I miss Charlie but I miss the old me.