trigger warning: loss of baby, stillborn
The days have been going by dreadfully slow for the past couple of months, crawling by with searing heat that burns my skin and bringing no cool breeze to make it better. I have taken to staying inside most of the time. For the past few weeks, I have been relentlessly cleaning, and you would be surprised to find how much cleaning you can do in a home you've only been inhabiting for a few months. Leoffrith stays home with me most of the time, though I often wonder and worry if he ever grows resentful from being away from work so long, though he does spend time with Miss Nettle, learning her craft.
A couple of times I have drifted into Bree to see Cesistya and spend time with her, though I can no longer lower myself onto the floor with her. I have also taken to spending time with Byrge and his companions as they draft up blueprints and contracts and things for the barn they will be building for Leoffrith and myself. My husband has also brought home a baby tortoise, seemingly abandoned, and Byrge will make us a pen to keep him in, as well as a rabbit hutch for Blossom. I have more pets now than I have ever had in my entire life. Perhaps, next, Leoffrith will let me have a goat.
For a few days now I have been more distraught than I can ever remember being. It suddenly hit me, like a wave and I standing on a shore in Gondor, that I was supposed to return home and I did not. I was supposed to return home in the last few months of being with child, for my mother and my family to take care of me and the baby and to prepare me for whatever may come. It was a tradition that my mother did not follow, given her line of work, but that she had eagerly spoken of. I have cried so much in the past few days that I feel like I don't have enough tears left. She was supposed to dot my forehead with saffron powder, sprinkle rosewater over me, and then I would eventually return home.
Keeping my depressive thoughts at bay is the knowledge that Blid and Maddoct will be returning to Bree soon, and are on their way perhaps as I write this, or maybe they have already arrived. The need to speak with Maddoct is urgent, to tell him of the baby's upside-down position because I know that he is the best and that he will know precisely what to do. As a midwife I have delivered several babies who were breech, and the amount of how many did not make it versus how many did is what fills me with such dread.
But I am sure in my heart that Maddoct and Blid will take care of everything, and that I may not be at home with my mother and grandmother and aunts and cousins, but that there is nobody else better suited to take care of me than who I have. The true question, really, is whether or not we will have to make Leoffrith wait outside.
