At My Baby Shower He Celebrated Another Woman’s Child Chapter 30
Looking at it now, it was just a page of notes that belonged to me.
The knowledge was mine. The dreams were mine.
I gathered my materials and walked into a child development center.
After reviewing my proposal, the director looked up. “Why do you want to create a language support program for families who have lost a child?”
My fingers stilled for a moment on Iris’s footprint card in my bag.
“Because some parents never get to hear their child say ‘mama.’”
“But they still need someone to tell them that brief life was real.”
A week later, the program was approved.
I named it The Iris Project.
June helped me contact the social worker from the hospital.
The woman who had asked me, in my darkest moment, “Is there anyone else?”
The moment she saw me on the video call, her eyes reddened.
“Nora. You look so much better.”
“You’re the one who called June for me.”
“I was just doing my job.”
“That phone call saved my life.”
I invited her to be the program’s first consulting advisor.
We used our first round of funding to improve emergency contact protocols in hospitals and detention facilities.
When a pregnant woman has a medical emergency, her life shouldn’t depend on a single person who won’t answer their phone.
And when a mother who has just lost her child is discharged, she should not be pushed out onto an empty street and told to “figure it out.”
On the day the program launched, June wrote an article.
She didn’t turn me into a scorned wife who got her revenge.
The article contained only public court records, the hospital’s call log, and a single photograph of purple iris flowers.
The headline read:
*Every Child Who Left Without a Cry Had a Name.*
After it was published, letters began to arrive.
One person wrote about a son who lived for only ten minutes.
Another wrote her stillborn daughter’s name for the first time.
Someone else mailed in a tiny footprint card, saying she’d kept it locked away for six years and had only now found the courage to look at it again.
I read every letter.
June asked, “Doesn’t it hurt too much?”
“Yes.”
I carefully put the letters away.
“But hurting doesn’t mean we should forget.”
That evening, I hung a string of new paper irises by the window.
The moon wind chime rang softly.
It would never hear Iris’s laughter.
But it stood guard over the names of so many children whose mothers had once been forced into silence.