(Sorry if this is too much baby talk for anyone, but this just feels like it belongs in the middle of Dead Baby Land, not in the trying to be positive, subsequent pregnancy corner of Dead baby Land.)
Today, I had an email pop up in the corner of my computer screen. (I use Ou.tl.ook) and from the title alone, I knew it was a pregnancy announcement. " ... expecting our first child in May... ". That basically sums up the difference between those who have lost and baby and those who have not.
If none of your children are dead, you "expect" a baby, a live, breathing baby who comes home with you, grows up and eventually outlives you. You get pregnant and then all you have to is wait 9 months for your "expectation" to be met.
Once you have a dead baby's ashes sitting on your mantle/dresser/shelf, you no longer "expect" that you will be getting a live baby even after you are pregnant. You desperately hope that despite your personal experience to the contrary (and the experiences of all the other DBM's that you have "met") that somehow you will manage to keep a baby alive inside you for the required amount of time. You try to make plans for bringing home a live baby, despite the thoughts in your head about where you will put another urn on your mantle/shelf. You then try to come up with a way get that baby out of your uterus without them dying or you losing your mind (or both.) All the expectations are gone, it's just desperate longing and what feel like foolish hopes.
I am 31+ weeks pregnant and I still don't "expect" to have a live baby in January. I do expect to have a c-section some time in the next 7 weeks, but I don't expect a live baby. It's not that I don't really want a live baby, but there is nothing that will absolutely convince me that I will come out on the right side of the statistics this time.
5 comments:
So true. While I always hoped Allie would make it here alive, I could only believe it when she was here in my arms (and even then it took awhile to sink in). Somedays I still say out loud to my husband - we have a baby!
I completely get it. I can't believe it will actually happen and be okay either, although not in the same way as I felt fretful about Freddie. It's just a lack of belief rather than foreboding.
I keep telling myself though that it normally does go okay and that I have to allow other people their expectation of normal because that's what it is - normal. We're the un-normal ones, we are the aberration and peculiar ones. Most babies go home. Our rainbows probably will. It seems incredible and unbelievable, but it is true.
A perfect description. I found it very hard to believe that my expectation would be fulfilled. I think that many people felt I would completely relax after I passed the 28 week mark and avoided extreme prematurity again. But I didn't.
Desperate longing and foolish hope. So true. Every time I started hoping, I wanted to squash it back down, frightened that life would make me feel like a fool again.
I just kept quoting Merry's advice to myself, that to lose a baby is unusual, it does usually go just fine. Hard to believe when you have been through the experiences that we have. Hoping for you x
I was OK with saying 'having a baby' (rather than expecting) because the way I saw it we were. Just we weren't guaranteed what state it would be in.
It's so hard. Everything is crossed for you. xxx
I totally get this. I never let myself believe that I was going to bring home a live baby until we were loading him up in the car to drive home. Irrational? Maybe. But I think babyloss moms understand.
Thinking of you daily and sending out good vibes...
Post a Comment