Holding Pattern

When I arrived at the hospital in the wee hours of the morning on May 12, I waddled through the door completely expecting to bring a baby home when I left the hospital. I hadn't felt any diminished movement and labor happened spontaneously and seemed to be going smoothly (you know, as smoothly as back labor can be when your body is trying to expel a watermelon) but of course, I was wrong and we left empty handed and heavy-hearted. As I walked out of the hospital grappling with my new reality, the thing at the top of my mind was, "I hope it’s not long before I walk back in here again." One of my first questions when I learned that my baby didn't have a heartbeat was, "How soon can I get pregnant?" As it popped out of my mouth, I felt like I was coming unraveled. I was sure that everyone in the room thought I was a lunatic. My dead baby was still in my body and I was already thinking ahead to the next pregnancy. Normal people, I told myself, will tell me that I have to take the time to grieve, to process, to move on. Normal people aren't contemplating their next pregnancy while their body is literally working to end the pregnancy they are enduring. Normal people will think I am bonkers for feeling this way right now. Normal people would never put themselves through this again. But normal people haven't had stillbirths, so normal people don't actually have much of an idea of what is normal in this situation. As open as I have been about life after a stillbirth I have avoided articulating the thing that has had the most impact on me: the overwhelming desire to be pregnant was immediate, all-consuming, and absolutely desperate. I thought of almost nothing else for months. I got home from the hospital and closed the door to the nursery, not knowing what to do with it. I couldn’t bear to look at this place we had created for Sam, but I didn't want to deconstruct it because I also was hopeful that we’d be able to put a baby in there before we moved from this house. My midwife had told me that there was no need to wait-- once my body recovered from delivery and my hormones stabilized enough to sustain a new pregnancy, it would be safe to be pregnant. Probably only a few months, she said, before my body would be able to handle it. It was up to Mike and me to decide when we could handle it emotionally. I mostly kept my desperation to be pregnant to myself, feeling sure that if I voiced its intensity, the reaction would be divided into two categories of judgement: Those who would believe I needed to slow down and spend an "appropriate amount of time" (whatever that is) mourning the baby I had just buried, and those who would be relieved that I was “getting over it.” In truth, neither view would be accurate-- when your body delivers a baby, and when every part of your life has been reorganized to have a new life in your home, every cell in your body expects to be caring for that baby. I'd wake every few hours at night, feeling vaguely confused until reality set back in and I remembered that I didn't have a baby to feed, just a baby to miss. I'd drive my one living child around in the mini van we bought five weeks before Sam's birth, feeling dumb that we had so much space for a single car seat and a single stroller. I’d walk past that closed door to the nursery and feel the emptiness behind it. It's natural to want to fill those emotional and physical spaces when you've gone to such lengths to prepare them. I wasn't moving on or getting over Sam by obsessively contemplating my next pregnancy-- I was grieving him alongside these intense but biologically normal feelings of yearning to be pregnant. This desperation to be bringing a new life into our family governed my days until early October, when I learned that I was pregnant again and I traded in one set of anxieties for another.

Now 22 weeks into a perfectly healthy and normally progressing pregnancy, I don't feel a sense of security with each ultrasound or heartbeat check or round of blood work with perfectly good results. It was just over a year ago that I was 22 weeks along with another perfectly normal, healthy pregnancy that failed at the 11th hour for reasons entirely beyond anyone's prediction or control. I don't feel reassured when I feel a fetal kick-- Sam was already dead inside me and I could still feel him moving. I spent the months between pregnancies wondering when and if my body would ever sufficiently recover to sustain a pregnancy. Now I wonder how long this pregnancy will last and whether this baby will get to come home with us. Without any of the joy that typically accompanies a pregnancy, I’m just left with concerns. (And also nausea and heartburn and exhaustion.) It's a tremendous effort to force my brain to consider the possibility of how life will look with a baby in the house, so I generally don't-- I just take this pregnancy day by day and avoid picturing a future at all. I know it's self-protective, but it's also counter-productive, because it's not like having this distance between myself and whatever is in the future will make another stillbirth suck any less if it happens. It's very hard to separate this pregnancy from my pregnancy with Sam-- for one, the timeline is so similar-- this baby's due date is within a month of Sam’s first birthday. They'll practically be Irish twins. (I'm Irish so I'm allowed to use that dubious term, right?) And there's the inescapable fact that without Sam's death, this pregnancy never would be happening right now. That's a complicated thing to navigate. This pregnancy is inextricably linked to Sam, and to my grief for him, so I've just come to accept that this pregnancy operates under the long shadow of Sam's loss. I debated for a long time whether I wanted to share anything about this pregnancy at all. It seemed so much easier to just have a baby and THEN talk about it, if all went well. But when I started this blog, I did so because I wanted to keep Sam present in my life in a way that worked for me. I wanted to create a record of my grief, so that it would be real to the world even when it wasn't fresh and raw, and so I could offer the benefit of my own experience to those walking in this path behind me. So it didn't feel right to keep avoiding writing about the single largest aspect of my grief for Sam: the outrageous, nearly crippling baby fever I was left with when I lost him, and the subsequent challenges of navigating the pregnancy that came after him. Pregnancy is, unfortunately, a visible condition that people routinely comment on without concern for your feelings, and even though I have always been annoyed and offended when others comment on my body, pregnant or not, I wasn’t surprised that my three-year-old did, because three-year-olds don’t know it’s rude to mention someone else’s size. (And why would they? We spend so much time telling them how big they’re getting.) At around 18 weeks, my belly started rounding and Ellie noticed. "Mama, is your tummy getting big?" I felt lucky that we had managed to make it that long before this conversation necessitated itself, but I was worried that with a preschooler's poor concepts of both time and death, she would think that maybe this was still Sam in my belly. I projected all my own pregnancy fears onto her, worrying that she would be concerned and ask, "Will this baby die too?" or that she'd be scared that we'd be put through hell as a family again. But as she continually does, Ellie surprised me with her sensitivity and intelligence. "There's a baby in your tummy?" The question came with the tiniest hint of excitement. "Yes. A new baby. It's not Sam, it's a different baby." Drawing on what we had told her to explain Sam's death, she asked, "Is the baby's heart beating? Does the baby's body work?" "Yes. Right now this baby's heart is beating and its body works." She marveled at my midsection, and asked if she could hug the baby. "Yes. I think the baby would love a hug from you. You are such a good big sister.” Ellie wrapped her arms around my disappearing waist and stared up from my lap with a very contented, almost sleepy expression, as if she had been waiting for this news forever and she could finally relax now that she had heard it. "Mama? Can I bring this baby home?" "I hope so, Ellie. I really, really hope so."