waiting to miscarry...

I’m miscarrying again. I barely had time to know this pregnancy, spent most of it worrying, barely believing. I wonder: had I believed in it more, would it have stayed?

It’s just so unfair. I found out I was pregnant the same day Helen died, just days after arranging my own mother’s palliative care. With all this loss, I thought sure the universe wouldn’t take our September Baby too. ...but it did.

I get caught up on dates. (Find me a woman trying to conceive (after a loss especially) who isn’t and I’ll show you my flying pig.) My LMP was December 25^th – merry Christmas to me. Little did I know it was the first of the good “sighns” (inside joke). I’ve been feeling good, for the first time in a long time I felt a little hope, and caught myself daydreaming about the what ifs. Ever since the loss of Baby M I avoid thinking of the what ifs, because they hurt too much when they disappear. I shamefully looked up my potential due date, September 30^th...my favourite day.

I love September 30^th. Every year it’s a beautiful day – rain or shine it doesn’t matter, it’s all about the foliage and the lushness of the end of season. The harvest moon, turning leaves still hanging on to trees. It’s my favourite time of year. I would have loved to have a September baby.

That ugly dark cloud of miscarriage hangs over my head now. I’ll never be naively blissful about pregnancy again. I realised that this time around, I cried almost every night. I kept rationalising that the universe wouldn’t be so cruel to have me lose Helen and my Mom AND another baby. Then I wondered if it was the universe’s twisted way to have me lose two loves in order to have one more. Every twinge scared me, every cramp, every feeling. I was running to the bathroom every ten minutes to make sure I wasn’t bleeding.

How unfair I was to this little baby, not believing – having no faith. I don’t know how to escape the cloud. Inside me though, was enough hope to write to Erinn about the midwives, and call Dr. Siren. With all that coming together so smoothly, all the care, I thought surely this was all good. I hoped enough to download two pregnancy apps on my phone, which I deleted immediate upon leaving the hospital Monday morning.

I was so unaware of what can go wrong when I was pregnant with Hannah that I had no worries or fears..., I just watched my belly grow without any question – she was coming, and she did. 

I felt a similar feeling when Baby M first appeared: there was no doubt in my mind that we would have a live baby in a few months time. That old cliché: “miscarriages happen to other people, not me”... naiveté. I thought I was safe at twelve weeks, only to have my world blown apart.

Waiting to miscarry again, knowing that somewhere in me is new life dying – is brutal. I wish I could understand why this had to happen – again, why we couldn’t have had this – now, when we need it most. 

It’s hard to accept that I’m still pregnant, but soon I won’t be. I’m scared.

I could have shared some of this beautiful thing with my Mom before she goes. Why couldn’t we have had just that?

Damn you, universe.