A Birthday Lost

March 12, 2012

I don’t know why this date is such a sucker punch, when a healthy full-term baby can be born anywhere in a four week span.  Why I hold onto this day like a delicate yet prickly flower.

Why I spent the past eight months randomly entering BabyCenter.com to see how far along I would be, knowing each time it would reopen the wound – like picking a scab and watching it re-bleed – only oh-so-much more painful than any physical injury.  Why, while reading about the baby being the size of a kumquat, a butternut squash, a pineapple, I’d touch my hand to an empty and flat stomach, pretending I could feel a bump, a baby move inside me.

Why my disappointment, my sorrow, my grief have caused me to angrily lash out at the one person, the only other person, who could feel the loss, our loss, as terribly as I do, knowing even his loss is not exactly the same as mine.

It hurts and I ache and I cry.  And I hold it together during the days, and sometimes don’t even think about it in the day.  But the night comes and with it my loss.  My pain.  The unhelpful thoughts of “whys” and “could haves”.

They say there are reasons, biological reasons, and to that I do not even understand because there are so many odds, so many statistics (so many blessings) of nothing being wrong, no biological/chromosomal/blahblahblahal reasons and zygotes that grow into healthy fetuses, so why couldn’t mine?

Will it ever feel better?  Or will I forever think – I could have a newborn, a two-year-old and a four-year-old, or a 20-year-old, a 22-year-old, and a 24-year-old.

My girls, they fill up my heart in so many mysterious and wonderful ways.  I don’t want a piece of it to be broken, to be missing.  I don’t ever want them to feel they are, or were, not enough.  Because oh, how I am blessed by my MotherLove for them.  Oh how they complete me in a way I didn’t even know needed completing.

Selfishly, I want more.  And that, I suppose, is part of my heartbreak.  Because I know there could have been another baby for my MotherLove.  To give and expand and envelop.  To have a piece of my heart walking around outside my body [credit].  But instead of the ache of a baby with my heart outside, the ache but the joy of watching it grow, fly and love, I have a piece of my heart gone, forever.  Or at least this lifetime.  And I just hope, somewhere with my grandparents and chosen-Aunt Jane, that little piece of my heart will be waiting for me.  That that piece found my grandparents, my chosen-Aunt Jane, to hold until the day that we can hold each other.

Because I can not bare the alternative.  The chance that it Never Was.  Because how could I feel the loss so deeply if there was never anything there to lose?

My two pink lines.  My five week little bean.  My baby.

How different the last eight months would be.  How different life all would be.

And so I say, Happy Birthday, knowing full well this would most likely not have been your birthday.  Knowing that birth days indicate a life outside the mother and you will forever be inside yours.