My Baby Deserves My Heart

Told by: Andie

I’m a mother, been a mother since I was 17 years old.

I have four amazing children…three boys and a girl; ranging from 15 to 19 months.

I’m still nursing my littlest guy. I haven’t had a period in a long time- since I got pregnant with my last baby actually. I have however in the past few months experienced other signs of ovulation. I’ve kept track because we were wanting to try for another baby. I hadn’t had of those signs in the past few weeks…on the contrary, I’ve felt “different”. I considered the possibility of a pregnancy. I tried not to get excited, yet, and didn’t take a test. I wanted to wait a few more weeks before I jumped the gun. Well last night, as I got in the tub with my baby, I noticed a few bright red clots. Which is weird for me in a cycle. I’ve continued to have bright red bleeding, clots, and a general sense of being un-whole.

Now I’ve spent the night and day wondering and thinking if this is a period or an early miscarriage. It makes me feel blue- because if it is, I may never know on paper. I didn’t get to celebrate someone that was and is no more.

That probably doesn’t make much sense.

I am a registered nurse, and a student midwife, so I have this curse of knowledge. I’m trying to overlook some of the tale tell signs because I don’t want it to be so.

I’ve never had a loss and I don’t know how to process it or communicate it. My entire being is saying I’m losing something important and special and unique and worthy and meant to be. I’m confused. I’m feeling emotional and regretful…guilty and sad….uncertain and quite alone.

Because I never had a pregnancy test or an ultrasound that gave me the scientific yes- I am taking on this societal NO, giving me a weight of NO:

No Andie, you don’t have a reason to celebrate, and no you don’t have a reason to mourn because there’s no certainty.

I can’t live with that. I just feel…I don’t have a good word for it…but something.

There was something and now I feel empty. My body is going through a new experience, I know my body well and this is foreign. I would have been due in February. I wanted to share mostly because I had an inner voice telling me not to, and that’s not right.

This is happening and why should it be a secret that lives only in me. I don’t want to ask permission to be sad over this, I’m giving myself that privilege.

I deserve to have my feelings and my baby deserves my heart.

Its strange how a mother can love a being she didn’t even know existed, but I do. I’m in love with the tiny babe my husband and I made, I’m in love with God’s creation, I’m in love with knowing Jesus is rocking the baby I can’t and that one day he will return that babe to my aching arms.

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BIRTH & BEREAVEMENT QUOTES

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She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I am strong.

— January, founder of Birth Without Fear

When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

— John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite.

— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

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