~~~ Flashback Post ~~~
This Could Have Been So Much Fun (March 16, 2015)
You know what, this whole thing could have been so much fun! I mean really, after eons of years of infertility, at the ripe old age of forty, the miracle and amazingness of all this could just have been so fun.
But… it’s not.
I’m hiding out behind hoodie sweatshirts, praying no one will notice or comment on my thickening waistline. We’re waiting in agony days and days on end for test results, phone calls, and follow-up appointments. I physically feel horrible almost all the time and feel like I need to apologize to my husband every few hours about it because he seems to be quickly losing his patience with me when every other sentence is about how I am not feeling well. I should be climbing in bed exhausted and fast asleep within moments, instead of mapping out the time frame of my nightly sleeping pills to get me from sun down back to sun up the following day.
Instead of fun conversations into the night about decorating a nursery and fun ways to announce this craziness in some fun and cleaver way over social media, we’re talking about the heaviness of my spotting, wondering the cost of cemetery plots, worrying over who to share what information with before it’s “public” and wondering how our family and teenager is processing all this, as they are a few steps behind us in our mental grasp of this reality.
We should be frantically calling around trying to get on someone’s fall daycare waiting list, we should be flipping magazine pages and the “What to Expect While You’re Expecting” week by week chapters together, while we sit in bed watching my belly grow, talking in awe at the changes and growth going on inside me. But we’ve basically gotten no general “Welcome to Pregnancy” information, the one pregnancy book from the only nurse who’s congratulated me, is tucked far away in the bathroom closet and has hasn’t been opened. There should be doctors and friends soon telling my husband that everything I’m feeling and whatever discomforts I’m having, is all completely normal, and to spoil me a little, and just enjoy this time before there’s a new baby crying through the night needing 100% of our time and attention. My husband should be eager to touch and talk to the invisible within, but he hasn’t even reached out once to even brush past my belly.
We should be splurging now and again on a little pink dress and matching tights and glittery shoes that are just too cute to pass up… But instead we’re wiping away tears while attempting to hold back an utter adult meltdown in the isles of Walmart and Target while we try pick out the perfect light pink plush blanket to hold her briefly in, and then bury her in.
We’re not thinking car seats and baby swings or even bottle vs breast. I’m not flipping through cute maternity wear fit for fun and fashionable twenty-somethings. We’re not stockpiling diapers and washing up blankets and little socks, all things that would have been so fun to get to finally indulge in, through laughter at how old we’ll be by the time this one graduates, and dreading how many people will think this baby is really our grandchild, and gauging their reply when finding out otherwise.
We don’t have the same kind of nervous fear of labor and delivery. We aren’t going to sit in child-birth class with young adults half our age. We will sit through a quiet conversation with our palliative care team verifying and documenting what our hopes and wishes are if possible, and will carry sheer and utter trauma filled terror of this birth and delivery. We have a “due date” but no idea when that will actually happen.
Now we have the hard reality soon before us of how to even tell anyone this news. There won’t be any big facebook announcement with 200 comments and 500 likes. And how do you tell the complete stranger at the grocery store who asks when you’re due, that it doesn’t really matter… We’ll be going home from the hospital the same size family as we were as we drove there. And how do you say it all in a way that makes you feel justified and they not turning away in horrified tears?
I often find myself thinking of our birth mom. Granted this is totally different, she chose life, she chose us, but yet… both of us will have carried a pregnancy, grew a life within that nearly the whole time you knew would not become a part of your immediate life and family… We will both have been fresh moms, being discharged from a hospital, climbing into a car and carefully sitting our sore bottoms down, while sobbing from the empty ache within, as we drove away without our babies. I at least got to extend her tears to my car and my cheeks as I buckled her little baby in and drove home nearly seven years ago. She gets photos and updates and validation that her hard decision, was in fact a good and fruitful decision overall. I wonder what she thought through the pregnancy, through her body’s changes, through the conversations she had. I bet we’d be surprised maybe just how similar the two are. I don’t think that’s a conversation I’m going to ever have with her though.
I do however wonder if we do have a big and public visitation and / or funeral, if she will come… either silently with a signature in the book left for us to find afterwards, or boldly & bravely with a hug and huge matching tears… Yes, I think about these things, I’m not going to lie. I shouldn’t, but it’s the way I’m wired.
I realize I could somehow chose to make this “fun”… and it’s not that I’m not finding and allowing moments of laughter in my life every day, it’s just that it’s different. It’s not normal, it’s not ideal, it’s a constant heaviness and nearly strangling weight… and it’s not fun for me. I long to embrace this season with joyful abandon, but instead I find myself surviving in an exhausted dread.
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