I can't believe my son is going to be 8 years old next weekend. Where has the time gone? It just seems like yesterday that my husband and I were struggling with the car seat in the parking lot of the hospital, convinced that social services had been called to come take the baby away because we clearly were not going to be good parents if we couldn't work a car seat! I still remember the first time we changed his diaper in the hospital (the nurse made us) and it was the black poo. It was then that my husband and I realized that "oh, we don't get to take the nurse home with us?" But, we got through it. That was 8 years ago this month. But a year before that, I was dealing with the death of my first child.
I lost my first baby about a year before Aidan was born. The possibility of miscarriage wasn't even on my radar. After all, my mother didn't have a miscarriage and I had thought it was genetic, that it ran in families. My husband and I went to our 14-week appointment, hoping to hear the heartbeat. When my doctor wasn't able to hear anything, she sent me for an ultrasound. I remember sitting on the table during the ultrasound, watching at what the technician was doing on the screen, looking at this fetus on the screen and it never occured to me that there was no heartbeat. When they had to come tell me the news, I was completely devastated. By their measurements, they guess that the fetus stopped growing at 10 weeks but weren't sure when it had died. Because of this, I had to have a D&C which was scheduled a couple of days after that.
I felt completely alone during this time. Sure your partner, family and friends are there for you, but you still feel very alone. No one really understands what you are feeling, except for those who have been through it themselves. There is a lot of guilt that you feel. For me, the guilt was from me not being able to protect my baby in my body and that I allowed this to happen. I was obese at the time, so I'm not sure if my overall health (or lack of), could have had anything to do with it. I never found out and will never know why I lost that first baby. Fortunately, I didn't allow myself to shut out everyone and put my faith in God that things would work out. But it took me a long time to recover from that tragedy.
Four months later, I got pregnant with Aidan. In those four months, I had managed to lose 20 pounds so I was able to get a little more healthy for my little one. As you can imagine, I was nervous during that first trimester but it did pass without incident. On May 22nd at 6:41, my son made his entrance into the world in dramatic fashion: vaccuum delivery with the cord wrapped around his neck twice and his stomach but he was just fine. He arrived one year to the day of my D&C.
As I finish this up, my daughter is putting lipstick on me and I am in tears thinking of how lucky I am with the two healthy kids I have. My daughter just asked, "Mommy, why do you have water on your face? Are you sweaty?" Nope, I'm just thanking God for the gifts I have and thinking of the one that I never forgot about.
