My Child.

So I got sucker-punched in the gut this past week. Metaphorically speaking, but way more intense than any physical act could ever be...

I suppose I should probably tackle this issue head on. I was the one stupid enough to plaster my Myspace page with baby paraphernalia before the Second Trimester... So if I was willing enough to share my happiness with (in some cases) perfect strangers, then I should put my big girl panties on and share my pain just as willingly.

My husband and I lost our Baby. I was 6 weeks and 5 days pregnant. My HcG levels were through the roof, so the doctors thought I was farther along than I actually was... My first ultrasound I saw a little comma. It was so tiny that it looked almost like a whisper. I was convinced if I reached out with the side of my hand and just ran my fingers gently across the screen, it would disappear right off the monitor. The second ultrasound, they could see the yolk sac, and they simply thought the baby was hiding, so they couldn't measure, but they swore that they should've heard a heartbeat by that point. I thought of my mother, and how when she was giving birth to me, I wasn't coming out fast enough to please the doctors' rich, white fancies, so they started prepping her for a C-section. And that's when I crowned. I was just too stubborn, I had to do things my own way, on my schedule, and to be honest, not much has changed since my birth. It makes sense that I would be carrying a child who would be stubborn and rebellious... and would do things on it's own schedule.

After that second ultrasound, I rushed home and looked at all the pregnancy websites, frantically reading blogs and message boards, looking for anything that defined my situation as normal. I felt if I could find just one woman who had gone through the same thing and her baby turned out fine, then it would be okay. My heart could stop beating like a jackhammer and my thoughts could stop hovering over the one thing that I wished in the world wouldn't happen...

I couldn't find one post-er having the same problems as me that had a healthy pregnancy.

That's when I hit my knees harder than I ever have in my whole life. I prayed to God, Jesus, Saint Jude, my Mother, Saint Anne, Holy Mary... I prayed to the stars. I prayed to the babies I saw in the supermarket. I prayed to every church I drove past on the way to and from work. I didn't even make sense to myself with prayer to the dead and inanimate objects. I was so insane imagining what was going to happen, but I wanted to do everything from stopping the inevitable. That feeling in my gut, that nagging thought in the back of my mind, that constant ache in my heart...

When I learned I lost the Baby, so many thoughts went through my head. I cried so hard I thought I was going to break in half. But while my body was useless, my head was in overdrive. I was more infuriated than I could ever remember being before. I remember friends of mine in the past complaining about how they were pregnant, and I kept thinking to myself, "I can't believe they have children right now while I'm mourning the child I could have had." I thought of all the children born dependent on drugs, who had mothers, if you can even call this person you share your genetic makeup with THAT, who didn't even care a whit whether or not their baby took a single breath, as long as they got their next fix. It makes me sick that they can breed children, while I lost my baby... And I'd already started a college fund for them.

I thought about how I found out the day after my 21st birthday that I was pregnant, and I had two drinks on my birthday. I thought about if any the fish I had ate had mercury in it, or if my body temperature had gotten too high. Did I forget my prenatal vitamins one day? Was I an idiot for sneaking a few cigarettes? So what if the doctor had told me not to quit cold turkey... What if that had been better for the Baby? What if the stress had been worse? Or better?

The questions, doubts, and self-hatred circled overhead like vultures.
In that busy hospital, I was more alone than I had ever been in my whole life...
Believe me, no one could be more judgemental than I.

I asked the doctor if there was anything that I could have done. And she told me no, that there was something wrong with my Baby. I wanted to throttle her. She couldn't be any more wrong than if she said the sky was orange! How dare she say my baby wasn't perfect, that there was something wrong with my child?!

And then I remembered that sometimes the sky is a kind of orange color... Right at the dusk or dawn time. When the world shifts to begin a new day... or when the day ends to make way for the one that will be coming tomorrow, glorious and unaware.

The best I can figure is that both the doctor and I were right.

Maybe there was something wrong with my Baby, deep down in it's chromosomes, down where no one can delve except our Creator. But there was nothing wrong with my heart, my thoughts, and my dreams. And if I have to trust in the Creator about chromosomes and genes, then I can only come to one other logical explanation:

I also have to trust my heart, my thoughts, and trust that someday I will have the Baby that fills my most sweetest of dreams.