Three Times a Mom

One year ago today, I found out that I was carrying this precious little nugget. I'd love to tell you about the happy tears I cried, the jumping-up-and-down-joy I felt, the overwhelming gratitude; but that would be a lie. I was crushed. Devastated. Terrified. You see, just two short months before, I'd been in surgery to remove the remains of the last little life we had created but that my body had not sustained. After two years of trying and two miscarriages, I was traumatized and wrung out and I had no other context for pregnancy than pain. I wanted so badly to be pregnant, but when I saw that second line on the test, all I could think was, "I'm going to have another miscarriage and I won't survive it this time." The first word out of my mouth was a curse word, I called my husband crying, and I spent the weekend (and a few more weeks after that) in a depressive funk. It took me months to feel comfortable and confident and to stop being terrified of what was happening inside me. I wrote this (or rather word-vomited it) the day I found out about Leo and I've never shared it with anyone until now.

Three Times a Mom
Today I am three times a mom.

Today I saw two lines and said, “shit.”

Today; dread and fear. Nothing else.

I’ve already been made mom twice.

The first bled from me while I sat helpless. In pain. Confused. So afraid.

The second clung to me, even after she had stopped growing; her life over before it began. So he became nothing. Nothing but matter, removed with a surgeon’s tools. Discarded.

Heaving, sobbing, on the floor of my shower again; empty, lifeless, alone with myself because my baby isn’t with me anymore. Screaming. Fists pounding the wall. No one to hear me. No one hears me when I pray.

“God, I beg you protect my baby. I won’t live through this again.” That baby? Dead. No one hears me.

Today I look ahead. I see pain in my gut and bloody mess and comatose and hyperventilatingIcan’tbreathebecauseithurtstoomuchtoexist.

Miscarriage. Infertility. They have stolen so many of my yesterdays and obliterated my dreams for tomorrow.

Today? I am pregnant, but they've stolen that from me too.

Pretty heartbreaking to look back on. Very honest and very real. During that season, I understood Rose's words to Jack on the deck of the Titanic (yes, I am a 90s baby about to reference a DiCaprio movie), "And all the while I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a crowded room screaming at the top of my lungs and no one even looks up." Even though I was surrounded by people who loved me (and a husband who was not afraid of the pain but who laid on the floor next to me), I felt like no one could really grasp the depths of my anguish. I felt completely alone with a self that I hated; trapped in a body that kept betraying me. I remember the sharpness and the loneliness of that specific grief a little to clearly. And my heart breaks over and over again for all of the women still stuck in those trenches.  

Today I look up from my keyboard to see this tiny miracle sleeping in his bouncer and I feel so many things; relief (he made it!!), awe, gratitude, and mostly, deep soul level healing. Leo will never understand how much I adore him, what it cost me to meet him, or that he has given me so much more than I will EVER give him. The waiting and the pain will never be erased from my memory. Nothing will ever make those losses okay, but there is so much healing in knowing Leo. If either of my other two babies had made it, he wouldn't exist. That doesn't make it okay that they're gone. Nothing could make that okay, but Leo somehow makes that sacrifice a little easier to bear. I can't even imagine a world without him in it.

This baby is everything I've wanted and so much more. A whole person with his own thoughts and ideas and desires. The biggest smiles and these eyes that pierce straight to my heart when he looks at me. Ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes (Okay, not tiny fingers. He has really big hands for a baby). Little snorts, attempts at early laughter, even the crying is perfect. When he's really upset and he screws up his whole little face and starts crying so hard he can barely breathe, it breaks my heart. I want to cry too. But he sounds so alive, so full of emotion, so healthy, that I'm grateful for even the meltdowns. I'm so grateful that my son made it out of me whole and that he has all of these feelings and ways to express them. It feels so profound just to watch him breathe while he sleeps, to feed him, to see him open his eyes after a nap. He's alive. He's whole. He's here. And he's mine. Nothing compares.