Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Following her daughter’s still birth, one woman faces an emotional rollercoaster of grief, love and uncertainty as she finds herself pregnant again
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She was a beautiful baby, with long black eyelashes and big dark lips. I will never know the sound of her coo or the color of her eyes. They never opened.
My first child was born dead.
Stillborn.
She moved and grew into a healthy child inside of me for 40 weeks and 4 days, only to become silent in the hours that I slept before her quiet birth.
Seven months after my daughter was stillborn, I was pregnant again.
Pregnant Again
“That’s not a line. It’s too faint,” my husband said as we stood shoulder to shoulder, examining the light blue stripe on the pregnancy test.
“Yes, it is. Look here, the directions say any line is a positive result,” I explained while pointing to the flimsy piece of paper in my hand.
He shrugged, “It’s too early. You haven’t even missed your period yet.”
“I know,” I replied. Looking down in defeat, I walked back to the bathroom and threw the test in the trash.
The excitement and innocence of this new pregnancy was held hostage by the defeat of the previous one.
Early Pregnancy Denial
Early pregnancy passed with apathy and detachment from my body. I didn’t let my husband touch my belly or talk to the “baby” that was supposedly growing there. Morning sickness was a cursed blessing. It reminded me that I was once again pregnant with a child I believed was destined to die, while at that same time, the waves of nausea comforted me in knowing that the being inside of me was maybe still living.
We waited longer than the time before to share the news — well past the 12-week “safe zone,” which now seemed naive and absurd to say. There is no safe zone in a pregnancy. Our daughter was a sure thing, or so we thought, and then she died on the day she was to be born.
Other things waited as well. Even when my blooming belly began bulging out of my jeans, I would refuse to buy maternity attire, as it was a commitment to hope I was not ready to make, along with the fidelity to love this baby. The guilt that came with loving the possibility of a child felt like a betrayal of my love for my daughter who died.
I Already Have a Daughter
The ultrasound tech asked, “Do you want to know the sex?” I turned to my husband in the dimly lit room and could tell by the look in his eyes that our answer was yes. We both nodded.
In the moments before her announcement, my husband squeezed my hand tightly, as I repeated a silent wish to myself for our second child to be a boy. For the previous nineteen weeks, I had committed myself to the idea that if this child was the opposite sex from my daughter, then this pregnancy would surely have a different outcome than the previous one. It was a delusion I hoped to hold onto to help me get through the rest of this pregnancy.
“It’s a girl!”
As her exclamation echoed in my ears, my body became numb, and my mind began to quiver. Confusion and anger swirled throughout.
Why this girl and not my other one?
Will This Baby Die, Too?
As the pregnancy progressed, so did my fears. Instead of bonding with this baby, I made ardent efforts to not make the same mistake twice of expecting this baby to be a guarantee, like I so foolishly did with her sister. But with each passing week I was blooming with baby, I grew more attached to her. A subconscious connection had grown with the child inside of me as she did.
“Please, baby, move. Let me know you’re there,” were the words I would whisper through my large third-trimester belly each night upon waking anxiously from a deep sleep.
Not knowing when the last time the baby had moved, I would count the minutes as I waited for her to kick, and sometimes I would poke and prod in hopes that she would push back. It was in her lack of response to my probing that I was certain she had died. Flashbacks to the words, “No heartbeat,” that marked her sister’s death flooded my mind.
“Please, baby, move. Please, be alive.” I was no longer asking, but begging her to respond.
Kick. Kick. Jab.
With these wiggles, tears of relief released, “Thank you, baby. I love you so much! Please don’t die!”
Giving Birth to Life
Lub dub. Lub dub.
I could hear my heart beating in my ears as my eyes stayed focused on the surgical lamp above. In it, I could see the reflection of my OB-GYN lacerating my abdomen to start my cesarean section.
Within seconds of the incision, I heard the most sacred sound, the wailing of my second daughter’s lungs gasping for her first breath.
“Is she OK?!” I would repeat a hundred more times as my husband leaned down and kissed my forehead, his tears mixing with mine.
After the nurses tossed her back and forth like a football over the scale and wrapped her in a receiving blanket, she was placed on my chest. Her skin touched mine.
“She’s so warm. So warm,” I said in disbelief that this baby was not cool to the touch like my other.
I searched my breathing baby’s face for a person who was not there, disoriented by grief and how the past can show up in the present. The dissociation only lasted a second. Within a heartbeat, my soul connected to the new little bundle of life cradled in my arms.
She’s a beautiful baby, with long reddish-brown eyelashes and big pink lips. The sound of her coo brings a smile to my face. The color of her eyes is a seductive blue. When she opens them every morning and they meet mine, my heart whispers, “Thank you.”
You may also enjoy reading The Virtue of Vulnerability: How Miscarriage Reconnected Me to My Intuition, by Cindy Kirkilis-Kramer.
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