Some mornings, like today, I wake up and just lay here in a stunned kind of mental silence. I can’t believe he’s gone. I can’t believe it’s all over. I lived with this person inside of me for 8 months and, just like that, he’s gone. I didn’t even cry, not this time. I’m still struggling to accept it.<\/p>\n
I have spent so very long imagining a baby in a cosleeper in our bedroom… waiting to hold my child… waiting to breastfeed. Over and over in my head I say, “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. This isn’t how it’s supposed to turn out.” How can my sweet little boy be dead? How could he be fine one week and gone the next? How could we never get a chance to meet him? Oh we held him, we got to see him – and I thank the light for that. But what about the rest? We will never get to hear him cry, to know what kind of baby he was, to find out what his personality was like. We will never get to look down at his precious face and see him smile. We don’t even know what color his eyes would have been.<\/p>\n
I will be forever grateful that I got to experience pregnancy like I did. But how much I loved it accentuates how much I miss it now. I didn’t want pregnancy to end as it was – I thought I’d be sad even with a healthy child to love and raise. But I figured that child would make up for the loss of pregnancy, would make it all worthwhile. And now I have nothing, nothing to make up for the loss. My heart and my body aches for what is missing.<\/p>\n
I do regret not holding him more in the hospital, and not having better pictures. We did the best we could at the time, so I can’t feel guilty. But I wish I had looked at him more. I find myself looking at his pictures just to remember what he looked like. The memory fades so fast, especially since we were in such a place of shock and sorrow. It feels like a horrible dream. But I want to remember. The one thing that sticks out in our minds is his little hand on my finger. I stroked his tiny little fingers. If you focussed on his hand you could imagine that he was just sleeping, gripping his mama’s finger. That image is burned into our brains – it’s the image that haunted us at night, that broke our hearts over and over again. Den said it was good in a way, and yet in some ways he wishes he could forget, he wishes he could close his eyes without that image in the way, reminding him.<\/p>\n
::<\/p>\n
A friend, Jess, called yesterday just to talk – and to listen. I mentioned the loss of direction and purpose I was feeling and she suggested channelling some of my energy into some sort of non-profit, advocacy, or peer-counseling program. I really like that idea… I know of a few organizations relating to either infertility or child loss that I feel I could be helpful to. It would be a way to remember Devin without being wholly focussed on the past… I like the idea of using everything I have learned, everything I have gained (and lost) to help others, to cause change in the world and pay it forward. It’s certainly something I will have to look into some more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some mornings, like today, I wake up and just lay here in a stunned kind of mental silence. I can’t believe he’s gone. I can’t believe it’s all over. I lived with this person inside of me for 8 months and, just like that, he’s gone. I didn’t even cry, not this time. I’m still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[76,69],"class_list":["post-1063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ivf-3","tag-loss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}