Due Date

This is not a blog about miscarriage, grieving or overcoming loss. It's a blog about family, the day to day ins and outs of our Boyd life. It started as a way to keep out of town family and friends in touch with our lives, and over time it's become a bit of a journal for me - a place where I can keep my thoughts and ideas documented, photos organized, and milestones recorded.

It's become a very important space for me, a place where I can rehash, and relive our day-to-day lives and the small moments that make up the whole of my life as a mother, a wife, a friend, a woman. And because this is my space I am going to write about what happened on October 27th, 2012, the day I lost our baby. It is a strange place to write from, months later on the day our baby would have been due. I look back with sadness, but also with the benefit of time. Time that has softened the loss and given me perspective to understand that even though I thought the pain was intolerable at the time I could and did tolerate it. Minutes melted into days and weeks and before long a full day went by that I didn’t think about my miscarriage. Then another day. There was guilt that followed because I felt like I was somehow betraying my baby by not dwelling or remembering constantly, and there was fear - that cold and clawing dread - because I didn’t want to forget, because forgetting would be the ultimate betrayal. Within the heartache and the deep deep pain of losing a baby before you have even had a chance to meet him, there is also a desperation to remember, to cling to the love and the life that was once so true and strong inside you. 

It took a long time for me to realize the truth that you never forget, that forgetting would be impossible. It's not forgetting, it's just the remembering that changes and reinvents itself into something that doesn't have to tear your heart out every time you look back. And so you move forward, armed with this new way of remembering.

I thought I could never get there, but today on this precious day when there should be a baby in my arms but isn't, I can say that I have arrived at that place. I know that I have arrived in that place because I am here in my space writing about that sad, sad day in October while honoring this one in April. A new way of remembering.

October 27th was painful in every way your imagination would allow you to conjure. My husband and I had longed for that pregnancy for a while. It didn't come to us as quickly as my pregnancy with Jake did, and when the moment finally arrived we met it with excitement and complete blind faith. We took it totally for granted, assuming that two lines on a stick guaranteed a baby nine months later. But similar to my pregnancy with Jake the first trimester sped by relatively normally. There was morning sickness, fatigue that had me in bed before 9pm everyday, and all kinds of salt driven cravings, but nothing was out of the ordinary. At twelve weeks I heard a strong and steady heart beat, and was coasting well into my second trimester. The thought of miscarriage, if there had been any, was long gone. So waking up to the reality that something was suddenly very wrong was a totally surreal shock to me. Within a few hours everything we had planned for, everything we had hoped for disappeared down the automatic flush toilet at the regional hospital. 

I came home from the hospital that night to Jake, wide awake, blissfully unaware, and needing a bath. Life waits for no one.

To dwell on the details of that night on this day would, to me, be just as bad as forgetting it altogether. It is not how I want to remember our baby today. Instead I want to dwell on the beauty that was born out of our loss. The deeper relationship with my son and my husband that bloomed from that grief. The wonderful faith that life knows exactly what it is doing, that no sadness and no challenge can be greater than all the joy that is infused in the every day. The joy of the life that is, the relationships the stand firm, the ground that holds you. The beauty that comes from actively making the choice every single day to go forward.

The baby we lost is never forgotten, it might go without saying but on this day saying it feels like the last thing I can do before I take another step forward, another step away from October 27th. 

Sweet baby of mine, how loved you are and will always be. For you today we danced. 

Love mama.