Tribute to My Little One

Today (November 6th) is the one year anniversary of when I found out I was pregnant.  I had gone about my day in a usual way.  Thinking I was pregnant was for once the last thing on my mind.
In fact, I had had two days of spotting so I was stocked up on pads and tampons.  Sure that that month was another "no".  I didn't even have an inkling of a doubt.
Ironically I started seeing a new therapist on this day.  In part to help me with my grief over my TTC journey.  I don't think that was a coincidence because I would end up needing his guidance immensely in the months to follow.
It was a busy day.  I had just agreed to be a Girl Scout leader one month earlier.  One month earlier I had actually left the house for a Girl Scout parent meeting so that I could sign my 1st grader up as a Girl Scout.  I left the house saying to my husband "They better not ask me to be a leader because I'm not interested."
I attended that meeting and reiterated this (in a kinder way:) when they asked for volunteers to be leaders.  Another mom, Laurie, was there and said she can help at meetings but can't be a leader.  I nodded and said "same here...I can help occasionally but I won't be able to be a leader".
The more they talked about Girl Scouts and what goes into being a leader I was reminded of my experience as a Girl Scout and how much I loved it.  I had the Brownie jumper, the beanie---the whole nine yards.  I loved every bit of it.  That's when it dawned on me that I wouldn't want to deprive my daughter of this experience....simply because there is no leader and I'm not volunteering to do it.
The TTC depressed/emotionally exhausted voice in my head said "you can't do this now...you have too much going on emotionally".  But a wiser voice inside my head said "this may be the very thing you need right now".
I found myself raising my hand....half not knowing "who" this person was who was volunteering to do this.  I thought to myself I have no idea how I'm going to pull t his off because I am feeling so depressed, but some way I will make it happen.  They were so grateful that I volunteered.  And now Laurie, the other mom, changed her mind too and said "I can co-lead with her".
I am a stay at home mom.  But my daughter is 7.  So now that she is in school...I feel a bit of an empty nest during the day.  In comparison to summertime.  
I work from home part-time as an editor.  And as an introvert, I bask in alone time.  But nearly 7 hours of alone time 5 days/week can turn out to be too much of a good thing.  Especially when you're going through secondary infertility and multiple miscarriages.....or any challenge in life.
Too much time to think.
So Girl Scouts has turned out to be one of the very best things that has happened to me in the past year.  It is rewarding.  It is an outlet for my creativity.  And in the face of not being able to conceive and successfully carry another child (thus far) it has been so therapeutic to have an opportunity to work with many happy, spontaneous, creative children, including my own, in this setting.
It has its challenges at times :)  But it enriches my soul and I love the sense of connection.
So getting back to how I got started.....a month later, we had our own parent meeting for our new troop.  It was November 6, 2012. Presidential Election night.  I came home from the meeting that night and noticed that my pre-period spotting had stopped.  
I am not one to get instincts (or maybe just not one to be in tune with them to notice them....) but I'll never forget the way I felt.  It felt like there was electricity in the air.  And I thought about the electricity of awaiting to hear who our next president would be and I realized....what if this is MY night too?
I took a test and was floored to see the word "positive".  I had seen so many "not pregnant" results in the past year....it was surreal.  I was overjoyed.  I showed my husband and his 41-year old eyes and their growing far-sightedness (literally...he has to hold things farther away to read them now) lead him to say "I don't get it...what does it say?"
"Pregnant!" I shrieked in a whisper.
I remember feeling so grateful and specifically telling my husband that "even if this doesn't work out....because I know it's so early......I am so grateful to see that my body can do this" right when I was giving up any hope that it could.
I wish I could say that that positive result was truly "enough" for me.  But as any woman knows....the bond begins so early.  And you NEED this little one to be OK.  And you feel responsible for this little life.  And love him/her with all your being even when they are just a glimmer of desire in your heart.
I also wish I could say that the days and weeks that followed were equally electric as November 6th.  But they were for the most part grief stricken days.  The RE didn't like how low my hcg started out.  But then it more than doubled yet they were still stuck on that original number.  This was my first experience with the "hcg numbers game" and the repeat hcg tests and the repeat ultrasounds.
This went on for weeks.  Could be non-viable.  Could be ectopic.
Two days before Thanksgiving (November 20th) we received good news.  They now found a gestational sac on ultrasound.  It hasn't been there four days earlier.  And my overly conservative RE now felt encouraged enough to tell me on the phone "I am feeling much more optimistic.  I had another dr. look at the ultrasound and it has the characteristic halo."
That maybe the dates were off.  And that was the reason for what seemed like a "slow start".  I knew in my heart that the dates weren't off.  But I believed that somehow, someway everything was going to be fine.
And Thanksgiving, two days later, took on a whole new meaning for us.  Something very new to be so very thankful for.
It took a few days for the worrying to let up.  We had been worrying for weeks.  But by the following Sunday I was breathing a sigh of relief.  My neighbor texted me and asked how I'm doing and I wrote "All is calm."  The next day at the bus stop I told her how I'm feeling so much more positive now and actually just completely optimistic.  Which is so unlike me :)
I drove back to my house and felt wetness :(  Turned out to be spotting :(  I called the dr. and they got me in for an ultrasound.  Which showed there had been hardly any growth in 6 days.
The dr. looked grim.  He said we would wait for a natural miscarriage.  This waiting went on from November 26th until December 12th.  Kept going back for repeated scans and blood draws.
Those were the darkest days of my life.  I would manage to get my daughter on the bus in the morning.  And get her off the bus in the afternoon.  What I did in between I can't even account for.
Cried and cried.  Sometimes in the middle of the floor.  Kitchen.  Wherever I would collapse from my emotions.
Sometimes I would go in to my daughter's bedroom and just rock myself like a baby.  I feel bad about that now...thinking that I was releasing sad energy into her room (I believe things like that).  But it consoled me to be in her bedroom.  And rocking was sometimes the only thing that helped me pull myself together.
By December 12, 2012 I was 9 weeks.  Morning sickness....that pregnancy fatigue.  All the symptoms of pregnancy but no reassurance from the dr. that everything was going to be OK.  I would ask for percentages at my weekly appts and I was told there was a less than 5% chance of everything turning out fine.  Still no natural miscarriage.  The hcg continued to climb and was in the tens of thousands.
My acupuncturist remained hopeful nevertheless.  He said it's not over until it's over.  And he would do this abdominal massage on me to try to help with the baby.
He has been practicing Chinese medicine for 30 years.  He suggested I add cardamom to my ginger tea because cardamom can help when there is a threatened miscarriage.
As a result, to this day the smell of cardamom reminds me of my little unborn one.
Every time that cellphone would ring with the latest results from the RE my heart would stop and I would hope against hope that there was miraculous news.
There would be slight growth...but not what they needed it to be.  
At my December 12th appointment they found something new on ultrasound....in the pelvic cavity that potentially could be a pregnancy and the one they'd seen in the uterus COULD be a pseudo pregnancy.  I never knew there was such a thing.  But they told me it does happen and there was a chance this could be ectopic and they didn't want to take chances.
So on December 12th, I had an exploratory laparoscopy and a D&C.  There was still no heartbeat and they needed to rule out ectopic.
I thought that medical intervention would be the worst thing for me during this time.  But to my surprise...it ended up bringing me some relief.  Some start of closure.  Or if not closure....at least the end of limbo.  That is probably the better way to describe it---the end of limbo.
What followed in the weeks and months to come was more anguish and grief of massive proportions.  Getting through Christmas was ... difficult.
Not at the same dysfunctional level that it had been in prior weeks.  But an ongoing sadness.  Tears at inopportune times.  Anger that would flare inside of me.
But Christmas for the most part was survivable.  On Christmas Eve, my daughter (then 6 years old) handed me a gift.  Something she had bought from the craft sale at school.  This stuff is usually a trinket of some sort...made by the 5th graders.
So I didn't have high hopes :) but I knew she was so excited to give this to me.  I'll never forget how I felt when I opened that present.  It was a blue fleece blanket...the perfect size for a baby.  My eyes filled with tears.
Because my daughter does not know about the pregnancy and the loss. She doesn't know that we are/were TTC.  
I feel like on some soul level...she knows.  And this was her heart's way of connecting with my sadness and trying to soothe my soul.
She doesn't have a clue were are trying for another baby.
Yet here was this baby sized blanket.  I knew immediately what I would do with it.  I would wrap the framed ultrasound (I have a photo from the one day we got good news) up in this blanket.  And so I did.  And it sits in my nightstand with poems and song lyrics and positive pregnancy tests.
I eagerly await the day when my daughter is grown and old enough to handle this sort of information.  And I can tell her what her gift did for me.  How beautiful it was.
As for the baby that was lost...I love that little soul.  I don't care if they couldn't see a heartbeat on ultrasound.  I don't care about the medical jargon.
This was the start of a beautiful life that my husband's and my beautiful love created and had awaited for so long.
I am sad that I don't have a snuggly 4 month old sleeping in the crib down the hall.  The little someone who was supposed to be there.
I am sad that November 6th, among many others, is now an emotional day.
But I will always cherish this little one.  For teaching me how much my heart can love and hope.   And for giving me the honor of being his/her mom even for such a short time physically.
I will even go so far as to say that maybe it was the soul of this little one speaking through me that day at the Girl Scout meeting......telling me "this may be the very thing you need right now". Because being a Girl Scout leader has added to my sense of purpose in life.  And as many days, because of my grief, that I felt I wouldn't be able to drag myself to a meeting...I have always found the inner strength to do it.  And I have always been so glad about it in the end.
I like to believe that this little soul....knew he/she would only be here for a short time...and so intentionally lead me to something to help feed my soul and soothe my broken heart.
I will always remember how much I craved pumpkin pie when I was pregnant with him/her.  When nothing else sounded good because of the nausea.  I am not too ashamed to admit that one day during the pregnancy I bought an entire pumpkin pie from a grocery store and ate a piece of it straight from the whole pie in my car after an appointment :)
When I am not immersed in my grief and self-pity.....I am thankful for this experience.  That as painful as it has been....it has taken me to depths I never knew I could go.   Some days "I just want my baby" and I don't care about the depths or the gifts or the wisdom.  But most of the time I know that I am a better person because of this.
I have greater compassion because of this.
True, I probably also have a greater capacity for anger and sadness because of this.
But I have learned what it truly means to hope.  What it truly means to feel loss.
And by far, I am a better mom to my daughter Brooke because of this.
This journey has taught me about both the fragility and miracle of life.  
And for that I thank my little one.
About a month after the loss, I bought a photo frame---that holds three 5x7s----for our kitchen.  I put a photo of each of us in it (my husband, our daughter and me).  In the end it wasn't hard to decide which photo of myself to use.  I found one from November 6th.  My daughter and I had just come home from our Girl Scout meeting and I had my husband take a photo of Brooke and me.
I was able to zoom to the image of myself to use for that frame.
In that photo I was just minutes away from taking a pregnancy test. There was a sparkle in my eye in that photo.  And I like to think of our lost baby as being the twinkle in my eye.
At the time...when I framed them...I hadn't yet gotten pregnant for the 3rd time (and experienced a second loss).  That occurred several months later.  But when I did the framing....it felt so right. Because it helped me feel that "our whole family" was in the picture.
My husband, our daughter, myself and our unborn baby.
"Nothing is lost on the breath of God
nothing is lost forever;
God's breath is love and that love will remain,
holding the world forever.
No feather too light, no hair too fine,
no flower too brief in its glory;
No drop in the ocean, no dust in the air,
but is counted and told in God's story."
(excerpt from Colin Gibson's song "Nothing is Lost")