Pregnancy After Loss

Dear New Mom,

You thought your firstborn would be it, that she would never know a biological sibling when you try for nearly three years to conceive. You’ll stop watching TV, stop leaving the house, stop living, fear of seeing a mother and baby walk by to rip the soul from your chest. You’ll curse God, beg God. You’ll wonder if there’s a God at all.

Then, you’ll get pregnant.

Celebrate, tell everyone you know, make a list of names and dig out your daughter’s old baby things because they need cleaned. You can’t have a new baby in old, dirty things. Thank God, your life is complete.

Then, you lose this baby.

You’ll go numb, build walls of steel so no one can really know you. Lock yourself in the bathroom nearly every night to silently scream, cry, purge, stare at yourself in the mirror and whisper words of hate into your worn eyes. No one will understand why you can’t get over it, why you can’t move on. “It’ll happen when it’s supposed to happen,” they’ll tell you. You’ll grit your teeth, smile and walk away saying, “they’re wrong.” You’ll remember the post-partum depression after your firstborn when you’d spend hours, in the dark, on the cold bathroom tiles. You’ll think you’re losing your mind like you did then. You’ll want to cut, rip the skin open to let the blood flow—let the pain flow—like you did before.

But, for whatever reason, you won’t.

Keep trying to have that baby. Out of sheer stubbornness. Prove the doctor’s wrong, prove your body wrong. For another two years, try to make that baby. You will succeed.

Then, in the early morning still of a chilly New Year’s Day, you’ll lose this baby, too.

But this time, you’re already broken. You can’t be re-broken just as you can’t put together the jagged pieces of the small mirror you smashed against your hand. Accept this baby will never happen and move on with your life. It hurts. A lot. You have no one to talk to. Curl up in a ball and never emerge from the sheets again.

But you have a daughter who needs you and she’s amazing. Get lost in her and you’ll see that a few weeks later, you’ll be pregnant again. Hold your breath through the first appointment where they’ll call it a “threatened abortion.”

You WILL hear a heart beat and you CAN breathe again.

Hold onto to the sound of that tiny, perfect, heart. Bury it inside your ears when the fear of another loss crosses your mind. You’re tired but exhilarated. Every visit you’re scared, but every visit, your baby  is still thriving. A fighter, like his momma.

Towards the end, when there isn’t enough fluid supporting his beautiful head, you’ll be in and out of the hospital, forced to bed rest and finally, induced. The labor is terrifying—the worst pain you’ve ever felt. You beg for them to kill you, instead.

When it’s time to push, don’t.

Every push kills your son. His head just lies there, stuck, and the force of every contraction doesn’t help him through. It stops his breathing. Remember the two babies lost, how long you waited for this, how much you love this boy already and when the doctor tells you to wait, LISTEN.

When he’s ready, the umbilical cord snaps off the placenta and your precious boy isn’t breathing. They work on him a solid half and hour. You don’t see him, you wait while they sew you up and ponder over the massacre that is the birthing room. They tell you if the cord had snapped in utero, you’d both be dead.

You thank God, if he’s there, that it didn’t.

And despite everything, you hold your son on his birthday … on your daughter’s birthday … because they’re one in the same. You finally get to see a dream come true.

And he’s beautiful.

~Candace Ganger

Candace Ganger is a YA author, blogger at The Misadventures in Candyland and freelance writer who used to sing, married a drummer, and loves everything New Medicine and The Used. She’s a stay-at-home mother of two, an assistant editor for Physorg.com, a Spelling Judge for Lionbridge and [occasionally] gets to breathe. Not often, though.