I don't even know where to begin. I guess, first and foremost, I just feel overwhelmingly sad. More than sad. Kind of heartbroken. I have that aching feeling in my chest. The one you get when you lose someone you love. Or you miss someone. I'm sad and disappointed and maybe even a little bit angry. And I don't really know how to sit with those feelings. I have a life. I have kids, work, a house to clean, errands to run, a relationship to invest in. I guess maybe I feel like I cannot give myself the permission to acknowledge my pain because it takes times and attention away from everything else and, let's face it, I don't have time to be sad. But I am sad.
I lost a baby almost a month ago. I wanted to get pregnant for a long time, years off and on really. I'm 32. My biological drives are going insane right now. I know that I'm running out of time. And I really really want to experience that feeling of a baby growing and kicking inside of me again. I want to hold and nurse a newborn again. I want to have a sweet cuddly little baby and toddler again. But I am petrified of everything that comes after that. I don't honestly think I really want another child, another teenager, another person making messes and needing me to invest my already thinly stretched resources in. It's a very deeply confusing struggle to have my biological drives completely overwhelming my rational thought. I've gone back and forth no less than a million times on wanting another baby. Do I? Don't I? And then it happened. And I had about 2 or 3 hours where I freaked out and thought about abortion or adoption and then realized that as freaked out as I was, I wanted that baby. And I got to have about 24 hours of happiness before I started bleeding. And then, over the course of the next two weeks I lost that baby and it broke my heart. My fiance' and I started looking forward to that version of our future together and then it was taken away. We didn't know what to do but name our baby and tell our closest family and friends about it's existence because we were losing our child, a child that would not leave behind a body or grave as evidence of it's existence. I snapped the only photo I got of myself pregnant and tucked my positive pregnancy tests away in a drawer to save for a scrapbook page or something later down the road. And we just tried to move on with our lives.
I didn't really know what to expect with my cycles after a miscarriage and was pretty shocked that my body seemed to be fertile again two weeks later. Because of what my body was doing and what I read about increased fertility after miscarriage, I was sure that I was going to end up pregnant again this month. Before my pregnancy my cycles followed a pattern of "signs and symptoms" that were distinctly absent during the cycle that I got pregnant. And, again, they have been absent this cycle as well. I've had symptom I had during my pregnancy but, morning after morning, I've gotten negative pregnancy tests and, morning after morning, my hope has turned into despair. It's been like almost grasping your dreams and then watching it slowly slip from your fingers. Each day the answer grew louder in my heart until I just knew. My period hasn't even come yet and no one has to tell me. I just know. I'm not pregnant. I really don't understand what happened because I was absolutely convinced it was happening. I'm completely at a loss but it's not and I'm so deeply disappointed. There are all of these logical talking points swirling around in my head, trying to reason with me and convince me why this is all for the best. But my heart and the overwhelming instinct to reproduce are screaming so loudly that everything else is being drowned out. I'm not pregnant and despite every logical reason why now isn't an ideal time, I don't care. I want to be pregnant. I want my baby I lost. I want the one I thought I was having this time. That's all that I can see.
So I'm sad. Depressed. Confused. Grieving.
And I don't know what to do with that.
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