Innocence Lost

I remember when I was first pregnant with Isabella, I was on top of the world. I was excitedly buying pregnancy books and registering for online newsletters for weekly updates on my baby's development. When I look back on that time it's the innocence that stands out the most to me. How I never thought anything could or would go wrong. How I skimmed over the parts of the books that talked about "complications". It was all so foreign, it wasn't for me, my baby would be perfect.

It makes me wish that innocence could be recaptured. This is something I've been wondering since Isabella died and I started reading books and websites about pregnancy loss and conceiving again after a loss. How does anyone do it? It talks about the time it might take to grieve and work through a loss, how you never really get over it but assimilate your life to this new existence. But then when you're actually going through it and the time is passing so slowly and you think you're ready to conceive again but month after month you don't, how do people deal with that? And then how do I deal with it all over again for the second time. I really felt like it was all too good to be true when I was pregnant with Sean. You'd think I would have jumped up and down and ran screaming all over the houses with excitement that I was pregnant again, but I didn't. I couldn't believe it. So now, 9 weeks after my second miscarriage I wonder how I can pick myself up and go through it all again. I wish that I was trying to get pregnant for the first time. When everything was fun and exciting and wondering if this would be the month, before I started to dread getting my period, before it started to feel like a chore. I couldn't be that excited the second time I got pregnant because I knew how much it hurt when it all went horribly wrong, I didn't want to get too attached, I didn't want to hurt that way again. But I did, and I do, and I always will.

How do you get through each day until you're pregnant again? How do you get through each day of your pregnancy wondering if it will be your last? How do you open your heart again to the chance that it might actually all work out? I think of all the women in the world who have lost a baby and know that it's a hope not a promise but I can't even get myself to hope anymore. I use to be able to imagine having a baby one day, now it seems like an impossible dream.

I envy the women who sail through pregnancy, who get the big belly and feel the baby kick, whose biggest complaint is that their birth didn't go exactly as they planned, but what does that matter if you get to take your baby home?

I want to have a baby so badly that I will endure daily injections of blood thinner to do it, and I'm not a big fan of needles. When will it be my turn? When will it be my time?