sad

I am sad, sad, sad.  Today the email popped into my inbox, "Your Pregnancy: 19 weeks."  And as I read about tiny hair buds and the ability to hear, the tears came. I know, painfully well, what this baby probably looks like. Or at least what she will be like in 2 weeks.

This time of pregnancy is hard. This time of year is hard. I forgot that they would coincide this year. 4 years have passed, and yet it's all still there. Four years ago, on the day after Christmas, we went to our first ultrasound. I was 19 weeks along. I left terribly upset that the tech could not tell us the gender and that she had seemed passive, avoiding our questions. We didn't know for three days that something was very wrong.  Then came a whirlwind of trips south, and bad news became worse. Then, at 21 weeks, I pushed out a tiny baby girl.

She was so small. Smaller than I thought she would be. She fit mostly in my palms, with long, gangly arms and legs.  I remember the tiny traces of hair just barely visible on her head, her tiny, perfectly formed nose and mouth and feet that looked like miniature versions of mine.  Her skin was so thin it was almost see-through, revealing tiny webs of blood vessels just below the surface.  We looked briefly at "her defect" (as the nurse put it), a large lesion that split over half of her spine, but it was easier to admire the rest of her. 

I didn't know what to do with her at first.  She was my baby and yet I felt like she wasn't there, not really. Her spirit was long gone. The nurse commented that it looked like she had been gone "awhile." (I still wonder to this day what that meant. Does that mean she had gone before the induction even started?  I will never know.)  It wasn't until the next morning that the reality hit. She was really my baby, and she was gone.

There is something about these weeks of pregnancy, having that acute awareness of just how tiny and fragile this baby still is, how much she probably looks like my tiny girl....it hurts. It feels vulnerable. And just like with Orrin, there is grief too...injustice that they are healthy and she was not.

This is supposed to be a happy week. We are preparing for a birthday this weekend, celebrating the boy who is currently fighting bed time and giving me absolutely no time to be sad. No time to do much of anything, really.

I kind of just want to cry for a couple of days.