Some days are harder than others.

The other day I passed a sign for the hospital that I was in when I lost Baby Mack. Most of the time I’m fine and can talk about my pregnancy, or about the miscarriage or the hospital stay and although there’s sadness it doesn’t consume me. That day, it did consume me. I felt every bit of the miscarriage again – the light-headedness  that was my first clue something was wrong, the contractions that I thought were simply cramps at the beginning, even the feeling of my body pushing out my baby that just wasn’t ready to be born yet. 

The doctor that performed my D&C told us to wait three months before we tried to conceive again, but my doctor brushed that aside and told me to try when I felt ready. We are ready, and we are trying. There’s a part of me that wonders if I’ll miss Baby Mack any less if we do have a baby. Some days I miss him so badly that I still feel the emptiness of my uterus like a wound or broken bone. I wonder what he would have been like… Would he love to read, like me? Would he have had his father’s sense of humor, or the geeky charm that drew me to D to begin with? Would he have actually been a she, full of pink dreams about princesses and horses and all the other things that little girls love before they develop their own individual interests? Maybe a champion softball player or a concert pianist, or even just a sweet, friendly girl that stood up for others when they were picked on. 

The journal that I started for Baby Mack now contains my ultrasound pictures, hospital bracelets, and short letters that I wrote to him during my pregnancy and after it ended. I’ve only taken it out once to look at it, to remember my little one purposely. I know I’m a mommy – I’m his mommy. How does this work? How am I Mommy to a child I can’t hold? How do I celebrate a life that only existed for a little while, that I never met? I feel like I’m in a kind of limbo, in an odd sort of half motherhood.

It’s days like this that I am so grateful for those I do get to hold – friends’ babies, my precious baby nephew, my seven year old niece, my two year old niece. My arms aren’t always empty. There are so many children around that I can pour love out on, even ones I haven’t yet met. 

D and I have registered for a class to start the process for foster care and adoption. I so want my own child, but for now I’m trying to be content with loving other people’s children as well as making our own.