better luck next time, kids…

I had already started picking out the cot – an antique cane one for a little girl, a modern beech style for a boy. We’d picked out some names we liked and even joked about who our baby might look like. Hopes and Dreams. But then in the middle of the night, just as fast as those Hopes and Dreams had been built up, they came crashing down when at 3am, I felt bleeding. This story isn’t all that different from a lot of couples. We have wanted this baby oh-so-much and when you’re putting all your hopes into something, you can’t help but be nothing short of devastated. I’m used to hurt, pain even but I really wasn’t expecting it this time. I thought it would ‘take’, I really did.

Feeling like I’d been dragged through hell backwards, I decided to go for a walk by the beach this morning and get some fresh sea air into my lungs, help push out all the hurt. As if flaunting it in my face, I passed by not one but two pregnant women – at different stages of my walk. On my way back to the car, one of the pregnant women had stopped to talk to another woman who was walking her dog. ‘Oh I thought it was bad enough losing one at 12 weeks,’ she said rubbing her rounded belly. ‘We actually had him,’ the other woman said. ‘He was alive and we lost him’. I think those women were there to remind me not just that I’m not alone but to toughen the hell up and remember that however shitful I am feeling right now there are people who are going through much more hell than I am. People who’ve lost their babies, not just a failed IVF attempt.

Now, we have to start all over again. I’m not sure when that will be, we’ve got back up embryos in the freezer but there is a little piece of me that says ‘what if?’. What if I can never have another baby? Positivity is indeed the strongest sense of power but it’s hard to be all sweetness and light when your heart is breaking. Well, not just mine but for my beautiful husband as well, who wanted this little peanut just as much as me and who is just as powerless as me to control the outcome.

Then there’s the heartache of the boy. When I told my 9 y o this morning that, sadly, the baby hadn’t taken, my heart ripped in two as I watched tears stream down his little cheeks for the baby brother or sister he thought was growing inside his mummy’s belly. It’s okay, I reassured him. We can try again. ‘But what if it doesn’t take that time or the next time too…?’ he whispered between breaths of tears. Well all we can do is hope and pray that it works next time. We just have to be super good, I told him as I watched his broken little face put his school hat on and get out of the car.

What if I didn’t lift my 35-kg dog into the back of the car because he refuses to jump? What if I didn’t move some furniture around because I was having a ‘redesign moment’. What if, what if, what if. But there are no reasons it just isn’t. I’m just not. Like so many try and condescendingly tell you ‘it just wasn’t my time’. All we can do now is stay positive and hope that the next time it is ‘our time’ that we do have a healthy growing little bundle of loveliness that decides to enlighten our world even more…and we all three can’t wait to meet the little cherub whenever it is the little he or she does come into our lives.

As always, Lov n hugs, Lady MamaG xox