My thoughts change so fast these days. These hours. This week has gone more slowly than any other week of my life.
Sometimes it’s impossible to believe that I’m actually pregnant, and it seems utterly absurd to imagine Christmas this year with a newborn. I can’t quite take it all in. Normally I launch myself in to new things with loads of background research, plans, and above all, lists. I’m such a planner. But I haven’t made any lists. No lists of stuff we need, no lists of dreams or plans (although I have many from the last 5 years)… no lists at all. Brian has been thinking of names, but it hasn’t been on my mind… This is the first time in years I haven’t thought constantly about how I’d handle various parenting challenges. Instead of analyzing how parents respond to toddlers in the supermarket and wondering how I’d handle things… I feel like I’m in stasis.
Partly, it’s that it’s hard to believe I’m probably growing a brand new human… and partly, it’s because I might not be. I keep ruthlessly reminding myself that I could have a dead embryo. Not even a dead fetus… at this stage it would just be a dead embryo. I could have a perfect embryo and it might die next week. Maybe I will lose this baby and it will take a year to conceive again. Maybe I cannot carry a baby to term. Maybe I will never be a parent and we will all be heartbroken many times. It’s too early to know. I hear a meanness, a bitterness in my own voice that I didn’t expect. I am almost never cynical. I suppose it’s some kind of lousy form of self-protection. Maybe it’s easier to constantly interrupt my own hopefulness with this harsh cynicism than it would be to give my heart away right now and have it broken in a few weeks or months.
It’s so hard to wait. It’s so cruel that life is so fragile.
I feel like it would be normal to just daydream about having a cute babbling infant, or a cute little one-year-old, or even a teenager. Maybe it would be normal to panic about labor and delivery. But more than anything else, I’ve been imagining how awful it would be to tell everyone about a miscarriage… how awful it would be to see an empty sac or quiet heart on an ultrasound.
Sometimes, though, I let my mind wander. I imagine passing the baby around at Christmas and watching the family get to know him or her. I imagine getting up on winter nights to calm and soothe a newborn. I imagine Brian dancing with the baby… I imagine us walking by the river in the snow with the baby bundled up in a carrier…
Oh, please, please, no heartbreak.
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