The Wood Between the Worlds

What's up with all this blogging again suddenly?  I've been quiet for these past three months because I couldn't truly be honest.  But now you all know, and so I return to blog land.

Does this year feel vaguely familiar to any of you?  Probably not...unless you are reading my blog again for the second year in a row and you realize that I am pretty much exactly the same amount of gravida as I was last year at this time.  Sometimes I can't help but wonder if last year WAS just a dream.  Can this really be happening to me?  After I lost Elsa I just wanted to be pregnant again.  My first preference was to go back in time and be pregnant with her again.  Even if it meant being pregnant with her forever...just so she could stay with me.  But since that wasn't a reality, I decided that the next best option would be to carry on with life and start over again with a new baby.  And I KNEW that if I did that, I was NOT going to take one single day of this pregnancy or time with this baby for granted.  The sad truth is that we never really know how long we have with our loved ones.  And so...I am ELATED to be spending my days (sick or well) with little Jefferies baby #4.

But it is a weird sensation knowing that I am due 2 days after Elsa's first birthday.  At least...I am due 10 days before I was due with Elsa...so I am a week and a half ahead of where I was last year.  That counts for something psychologically.  It was not really our intention to have this next baby so close to Elsa's birthday...but I think that Elsa worked it all out for us so that we will have happy times in Augusts to come...and not just sad times.  BUT...I know that this is a different year.  I have already been blessed with many reassurances of that.

In this pregnancy and with this baby, I feel permission to move on from the pain of loosing Elsa.  Not to move on FROM Elsa.  Not that I still don't miss her a lot.  Oh how I miss her!  But I feel that this next baby will be healing.  In the very first week after loosing Elsa, I knew that they key to healing myself would be to have another baby.  During the long summer heatwave we had here, we drove to the beach often and in the car I read all of the birth stories in the book Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin out loud to Brent.  We felt that it was groovy to fill our minds with as many natural birth stories as possible.  Well, I remember pausing on the few stories where someone had a stillbirth or a miscarriage and just solemnly letting it register.  So, after I lost Elsa I remembered those stories and knew that I needed to re-read them.  I spent the whole first hectic week trying to find the story where midwife Ina May lost her own baby.  It was hidden within another story.  But when I finally found it, it brought me the peace and comfort that I was seeking.  She said something about how she was filled with grief that didn't really heal until the birth of her next baby.  Right when I read that, I knew that was my path.  And reading Mary's story of her two miscarriages brought me the strength to 'keep it together' in those early days.  After her second miscarriage and third, successful pregnancy she said "I really know in my heart of hearts that choosing to be spiritual instead of depressed was what got me together enough to have a baby."  These words hit me and I knew I had to be spiritual and keep it together so that I could have another baby right away.

And I am so lucky/blessed/grateful/healthy to be able to do this again so quickly.  I know that there are many couples out there that have a harder time with pregnancy and I am now shedding tears and saying a prayer for you.  I cannot imagine the heartache of having to wait and wait (especially after a loss).  It is something I wasn't able to comprehend until I went through 9 months of pregnancy (that's a LONG time!) and then only to unexpectedly loose the baby girl that I had been planning on keeping.  I didn't even realize how long 9 months was with my first two pregnancies...I think afterward I was too absorbed with my newborn to remember how long it was.

And so, I continue to read happy and good birth stories in the hope that my trust in birth and the ability for life to triumph has not been too heartily shaken.