Major Breakthrough

Today marks 22weeks. Getting this far with my sanity in tact has required quite a feat of mental gymnastics. Mostly it's meant completely distancing myself from the baby and consciously not allowing myself to bond with him. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that, but it is the truth.

I am a planner by nature. The type A-personality, control-freak kind of person who over-plans and over-analyzes every big event in life. With my other pregnancies, I indulged in all the fun planning practically 10 minutes after peeing on the pregnancy test! I bought every baby book that Borders carried, poured through all the baby name websites searching for just the right choice, researched every detail about breastfeeding, excitedly created baby registries, and spent endless hours designing the perfect nursery.

With Gracie, all the planning and preparation paid off. With Isaac, not so much. Coming home to a room of baby things when you no longer have a baby ..... well that's just torture. It's been over two years, and I haven't been able to even *look* at that room since then. Staring at the empty crib sitting there, and envisioning how it should have looked with the perfect shade of blue on the walls, the softest chenille bumper pads and rich silk drapes .... it was all more than my heart could handle. So, I did what any weak-minded grieving mother would do: I shut the door and simply refused to deal with it. Every now and then we would open the door, just long enough to throw in a box of outgrown clothes waiting to be donated, or an empty crate we needed to dispose of. It became a quasi-storage room really.

But always with the door closed.

Since becoming pregnant again, I have instinctively made no plans. People will excitedly ask me things like, "have you picked out a name?", "are you gonna paint the room blue?", "when will you have a baby shower?" ..... each time I can only smile and shrug my shoulders. No plans. No names. No nursery decor. No showers. I simply can not bring myself to do it. I am too afraid.

But something changed last night. I couldn't sleep. I literally laid in bed, wide awake, ALL NIGHT long. My brain was running a million miles an hour and I couldn't figure out a way to turn it off. I was overcome with a feeling of guilt for refusing to bond with an innocent baby. *My* baby. And suddenly an urgent need flooded me: a need to make up for lost time. I laid there, desperate to fall asleep, until about 5:00am. At that point I finally gave up trying. I quietly tip-toed out of bed, walked across the hall to the dreaded room, and opened the door.

Then, I did something even more heroic: I sat down right in the middle of those 4-foot stacks of boxes, and I began cleaning. You should have seen James' face when he woke up a few hours later for work and found me there.

For nearly twelve hours I have sorted, organized, and disposed of the mess .... all the while convincing myself that it's way past time I get over it. It was a bit like a 12-hour pep talk inside my head: I can't let fear rob me of any more of my pregnancy ... This is supposed to be a joyous and magical experience ... I have to believe that we're going to get a happy ending this time.

After much pondering, I've decided that this is truly a leap of faith. And today I take my first little hop.

By the end of the day, I had packed up TWELVE very heavy boxes and bags of things to donate. By some miracle, I managed to drag them all downstairs and load them in my car without going into pre-term labor. Then Gracie and I drove down to Goodwill and passed it all off.

I'm now feeling quite exhausted, having done all this activity on zero hours of sleep. But I'm also feeling incredibly relieved. Today I've purged equal amounts of material junk and emotional junk.

It feels good.

The halfway point!

I can hardly believe I'm 20weeks already! The last several days have been emotionally draining to say the least .... with passing the "milestone" gestational date when Isaac died, Laura being in the hospital, and fears of increasing contractions and a thinning cervix. Praise the Lord we've all survived, and Laura is just fine despite a good scare.

I must say I expected Isaac's milestone date to be sad, but in all honesty I was not expecting it to be so completely overwhelming. I literally spent the entire day in tears, and on the way home from Dr. Garcia's office I stopped by the cemetary (haven't been in a while). There I sat, alone, sprawled out in the grass, weeping like a crazy woman while it snowed.

Not my proudest moment.

I'm blaming it on the hormones. And the fact that our current circumstances have increased my fears of a repeat. I've been seeing Dr. Mann (perinatologist) every 2 weeks ... each time I go she does an ultrasound and takes careful measurements of my cervix. At week 16, it was measuring 4.0cm, which is good. Two weeks later (week 18), amidst increasingly frequent contractions, it had shortened to 3.5cm. This is right at the bottom end of the "normal" range, but of course its enough to have my mind racing with fear. I go back again on Wednesday for another measurement - I'm praying for no change so I can relax a bit. Right now James and I are holding our breath, to some extent it feels like waiting for the other shoe to drop. We talk about our fears often, which helps just to know I'm not alone. James is also immensely stressed and frightened.

Though he can't blame his fears on the hormones. That's one of the perks of being pregnant!