Birth & Death

It's amazing how birth and death are so closely intertwined. To give birth is to realize that at one point, death will come for this new life.

You can't have one without the other. I realized this so heavily for the first time when my Mother in law died 18 days before I gave birth for the first time. It's all a circle, you can't have one without the other.

And when conception in and of itself means death before birth.

And to be pregnant means life is growing within my very body. It's quite amazing, miraculous.

The most amazing.

Once again, I am flooded with thoughts of my little angel baby in heaven.

The one that grew in me, had a heart beat, looked like a little jelly bean. I don't believe in having numerous unnecessary ultrasounds, so I've never seen any of my other precious babies so young and so little.

But I am glad we knew this pregnancy had a complication to begin with, because that meant I had to have an ultrasound early on.

And that one glimpse at my baby and the tiny little heart beating is the closest I will ever get on this Earth to holding my baby.

I have been almost obsessing over my little angel lately. Reading sad things, listening to sad things, watching sad things. Anything to nurture my hurting heart. The one that currently beats for my lost little baby.

The baby I flushed down the toilet. Because there was blood, so very much blood, and a baby in the middle of it. And I was so grief stricken I didn't know what else to do. And alone.

Fishing around in the toilet to get out my baby didn't even go through my mind. I cried. I cried, and cried and cried. And fell against the bathroom door sobbing at what just was, at the baby who died that 3 days earlier had a heart beat, at what could have been.

And then my 1 year old needed me. So I picked the pieces of me up off the floor, put myself back together as best I could, flushed the toilet and went to my child.

Because we are first mothers to the child sitting in front of us, we are second mourners to the baby that is gone.

That moment sealed the path of my healing. I would be okay. I feel like I'm in a million pieces, shattered and broken all over the floor and never able to put myself back together. But I'll be okay. I'll put one foot in front of the other, as heavy as my feet may be. I'll allow myself to cry, I'll fall back into pieces at times, but I'll still be able to be a mother. To take care of the little one that is right in front of me.

And having a baby growing in me puts me right back to that open and vulnerable place. That raw place.

The place where I have never, ever forgiven myself for flushing my baby. For not thinking clearly enough to just leave everything alone, think for a bit, and get my baby out of the toilet. And bury my baby, like any once living human being deserves to be treated after death. And me, the mother, couldn't even think clearly enough to do that.

And every time I say it's my 3rd baby, I cringe. No, this is my 4th baby. I have my 3rd baby already, he's 1 1/2 right now. Maybe that's a big part of why pregnancy means mourning my lost baby. But what am I supposed to do, relive this to everyone every time someone asks? Of course not, society would not accept that. It would be awkward. People might not know what to say.

Or maybe I feel guilty at my body's ability to grow and nurture this baby, when I couldn't do that for my 2nd baby. When my 2nd baby died because of my circumstances, not because the baby wasn't healthy.

I chose to have an IUD put in.

I got pregnant with an IUD in.

I chose to take the doctor's advice and remove the IUD while there was a baby growing on the other side of my uterus, but the same uterus nevertheless. Maybe my midwife would have directed me otherwise, or even given me more of an option. But this pregnancy was complicated, and so it had to start out with a doctor, and go to a midwife when the complication was dealt with.

I chose the actions that in the end, made my little baby die, and to make things worse, I then flushed my little baby down the toilet. A burial in the Phoenix sewer system, along with millions of other people's raw sewage.

I went outside of the safety of family 3 weeks after my baby died. This was so raw, so new. I was already trying to hide behind myself so no one would know I was hurting. And I had someone, who was supposedly a friend, ask me "So because you weren't planning this pregnancy, I guess it must be easy to get over it. It's not like you wanted the baby or something."

Excuse me?! Don't pretend to know my circumstances. Don't make comments before thinking. I am mourning my baby. My very real baby. Who had a beating heart and existed, just like you. Just because we didn't plan to have another baby does not mean we didn't want this baby, that we were not already picking out names and trying to figure out moving our 1 year old to the bedroom closest to the street, because I didn't like putting a newborn in the room with the window over the street, we did live in the city afterall. That I wasn't daydreaming at the possibility of having 2 little boys, just like I always wanted. That I wasn't waiting to feel that first kick, or imagining my life with 2. Wondering how giving birth would be again, if I would love it as much as I did with my first.

We didn't regret telling people that we were expecting. I'm not going to go on pretending this life never existed, it did exist. And to pretend that it didn't, that would not have been okay with me.

Maybe you can imagine, then, how being pregnant again... after losing a baby... will never be the same as it was before losing a baby.

It no longer takes birth to require death.

It takes pregnancy to require death.