Hindsight

I wanted an April baby. I kept rubbing my belly and whispering, "Wait 'til April, little one..." I don't even know why. Silly, superficial reasons. April is a brighter, prettier month. I like April's birthstone better. (Diamond!) I like 4's (even number) better than 3's. So I wanted an April baby and I asked him to wait.

And he did. He waited until April. But by then, he was dead.

I never thought I'd be looking at a calendar with "May 2009" at the top and not be holding my baby.

It never even crossed my mind - at least, not consciously.

But hindsight is 20/20, and now I can see the signs. I know they weren't predictive, and I know, at least intellectually I know, that I probably couldn't have consciously heeded them and prevented William's death. But they were there. So very many of them. Not just current ones, either. There have been signs I would at some point lose a child going back to... well, as far back as I can remember.

The first thing was the loss of my sister, Denise. She was three when she was hit by a car. From the time I was young, I was fascinated with the story, and horrified with my mother's loss. How could she bear it? I'd never known my sister, she died before I was born - but I truly couldn't imagine losing a child, how someone could actually survive the pain.

Then there was the recurring dream I've had since I was in high school. I used to sleepwalk, and go around looking through cupboards and under things, frantically saying, "Where's my baby? Where's my baby?" I never remembered them... but other people told me about them. My ex said at least once every 6 months I'd do that, in college. Eventually I stopped walking/talking in my sleep... but Michael has said I've woken up saying that phrase before. And even when I was awake, sometimes, that phrase would just "come" to me. "Where's my baby?" It made no sense at the time. But it does now.

In the past two years, I've written three stories centered around the death of a child. I even had another author say to me that they thought "playing the dead baby card" in a story was, in effect, cheating, a betrayal to the reader. I always defended my decision... babies die. It happens. People lose children, it's horrifying, it's awful. But in reality... I had no idea.

I was also worried about this pregnancy from the beginning. I had all the genetic testing done, concerned about my "advanced maternal age." Like most mothers, I breathed a sigh of relief after that twelfth week, when I passed the highest percentage risk of miscarriage. But that nagging worry never really left. I worried that he would be deformed, that something would go wrong during labor. I kept hitting the tree, but missing the target.

At about twenty weeks into my pregnancy, I remember the doctor putting the doppler to my belly and taking a little longer than usual to find his heartbeat. He looked worried at first and I commented on it. He said, "I found it pretty quick. It's when you put it on there and move it around and around for minutes and hear nothing but silence. That's just..." He shook his head, unable to express it, and I felt a stab of dread. Premonition? I don't know..

I was really extremely overly emotional at the end of my pregnancy, and I was especially sensitive to stories about children dying. There were two horrible, prominent news stories during that time, one about a father dropping his four year old daughter off an overpass and the other was Baby Grace. Both of them left me literally incapacitated for days. I cried all day long about them. I kept wondering what was wrong with me? Sure, these stories were sad, and in the past, I would have felt that, but this was different. It was as if I was mourning something for myself, as if these were my losses, somehow, and it made no sense. Not at the time.

I know it sounds like I'm saying, "It was meant to be" ... but I don't believe that either. I just know, there were signs. There were things pointing toward this, or something like it. I don't understand it, and I probably never will, but I don't want to leave these things unacknowledged either.

And I'm not the only one who had this happen. M. said he felt like he was "going through the motions" when getting ready for William to arrive. He got the birth tub ready, he picked up groceries, but there was just a feeling, like it wasn't going to be necessary. It wasn't conscious, and he couldn't have voiced it before William died... it only made sense after he was gone. And I understood that. I experienced M. as a little removed from this pregnancy, too. I thought it was because it was our third - we already had a boy, a girl, this was old hat. I would ask him, "Are you ready for this baby?" and he'd say, "Well, I don't really have a choice, do I?" I was a little hurt, at the time, by his response... but now...

I think part of him knew. I think a part of me knew, too. Neither of us could have said that out loud and we probably would have denied it or chalked it up to pregnancy-parental-paranoia at the time. But with William gone, looking back, I think M. was right. Ready-or-not, things were going to unfold, however they were meant to.

We didn't really have a choice.