the beat of relief

When I first converted this blog to private, I had all sorts of great intentions of writing through the first trimester experience, all the moments of prayer and faith (or lack of it), the ups and downs and everything baby wouldn't let me eat.

I am not a fantastically stable person, emotionally speaking. I get rocked pretty hard by the waves of whatever chemicals, hormones or otherwise go coursing through my brains as the days pass. My mom could tell you--every now and then I have to call her and regale her with whatever "grown-up hissy fit" I've just thrown (which I try to do only when I'm alone, if at all possible.) I also tend to have no skill whatsoever in hiding any feelings--good or bad.

I have noticed, though, that during moments that truly overwhelm me, I clam up. An old employer used to call this tendency "going dark." After we lost our first baby, I didn't talk about it. I didn't really want to talk about it. It's really only been this year that I've felt like I could talk about what happened, thought I always felt like I was talking about something that happened to someone else.

I haven't really written anything at all during the past two months, on here or in my own personal journal, which really only got entries like "still here, still pregnant, still sick." Occasionally I would think about how I was afraid to talk to baby, afraid baby was dead already, afraid to leave things in God's hands in case He had plans other than the ones I wanted. It has been a long two months.

I had my first doctor's visit today. Because I can never have a normal doctor visit experience--last time around they lost my appointment--I got a phone call around 4:30 yesterday from the office saying that my insurance didn't cover maternity. They had outdated information, which I told them, and gave them my new insurance information, but that didn't stop the panic that they'd call back and I've have to reschedule again or even find a new doctor entirely.

The cat woke me up at 4 a.m. this morning (for reasons that shall have to be explained in another post) so I laid in bed for quite a while, thinking, brooding, praying, trying not to imagine the worst possible scenario, trying to think of how I would cope if the sonogram showed what it did last time. When I did finally get up, my hands shook so bad that I only barely managed to get mascara on my eyelashes. Most of it ended up on my eyelids.

I met Jeremy at the doctor's and we prayed in the parking lot. Our wait was short (thank God) and when we made it back to the sonogram room, I was already eyeing the box of tissues stuck the wall. Dr. R came in and asked how we were, to which I readily replied "a nervous wreck!" She understood and skipped the regular...um, exam intro things, I guess...and got on with the sonogram. The nurse turned the lights off and I asked for tissues--a good thing, too. Once that little body showed up on the screen, I looked desperately for signs of life, which Dr. R. saw right away. She gave a murmur of approval (for the life of me I can't remember what she said) and turned up the monitor so we could hear the little swish-swish of heartbeat. Jeremy and I both burst into tears. Relief, joy, thankfulness, disbelief, peace...you name it, we felt it. I could feel his hand shaking in mine, and the picture on the screen dipped and jiggled as my sobs jostled the sonogram wand.



"Heartbeat is good, placenta looks good, everything like it should be!" The doctor was measuring baby, who was right on schedule at 14 weeks. We saw baby's whole body, head and arms and tummy and legs, saw the heart beating, saw baby do a little jig a few times. It was so surreal, yet so perfect. Just right. For a weak-minded person like me, who felt sure for the last three years that I would never see this moment, the thought of having a pregnancy where everything was just right was hard to comprehend. But there he--or she--was, in black and white.