A Week from Tomorrow

I should be preparing to celebrate Blue Sunday's 1st birthday. A week from tomorrow is 5/31/13. Instead, I will be at a heartbeat check for Take Two. I had my (first) SHG right around my due date last year. This seems to be a pattern- in the OB's office right around Blue Sunday's EDD. I like to think that it keeps me closer to him, as if I could ever forget.

This year, I'll be 8 weeks 4 days pregnant. I wonder if  I would have been trying yet. I imagine that I would have been, though I don't actually know how taxing it is to care for a child under one. Assuming it all works out with Take Two, we're planning to start trying again in the fall. We'd like the kids close in age, and given how long it took this time, we don't want to waste too much time.

Because of that, this baby really isn't a "wouldn't have been" baby, like so many others conceived after TFMR. Babies that were conceived when mom should have still been pregnant, or immediately after their EDD. There will always be a missing piece, an unfulfillable hole. Not just that Blue Sunday is missing, but really that all of my kids could have been in existence, Blue Sunday included, when looking at the timing of their births.

Then again, I hadn't really had an issue with conceiving Blue Sunday, we might have waited a year, just started up trying around Blue Sunday's first birthday. It is unknowable.

Like so much of this journey- of any journey- you can't see what would have been accurately. You can only imagine the life you would have led if things had been different, a single decision causing ripples of effect very far from the decision point.

Blue Sunday was never healthy- so really, a first birthday would not have happened. We wouldn't have consented to heroic measures. We would have had a DNR in place from the earliest days. It may have been that Blue Sunday would never have taken a breath, even without my choosing to terminate.  We may have gotten minutes, hours or even days with him. But not in my wildest, fact-based day-dream would we get months adding up to a year.  5/31/13 would always have been an empty day.

That realization is both painful and relief. It is awful to know that a child you created was destined to die incredibly young.  It is a relief in that the ripples of my choice don't extend that far, in the end, I would be mourning my Blue Sunday in the coming days.

I feel so lucky to have a second chance at this- bringing a healthy child into the world. I hope that on his due date, Blue Sunday is looking down over his Little and allowing her (or him, but I'm feeling her) to grow and thrive and to have the chance he never really did- to live.