Cheating at #MicrobloggingMonday

I am cheating at this today. I have A LOT to say- so I am making a micro post and a big 'un.

For micro: I read this article linked from facebook by a mother who lost her daughter at birth. Nadia, the baby, was very sick. Her parents discovered this VERY late in pregnancy- 37 weeks. They considered termination as well as a C-section and intervention but ultimately chose comfort care instead. Regardless, Nadia was stillborn. One of the paragraphs her mother wrote struck me as a universal for the babylost community:

...I look at her pictures, hand prints, the plaster cast of her feet. But what would she have been like?Or was sick all that she could have ever been? How could a gene or two erase everything else that she was, had the potential to be? Some parts of me, some parts of André, some history of all life ever, assembled into her, an almost perfect child. Almost.
People understand that to lose a baby before it has been born is to lose an object of hope; that a beautiful idea of what the future should have held was suddenly ripped away from us. But there has to be more to it. Was it just hope that grew as the pregnancy progressed, as she passed all the usual markers for concern, and was this what set us up for our big crash? Or was it her that grew, and became more human? I cannot imagine anything specific to her as a person however hard I try. And yet I long for her, so badly. But how do I even know that I long for her?

I remember in a long ago post I was circling this question myself. Who was Blue Sunday? Or more correctly- who would Blue Sunday have been? IF- if the chromosomes were typically arranged, or IF he could have survived even with T18. I wrote:

... May be I'm on the right track. And what happened to Blue Sunday was just a huge Charlie Foxtrot. I want to emphasize "what happened to Blue Sunday", I don't believe that Blue was the disease, I feel that she/he was separate from it. That this is something that happened to him/her and not all he/she was. I know that is a little point, but it is one that matters, and one that makes it so hard for me. The extra chromosome was added to a baby who would have been wonderful, special., naughty, cute and mine all on his or her own.  I'll never know what that little person was like because of this little extra piece. It's true I suppose- It's the little things.

Even so many years out, I still ask these questions.

I think about it a lot more now, now that I am weeks from delivering our second rainbow, I am very close to finally finding out the gender of Blue Sunday. I decided to find out when my family reached what we will call complete.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.