Yes, here I am, continuing my daughter’s birth story a mere four days short of her SECOND birthday. Let’s see how much I can remember, yes?
Pregnancy after loss is a challenge, at best. Pregnancy after four losses is a whole THING. When we visited my beloved midwifery clinic for our 12-week appt, we started in a room where we’d once had a “bad” ultrasound. And even as my stomach protruded with the evidence of a healthy, growing baby, I couldn’t stay there.
“Not this room”, I said. “I’m so sorry, but it can’t be this room.”
And to their endless credit, no one batted an eye. They held my trauma and my joy so graciously, and we had another successful ultrasound. And so the pregnancy went- trauma and joy, fear and anticipation, side by side.
During the IVF process, we’d opted not to know the sex of our embryo. Leading up to our 20-week anatomy scan, I’d convinced myself our baby was a boy. Not for any particularly reason, other than maybe to hide the fact that I secretly hoped for another girl. Still, when the tech paused, and said “Alright, I can tell you the sex–you’re having a little girl”…I laughed out loud, while grateful tears slipped out the corners of my eyes. A sister for our Sadie.
A few days later, our family gathered around and we announced the good news. I’d gone back and forth on having a whole reveal party, but ultimately decided that we would celebrate this baby at every possible turn. The party was on January 11, 2020, and looking back, I am deeply grateful it happened. We couldn’t have known then that in six short weeks, everything would change. I remember that night now as one of the last warm, glowing, happy evenings of “before”. We couldn’t have known that night that the baby sprinkle planned in March wouldn’t happen, or that no one, not even her big sister, would be able to visit our baby girl in the hospital. I’m glad I didn’t know. Like most moments in life before the thing we never saw coming, we basked blissfully unaware in the love of our dearest people who celebrated, finally, our dream coming true.
A global pandemic beginning at 28 weeks pregnant was not in our plan. Of course, very little about Savannah’s journey to us was part of the plan, so that tracks, I suppose? I may never fully process the total shock and grief of those early days of Covid-19. Within one week, my husband’s job sent him home. We decided it was safer for me (we knew very little about Covid and pregnancy then- now, I know we made the right call to be cautious) to take my client sessions virtually. And we made the heartbreaking choice to pull our daughter out of pre-K at a school our whole family dearly loved. To this day, there are friends in her class she has never seen again. It brought me to tears daily then, and doesn’t take much to cry about it now. It was the first time as a parent that I’d been out of control of my daughter’s experience. I had been so privileged up to that point to curate her life- swim class, dance class, preschool, playdates. And while we were still immensely privileged to have the flexibility to keep her home AND keep our jobs, we were blindsided by how incredibly hard it was to lose so much, so abruptly.
It was a strange and beautiful time, those last days of pregnancy in quarantine. I grieve over the time and opportunities lost, and feel profound gratitude for the time with Sadie. Morning walks, identifying newly blooming trees and flowers, shaving cream and slime at the kitchen counter, letting her do my hair for me during afternoon movie time. Just our family of three, huddled together and disinfecting our groceries, waiting to bring a long-awaited soul into a world now unfamiliar to any of us. I saw clients most afternoons in our guest room, laptop perched on a dresser. When we had a scare with Savannah’s high heart rate at an appointment, resulting in my first Covid test and an overnight hospital stay, I decided to begin maternity leave early. And then, at 38 weeks, when Savannah’s inexplicable (and yet unnerving) high heart rate continued, my midwifery team and I decided that a medical induction would be the best route to take. So we scheduled it- May 21, 2020 was to be our Rainbow’s birthday.
Our Rainbow, it turned out, had other plans.
Jess Stands Amazed 