Joy and Fear and Trust.

So, I had a nesting urge this week. I went with it. I can honestly say that I just didn't get this when I was pregnant with Emma. It's one of the things I look back on, now and wonder if I had an intuition stronger than I realised. I felt uncomfortable buying anything. I did wash clothes and prepare but not with the same urgency that I had felt with my first two pregnancies. Maybe I'm reading too much into it or maybe I'm not ... Either way, I decided to embrace the urge to get some things ready this week.

With hindsight, I should probably have waited. As we don't know Jurgen's gender, I'm washing all the neutrals, a few girls and a few boys things. I really don't have a problem with my newborn boy wearing a pink sleepsuit or my newborn girl wearing her brother's things. The trouble is, I only have the girl clothes here with me currently. I passed along all the boy things when my nephew was born back in May and I haven't got round to collecting them again yet. I don't know if mixing the (oceans and oceans) of pink with a bit of manly blue would have made the job any easier. Perhaps. I know I spent Monday morning sitting on my little boy's floor sobbing into a pile of pink clothes - remembering when my first daughter wore them, remembering when my second daughter didn't. I missed her so profoundly then. It wasn't anger or denial or any of the other complex grief emotions - just straight out MISSING my baby. I want her, I want HER. I want my Emma ...

And I want Jurgen. I know there have been several posts in different places recently on the subject of subsequent/replacement babies. I don't go to that place in my mind very often. Physically, it is possible that I could have had both children but realistically, it's not that likely. I tend to avoid the difficult emotions that the subject evokes. Simply, I am sad I don't have Emma and I'm enormously joyful and grateful for this new pregnancy and the possibility of a new baby. There was joy too as I sat surrounded by piles of tiny clothes. The end still seems so far away - I still can't quite imagine that it will work out this time but as I sorted teeny-tiny clothes, there was a definite spark of hope that someone will get to fill them out and outgrow them this time.

I realised, as I poured clothes into the washing machine and arranged them on radiators, that the fear and the joy are ever present and entwined but there's a big hole where the trust should be. The first three times I was pregnant I trusted my body to grow a healthy baby. That trust was eroded slightly by two difficult births and blown away completely by a catastrophic one. I trusted God to protect my babies. A year on, I'm still feeling my way with that one. Still trying to fathom what it is I now believe about the way the universe works, about what I trust outside of myself. But trusting in something felt like a safety net and it's pretty terrifying walking this tightrope without one.