33 weeks.

We're growing, Jurgen and I. Baby is growing right as he or she should. Serial growth scans suggest a baby of "good" size - not too small, not too big. I'm growing at a slightly more alarming rate - measuring 37 weeks at 33. Note to pregnant self - "No more mince pies - you are pregnant, not Father Christmas."

Physically, I have developed pelvic pain - a brand new symptom for my fourth pregnancy, which means I have the advanced pregnancy "ship in sail" waddle down to a tee - and occasionally I just lock up all altogether and can't move! I don't care. I continue to feel absolute gratitude for this gorgeous child.

Emotionally, it's as I expected. Both Dave and I have felt the anxiety levels ramp up these past weeks. We continue to cherish Jurgen and sometimes (occasionally) dare to talk about *when* he/she comes home rather than *if*. But neither of us sleep well and I do believe this poor baby (along with all other rainbow siblings I'm sure) is the inhabitant of the most prodded belly ever.

But we chug along, taking it a day at a time. I'm at the stage where I'll be having weekly checks with either my midwife or my OB - and it isn't long until B-day really, even if it feels as though every day is a lifetime.

And the world turns ...

In a couple of hours it will be a milestone date again - fourteen months on the fourteenth. In a couple of weeks it will be Christmas again. Things move on apace and I wonder if I have too. I suppose I have in some ways. Crying is no longer a daily occurrence and the anger is all but gone (sweet relief). I am fumbling my way towards some sort of reconciliation in my faith - tentatively and in a piecemeal fashion - but it feels like progress.

But, I still wake up some days and it hurts. I couldn't explain why yesterday was so much harder than the days preceding it - there was no obvious trigger but there it was. Grief - sharp, bitter, uncomfortable and draining. Sometimes it's a relief to know the tears can still come - they remind me of how much I love my baby. How much I miss her. How much I still want her back.

Not many words.

I just don't seem to have many words at the moment so the gaps here have lengthened again. I can feel myself drawing in as I prepare for another Christmas without my youngest daughter. I have been doing well - I have shopped and wrapped and written Christmas cards and made plans for the festive season. I have even found myself looking forward to parts of it. We put our tree up yesterday. Last year my sister gave us tree ornaments for each of our children with their names engraved. Putting up Emma's ornament prompted mixed feelings. I felt the same pleasure I felt last year, to realise that someone had thought of her. At the same time I feel such sadness thinking of the bright stockings upstairs, already stuffed with gifts for Ben and Lucy. Emma has one, small but beautiful tree decoration. We will find other ways to include her - a gift to charity in her name perhaps - but suddenly her absence, always there, feels bigger all over again.

***

I don't really have many words to describe how my pregnancy feels right now either. We're as ready as we're able to be. Clothes and bedding are washed and hospital bag supplies purchased. I don't have the same sense of something imminent and bad that I had last time but I still have no strong sense of this little being who is so physically present within me. I am in love but I couldn't tell you I had a strong sense of the gender of this baby or that I have any true belief that we'll get to bring him/her home with us. Just hope. I am anxious about the birth of this baby. I have not really had anything that would constitute a "good" experience of giving birth. I'm hoping our bereavement midwife will be able to help a little when we see her this week.

***

In the absence of anything profound to say, I thought I'd include this song. Our nephew stayed with us this weekend and he played this a lot. Just after Emma died, my best friend sent me a link to the song saying how much it reminded her of Emma and I:

Subsequent Pregnancy Guilt

Survivor, survivor's, or survivors guilt or syndrome is a mental condition that occurs when a person perceives himself or herself to have done wrong by surviving a traumatic event. It may be found among survivors of combat and natural disaster, among the friends and family of those who have committed suicide, and in non-mortal situations among those whose colleagues are laid off. The experience and manifestation of survivor's guilt will depend on an individual's psychological profile.

(from Wiki.ped.ia)

Lately, I've been dealing quite a lot with what I can only really describe as "Subsequent pregnancy" guilt. I love this community. I have no doubt that my path through grief has been a little smoother, a little less lonely because of my involvement in various online communities. But, it is strange to actually cry tears of anger, frustration, joy for people I have never met face to face. There is a large degree of trust going on here. You have to trust that I am truly a bereaved mother, just as I do for you. And I do ...

To digress for a moment: my husband and I are big fans of a cult, terribly British, sci-fi show from the seventies (sounds great, doesn't it !?) called Blake's 7. I remember, in particular, an episode when an idealist, alien, freedom fighter tells a far more cynical character: "My people have a saying. One who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken." I can't quite decide if that is profound or just terribly cheesy. Maybe it's both. But I think of that quote often when I'm meandering around in cyberspace, especially this babylost portion. I choose to believe the blogs I read - usually because there is something in them that strikes me as real or honest, something I recognise from my own experience of losing a child. As a result, I do invest a lot of emotional energy in what I read. I quite often dwell on posts throughout my day. I quite often feel frustration at my inability to do more than simply post an (often inane) comment.

So, back to the pregnancy guilt. There are a lot of us here who are navigating our ways through pregnancy after loss. But, I am so very aware at the moment, there are many other blogging parents who are hoping and longing for another pregnancy. And I feel so tremendously guilty that I already have 2 living children and I've been able to conceive with relative ease again. I feel a little ashamed of having broadcast my very straightforward, average PAL when other pregnancies after loss are not straightforward and have risks of complications and difficulties attached.

I suppose all I can do is to say that I do not take the blessing of my living children for granted. I do not, ever - not for one minute - take the blessing of this little life within for granted. In the midst of fears about losing again and grieving again, I do acknowledge the awesome privilege that this pregnancy has been and is. And to say that I long for each and every babylost mother or father who wants it to be able to walk this path too is an understatement.

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.

On Teeth and Being Average. Some pregnancy ramblings.

So there is an old wives tale that you lose a tooth with every pregnancy. I'm not exactly a toothless crone (yet) but I certainly seem consistent with regard to mouth trouble during pregnancy. I planned to update here earlier in the week. A more positive post to say that I have been climbing slowly back out of the funk that has surrounded me since Emma's birthday and regaining a little bit of equilibrium. Then I developed a horrible hacking cough which has kept me pretty sleepless most nights this week. Then, to add insult to injury, the wisdom teeth decided to throw one of their infrequent (but not infrequent enough) hissy fits and - well - the equilibrium vanished again.

It's hard not to feel a bit low when your mouth throbs and your chest rattles. My wisdom teeth are terribly misnamed, given that they are trying to grow into my mouth at a 45 degree angle. They have been doing this periodically for ten years. Once or twice a year they attempt to break the gum, only to hit the tooth next to them and then retract. Just one more small example of the way my body doesn't exactly do "normal" all that well. "Normal" wisdom teeth grow straight up. Normal births result in live babies. Every so often I am reminded of my body's idiosyncrasies in unpleasant and painful ways.

***

On a happier note, I had one of my monthly growth scans this week. At 29 weeks, Jurgen is estimated to weigh 2lb 12oz - exactly 50th centile on the size graphs. Whilst I know such things are not absolutely accurate, I have had 3 other babies who weighed around national average at birth so I choose to believe that Jurgen is almost certainly of "average" build too. Most of the other measurements were pretty near the middle of the charts too (a slightly larger than average tummy measurement and a very slightly shorter than average femur length? Mummy's mini me I think!). I felt a definite lightness as I walked out of the scan. It felt good knowing that, despite the distinctly unaverage nature of my emotions as I navigate pregnancy after loss, physically Jurgen and I are happily experiencing a very average pregnancy. I just keeping hoping for a perfectly average outcome.

Anger revisited.

Approximately 24 hours out from losing our precious girl, I got myself on the computer and ordered up a stash of grief literature. It's what I do. Need to know something? Find a book. So I did - and I read them cover to cover in the days that followed. But I really didn't read them as though they had any relevance to me: I had a sort of anthropological detachment as I read the stories of other grieving parents. "Oh. Those poor parents. How sad. How horrible. How do they cope?" It wasn't "forgetting" exactly, more a complicated form of denial that I was and am one of those parents now. I read about the grief cycle and how anger can be a BIG part of it. "Not for me", I thought breezily. I'm from a cold, damp region of the world and my constitution is, at best, described as phlegmatic. My idea of a blazing row with D. is to sulk for several hours until he asks what's wrong. I'm just not an angry person really.

Correction - I WASN'T an angry person. It was around Christmas time when I was surprised by the blazing rage that took hold of me - around 2 months out. It really, really scared me. Rage is such an out-of-control emotion and I don't like to be out of control. But, as it persisted over the next few months, I got used to it and I (almost) grew comfortable with feeling so close to boiling point all the time. It felt like an "active" emotion. Feeling angry at my daughter's death made me feel like I was actually parenting her in some way. It felt like expressing my disgust at whoever thought they could take her away from me, at the universe, at randomness, at God, at whatever it was that caused this foul chain of events that ended in my daughter's heart stopping, was productive. Maybe it was. I decided from the outset that whatever I felt was what I needed to feel, even if the emotion was downright ugly. I certainly think it's been healthier for me to feel these emotions than to repress them.

All the same, I was relieved when the anger just naturally dissipated over the summer. Nothing in particular happened to move me along. It was just a gentle summer with lots of fun things happening and it was healing for us all in lots of ways. There were days when I actually didn't mind the version of normal that I have now - it was okay. I learned how to laugh and not feel guilty. I discovered that I could be pregnant and scared but also excited and hopeful.

Since Emma's birthday, the anger is back - but it's mutated. This is cold. It's not passionate or helpful, it's my version of a pity party. I try not to think "Why me?", because really, what's the point? It was me and that's not going to change. But it's the refrain that underlies everything I do at the moment. Some of it is fear - the end of this pregnancy feels close and yet so far. I have started to have very vivid dreams about stillborn babies which I try to shake off but which linger in the shadows through my days.

It's more diffuse now too. I have spent a year in this little corner of the internet now and I have "met" some amazing women (and men). Whenever I read about another stillborn child, another baby born too soon; whenever I read about mothers who are grieving for their precious children and yet also face battles to conceive again or who lose again I feel SO angry. I want to stamp my feet and scream about the unfairness of it. Not just "why me?" but "why us?"