Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (18 page)

Six years later I was ecstatic to find out I was pregnant again. Sure, I had anxious thoughts while I was pregnant, especially as the due date approached, but my doctor reassured me. He went above and beyond, taking all precautions; my son was induced two weeks before his due date, and emerged healthy, loud, and strong.

But I was not the same woman from six years ago. During my first pregnancy the possibility of a stillborn was not on my radar. Now, I knew the SIDS statistics of every state west of the Mississippi. I clucked my tongue at any mother who didn’t know vaccination side effects. I was armed with knowledge, and dangerous.

But the biggest change within me was not my fascist stance on breast-feeding, but my incessant feelings of worry, fear, and weakness.

Although my son slept through the night by the time he was six weeks old (don’t hate), I gave myself insomnia worrying about SIDS, colic, autism, and the notorious flat head syndrome.

I even worried that I worried too much. I thought I was going crazy, like, grab-a-cop’s-gun crazy. I was on a cycle of worry, weakness, despair, worry, weakness, despair. The cycle was exhausting, and I retreated more and more.

After a night of staring at the video baby monitor, it occurred to me, “I’m not a Warrior Mom. I don’t deserve the blinged-out
W
. Or better yet, that
W
stands for something else. I am a Wimp.” I had discovered my mom type now. I am Wimpy Mom.

Frustrated by this revelation, I sought out the advice of other moms. Did they use a meat thermometer to check the bathwater? Did they pay for background checks on their doctors? By the raised eyebrows and one, two, three, steps taken back from me, I took that as a no.

When my son was eight months old, I overheard my mom talking to my brother on the phone.

“Don’t forget to call me when you get back from your trip. You know I worry,” she said.

I had one of those long, stretching-hallway moments. After thirty years, my mom still worried about her adult children.

I nearly slapped the phone out of her hand. “Mom will you ever stop worrying about us?”

She looked at me as if I had just grown two heads. “Of course not. My cause of death will be Worry/Disappointment.”

I gritted my teeth and ignored the last part of her statement, because she just gave me a glimpse of my future. A future I wanted no part of.

My next move was to garner spiritual, timeless truth to free myself of a possible life sentence of weakness and worry.

I googled “Worry scriptures.”

That is why I take such pleasure in weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and difficulties for the Messiah’s sake, for when I am weak, then I am strong.

—2 Corinthians 12:10

ISV

Ah, so, the wimpier and weaker I am, the stronger I become?

I needed more clarification.

I read the verse that preceded verse 10:

But he said to me, “My grace is all you need. My power is strongest when you are weak.”

—2 Corinthians 12: 9a

Then I read one that tied it all together in my mind:

The L
ORD
is the everlasting God,

  
the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He will not grow tired or weary,

  
and his understanding no one can fathom.

He gives strength to the weary

  
and increases the power of the weak.

Even youths grow tired and weary,

  
and young men stumble and fall;

but those who hope in the L
ORD

  
will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles;

  
they will run and not grow weary,

  
they will walk and not be faint.

—Psalms 40:28–31

I finally understood. It’s not about some caricature of a superwoman who can leap Lego buildings in a single bound. It’s about acknowledging my weakness, faults, and imperfections and allowing something greater than myself to be strong when I am weak.

Fast forward four years and now we have added a bouncing (literally) baby girl, McKenna Drew, to our family. She falls off slides, chairs, stairs, and people, and brushes herself off and moves on. She once swallowed dog kibble and dog poop within the same hour. I didn’t make her down a bottle of Ipecac or disinfect her mouth with Listerine. I simply checked poison control online, and obeyed when they advised, “just monitor for signs of discomfort.”

She is a happy ball of energy that needs to test the limits of playground equipment and gravity. I still carry Purell, but I use it more
on myself than on the kiddos. Their immune systems are as solid as my faith. I now rock my blinged-out
W
shirt, and I no longer care what my Mom Type is. We are all a part of the sisterhood of wimpy, warrior, weird, wacky, wonderful, and altogether worthy Moms who know where our true strength lies.

Mercedes Yardley

I
’m holding a baby in my arms as I write this. She’s three months old and fresh out of NICU. She isn’t used to a quiet house; she’s used to beeping and buzzers and terrible alarms. She would lie in her bassinet alone, unheld until it was time for nurses to feed her. My husband and I saw her as often as we could. It wasn’t enough.

She was a triplet. We called them Winken, Blinkin, and Nod, after the little ones who fished the stars. We were charmed and delighted and anxious about rocking three little babies at once.

I stayed up nights, sick with worry. I stayed up nights, eyes bright with dreams. I stayed up, my hand on my stomach, thinking that my heartbeat was no longer a singular thing, but one of four. One of
four.

Then the doctor called, saying we needed to schedule another ultrasound. I had so much hope at first, so much faith. In my body. In divinity. When they told me that one of our babies had died, that I was carrying around the remnants of my child, something broke inside. I lay there on the table while the tech deftly finished the ultrasound. Like everyone else, he focused on the living.

“There’s the head,” he said. “There’s the rump. You have two busy little babies.”

I didn’t care. I wasn’t looking at them. All I could see was the form of the one I had lost, that it wasn’t moving, that it was smaller than the others. I cried without making a sound. The tech handed me a tissue and carefully looked away. He would be the first of many to do so.

The pregnancy progressed. The remaining twins were both beautiful, beautiful girls. I pictured rosy little toes and matching dresses. We thought of names. We planned the nursery. Two children were less than three, and I felt the loss, but I also felt the sweetness of the remaining girls. It was enough to get me through.

But the doctor called again, and it was devastating. One of the twins was struggling, suffering from a severe genetic anomaly. Incompatible with life, they said. If we were lucky, she would live long enough to be born, and then die.

Born to die?

I didn’t know what to pray for. That she’d live? I’d get to meet her, hold her, snuggle her, and love her, but then I’d have to watch her pass away. Could I do that? Would she suffer? Or did I hope that she would slip away quietly, too early to feel any pain? No pain, but my arms would feel forever empty.

“If she dies in utero,” the doctor told us, “there is a very real possibility that the physical trauma could be too much for your body.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you could spontaneously abort the final, living baby.”

Lose all three? Unthinkable.

I became ill. At first, too ill to leave the house. Then too ill to leave the bed. Too ill to feel like a functional mother. My other two small children played on the bed beside me, napping and reading stories. I didn’t know how to feel. Excited. Terrified. Full of grief and sorrow and joy and expectation. We bought a crib and a casket on the same day. My husband went out and found two tiny matching white dresses, one for a blessing, the other for the funeral that we knew would come.

They came unexpectedly, two months early. Beautiful. Tiny fingers. Tiny ears. Two enchanting girls. The nurse put them together and took a picture of them side by side before they whisked them off to their separate NICU units.

The eldest died in my husband’s arms. We had time to hold her, to smile and tell her how much we loved her. We oohed and aahed
over her tiny bent legs, her exquisite face that was put together in all of the wrong places. I knew she was gone even before my husband looked at me and whispered, “She’s beginning to cool.”

We were forced to leave our remaining daughter in NICU while we drove home for her sister’s funeral. She was buried on a sunshiny day; that’s what I remember. After the service, we drove four hours to see our surviving baby. She would be loved ferociously, always. We promised her this.

Our last, the one I hold in my arms right now, she doesn’t hold one-third of our hearts. Sometimes when I look at her, the sadness washes over me because she is surrounded by the ghosts of her sisters. But usually I see her simply as herself, as my precious little one, and she makes me smile.

It’s time that I take a cue from those around me. I’ll never forget, and I’m not expected to, but it’s time to focus on the living instead of being haunted by the lost.

J.lynn Sheridan

In the Joy,
while waiting for you,
I lost your heartbeat.

In the Mourning,
I lost
your name.

Sometimes, I try
to whisper it
to give you
voice.

At night
I try.
In prayer.
In the deep comfort of dreaming,

You are the northern lights,
the silent splashes of watercolor
chasing the sky. You are Indian paintbrush
rushing through heaven’s prairie.

In the pinks of dusk I think I see
your yellow hair; it’s reflected
in the indigo frosts of winter and
the cherry blossoms in spring,
in the tide, in forlorn feathers
awash on the beach, in the summer
grass, and you smell like honey and
wind and poetry and…

I lost
your heartbeat.
I didn’t know
when it last shuddered.
A mother should know.
A good mother.

That night we sang lullabies to soothe
our sorrow borne during the stillness.

My December hands caressed a bouquet
of fresh baby’s breath. I planted it while
your heart still beat against mine.

Today, I untied the ribbon and sprinkled
the petals
upon the garden.

Stacy Clark

E
arly on an April morning, I sat beside my four-year-old daughter on the couch. She nestled close, her legs not quite reaching to the edge of the cushion, her pink-socked feet waggling in anticipation. I told her a baby had snuck inside my tummy. Her eyes went wide like a child, then wise. She placed a small hand on the curve of my stomach and said, “Mommy, it’s Hannah.”

Children know things. Or they only imagine them. Maybe both. This child had an uncanny way of clomping out in her plastic dress-up shoes and telling me the world was not as it seemed. Regardless, when she called the baby inside me Hannah, the name stuck.