Helpless

It was one month ago today that I lost the baby. It's been a difficult month. Some days are harder than others. One minute I'm happy and okay, the next minute I'm sobbing. The vivid flashes of what happened are excruciating. They hit me and I stop breathing. Every second of the miscarriage I can recall. Every ounce of fear and pain can come back to me in an instant.

I have realized in all the personal accounts of miscarriages I've read, no one has mentioned how helpless you feel when it's happening. You feel the pain, you start to bleed....and you can do absolutely nothing to stop what you know is going to happen. It's not like when you see an approaching car going right at you too fast, you can brake in an attempt to prevent an accident. Or when you're watching a child start to wobble, you can reach out and catch him before he falls. There was nothing I could do. I just had to sit and wait for the inevitable. I didn't want to believe what I knew was coming. I wanted to hold on to that hope with an iron grip and not let it go. But my body had a different plan and it wasn't going to listen. I was helpless. And that instant, the one where I knew I had passed the "tissue," is the one that flashes to me the most. I had started shaking uncontrollably. I know the exact lighting of the moment, what position Tim was sitting in, where my hands were, what the light outside was like. The fear I felt, the doubt, the instant sadness, it all engulfed me. All those feelings making me convulse. I wanted to reverse time, pretend like what just happened wasn't real. It was a nightmare. I spent all those weeks excited for what was to come, thankful that I was finally going to have a baby, and it was all over in less than an hour. How are you supposed to reverse months of excitement in an instant? I was empty, when two minutes before, I was full of what was to be. I had my baby, and then I didn't. I know these flashes will lesson over time, they'll be further and further apart eventually. But right now, they still consume me.

I'm having a hard time finding the feelings of excitement you get before you're going to try and get pregnant that I had before all of this happened. A part of me doesn't even want to. And the most ridiculous part of why I'm having such a hard time is the fact that I was going to have a fall baby. I'd be pregnant in the summer so I could wear dresses and I'd have a baby during my favorite time of the year. And now it will be a winter baby, and I don't want to be pregnant during the winter. I know all of this is just stupid, I know that...but everything was perfect. I'm a planner and I usually have a hard time when I have to stray from that plan. And yes, I also know that these sorts of things you can't plan. But I did. And it was going all according to plan. I know I need to let that go, I know that in the grand picture, that is not what is important. I'm working on it. There's a plan bigger than my plan, no matter how much I wanted a fall baby.