28 October 2011

Anticipation

The clock is ticking. Every day, I see the baby countdown ticker tick down the number of days left before my due date. There are 75 days until my due date of January 11 and just 54 until December 21 which is when I will reach the 37-week (full term) mark. When people say things like "You still have awhile left," I'm tempted to scoff. It doesn't seem like all that long. As the number gets smaller, I feel any number of things all at the same time: anticipation, anxiety, and excitement to name a few.

23 weeks belly

Disbelief is another big one. I keep wondering: Will I really have a child at home? Really?

There is no reason to expect anything will go wrong. It's just that things didn't go quite right the first time around, and this being the second, well ... I don't know what it's like. Though this pregnancy has been textbook perfect to date (a fact which I do not take for granted for a moment), to have "normal" from the point of birth going forward is still a foreign idea where my experience is concerned. Even with Ewan's diagnosis, we made our home ready to have a baby there. But the baby carrier, the stroller, the crib, the diapers, the changing table, the clothes -- none of them ever got used last time. I never got to breastfeed, bathe him, or wake up with him in the middle of the night (at least not in the usual way).

And here we are, all prepared again. Gulp.

The disbelief is a good heaping dose of "too good to be true," part having no other experience to which to compare it, and more than a smidge of having lived just over a year now in the thick of our loss.

I don't think we will lose again -- I'm not afraid of that this time around. But by the same token, the thought of "normal" when it comes to having a baby, watching her grow up, and doing all the things we missed out on before is almost entirely unbelievable to me.

I anticipate that I will simply need to take it one sweet, unbelievable moment at time, beginning from the moment she is brand new and in my arms -- and no one is coming to take her away.