Life with a PAL: Pregnancy After Loss

'Cause the sky is finally open, the rain and wind stopped blowin'
But you're stuck out in the same old storm again
Let go of your umbrella, darlin' I'm just tryin' to tell ya
That there's always been a rainbow hangin' over your head
Yeah there's always been a rainbow hangin' over your head

--"Rainbow," Kacey Musgraves 

I sit in my OB/GYN's office after the nurse hands me a pre-registration package for the hospital in which I am to deliver, the same one in which I said both hellos and goodbyes to three children so far. It feels surreal as I stare down at the envelope bulging with informational packets, brochures, and forms. It has been nearly forty doctor's/specialist visits and diagnostic/maintenance blood tests + ultrasounds to get to this day. Yet, I am luckier than those other women who have tried for countless years to welcome their first, whose stomachs are bruised black and blue from hormone injections, those would-be mothers whose adoption cases fell through and who are still left childless. It is three days before Mother's Day 2019, a holiday that in the past few years has become so loaded with emotions.

In 2015, I struggled with the idea of never being a mommy after nearly two years of silently battling infertility and doing everything I could to get pregnant.

In 2016, I learned how to be a mother to a little boy who captured my heart since I knew of his existence on my very first positive pregnancy test.

In 2017, I was elated to quickly and effortlessly welcome a baby girl into our family, only to be faced with the most traumatic heartbreak of my life when I found out during a routine ultrasound that her heart had stopped beating, and that she had died some four weeks ago.

In 2018, I came to understand the constant rift and pull of being a mom to a present earth baby who constantly demands my attention, and angel babies whom I never had the chance to know.

I think about my first daughter. It has been 16 months after I delivered her and held her lifeless body in my palm. I had never seen a baby so small and partially formed, with translucent skin and limbs as frail as a baby bird's wings. And yet her features were forming, and the way she lay arrested in development reminded me of my husband's demeanor. This tiny baby, half of each of us, capturing our whole hearts, leaving us with empty arms.

How I miss and think of her daily, how I long for her still, both guilt and gratitude shrinking and swelling my heart, that I am able to surpass the intense grief of her passing and welcome the thought of another baby in our family.

After Thi passed, I looked for signs that she is peaceful and happy in another realm, but also still around me and watching over us. Maybe through butterflies, or birds, symbolic of transformation and flight. She ended up coming to me in the form of fog, as many fog-covered days enveloped me during the winter in which she was born. I wept over her nearness and beauty. I could see her, whole and formed, but I could not embrace her ethereal presence. She is telling me, "It's okay, Mama; I am fine, and so are you," and I marvel at her wisdom to comfort me when I feel most alone. 

However, when those earth-clouds lifted and spring arrived, I noticed another sign: I started seeing rainbows everywhere I went, their abundant presence gracing me from the year's prolific rains.

I think about my second son. It has been 9 months since I had the D&C surgery to remove what was left of him. I never saw him form, and his passing was early and brief, but he holds a special place in my heart. As unfair as it was to lose him in succession to Thi, his death was in a way a small mercy, a selective decision of nature; with a double trisomy disorder, he would have struggled if he had lived. I think of the pain of parents having to watch their babies go through endless punctures, tests, and surgeries, hearing them cry, watching them struggling and gaping for life-sustaining breath. These frail babies living in limbo, who never know the chance at a normal life beyond the walls of a plastic bassinet, with their grief-stricken parents keeping vigil, finding it hard to hold on, but unable to let go. I am spared those endless days and nights in a hospital, or that gut-wrenching decision of having to terminate for medical reasons, or that unsettling unknown of having to wait it out, wondering even as I carried him when my baby will die.

I am not sure how I was fueled with the strength and heart to try again after two consecutive losses. Since they were unrelated demises, my medical team, including geneticists, assure me that both incidents are not likely to happen again, and I was medically cleared to proceed. Coupled with our desire to add to our family and provide Luc with a sibling with whom to grow up, and goaded by the window of our childbearing years coming to a close, we did the only thing we've known how to do in the last years of heartache: we forged onward, charting cycles, taking supplements, and hoping, always hoping. I lived between the miles of solitary jogging I did to get my body back into prime shape; I bought ovulation strips by the max pack and brought them to test surreptitiously at work in order to catch that magical surge that is the precursor to the release of a ripe egg.

Two months after I lost my second pregnancy, 12 days after ovulation tracked daily with a Basal Body Thermometer, I was staring at another positive pregnancy test.

The ten seconds of elation were followed by countless days, weeks, and months of living in fear and anxiety, treading on eggshells with the possibility of something once again going wrong. We didn't talk about "the baby," didn't tell Luc about the arrival of a sibling, and didn't make our usual fanfare of announcements beyond when and to whom it was necessary. I survived from day to day and aimed for that next milestone: the beta blood tests indicating a growing life; the first scan and seeing a yolk sac and fetal pole; hearing that heartbeat; seeing a baby form and the wiggles on ultrasound; getting news after genetic testing that all is checking out well; feeling those first kicks and rolls, so missed and so welcomed.

24 weeks, and the baby reaches its first viability milestone with a survival rate of 20-35%.

26-27 weeks, and the chance of survival reaches up to 85%.

28 weeks, 90%.

That's what the studies say, and yet, even fullterm babies at 40 weeks are sometimes stillborn. Nothing is ever guaranteed. I frequently scanned the baby with a home Dopper that I was not keen on using during Luc's pregnancy, just to quell my mounting panic that the heart did not just suddenly stop beating.

The tears don't end with a new expectation; we mothers who have experienced losses still feel the emptiness keenly in our hearts. Having hope for the future does not erase the pain of the past. We still love and think of our departed angels. We still ache to hold them, even as our arms prepare to receive another. There is no sorrow like that of losing a child.

Mother's Day, 2019. My first baby girl would have turned one year old. I spend the weekend watching my second baby girl squirming on an elective 3D ultrasound, feeling her life inside me, marveling at my luck and my miracle. In the past 7 months since she has been with me, I am torn with trepidation, not daring to believe that this could be true. I hid her from the world as if I could protect her and not jinx her existence. Yet, guilt weighs down on me that I am not fully acknowledging her, accepting her, and opening myself to an unconditional love for her. With pregnancies in close succession, and with the knowledge that it is a girl, I'd often forget and think that I am still carrying Thi. The early onset of morning sickness that lasted into the second trimester, the way in which I would constantly catch colds and coughs, the same cravings I had with girl pregnancies---they all remind me of the baby I carried and lost, and I'd have to snap myself out of a downward spiral of thinking, forcing a reminder that is is a new baby with a different identity and fate, who may not be here, had her older sister lived. I continue to log my basal body temperature. Today is Day 193 of this cycle, and it is a moot point to track temperature this far into a pregnancy, but it serves as a daily reminder not to give up on her. She is the first thing I think about every morning.

There is never a total solace for those who have experienced multiple losses. . . but sometimes there is a glimmer of light at the end of a storm, and as the clouds part and the rains abate, one is rewarded with the breathtaking sight of a double rainbow.