When I first started writing for this blog, I had already been through a successful pregnancy after loss, and I was in the thick of a nearly 2 year-long battle to get pregnant again.
The stars finally aligned, and I am now 14 weeks pregnant with my 2nd rainbow baby. My first rainbow, Lucia, is now almost 3 and a half years old, therefore making it 4 years since I’ve walked this road of pregnancy after loss.
During those 4 years, I must have forgotten how hard the waiting is. How long this road is. It’s so hard. Sure, for first-time parents, or for parents who have never had a pregnancy complication, I’m sure it’s hard to wait too. But when you have had a previous loss at 29 weeks, and a loss at 5 weeks, and it’s taken you years to get pregnant, the wait is HARD. Grueling.
The wait for my first sonogram and 6.5 weeks felt like an eternity. The minutes, hours, days, inching by like a snail. I tried to remain positive and centered. I focused as much as I could on household tasks, work and caring for my daughter. But still, I wondered if this pregnancy was real. I worried. I doubted. 
The appointment finally came, and when it did, I saw that gloriously beautiful flicker of a heartbeat inside me. Oh the relief! Real it was. But, as us loss mamas know all too well, anything can go wrong at anytime, so even when you get excited, it’s that somewhat tentative excitement. The intensity of the tentative varying day to day, even hour to hour or minute to minute, depending on so many factors.
Over the last 3 months, I kept hearing myself say, “after my next appointment, I’ll ___”, fill in the blank. I’ll tell more people, I’ll feel more confident, I’ll buy something for the baby, I’ll start cleaning out the room for the baby, etc. That’s tentativeness right there for you.
An OB appointment that goes well is certainly a confidence boost, and the hope is that the boost will get you through until the next appointment. But in between appointments, you are out of the comfort zone of that doctor’s office. You are out in the world, living life. Not in a bubble. Even though you so desperately want to put yourself in one. I had forgotten how hard that time between appointments is. That time when you’re just living life in the real world. Quite frankly, it’s scary.
It is a hard and long road indeed. But this might be my last pregnancy, and so I am really going to try my hardest to breathe and enjoy it as much as I can. I am starting to embrace it more now. I really thought that in a subsequent subsequent pregnancy after loss, I’d be a little more laid back, having experienced things going right with my daughter, as opposed to how drastically wrong they went with my son 5 years ago. But the fear is still very much there, and it is real. Yes, I had almost forgotten. But how can you forget such a fear when you have been traumatized by the loss of a baby? You can’t.
Over the next 26 weeks, I plan to lean into the fear when I need to, but then pull away and hug my hope, for it’s hope that will carry me through on this road, and that is something that I’ll never forget.
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