Bereft

Probably not the place for this, but I have to put it somewhere.

Today would have been the due date for my baby.

It feels like a hoax, or a lie to call what I could not carry to fruition a baby.

Truth is, I saw it. When I miscarried, I looked, and I saw what left me, and it could never have been mistaken for a baby.

Logically I know that what happened was a frenzy of procreation that didn't go right.
Cells multiplied and divided. The climate of my body began to change to encourage the growth of the new inhabitant, but then something twigged in the system.
This was not viable.
What was growing was not going to develop into a life.
An evolutionary system override kicked into gear, and my body became toxic. It cut off the nourishment, the hormone supply, it efficiently rid my body of the bad investment in a matter of two days.
I can examine the evidence. I can see that my body was not ready. That this life was not viable. That it in no way diminishes my ability to carry a different pregnancy to term.

Grief, I am learning, is not a reasonable creature.

I was doing really well.
I'd not thought about it in almost a month. I knew the date was approaching in december, but it was November. I figured I had time.
Then, on thanksgiving, sitting on my sister's floor with a belly full of laughter and wine and with a room full of loving beloved people singing and carrying on around me, the black sorrow loomed up and swallowed me utterly, with no warning.
I jumped up as though electrocuted and barreled down the stairs to my own apartment. I put on some loud music and sobbed hard.
I remember the thought I'd had when the nurse on the phone set up my ultrasound and told me my due date was december 6th.
Congratulations, she said, and I'd been stunned.
Right.
I thought.
Congratulations, indeed! I was to be congratulated. I was knocked up, and it was wanted! The beard and I were going to rocket into parenthood like shooting stars of promise and adulthood.
We were terrified, but in a knee shaky, ready to climb onto the rollercoaster kind of way.
What we were was ready, and that was the scariest thing of all.

Over the brief time we knew I became a scientific observer of my body's changes.
My stomach rumbled incessantly. My tummy began to pouf a little. I was hungry at weird times and not interested in certain foods other times. I never once experienced nausea, and that was a good thing!
It was approaching Easter at the bakery, one of the bigger holidays in my business's world.
It was a happy and silly thing. I was going to show up at 5am to pack hot cross buns into boxes and frosted orange rum cakes into slices. I was going to wear bunny ears and serve coffee to all our regulars.
I toyed with the idea of telling one person...just as a treat. I knew it was still the first trimester, but I was almost at ten weeks. It couldn't hurt to tell someone.

Then there was pink.

I tried to ignore it. All the internet thingies said pink was normal.
I went to a brunch after work.
I left a bit early. I felt sort of peaked.
When I got home, pink turned to red.
I went to the hospital and had blood drawn, and they called me back that night to confirm what was happening.

I felt all the things. Beard felt them too.
It was hard.
Easter, right?
What a fucking joke.
Here it is the most exciting, fertile, treaty time of the goddamn year, and my body decides to kill the life inside it.
My sense of irony is truly incredible.

But time marches on.
The moments I was overwhelmed by sadness became fewer and further between.
I began to forget.

It was hardest when I got my period.
Not that I was ready to try again, but that it just reminded me of that process. The whole thing.

Then thanksgiving, and the free fall into unexpected sadness.

It feels so unreasonable. I think about the women who have stillborn children. Who have to go through the pain and emotional wreckage of that labor. I think about women who have a child and then have a miscarriage and then get pregnant again right away. As if they can somehow tape over the hole in their heart with this new creation. I suppose they can. I think about women who can't have children at all, and I wonder if I will join their ranks. It was my first pregnancy. I have had problems menstruating in the past. Perhaps this is a thing my body cannot do. I think about women who have children who die of SIDS or fever or women who can't stop smoking meth and give birth to hurt children. I think about women who drive their cars into lakes with their babies strapped into the back seat, and women who watch their children chase balls into the street never to return. I think about all the lost children and the devastation in their wake and where on the meter my own loss falls. How much value does it have? Am I allowed to feel the hurt as deeply as I do, or am I being indulgent and weak? Am I simply obsessing like I always do, and skipping on a tragedy like a needle in the warped groove of a record?

But that would be overcomplicating matters.
The truth is today was always going to be sad.
I was told, seven months ago, that I would be meeting my baby today.
It's a full moon, and I would have gone into labor tonight. I know it.
I would have delivered exactly when I was supposed to.
Tonight, Beard would have sat with me until the contractions were down to five minutes apart, and then we would have hopped into the car and driven to the hospital. We would have called my parents, my employers, our nearest and dearest friends.
People would have come to the hospital to sit in the waiting room for updates. They would ask if we needed anything on their way over. They would watch videos on their phones to kill time.
I would be doing some of the hardest work of my life, and sometime in the late hours of december sixth, possibly the early hours of december 7th, we would have met our baby.

Here is where my dream pops like a bubble.
I can imagine all the circumstances.
I did during that couple of weeks in April. I pictured how big I would be at thanksgiving. I imagined how I would have to leave work, and how I would probably be just well enough to drive up to my parents place at Christmas with the newborn, and it would be our first holiday as a family.
My parents would meet their first grandchild.

Yet somehow, I cannot accurately picture the child itself.
This is where the expanse of my imagination simply stops.
Call it self preservation, or merely the simple cramp of the human ego not allowing me to see further than my own experience, but I am not able to imagine holding the warm new bundle. I can't fathom it's face, whether it would have hair or a snub nose or ears that stick out. I can't even decide whether it would have been a boy or a girl.

I guess the saddest part about this grief of mine is not that I am mourning the loss of a baby, but that I am mourning the loss of an idea.

The idea of all this joy.
The idea of how exciting it would be to share this with my beardly one.
The idea of the love I would feel for it.
The idea of the entire course of my life being repurposed for this new avenue of motherhood.

It was terrifying to confront as a prospect.
But I was ready.

It is bone achingly sad to review my catalogue of hope and know that none of these things are true.
And yes, logically, I know there is a high statistically chance that I will experience everything I looked forward to in April at a later time in my life.

but that doesn't change the fact that grief is unreasonable by nature, and so I will sit here, inside it.
For a little while longer.
I am permitted that.
At least.