It's interesting the more people we meet that have lost babies and tell us of their comfort and peace. I don't feel peace and I feel less comfort as the days go on. Things that I found comfort or had confidence in have slipped away.
On the Tuesday before Wyatt died we got a remarkable sonogram report: baby has grown, is practicing breathing, and blood flow studies are stable. Within two days there was no amniotic fluid and I could feel him moving less and not as strong. We took that as our sign to have a c-section so he could live but I wonder if we should have taken him on Tuesday, when all things were good. Would he have lived then? What if I had rested more? Eaten better? It seems God wanted Wyatt no matter what so now I find myself angry at having a c-section at all. Recovery is slow and painful and I've had infections, mysterious & painful bumps, trouble sleeping because of pain, and adverse reactions to medications. I've also lost the ability to give birth naturally again. Wyatt was so small I had to have a classical c-section which makes laboring again impossible unless I wanted to chance a ruptured uterus and risk another baby. While I mourn my son, I also mourn my body's natural ability to give birth as well as the thought of any more children. I cannot imagine voluntarily having a c-section ever again. With past children I've been healed and up and running after 48 hours. I'm going on 2 1/2 weeks with almost nothing to show for it. I can barely sit down. The only thing that does seem to heal is the scar itself, which makes me angry as well. I don't care what the scar looks like or if it ever goes away. It's a symbol that Wyatt was here. If it disappears I have no mark left to show that he was born. I don't understand it when doctors praise how nice your scar looks. I'm more concerned about having been put back together correctly on the inside, and that's the one thing that doesn't seem to have happened. Great, no scar, but your muscles were sewed up wrong and your bowels don't work anymore and there's severe pain when you eat and sitting and standing and walking are all excruciating. Grieving for Wyatt has been side-tracked numerous times by trying to physically heal and figure out what in the world is went wrong with my surgery. Most of my tears have turned into anger and fury that I still cannot function-even if I wanted to-for the children that I have here at home. All of this has led me to second-guess having tried to save him at all. It would've been better to let him pass in the womb and then give birth to him. I'd be recovered by now and the end wouldn't have been different. It looked to me like he suffered more at the hands of medical personel than he would've any other way. That is exactly what my husband and I were trying to avoid. Seems like it was all for nothing, so where did we go wrong?
I look at the pictures up in my house of days before I knew what this kind of pain was like. My bedroom is full of pictures of my husband and I dating and taking vacations. You can almost smell the naivete. We didn't have a clue what was in store for us. Our life together has been hard and this has been, by far, the worst and hardest thing ever. I feel like running away honestly, to live a life I did as a single mom. Maybe being married has brought me bad luck. But I suppose something like this never gets away from you. We could leave each other now and never have contact again and we would never be the same people. The damage is already done. I miss the days of being happy and confident in life with the ability to give love to my husband and children. I miss the days of my husband jumping and dancing around the house in lightheartedness that hadn't been disturbed yet. Life has hit us hard and doesn't seem to want to give us a break. I wonder why some people go through life untouched and others get pounded like we have? I wonder what we did in life to deserve this. I didn't appreciate being pregnant, like really appreciate it. Is God teaching me a lesson? Are we not good enough people that our prayers aren't listened to? Did we have to lose a baby? Do I have to have such an impossible recovery? What did we do that was so bad? In the past two weeks I've gone over the pregnancy a thousand times, the information the doctors gave us as well as all of my sins ever committed. I've come up with a million things that could've been different, as if I could go back now and change any of it. I feel like I can...it's the oddest thing. I get "ah ha" moments where I feel like I know where things went bad with the pregnancy and then I get disappointed that there is nothing I can do about it now. I admire my husband who is content to just leave things as they happened and accept that God has a better plan. This whole thing has just made me more skeptical and given me more questions that could ever possibly been answered. I look at the photos of my deceased son and I think to myself "I did that. I killed him". In exactly what way, I'm not sure, but I didn't give him life.
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