Heaven

If you ask me about heaven i will only tell you one thing.  Heaven is a dream.  It's my favorite dream.  As far as i know there are two options.  Hell for the bad and heaven for the good.  But what if the concept of original sin exists and we start out living in hell until heaven is earned.

I believe heaven is a dream.  At night i get to drab of the most wonderful thing ever.  I get to hold my child.  I get to watch her grow up and run around laughing.  I hear her asking for fun things like spinning around in a circle with me until we fall to the ground laughing.

Heaven is the place where i get to join in on the conversations explaining the adorable thing my child had done the previous day.   It's the place where my daughter gets to be the center of attention.  It's also the place that i don't want to leave.

If hell is the place bad people go when they die, i must have been alive in another life and this reality is my punishment.  I can't even imagine how bad of a person i would have had to be to get this pain. 

There is also the idea that heaven is a reward for being good in life and living through and succeeding in everything that life throws at you.  I hope for my sanity that the latter of the two ideas it's true. 

I spend my dreams with you and spend my days thinking of you.  I pretend at times you are still with me and that im being quiet trying not to wake you from a nap.  I sit quietly and imagine you playing with the children of my friends.  I know that you would have been perfect.

Leaving my husband

Having a relationship with a man during the hardest emotional time in my life did not help.

I was supposed to be able to get back into my feet without problems.  I was expected to get pregnant right away.  I tried for 1 and a half years with no luck.  Sex became a chore. It was not passionate and made my emotions way worse. 

I loved my husband and I still do.  We just are no longer together. 

I wish there was a way fir is to talk.  He says the break up happened for different reasons but in the end we couldn't get back to being us.

I have lived your greatest nightmare

Where I work, I hear every sad story about life.  Only once did I ever tell someone about me.

My world was turned upside down in the manner of minuets.  I had no idea that it was even going to happen.  On a daily basis, I hear that I am the last person to which they wanted to talk.  There is no one else to help.

It takes all of my insides not to slap them sometimes.  I see the young women who are pregnant with babies that they do not want.  I see parents with a whole bunch of children when they should have stopped at two.   I see teenagers who had sex once and got pregnant.

I had a lady come in and on her fourth pregnancy (three healthy babies at home) she came in and told me about her miscarraige.  She was shaken to the core that she has lost her baby at 10 weeks.  SHe insisted that it was for the best as she had just signed the divorce papers with her husband.

I told her about my daughter.  I explained that it happens for a reason.  I have no idea what that reason is, but there is no way I can tell my self she was for nothing. 

Personally I know that Lily was born to be my guardian angel.  I say that a lot, but it is true.  I see my self as a mother in my dreams but the children are never mine.  I am sure this is a sign that I will end up with adopted children and stay in a line of work where I will always have children around me.

First visit with doctor not pregnancy related

No woman looks forward to her annual exam with her doctor.  It is a very awkward exam with cold instruments and uneasy conversations about your sex life that makes it seem like your partner is an evil person that you have to defend.

It was my first time seeing this doctor in a long time.  I had been seeing the prenatal department and then I just stopped going to the doctor's office for a year.  I told my self that there would be no tears.  It was already going to be weird. Something about the being naked in a strange place and a person that you are not used to seeing you just made the experience uneasy to begin with.  I thought that there would be some research into my medical history   I knew from the first question the doctor asked me that she had no idea about my medical history. 

I see that you were in the prenatal program and gave birth a year ago.  Are you still nursing?

What was my response supposed to be.  I started to cry and at the same time explain that my daughter only lived two days.  I am pretty sure she was fed through her IV.  There I am sitting on the examination table, wearing nothing but a hospital gown.  I tried to save some dignity and explain my story. 

The rest of the exam happened as normal.  I was able to calm down.  I really wanted to focus the conversation on trying to conceive.  At my post postpartum appointment I was asked to wait a year so I could be more emotionally ready.  Instead of talking about my condition, she insisted that I needed to grieve and grow more as a person.

My only answer to her saying that I need more time to grieve, I spent a year learning that I will never be the same person I was before I gave birth to my beautiful daughter.  I came to terms with the fact that I was the one who made the decision to let her die instead of living in pain just to die in her sleep after living on morphine. It is not fair to ask a mother to grow more as a person.  I personally think she did not know how to handle my situation.  I have a condition that very little is known about, and every reference to it says very little. 

We spoke for a breif moment about my condition.  I have what is known as an incompetent cervix.  I had a healthy pregnancy, but my cervix could not hold a baby.  I felt like she was dropping or kicking down instead of her normal spot on my belly button.  Then the next day I lost my mucus plug and went into the hospital.  At 24 weeks 0 days I was 3 cm dilated. I gave birth 3 days later.

I was asked by this doctor if I felt that what I had was an incompetent cervix.  I went to school for law, not medicine.  I have to be able to trust what the doctor says.  If she has no idea what is going wrong with me, than maybe I need to switch doctors. 

Lily's first birthday

The 13th of may is coming up really fast, faster than I want.  I still want it to be last year when I was pregnant and did not have a worry. 

 Most people on my Facebook are now starting to be pregnant once again.  I am trying to save face while planning my daughter's first birthday.  Even though she will only be watching from above, I still want her to have a party.  It won't be big event, however I do want it to be a happy occasion. 

So far, my life has been up and down with emotions.  My daughter was my inspiration to go find a new job to make my life better.  she was my inspiration to go out and get a better car so that when I do have more children they will be safe and sound. 

I am giving her a first birthday that everyone will love.  I went and ordered her a disney princess cake, I boiught princess plates and decorations and I even made invitations.  I just wish there was a little one there to open presents and smash cake into her mouth. 

I hope no woman ever has to feel the pain of trying to keep her head up and fake a smile as her friends tell you that they are pregnant.  I hope no one ever has to remember praying in a hospital that they would be there for a while longer.  then after the baby is born foiur months early, praying that the baby is health and just needs time to grow.  A mom should never have to sit and remember the pain of walking out of the NICU crying because she just watched her baby die in the arms of the father because it was better than another week of selfishly wanting the baby to be fine.  In reality the baby was living off of life support and morphine to keep the baby from feeling too much pain.

This mother's day, I am going to be with family and loved one's and not have to make the hardest decisons of my life.  I will be there letting someone else decide how to make the day joyous. 

In honor of Lily, I am making my life better one step at a time.  She will have a mom that is ready to take on life-- who celebrates the two days that her daughter lived, not in silence, but with friends and family.  My daughter is not a secret.  She isn't a skeleton in the closet that I am afraid people will find out about.  Quite the contrary.  Lily is the light that glows in my life.  She gave me what I wanted most, to be a mother.  Yes, I only got to know her shortly, but she was the best two days of my life.

Strength of a Heartbeat

It's never easy to be able to go through a tragedy, especially when your tragedy was supposed to be your biggest achievement.  I have gone through college and made through it with my head up.  I found my fairytale knight in shining armor and I married him.  I now know why those fairytale princesses never have children at the end of the story.  It's because their story life was not perfect.  I was so excited Christmas day to read my pregnancy test to find out, and then going to all of the doctors appointments to hear her heart beat to know that she was there and healthy.  I thought that my fairytale was going to be complete.

I was wrong.  I had the perfect husband, who in reality is not perfect but I love him even more for it; and now waiting on my little one to come I did not know anything could happen so horribly.  Her tiny life coming out to see me four months early was overwhelming.  I spent a week in the hospital eight hours away from my home crying.  I stayed in bed for 3 days hoping and wishing she would stay on the inside for just a bit longer.

I cannot believe how much strength I was empowered with each time I had heard her little heartbeat, first on the Doppler and then later on the monitor.  It was my daughters gift to me. She tried her hardest to not come out, but my body worked against her.  Even with the Magnesium that I was put on as soon as the doctors realized what was happening, my cervix still continued to open and force my little girl to come out.  I requested that the sound of her heartbeat be left on so that I could know, even in my sleep that she was doing okay.

When she was born, on Mother's day, She was sent to the NICU to be put on monitors and breathing machines.  I did not know if I could go see her because I was afraid.  I was afraid of what I was going to see, after all she was tiny and frail and I knew the odds were against her. The only thing on this planet that gave me the tiniest shred of strength was hearing that heart beat. It was so strong.  She was happy and content being with me.  I kept hoping that everything was a very bad night mare.  There was nothing that made sense to me.  Why would I be in the hospital if everything was normal for the first six months.  That little sound on the monitor kept me thinking about how she could have a future.  How even if she decided to come too soon we could still have her with us.

Jealousy

It's not that I am not super happy that you are expecting your third baby, who the father doesn't want, but I am still healing.  I am angry that I have not been given a second chance at having a baby.  It is so hard for me to listen to her talk about being six weeks pregnant and not really wanting the child.  Here I am fearing that with my emotional state, I won't get pregnant for a while. 

Moving on to figuring out my new self, I know that I will never be fully okay with pregnancies, whether my own or that of other women.

I don't want to be that sour puss in the back of a room trying my hardest not to cry, or that girl who tries so hard to find a believable excuse for not attending a baby shower.  I want to be that woman who is proud of her friends.  Who is the first person to go shopping in the baby section and isn't afraid of seeing tiny toes sticking out of car seats in stores. I want to be able to hold my head up high when I go into a gynecologist's office without crying because I know there is something wrong with me that they can't fix.

For now, I will work on my jealousy of pregnant women and hope that I can move on.  I know it's a lot to ask of my self, but maybe one day it will be to my advantage.  I will understand more clearly as to why sometimes destiny and fate suck.  I really wish that my little girl would not have left the world so soon, but she was a gift to me.

If sometimes referring to her as a gift seems weird, I don't know what else to say to her. I was telling her goodbye from the first moment I laid eyes on her.  She came to my life to give me some kind of truth, but I am not sure what that was, but one day I hope I will. For now, she will remain my guardian angel.  That is what I told her she is, and that I was just one of the very luck mommies to meet their guardian angel.  If you have not sat across from your one pound baby in a NICU waiting for more bad news, than you will never understand how it feels to force yourself into KNOWING that your little one is going to be a memory.  She is going to be those tears that you cry everytime you think of her. She is going to be those happy thoughts every time you hold your partner.  And when the time comes, she will be the reason that the future children exist. It sucks that her tiny little life left me in such misery.  I feel like I should go out in the world and raise awareness, but at the same time I don't have enough energy to go to work some days so how am I supposed to raise awareness of a flaw inside of my body.