baby lime

Three years ago I felt sick, not a "good" sick for when you're pregnant, and I bled and eventually, I lost a baby. Exactly 11 weeks old. Living inside of me, the size of a lime. It looked like a baby, M told me later. I remember most details of it clearly. Red has never been a color I associate very fondly with many memories, but this trumps all of the bad ones. The worst part is to remember the days afterward. I don't know how many days it took to feel a little bit better, but for many of the days right after, I have never felt darker. My sight in my memories of it is rimmed with black, and hopelessness, and deep deep grief. I had carried a baby safely, carefully, lovingly, happily, and in just a few traumatic hours it was gone. There was nothing there, and when I saw women with swollen bellies, women with tiny babies, friends posting about pregnancies just discovered, it made me want to throw something. They had what I didn't. It felt like the brightness of each day before would never return.

Things got worse for me. For my family. It was a season of loss for us all. Then they got better. I have since learned, in 3 years, that there are far worse storms to pass through. I would never wish the loss of a baby on anybody, and I do not downplay the sorrow, the horror, the unimaginable experience of it happening. However, I was pregnant again 6 weeks later. I have a beautiful 2-year-old who is as healthy as I could have prayed for, with light and potential in her eyes every moment. I have not known the permanent loss of my baby, because whoever's little spirit lived in that lime is perfect and in the right place. It is not that I don't think about it, it's that I have something even better to think about now. I did not know then that things can always be worse, even when they can also be much better.

Loss is relative. We think sometimes it's measured the same for all. Loss of a grandparent: sad but usually expected. Not for me. The loss of one of my grandparents is the most difficult losses I have experienced thus far. There are losses and there are sometimes things that you never even get to have at all. Truly, no two people will ever experience the same things, and that especially goes for loss, grief, affliction, trial.

I am grateful for what I've learned with my loss, though I am glad that with each day more time and more healing gets between me then and now. Just because it was a while ago, doesn't mean your loss gets easier. It just somehow gets more manageable to handle. Or maybe your joy is heightened and that helps take the sting.

I love you baby lime. Wherever and whoever you are. xo