The Diary of an overdue Momma!

4 days... in just over an hour it will be 5 days. 5 days past the day this babe was clinically determined it should be here. Don't get me wrong I know that due dates are b.s. and some woman gestate for much longer than others, I just thought I might try putting into words what my long gestational period feels like...
Jude was two weeks overdue, yep that's right he was due on the 1st of May and born on the 16th of May. One of the hardest parts for me in that waiting period is that we were planning a home birth and as the days went by, I knew that dream was fading away. Being induced was not ideal but there was still hope for a natural delivery, and in the end the induction put him in distress and he was delivered by c-section. This loss has been a lot for me to deal with. The loss of a beautiful natural birth where baby and I get to work together to be born into this world as mommy and child. I have spent countless hours processing this loss and coming to terms with living in the questions that I still have about it.
"They" say that baby's play more of a role in going into labour than mommy does. Baby gives off hormones, when babe is ready to come into the world. Let me tell you I'm the pre-labour queen. My baby's like to tease me it seems. "Ok mom I'm ready here we go... oh haha just kidding, silly mom." I have spent the last three nights in a row with contractions 5-7 min apart lasting a good 3 hours. Not so unreasonable to think that babe would be coming. That is the hardest part this time, the hardest part today in particular, is holding hope that my body will even go into spontaneous labour.
Why didn't it happen with Jude I don't know... but I know this baby is not Jude, this baby has a different placenta, and a different environment than Jude. So I can't think they are the same, just as everyone tells me when this one arrives how different they will be, why wouldn't they be different now. So what's the common denominator.... me.
My body, my mind, my energy, my strength. I know that I also am a different person than I was when I gave birth to Jude, I have been transformed through his birth and his life, and learning what it is to be given the gift to mother. Yet I find myself scared and believing that my body does not have what it takes to go into and STAY in labour.
It may seem like a silly thing to some, but to me it throws me into a tail spin of believing my body is against me, or betraying me in some way. I think about praying about it but find I don't think God really cares, or he does but some how has lost all his universal power in this one area. I know, ridiculous... So I waffle between apathy and hope, or worry and wishing and once again am faced with holding two dialectical positions in my brain, my heart, my being.
I used to get so angry inside when after Judes birth I heard countless times, "at least you have a healthy baby." I still don't think that is a helpful thing to say to a grieving hormonal mother, but I get it... I get it now. I look at my son who is growing so fast and YES I would most definitely do it all again for him, and YES I will endure what may come with this baby. I'm thankful for my son and for conceiving and carrying this child, I don't take these gifts for granted.
And tonight as I approach day 5 of yearning and waiting I will wish for spontaneous labour, and I will even wish for it to come tonight...

Remembering Isamae...

One year ago today we lost our second baby for good. It's hard to believe that a year has past. There are so many markers to this time of year for me, the most significant is the Berry Beat festival in Abbotsford that I dragged my recovering body around a day after surgery, and lovely friends brought me blueberries and strawberries as I lay on the couch.

In some ways it is so surreal thinking about that experience, that loss, and in other ways it still carries some significant impacts that now I feel with this new life growing in me. I am so thankful that this new baby has decided to make me aware of it's growing through movement that I can feel. As I type this I feel little pokes and prodes that assure me it is not in my head and this being is safe in my womb.

I find that today I struggle with guilt in celebrating this new life because of my desire to honor Isamae's life. If Isamae had lived there is such a small chance I would be pregnant again now and in that case I probably would not know this little one I feel inside. As hard as it was to wait on pregnancy again I am so thankful that I did not conceive until after Isamae's due date, because it was important to me to hold that space for only that baby.

But even still having done that work I realize again that grief is a spiral event and as we face new events in life our heart and body are triggered back into memory of the pain. At first I had a hard time attaching to this "tummy baby" (Judes name for baby). With Jude I told everyone the second I knew I was pregnant, this time it was like telling too soon would take away from the sacred encounter this child and I were having. With Jude even though I had had other friends who had lost their babies significantly into their pregnancies, I believed we would make it through to full term. This time I find myself falling into almost expectation that I will discover something is not right with this pregnancy. With Jude I also clung to the belief in natural birth and "my body is made to do this". Now I find I doubt in my body that it has the strength to endure full labour and delivery...

I am taking this class called "Dancing for Birth" with my doula (and friend), to use my body in a way already that holds hope of preparing for a natural birth. And after this class we were talking about my birth experience with Jude and as I talked I had a "body memory" of that night that directly paralleled a theological experience I had in my early 20's. It was at this time that I started deconstructing my view of God, Self and the world... What I realized that recent evening was that just as I had believed for so much of my life that if I did all the right things in honour of God, then my life would work out "well" or "good" or "right" (whatever the hell those words mean). And I became extremely disillusioned when this wasn't the case. I had to work hard to view God, the divine, the Other, through a much more inclusive and liberating lens. Well, I say all that because somehow I fell into the same belief system with my birth of Jude. I believed it would be natural if I had faith and did all the "right" things. That didn't happen and so I became disillusioned with God once again, and then my loss of Isamae only heightened this disillusionment. So the biggest impact left for me to process in spiritual and that incompasses all of my being.

So while I believe that our little Isamae is a soul that is alive and well in some beautiful place, and I allow her to hold a precious place in my heart. I continue to wrestle with scars of her life and her loss. And just as today the clouds continue to roam in this "sunny" month of June, so my heart feels the shadow of the life that we lost, and the brief warmth of the life that is growing.

When the Heart Waits

**This is an older blog I never posted cause I was too fragile at the time, but now relates to todays post***

I know I'm so horrible at keeping up with this blogging deal. That is mostly because I work almost 40hrs a week... But that is not what this blog is about.

So this is the month, the month our second child would've been born. Possibly an Olympic baby, the 2010 Olympics will always hold this history for me. I've done a lot of work with my grief in the past 7 months since my surgery. I've learned grief is fluid, it's organic and it's highly unpredictable. One moment I'm fine with a newly born child, and the next I can hardly stand the sight of a strangers pregnant belly. But the most difficult challenge these days is working through my underlying beliefs about my body.

I went through a time after my c-section with Jude where I truely felt like my body had betrayed me. I wanted to blame someone or something for this traumatic experience. And then I renewed my faith in God's beautiful gift of flesh and bone and was ready to trust in my 2nd pregnancy. So now I'm back to building a trusting relationship with my body.

The yearning to fill my womb has never left me since I lost Isamae. I struggled with this, and wondered if it was about replacing her. Now I know she will always be our second child, and I can hold grief for her and hope for another baby.

The challenge is with one tube gone, I am not fertile every other month, at least my left ovary does not release an egg into a left tube. The surgeon told me that it has happened that the left ovary's egg will be caught by the right tube. I have never hoped in that, until now. A friend of mine who has had her own fertility struggles reminds me that "it only takes one" One tube, one egg, one hope! So I am choosing now this month to live in the faith of ONE as my heart waits...