For the last three weeks, everything I have wanted to blog about has been related to pregnancy, but I couldn’t, because we weren’t announcing yet. Now we are.
What is different the third time around? For most people, who have had two normal pregnancies and normal births, I don’t know. I can only share our experience. There is excitement, there is joy, and the obvious obsession with baby names. There is also the early-pregnancy ambivalence, which I felt both times before—the “Oh, (expletive), am I really ready for this?” But there’s also an anxiety that I didn’t feel with my second pregnancy.
It took us three years to conceive Alex. That’s a whole story of its own. I’ve written it twice and deleted it as unnecessary to the point; the point is that it was a long wait to become parents. Alex is everything I hoped for and more. When we conceived again, after only four tries, I thought we were finally entering the same world everybody else inhabits, as far as parenting. I was wrong. Julianna was born with Down syndrome, which required me to bend my will to God’s. That was a painful process.
So now, we are expecting again, and it happened on the first try. (Who’d’a thunk it?) I no longer hold any illusions that God and the universe owe us anything. In the past 8 months, two family members have had early miscarriages and a close acquaintance lost a baby at 7 ½ months to placenta previa. I can’t quite allow myself to believe that this third child is really going to come to us this easily, after everything else God had asked of us in childbearing.
It’s making it hard to bond emotionally with this pregnancy. It would be easier to stay blasé—just in case the worst happens, as it happened to others we know. Yet how is that fair to this little baby?
And it is getting easier to believe. We’ve seen a heartbeat now, and although I have gained neither weight nor girth, I can feel things changing—hardening, rearranging, preparing.
This has been perhaps the most difficult blog post I have ever written. I want my child to know that s/he is loved and wanted, and that the news of his/her coming caused just as much excitement in Christian and I as we experienced with the first two. And it is true. (I couldn’t sleep the night before I took the pregnancy test, I was so excited.) It’s just that things are a little tempered by the experience of the past.
3 Responses
First of all, congrats to you and your family! Secondly, I believe your feelings are completely normal (as though you need them validated… sorry). I can only imagine the roller-coaster of emotions that happens when you have the history you do that forms you so.
Many blessings on the coming months as you prepare for your family to grow!
Thanks, Molly. It’s hard not to feel guilty for being less than unwaveringly ecstatic…but I’m grateful for all the people who care about us, who keep telling us it’s OK.
Congratulations on your pregnancy! You taught my husband and I NFP about 5-6 years ago in Columbia (we live in Jeff). Anyway, for some strange reason I was thinking about you guys a few months ago, googled you and found your blog. 🙂 We have 3 children now ourselves – 3 is a good number! Congrats again!