Right Where I Am 2012: Two years and five months

I'm glad Angie has decided to put on the Right Where I am Now project again -  my god it feels like so much has changed in a year.

Its a Sunday the 27th again, which makes it two years and five months exactly since I was strapped to a trolley in the emergency department, hand on my 34w pregnant belly, still hoping that we might hear Haloumi's heartbeat.  I'm back in hospital now - this time in the adjoining maternity hospital, but things are so, so different - and I am acutely grateful for that.  This time, it's our six day old baby boy, Ali, who is a patient in the special care nursery, but his outlook is the complete opposite to Haloumi's.  He's alive, to start with, and in rude health, but needs phototherapy for jaundice due to ABO incompatibility.  I'm sleeping on a recliner next to his isolette so that we can continue breastfeeding.  I'm still in a state of disbelief that we have a living baby who I can breastfeed, who gives me serious looks with his dark eyes, whose noises I wake up to in the night, thinking, "A baby is crying... oh, that is *our* baby". 

In the family lounge I talk to the grandmother of a baby girl born at 27 weeks, and I send out a silent thank you to all available deities for our chubby, healthy, full term little boy who looks so much like his older sister.  But where we only got still glimpses of her, he is here in real time - moving, making faces, clearly enunciating his "Waaaa" cry and drinking my milk - all the things I longed for so much  with Zainab.  I know now that all those possibilities are gone for her.  What she (and we) missed out on still makes me cry, but there's now an ocean of experiences which mothering her has given me.  If I had to choose, I would always choose for her to live, but none of us get the luxury of that choice, so I have to take what I can from being her mama.  And even if it isn't what I would have chosen, that is still a lot. 

It feels corny to try to enumerate what exactly to that is - to be honest, it feels as though my whole personality and belief system has re-shaped around being mama to Zainab.  It isn't that I've "found religion" or anything like that.  It's more that being mother to a dead child has meant that my love follows her into death, so I've had to think about what death entails - where is it exactly, and can I still connect with her while she's there?  I've come to realise that, if I thought of death as some separate, alien place that I needed to get to in order to be close to her, then being comfortable in the land of the living was just not possible. I didn't want to choose between being close to her and living - so I had to find her here - to inhale her softness with the rose petals, to wear her memory in my choices of jewellery, to let death sit comfortably at our table - feeling her existence each time we missed her.  And now, to notice all the resemblances between her and her brother. 

I feel like she is built into our lives now - we have our small rituals for her, and family and friends (mostly) acknowledge her as a significant part of our family.  The blanket my mum knitted for her - which she was wrapped in for much of the time we held her, is here wrapping Ali - especially on car trips, and exerting a protective warmth.  I like to think that they know one another - that her cells watched over his as he grew within me, maybe bossing him around a little like the big sister she is.  He's still in that newborn place where he seems to be in two worlds at once - staring at things just beyond my shoulder, making inexplicable but beautiful facial expressions.  I whisper in his ear, "tell your sister we love her".

Just as I refuse to choose between living and being close to Z, I've also realised that I don't need to choose between feeling the sadness when it comes, and enjoying pure joy when that arrives - even if they both tumble in the door at the same time.  It doesn't make sense, but I've now given up on trying to make sense of emotions - just feeling them honestly and genuinely is big enough. 

Looking back, my post last year touched on similar ground, but while I'd started to make friends with the intensity of losing Z, I was still so so sad, so much of the time.  I feel like my life has recovered a lightness since then. There really was a cruel little part of me that felt like I would never have a living child, that mocked me for wanting one so badly.  And yet here he is - soft-snoring, velvet-cheeked proof that the universe can be unimaginably good as well as unimaginably cruel.  I am so grateful that the odds favoured us this time. 

Nesting with a vengeance (or, Grief is grotty)

To be honest, I was really a bit scared to start nesting.  But then our dear friends S and C offered as their baby gift a whole day of spring cleaning to help get our place in lovely shape for Adzuki to come home to.  And somehow, having someone to work alongside, and who were really imagining a living breathing baby in our house, unleashed the nesting monster.  All the nesting we never got to do for Z, because we were moving interstate and she died before we moved into the new house - and a whole lot of new nesting for this baby.  For so long, we had just been in survival mode.  We'd unpacked in such a random way - I was discharged directly from the rehab hospital to our new house, and friends and family had unpacked all our furniture the day before. 

El Prima and I were never the biggest fans of housework to start with, but grief sucked much of the remaining house pride out of us.  Just getting back into work, getting the girls to school, dinner on the table, bills paid, laundry done, and then starting IVF took all our energy.  And when you've been given an acute appreciation of how the people you love can be gone in an instant, well, dusting just really doesn't come very high on your priority list.  And El Prima and I really didn't need another thing to argue over.  Oh look, we had all kinds of good excuses, but essentially we'd given up on the notion of having a lovely clean house - it was all just too overwhelming.  Somehow, having S come and clean broke that pattern - and as the one day of spring cleaning turned into about three and a half, and El Prima and I started getting into it, I  realised I could start caring about this house again - that looking after it didn't have to be an act of drudgery but could be an act of love and care - for ourselves and for Adzuki.

That doesn't mean that our place is now spotless, but it is so so much cleaner before, and with this new energy, we've been able to let go of lots of stuff we don't need, and to re-arrange and tidy up the stuff we do need. Who knows if our hearts will be broken again, but I figure - we're already so in love with Adzuki -  holding out on preparing for him to come home living and breathing wouldn't make things any easier if he didn't make it.  If we're jinxed, we're jinxed already by loving him so much.  The first thing I bought for him back in November was this vintage kimono - it is now hanging on the wall near his drawers and change table, hot pink with hope.  We're now at 38 and a half weeks - ready when you are, little one!

Archaelogy

There is a back corner of our garage where baby things accumulate.  It's where we hid away the little red suitcase of things we'd bought or been given for Zainab when it became clear she wasn't ever going to use them, along with the pram and carseat.  Over the last six months or so of this pregnancy it is where pre-loved baby things have washed up as dear friends have pressed them upon us.  Yesterday was a clear sunny day, impossibly warm for Autumn but a good washing day, so El Prima and I started our excavations.

We worked through boxes of baby clothes - washing and sorting them by size.  Tiny jumpsuits hung from our washing line like a cloud of white fluffy bats.  And we tried to imagine Adzuki's little feet - those little heels sliding regularly across the inside of my belly and giving El Prima well-timed kicks in the back - wearing some of these clothes.  It all feels quite unreal at this stage, but now that we've gotten past the same stage as our accident last time, some of the fear has lifted.  We're doing that crazy unbelievable thing - preparing for this baby to come home with us, and getting ready all the things we'll need to care for him as a living, breathing baby.  The part of my brain which tells me that I'm tempting fate, I'm hearing but not heeding.  Who knows what will happen, but I want to enjoy this bit of anticipation while we can.  

We started with the most recently stashed away things from friends, and then gradually dug deeper into the pile, finding the pram we'd bought second-hand for Zainab and pumping up the tyres, along with all the bits and pieces for it.  And finally we took a deep breath and turned to the little red suitcase.  I had imagined this as a little time capsule of all our hopes for Zainab - that we could open it, and while it might be sad, there might also be something bittersweet about her little brother wearing her hand-me-downs - a connection between the two.  I should have known from the weight of it that something was up, but the moment I unzipped it, we could smell what had happened - somehow water had got in and everything inside was mouldy and mildewy.  At first I just took a deep breath and started separating out the irretrievable things from the ones that might come good with a good soak, but as the extent of the damage became clear, we stopped and I wept.  That time, when we had felt Z kicking, and had bought these small things in anticipation - was well and truly gone - the new clothes we had bought then are no longer new but decaying.  The little gold sequined mardi gras shoes were still wrapped in plastic, so they smelt musty, but were mostly okay - the blue and orange overalls were so badly mildewed that the fabric fell apart as I pulled them out. The irretrievable things I packed back into the little red suitcase - it will have to go in the bin soon, but for now I needed some means of disposal that reflects the love and sadness we have for these mouldy little scraps and the baby who was supposed to wear them.

The other things, I soaked and washed and pegged out on the line - hoping that sunshine will help get rid of the smell, and that Adzuki won't mind if some of his clothes look slightly the worse for wear because they come from his sister.  Wednesday will be 36 weeks, so chances are, we'll be meeting him in the next month or so.  As scary as it is, we're putting faith in that thought. 

Holding onto the handrail

I'm sorry I went quiet there for a bit.  Just keeping up with full-time work, and staying sane, and safely gestating is using up most of my time and energy at the moment.  

Adzuki is 33 weeks today, and I can't help but replay where we were at this gestation with Zainab.  They were our last days with her, and we had no idea.  We were in the midst of packing up our house and moving interstate, and then the busy noisy chaos of Christmas and family.  This is why I linger in bed in the mornings when Adzuki starts moving - because we had so few opportunities to do that with Z in those last days.  I'm grateful that he seems to be a very active baby - whenever I start getting worried about him, I tune in to my belly and have been able to feel him move or hiccough. I'm trying to balance the fears - doing what I can to hang onto the handrail and stay as safe as possible - with the moment to moment experience of having this small person dancing in my belly.  I'm avoiding car trips wherever possible, and using a special seat that keeps the seatbelt away from my belly.  I know it's unlikely that the same thing would happen, but I also know how common car accidents are, and that even a less serious bingle could harm Adzuki.

And in just over a week (if all goes well) Adzuki will have been in my belly longer than Z ever was.  I feel frozen, uncertain of what to do.  I find myself procrastinating with my work - I long to hibernate in bed, to wait this out until I wake one morning and go into labour. 

I think our strategy for now is to mark 34 weeks as another anniversary for Z, and then to begin in earnest the preparations for Adzuki's birth - getting his space in our room set up, listening to the birthing cds, getting my head around the prospect of a pregnancy ending with a living baby rather than trauma and grief.  At least we really hope so this time!

Slow

I'm now 26w pregnant, and it is odd to be back in this visibly, publicly pregnant state - almost as big as I was when we lost Z.  And I'm just realising that, no, I didn't imagine it - my boobs really were this big last time, my belly really was this huge.  It's almost as though, when Z died, a part of me felt that because I hadn't managed to deliver a living baby, that my pregnant and post-partum body was somehow imagined - or worse, a kind of fakery, when really - there was no baby to show for it.  As though I wasn't entitled to have all this odd bodily paraphenalia of pregnancy.  As though her death cancelled out the whole pregnancy and turned all our plans and love for her into self-delusion.  Here I was, impersonating a mother.  Back when I started this job, I thought of myself as an injured person recovering from a car accident rather than a new mother of four months.  I was so focused on getting back on track so that we could get pregnant again -  grief was an energy-sucking distraction, an indulgence.  

I look back and I'm shocked at my own cruelty to myself.  It took me quite a while, but I've now properly claimed that title of mother to Z.  While it still breaks my heart that she's not here and whole, revealing her two-year-old self to us, I'm proud of her.  And I feel like I've learned a huge amount about being a mother because of her.  That I can survive the unimaginable, that I can feel that awful and still be me - even if it is a weepier, more fragile me.  That things can be completely, irretrievably broken, and mundane or miraculous at the same time.  I'm kind of stunned that I had this depth of love within me - to love a child who isn't even here, who gives us no tangible sign of  response, and yet who makes love spill out of me in such a way that I have to lavish it upon the stars, earth, sea and air in the hope that maybe some of it will hit one of her atoms.  She has, exactly as I feared, made me into a bit of a grief-struck crazy-lady, but in a much more whole and connected way than I ever imagined.  I even have some fondness for my crazy-lady habits, because that's how I know that I'm her mama - because I'm the woman who pauses on the street to stick my nose right into the heart of the rose, and inhales, whispering, l love you, my darling girl.   

We're at the point where we are beginning to plan for all the things we'll need if Adzuki arrives safely.   It feels ridiculously foolhardy to do these things - to accept gifts of second-hand baby baths, to go to a breastfeeding preparation class, to start moving furniture so we can fit a cot in our room.  A voice in my head constantly harps, Don't you know what happened last time?  What makes you think you'll be needing these things?  And the truth is, we don't know.  Nothing can guarantee that he will come home with us, living and breathing.  But I also know now that if all the awful things conspired and he didn't come home, I would still love him and he'd still be our son.  I won't kid myself that one grief fully prepares you for another, and I am still terrified of all the possibilities for things to go wrong.  But being able to sit with those possibilities also enables me to let in the good possibilities, and to appreciate that right now things are wide open, that for now I get to feel every kick and try to be awake to it - to experience the aspects of the pregnancy that are similar to my pregnancy to Z, and also those which are completely different.

El Prima and I are getting impatient now - mid May feels so far away.  And we know from Z that it could all happen much sooner than that.  I'm trying to hold onto the realisation I had while looking at the clouds the other day - that even when it looks like nothing is moving, if you give it proper attention, you'll see the slow shift of things changing moment by moment.

2012

You know that fresh, clean bit of the new year, when it really feels like ages until you have to go back to work?  When you really do think this is the year you will get organised and do all those little things that need to be done?  Yep, well that bit is definitely gone.  And I'm afraid that all the blog posts that were on my list of things to be done have evaporated into thin air - chewed up by the busy weeks organising and then staffing at a summer camp for the girls. 

The camp was an amazing, intense week, which reminded me that actually, I can organise things, I can run a team, and I can build yoga and quiet time into even the busiest of days, and that I have a beautiful support network.  The camp is also near where Z's ashes are, so I was able to visit her everyday, which I loved.  But I'm exhausted from the 7am-11pm days and from coming home to big fights with El Prima and a chaotic house with 7 members of El Prima's family staying over - including in our bedroom.  I mean, I'm taking the fact that they now come to stay as a lovely acceptance of our relationship (at last) but seven people as well as the four of us who already live there in a three bedroom house with only one couch and very little living space is very difficult!  

El Prima's eldest daughter has also come to stay - very welcome after a long absence, and she's actually been the most helpful and thoughtful of all the guests.  The rest of the family have now headed home, and we've got our house back, but there's nothing like in-laws to put a strain on things.  (There were also some unintentionally hilarious moments - El Prima's older sister seeing that I was pregnant and asking in a semi-scandalised voice, "Does your father know?"  I thought she was quite restrained, given that she's suggested on previous occasions that she could find a husband in Lebanon for me.) 

In Adzuki news, everything went well on our 20 week scan. For the benefit of my dad, and anyone else who doesn't want to know Adzuki's sex, here is a little spoiler alert image so that you have to scroll down to find out.  Just imagine some "oooooh-wah-ooooooooh" thinking music like they had on the 1980s Australian TV gameshow Perfect Match...

Image (and context, should you wish to brush up on your 1980s antipodean game show trivia) from here.

Okay, ......................................  drumroll........................................

..............................

He's a boy!


We had quite a hilarious ultrasound operator.  First, she asked, "Is there anything you'd like to know about this baby?"  And while I was temped to reel off a long list starting with, "where does this baby stand on the middle east crisis / circumcision debates / global warming?" and constantly punctuated with "will we get to bring this baby home living and breathing?", what we actually said was, "yes, can we find out the sex?"







To which she replied, "Well, there's the scrotum!" 

I'll leave the visuals up to your imagination, but let's just say there wasn't really any room for confusion on that issue.  I responded in quite bad mother fashion by immediately bursting into tears.  Distraught, sad tears, I'm ashamed to say. 

Let me try to explain this.  We are so delighted.  We are so bloody lucky to be in this position, with a healthy looking Adzuki kicking around my insides.  But one of the reasons I wanted to find out the sex despite being a big believer in surprises and non-gender specific baby clothing was that I knew that I was somehow imagining a little sister for Z, and that I had invested a huge amount of energy into the idea of having a living daughter.  I knew I needed time to work through all the emotions tied to having either a boy or a girl.  I had been so convinced I was having a boy when I was pregnant with Haloumi / Z, and was so fond of that idea, that I really associated finding out she was a girl with first seeing her face - and that amazing surprise of seeing your own baby for the first time.  Having a daughter was this amazing surprise gift from Z, that I didn't even know how much I wanted, even if she couldn't live.  I know none of this really makes sense, but I guess when you know so little about your own child, you hang onto the small bits of info that you have got, and her sex was one of those things.  And despite me knowing intellectually that Adzuki has always been a different baby to Z, that Z is irreplaceable - gone forever as the baby that we knew her - knowing that he's a boy is a clear confirmation that no, she's not coming back. 

And poor little boys - they have so much crap to deal with in this world (I know, little girls too).  But all those stereotypes about sport, and being tough and preferring trains / cars / mechanical un-empathetic shit....  I know that's not the whole picture for little boys, and I'm glad that we have such a beautiful diversity of gorgeous men in our lives - from my dad and brother, to El Prima's nephews, darling poet / engineer / loving dad friends and husbands / partners of friends and all our beloved gay boyfriends, including Z and Adzuki's donor.  But just knowing opens up a whole new field of worry for Adzuki, and how he might navigate this messed up world.   

The day after the scan was new years eve, and the kind of hot, dry day where just walking from the house to the car made you feel like every bit of moisture was being baked out of you.  El Prima and I braved the late afternoon heat to visit the local pool for its last half an hour of evening opening.   I did backstroke under the dry blue sky and wept into the chlorine.  When I looked up again, the clouds had re-formed, and directly in my line of vision was the cloud shape of a new baby's face.  Here he is, this tiny boy, completely dependent on me, and all I can do is weep because he's not a girl.  I know this sounds very flaky, but I think that was Z and Adzuki, conspiring to rearrange the water atoms in the sky to remind me of who it is here in my belly - my beautiful little son. 


(Z's day on 27 December deserves its own post and is next in line, but suffice to say that I now think it is pretty significant that one of the songs I chose for her play list (we hadn't had the scan yet at that stage) was "Here comes the Sun".)

Good Strong Knicker Elastic

I'm taking my title from Ann (Harvey & Dot's mum) and her comment to me on this post.

                                                           (image from here)

Good strong knicker elastic is indeed what I need - the kind that keeps your favourite saggy pair going until the holes make them  too rude to wear.  Persistence and strength in its most domestic and vernacular form.  Adzuki gave us a scare last night - bright red blood and a trip to the local maternity emergency department.  Our fabulous midwife was there before the doctor saw us, and took us into the birthing centre to use their Doppler - and found that lovely swishy heartbeat straight away.  (She seems to know everyone - I take that as a good sign)  The bleeding eased off very quickly, and we had to hang around to see the doctor and for blood test results and an Anti-D shot with the biggest needle El Prima's ever seen (I wouldn't look at it!). 

All that fear came flooding back - and we felt stupid for having already told so many people I was pregnant - as though we could have caused this just by having a little faith in the pregnancy.  It's hard to shake, that feeling that everything is going to be ripped out from under your feet again.  Who knows what will happen.  There's been no bleeding since, and the fact that there was no pain accompanying the bleeding is, I'm told, a very good sign.  I never had any bleeding with Z (even when the accident happened - that's one reason why I thought she'd be okay), and I'd dismissed the crazy scary bleeding back in March as related to that pregnancy being a blighted ovum that was tenuous from the very start.  Somehow, with my obstetric history, I've preserved some image of myself as a healthy pregnant woman.  But this pregnancy after loss caper is not for the faint-hearted.  Good thing I've got some sturdy knicker elastic on my side. 

El Dia de los Muertos

I'm slightly late, but wanted to say something about the Day of the Dead, especially given Angie's beautiful piece over at Glow.

I like Bionic Baby Mama's idea that wherever not-yet-born babies "are", spiritually speaking, they are probably in a similar spot as dead people, or are at least more able to get phone reception when the dead people call than we are.  So the Day of the Dead feels like a particularly appropriate day to celebrate my children - both dead and unborn.  (Gorgeous difficult-to-explain children that you are!)  I have no cultural connection to this particular tradition, but I guess Z and Adzuki may have, given that their donor (our beautiful friend J) has Colombian heritage. 

Given that, and my teenage obsession with Frida, I was excited to hear on the radio about a Day of the Dead party last Friday night.  So El Prima and I went, along with my brother, and danced and ate and drank margeritas (well, I had a sip) and invited Z to party with us.  It was beautiful to have a night in her honour, when thinking about our dead daughter wasn't "morbid" or weird, it was something to be celebrated and proud of, even if it did make us shed a tear while we danced.  And I dressed up, somewhat ridiculously, as Frida.  Yes, I may have ended up looking more like a dutch milk maid, but El Prima and my brother could work out who I was dressed up as. 
 

I don't know that I've written about Frida before here, but when I was in hospital, there was a moment when I was being wheeled into a new room, and my bed was piled high with the things I had surrounded myself with to warm my hospital room in the long quiet nights - blankets knitted by my mum and my best friend, the pink rabbit my brother and sister-in-law had bought for Z from Germany, an old bangle of mum's that smelled of her, Z's photo (in my arms).  And I thought suddenly of Frida - and how much time she spent in that state - building a small human nest and a way to function as a human through layers of pain, incapacity and isolation.  So I took her as my patron saint, and started documenting the experience, making art around it and through it.  I started taking care in what I wore, how I did my hair and ornamented myself, letting a new post-accident style emerge.  Good friends of ours were travelling in Mexico while I was in hospital, and bought the shawl I'm wearing in the picture above at the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacán in Mexico City.

We had our 13 week scan this morning, and my first reaction when we saw a beautifully formed, very much alive little Adzuki bean was to burst into tears.   The same thing happens every time I look at the pictures.  I'm not sure what it is - disbelief combined with the scary realisation that so so much is at stake now.  I love this little thing with its own ribs and enormous head and tiny, pointy bum.  This small dancing skeleton-baby - just like the decorations at the Dia de los Muertos party, only without the sombrero.  And I'm so scared when I realise how little I can do to protect him or her.

As she was doing the scan, our sonographer gave us little snippets of good news - "there's the nasal bone - a good sign as lack of nasal bone at this stage is associated with Downs", "that's a good heartbeat, no sign of any valve problems", "you should be fine with the nuchal fold measurements from what I see here".  So it was a bit of a surprise when she rang back a few hours later with the combined test results and told me that I'm actually classified as high risk for Downs - while my ultrasound result came back very low risk (1:795), my blood tests came back very high risk (1:53) giving me an overall risk of 1:161. 

El Prima and I are agreed not to do any further invasive tests such as an amnio - our main reason for doing the test at all was to assess the risk of the other more fatal triploidies - 13 and 18 - as we would be okay with raising a Downs syndrome child.  And, when we separate out the figures, our risk level for those more serious disorders is tiny (1:100,000).  Yet, because the test is designed primarily to pick up Downs, that leaves us with all the uncertainty and anxiety that goes with the "high risk" tag.  Now I just wish I'd never taken the stupid blood test.  After spending most of yesterday reading medical journal articles on the risk factors, my learned view is to forget the whole thing and just focus on enjoying this pregnancy and doing our best to get Adzuki here alive. 

Weary

Oh, the posts that have been floating around my head!  Sadly, I've had to direct my energy into marking two batches of 120 assignments - urk.  Meanwhile, my head is spinning with missing Z and being tentatively excited / worried for Adzuki, and alternately feeling guilty for letting doubt creep into this new pregnancy. 

Things seem to be going well.  We had another scan at 8 weeks, and there was Adzuki with a rockin' heartbeat, with the beginnings of arms and legs and measuring a few days ahead.  We've done crazy things such as book in with a midwife, and register with the hospital.  I had my ten week blood tests yesterday, and my GP had a poke around my tummy and proclaimed, "I think that's the uterus - it seems pretty big already", which was reassuring and alarming at the same time.  She's lovely though, as is our midwife, and I feel like we're in good hands whatever happens.  (*whatever happens*...  this is the kind of hesitant, tentative hope I'm holding onto at the moment.)  I'm glad I can blame my fat tummy on that old uterus, though, because I feel exceedingly lumpy already.  A student remarked on it today, and wished me luck! (Though I don't mind people wishing me well on the pregnancy so much when I actually *am* pregnant.  It was pretty awful when I wasn't.)

I've been delighting El Prima with continuing nausea.  She was very comforting but also a bit happy when I threw up my dinner the other night.  I'd forgotten the absolute desperation of pregnancy hunger, as well as the importance of eating slowly and being careful to stop eating when the nausea demands.  There is so much that feels just like my Haloumi pregnancy with Z, that it sometimes does my head in.  And yet the food I get hungry for is very different - all salty things.  So many little new bits of grief catch me by surprise - just the thought of explaining to a little child that her/his big sister died before she/he was born.  The thought that Z would in probability be talking by now, and how much that would delight my dad.  The thought of not having to explain to Z that she might soon have a little sister or brother. 

Just "gestating safely" and getting my head around the whole thing seems to take up so much energy, and yet this has been precisely when my work has stepped up and demanded more from me than I feel able to give.  I've also realised that I'm grieving the loss of my old job and workplace.  It was my choice, of course, but I miss my colleagues and a system that I knew my way around in. 

Our next scan is in two weeks at 13 weeks.  I don't want to wish that time away, because I started this pregnancy wanting to enjoy every moment of it, I know those are two important, beautiful weeks for Adzuki, but it is pretty scary too.  I'm trying to weave those two things together in my head - to know that this is the deal - this is what pregnancy after loss feels like - scary and amazing in equal measures.  I'm so grateful to be here, even if it scares the pants off me.