Thoughts from the bed

18 weeks + 1 day. 10 days post rupture.

I'm starting to meld into bed rest. The first few days my legs and back were so sore from laying down for so long. Now my body seems to have given in and things don't hurt so much anymore. I guess that's a good thing?

One of the worst things about bed rest is how much time it gives you to sit and think. And hey, if you're on bed rest you likely have shitty circumstances to ponder. These are a few of the (possibly crazy) things that have been running through my head.

1. It bothers me that if this pregnancy results in another dead baby, that it will somehow compromise Aidan's position as my 'one and only' dead child. I feel possessive of that title for him. He did not get a chance to express his personality or have any likes or dislikes. His specialness resided in the fact that he was my only child and that he was dead. If everything had gone as planned and Acorn was a normal full term healthy baby, then he would get the title of 'one and only' living child. Able to grow and develop a personality of his own. He wouldn't be my 'only child', but he'd be the only child I'd get to know. Somehow the two of them sharing the title of "Emily & Brian's dead children" seems to lump them together too much. If Aidan could remain as our 'dead child' and Acorn could remain as our 'living child' it somehow preserves each of their individuality, each of their specialness. It makes me sad to think of others not remembering them individually like I will. I feel that if they are on the 'same side of the veil' as it were, their relative importance in our lives will be lost.

2. We have obviously been speaking a lot more with friends and family over the past week. People want to know what happened and provide support, which I completely understand and appreciate. But as people are wont to do in the course of conversation, they will occasionally mention things involving 'the future'. Not the 'distant future', more like 'this summer', or 'at so & so's birthday'. For example, my brother mentioned going to the cottage this summer and how it would be nice to spend time with us up there. My mother talked about a restaurant that she recently visited and how we should go there sometime. My brother-in-law & sister-in-law talked about an annual out of town concert we could go to again this year. While I appreciate that this is what normal people do, talk about the future, make plans etc: It rips my heart out every single time. Because I did that already. After Aidan died everything I did from helping my friend move, to going to the cottage, to getting a new job, to planning to get pregnant again, was because AIDAN WASN'T HERE. I want to scream at the unfairness of possibly having to pick up the pieces of my life again and pretend that I'm enjoying what I'm doing instead of spending every single day thinking "I'm only doing this because I have no baby to look after". Maybe other people are better at doing this, distracting themselves with plans so as to avoid focusing on what was lost...but I'm not one of them.

3. Before we got pregnant the first time we had a boy and a girl name picked out. When we found out Aidan was not likely to survive, I was sad that one of those names, a name I had imagined belonging to a living child, would now belong to a dead one and I would rarely get to say it out loud. I wrote about it here last summer. So now, having received the same news about this pregnancy, we have a similar decision to make. If the baby is a girl, a fact which I doubt, she will get the name we had originally picked out for a girl. We gave Aidan the name we wanted for a boy, so we could not deny our first daughter her rightful name. However, boy names are trickier this time around because before my water broke, we hadn't agreed on a front runner. The name that I wanted to use, my husband admitted he was going to give in on...but now I'm not sure I want to use it. It's a distant relative's name, and while that wouldn't have mattered if I had a living breathing child around that I was calling that name every day, it will bother me to hear it referred to in family conversation regarding a person that is not my child. So, we should probably pick a name that no one, on any side of the family has ever used. But....what if the baby lives? Then I would want to go back and use the name I originally wanted. So do we pick two names? A name for a dead child and a name for a living child? It seems kind of unfair to Acorn. But then nothing about this situation is fair.

Well that killed a few hours, writing about my crazy thoughts. Exercising my fingers at least.

Feel free to leave a comment about anything above.