To celebrate turning 40, I’ve challenged myself to blog for each of the 40 days leading into my birthday. This is post number 7. You can read all the posts here.
My brain couldn’t process what the two lines on the stick were telling me so I went to my doctor, hoping the four tests I’d done at home were wrong.
They weren’t wrong.
Confronted by heaving sobs upon his confirmation, my doctor was bewildered, ‘What’s so awful about being pregnant right now?’
‘It’s not part of the plan,’ I sniffled.
Jaden was only four months old at the time and there were two main reasons it wasn’t ‘part of the plan’.
The first was that I wanted him to have more time as our sole focus before baby number two came along. The ‘plan’ was for our kids to be born two years apart. (Haha – yeah, I know. Plans.)
The second was that I’d only just gotten off the sleep deprivation bandwagon and back into the swing of full-time work again. I couldn’t imagine returning to that zombie state in less than 8 months’ time. Especially given where my business was at.
Be careful what you wish for folks.
Just as I’d gotten my head around the pregnancy and started feeling excited about how my kids would grow up best friends thanks to being born so close together, the pregnancy failed.
Grief, guilt and confusion were on high repeat in my brain, but my mouth said – ‘Look, it’s clearly not meant to be and it’s for the best anyway.’
I was pregnant again four months later.
Like the previous one, I had no idea how it happened. Just as I was getting ready to tell my girlfriends the amusing story of how their control-freak friend managed to get pregnant accidentally for a second time, I lost that one too.
Over the next 10 months I’d get pregnant twice more and lose both.
Did I try to find out what was causing all the losses? Did I ever. If I never have another internal ultrasound again in my whole life, it will be too soon. All the pokes, prods, blood tests and specialists turned up nought. I could see my obstetrician wanted to give me firm answers, but there was little he could say with conviction.
‘Could it be all the stress?’ I asked?