October 15th is Infant Loss and Awareness Day. I have posted about this before here, but it means something more to me today. Today I got to play with my son, I got to give him all the hugs and kisses I wanted to. It’s different this year because I am getting to experience everything I missed out on when we had our miscarriage. And it feels like I am experiencing the loss all over again.
Over the years I have told people that it was “sort of a miscarriage”, because I know so many others have experienced worse. I have played it off because I didn’t feel like I deserved to call our loss a miscarriage. But today I realized that even though I probably would have never known there were babies in my body if it weren’t for IVF (it probably would’ve seemed like my period came late had we not been in the middle of our IVF cycle), that it doesn’t matter because we did know. We watched every carefully crafted step of the making of their short lives. We have a picture of them as little embryo blobs, and I got my first positive pregnancy test and the first bit of good news we had ever gotten on our infertility journey with these babies. And to act like they never existed almost makes me more sad that they aren’t here with us today.
Would they have been boys or girls (or one boy and one girl)? Who would they have looked like each other? I wonder if they would have looked like me, or their Dad, or Everett. What would their personalities have been like? Would they like basketball like Josh or dancing like me? They would be 7 years old today, which is absolutely crazy to think about. I am sitting here imagining the different paths our life would’ve taken if they ended up being born in May 2015.
So if you are thinking of your sweet baby that you never got to meet today (or any day), just know that I am thinking of you and that your baby mattered.
First Comes Love 