What happened... Part 1

Mourning a baby and being pregnant with another one should be the dictionary definition of both "bittersweet" and "frightening." If I spend too much time thinking about Bronwyn and not the newbie, I feel guilty. If I start dwelling on newbie I feel guilty that I'm somehow forgetting Brony.

Although I'm trying not to think about it too much now - especially at night, in bed - I need to write down all I remember about what happened. Someday my memory may get fuzzy, and I already feel guilty about that too.

I found out I was pregnant early in June of 2008. We had been trying for many months, and I was even seeing a naturopath to give my fertility a boost. (That's significant because I'm definitely not a New Age kind of girl. Let's just say I was skeptical.) The breakfast bar in the kitchen was lined up with supplements and tinctures and vitamins. I was getting acupuncture, and I was charting every morning. I had been told for many years I might have trouble getting pregnant, and we wanted it very badly. We were ready.

That spring, I'd roped us both into doing a 50 km bike ride for charity, and on the day of the ride - June 1 - I was embarrassed. I was so slow, and I barely made it across the finish. I was more tired than I could ever remember being. A few days later, I found something to pin that exhaustion on - I was pregnant.

When we saw the two lines on the home pregnancy test we were stunned, thrilled, shocked, scared, elated. I immediately - so like me - started focusing on the finances: how fast we could clear our debt, how much I'd take home during maternity leave, how we could cut our budget. (That seems so silly now, but I look back on it as evidence of the way we were happily planning to completely overhaul our lives for this baby.)

I thought a lot about miscarriage in those early weeks. Part of me thought we had been lucky to get pregnant, but I wouldn't be lucky enough to stay pregnant. Aside from parents, siblings and two close friends, we didn't tell anyone. (Funny, my Dad didn't understand our reluctance to share the news. He was anxious to tell everyone right away.)

But I stayed pregnant, and aside from some early morning sickness, it was pretty uneventful. My boobs grew, my waist got thicker, I bought bigger bras and bigger pants. I read a lot - What to Expect and all that stuff. Every week I'd read to my husband the page on that week - what the baby was doing now, what was going on with me. I obsessed over how much weight I was gaining, I wondered about the reaction I'd get at work, I worried about the changes coming in our lives and yet I looked forward to them at the same time.

In the last few weeks of my first trimester, two women on my team at work announced they were pregnant. This was a big deal - no one on that team had been pregnant in 15 years or something ridiculous like that. I secretly couldn't wait to join them in the prego club. When I finally told my boss, he thought I was about to tell him I was quitting. While I was laying low at work and running to the bathroom every half hour, he thought I'd been making moves to leave.

My husband and I are a happy couple. In fact, my husband is probably the happiest, most optimistic person I know. But the pregnancy was an extra happy time. We joked about the baby all the time - we had a running joke that our giant baby would terrorize our neighbour's little boy, and scare all the other kids away from the playground. We joked about how our kid would be embarassed by us and our nonsense. Even though it ended as it did, I don't think I could wish the pregnancy away. It was probably the happiest we've ever been.