That said, I suppose I shouldn’t be a fair-weather friend to the present. Even now, in the grief, I know I need to reside here, right here, through the horrible reality of losing Lorenzo and the hopeful future—of watching our boy grow up—that has been canceled out. I know I have to travel from being pregnant (the past) to not being pregnant (the now) to one day being pregnant again (the future).

This not being pregnant is nothing like the 31 years of not being pregnant that preceded it. This not being pregnant is a literal absence, an all-consuming deduction, a passing on of what my husband and I created. It is a loss of Lorenzo, but also part of myself, part of Ryan’s self. Of what of us was in him. That is my now, that is my present.

My present is also HOPE. As I walk passed a park with Ruby and see the children generate the motion of the swings, their shrieks high in the air above us, I see HOPE. I see what can be. That is how I let the hope into the present, even if it trickles into thoughts of the future. Without Lorenzo. With another child. A second child. A “rainbow” child, I’ve now heard it called, meaning the child who will arrive next and heal us, who we won’t be able to imagine not having, who will lead us out of the past. But sometimes the future can be too intoxicating for the present to handle.

So I step back into the present, back into the moment.

In this moment, we have Ruby. We have her unconditional love and her silly ways and her gentle temperament. She teaches by example when it comes to living in the present.

In this moment, we have your love and support. If you are reading this, you support us. You take the time to understand more of our story, and I thank you.

In this moment, I have my own health and the health of my husband and the health of our moms.

In this moment, I add to a 14-page single-spaced document called “Lorenzo’s Heart.” It’s what I open to gather this experience as it filters back to me, sometimes scattering slowly and other times so suddenly that I have to go ahead and reside in the past for a little while in order to believe the present.

In this moment, I take a walk. Every three hours or so, I take Ruby outside and we explore the neighborhood. We meet other dogs and the children look up at their mothers as they walk by and point out the puppy. We do this starting from 6:30 am down until 10:30 or so at night. Then we repeat. The present can be very repetitive and that repetition can be helpful. 

In this moment, I make a meal. It no longer matters if it doesn’t come out right. Now that I’m not worried, it usually comes out just fine. Ryan comes home and we eat and we talk about the day and it’s okay that my today looked a lot like my yesterday. It’s manageable that way. 

In this moment, I haven’t gotten my period yet. I can’t imagine why I’d ever have told you all something like that except that now it hardly compares to how personal I’ve been with you, telling you we lost our son, telling you I delivered him, telling you his heart never beat on its own. I share this because the period is my ticket to the future. When it comes back, it will represent a first step toward being pregnant again. We’ll still have some time to wait as my system normalizes, then we’ll have the trying, then the risky first trimester to wait through, and on through the ultrasounds and testing that will bring ever more anxiety than before because we know the worst thing can happen to the most innocent among us. But I’m not worried about worrying. That’s parenthood. I look forward to it because it means there is someone to worry about, a rainbow baby boy or girl waiting for us just as we wait for him or her.

But, in this moment, there’s no period. There’s no first step. There are instead the many steps around and around the neighborhood with Ruby. There is the awareness that my interior is still beyond my control, as this experience has been teaching me. I know we need to be calm while we wait. That was the first thing my doctor said when I walked in last November with a calendar and a list of questions and said we were ready to become pregnant. She told me to relax, to give myself the full year—2012—for it to happen. 

Here we are in the middle of that full year, during which I’ve already been pregnant (the past), not pregnant (the present), and—this is where I have to stop for now because the future is a little dangerous for me to travel to too often, though people like to tell you about it… about the healing nature of time, about this making sense one day, about the whole landscape of our lives being more acceptable than the immediate picture. What they’re trying to tell you is that the future is easier than the present. Of course it is. That’s why it takes so much concentration—why it takes a whole blog post to all of you—to stay here.