Here goes…

I keep saying I’ll write this after the next doctor’s visit, then the next. I know that’s fear talking, the need for continual reassurance with something we’ve learned can be so tentative. But it feels like the right time to share that Ryan and I are having another baby <3. I’m 24 weeks along with what appears to be a healthy baby girl. The pregnancy has gone well. We’ve seen her four-chambered heart. She kicks. She’s already here in so many ways. And she deserves all the love that is waiting for her.

The journey has been anxious, at best, for me. Once you lose as we have lost, Innocence leaves the building and takes peace of mind with it. Nothing is taken for granted. A sense of control doesn’t resurrect itself. Each pregnancy symptom is embraced and cherished because it’s another sign she’s still growing and because you know a healthy baby is not a promise. Every ultrasound brings remnants of the trauma and, in the case of this baby, new reasons for joy.

Somehow that joy leads back to trust. Trust in this little girl’s life force all her own, just as we trusted in Lorenzo’s.

At 24 weeks, this is uncharted territory for us. A lot converged this past week, knowing it was the same period of time during the pregnancy that Ryan and I were making the ultimate decisions for Lorenzo, knowing that another of his September 20th due dates was coming to pass, knowing how this baby looks and feels because I held her brother at this time, and believing that soon I’d be on another part of the path.

Now, here I am. Here she will soon be.

There’s been a surge in the writing too, a need to get down the last few chapters of my time as Lorenzo’s mother. That time is endless, but as I’ve felt since I started writing about Lorenzo, I need to write from here, before too much time or perspective shifts immediacy into reflection.

I’ve debated announcing this. My heart accelerates knowing I drafted a similar post that I never published because everything changed so soon thereafter. Things do change. Our own bodies shock us into new states of being. The loss moves in so close to the hope.

I sometimes wonder how it has all re-made me. I am not a first-time mom. This is my third pregnancy in under two years. But this will be our first child to open her eyes, God willing, come January. What will that feel like? To witness the life force? To somehow distract myself from thinking she could suddenly be taken away, the air again sucked from the room, Ryan and I left to spin.

In re-reading the unpublished announcement I once wrote for Lorenzo, I’m tender toward my own Innocence. It’s what I often see in moms who are expecting healthy children. It’s a mix of giddiness, sharing untempered by loss, and expectation that things will continue on because the bad things happened to other people or because the odds are on their side. The bad things happened to me, for instance. We were the statistic. But that doesn’t mean that good things can’t also happen, or that the goals for motherhood I had at the end of May 2012 don’t still apply:

I can still be a good mom and support my child and my husband and the new shape of our family.

I can still raise a good person, who respects the world and the creatures within it.

I can still be present as the physical dimensions of that world re-appear to me as they appear to her.

I can still be open and accepting of a new life force’s own heartbeat, movements, dreams, and ambitions. Because we as parents are shepherds, not owners, as a mother of three once wisely advised.

I hope I was a good mom to Lorenzo for the short time I was able to be. I hope he believed in us as his shepherds. I hope this baby girl grows to run down a long, long path that I will never gain even a glimpse of the end of… I hope this is truly a new beginning.