I found out my wife was pregnant about three months ago. At first I was dumbstruck. What can I say, we had been planning to have another child for some time, but it’s one thing to plan it and quite another to give it a date certain. Soon enough I was planning for life with another child. Joy had replaced the shock of discovery. I began to wonder what it would be like to have another daughter, a protoge for Beth. I fantasized about Beth treating another girl in the house like one of her dolls, acting more like another mother than a big sister. I also wondered what it would be like to have a son, someone to torment Beth and vise versa. I began to think about day care options, and wether or not I wanted to work a four day work week to lessen our day care load.
This weekend I remembered what it is like to have those fantasies come to a premature end. It started with those words … words that mean nothing but trouble coming from your pregnant wife … words that I don’t really want to repeat. We went to the hospital and the doctor told my pregnant wife of 13 weeks that there was an eight week old fetus in her womb. Even before the doctor said he could find not heart beat we knew that womb had become tomb. Now I’m left with another dream of a child that has died. Once again the shock of discovery was upon me, but this time under much worse circumstances. Once again the realization did not come until a day later, but it was born out of despair instead of joy.
Where do we go from here? What choice do we have? We move on. I held off telling my coworkers about our latest pregnancy until Cheryl was a little further along. It turned out that I learned my baby was dead three days after I told all of my friends that my baby was on the way. Now I find my self going back to work to tell them much different news. I find myself trying to reassure them more than they are reassuring me. More than once I’ve said, “it happens.” I just wish it didn’t happen to us.