Angel

I am sure this will be the first in a series of many blog posts about the loss of our baby. I tried writing in the journal I kept for the baby last week and just found it too difficult. Writing this right now is still very hard--the pain is still too raw and too new--and so I will have to keep this brief.

I am an emotional wreck. Once I miscarried, it seems like the tears have not stopped. They come and go as they please, and I find it hard to concentrate without dwelling on our loss. I think I slept all of two hours last night. I just can't stop thinking about what might have been. Like most mothers who miscarry, I have a sense of guilt (and anyone who knows me knows that I tend to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders), and even though I know in my heart that I couldn't have done anything differently to ensure a different outcome, I still feel guilty, but that's a whole other entry in itself.

I wanted this first post about our loss to be about what we've gained.

Today was my first day back at work since the miscarriage. I guess the teacher (my department head) that I had told about the miscarriage (because of all the days I was missing) had told at least one other teacher. This other teacher (a Spanish teacher) came to me this morning during my planning period.

"Oh, bebe, I am so sorry. I am so sorry. But now you have an angel watching over you."

And I hadn't thought about it in that way at all. I had been so focused on thinking about the child I would not have, about the brother or sister that Max would not play with, about the grandchild my parents would not get to see, that it hadn't even occurred to me that I might be gaining something from this horrible experience after all.

An angel.

And what's ironic is that I recently started to collect angels. My mother began collecting them shortly after my father's diagnosis ("we need as many angels as we can get now," she said), and I decided over Christmas to start, too. I even received my first one from my parents, and I had also had Max paint several angels to give to family members as Christmas gifts.

But now I have the real thing.

Yes, if I could choose to have the child I had in my belly for three months grow to a full term baby and a healthy child and kind and loving adult, I would certainly choose that over the angel I have watching me right now.

But like my mom said, we need angels now and my family needs more than most. To a certain extent, I can understand the plan and why this happened to me--even though I may not like it. My dad is back in the hospital again, and maybe this angel is for both of us. Maybe God knows that despite the fact that I put on a strong face and have so for the past year that I really, really just need someone to watch over me, and felt that now was the time for that to happen.

I don't know. I just feel a little better today--even though I am still hurting very, very much and will for the rest of my life--but I will always appreciate that Spanish teacher's one sentence for making me look at things a bit differently.