Miscarriages mess you up...

It's weird this time around in the pregnancy, because rather than thinking about the future, rather than thinking about buying maternity clothes, and stuff for a baby, and furniture and setting up a college trust fund (ha ha... ha...), I'm just thinking: I hope I don't lose this baby. It makes everything much more immediate, and it's a little weird. What's going to happen when the baby IS fine, and all of a sudden Brad and I have to take it home, and we realize we have no car-seat or place for the baby to sleep because we had such a tenuous hold on the reality of it all that we're still scared to commit to being parents. Who knows how long it's going to take me to get over this feeling and start to ANTICIPATE things, the closest I get is anticipating perhaps losing it, and on a positive note, anticiapting a trip to the doctor where we can hear the heartbeat. I think once I hear a heartbeat I MAY be able to be a little more excited, but I don't know. That's why we've been calling the baby Maybe-it so far. It works, maybe-it's a boy, maybe-it's a girl, maybe-it's smart and beautiful etc. It does still work, but the real reason we came up with the name was "Maybe-it"'s actually a baby this time. Maybe-it will live...but we're still living in the land of the maybe-it's and it's a hard place to live, hoping for the time when Maybe-it won't be an appropriate name anymore.

At the same time - none of us know our maybe-it's. None of us know when we'll live & when we'll die. When we marry someone, it's on a maybe-it. Who knows where life will take you, a former student of mine (all of 20 or so) is married to a guy diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphona. I bet she wasn't thinking of dealing with cancer in the first year when she said "in sickness and in health". Life and death are sobering thoughts - hard ones to deal with, and having dealt with them the first time around, they're much more strongly in my head this time around...and therefore - Maybe-it is in our lives for the time being - and it's only up to God how long he or she will be there...