Today marks three months since we said goodbye to our little boy. It also marks the day in which I would have hit 37 weeks of pregnancy. I would have been full term today. I have a lot of emotions today that I'm not entirely sure how to navigate. I have more questions today, three months later, than I have answers. However they aren't questions about what happened but more so questions on what would have been.
How big would I have been?
Would Reese have come before his due date or after?
What would my baby shower have been like?
What would my third trimester look like?
How would the nursery look?
Reese had an incredible amount of hair at 23 weeks four days. Would it have been a wild mane of dark hair by now?
How would I be feeling overall? Ready to get the baby out or enjoying being pregnant?
What would Ross have been doing to prepare to be a Dad?
What would our baby class experience be like?
Where would we have gone on our "baby moon"?
I'll never get to answer these questions. Well that's not entirely true. Hopefully I'll get to experience a third trimester with little brother or sister. I'll have a baby shower and I'll get to decorate a nursery. We will attend a baby class and go on a baby moon. We will prepare to be parents in a different way, not necessarily to be first time parents but to be parents with a baby at home for the first time. But I'll never know when Reese would have been born because he was born on February 12th. I'll never know what his hair would have looked like full term, but I know what it looked like when he was born. I'll never know how I would have felt at 37 weeks with Reese, but I know how I felt from weeks 4-23. I felt amazing. I LOVED being pregnant with my son. I loved feeling his kicks that week leading up, when they really started coming, and I just know he would have kicked and danced even harder as the days went on.
The next three weeks are going to be interesting as we get closer to June 7th. The closer we get to our due date, the more the outside world realizes we were suppose to be giving birth. We are getting more and more coupons in the mail, reminding us to complete our registry. I've received boxes of formula samples, which I have since donated ( I can't justify keeping it with the shortage going on). Calendar events I forgot to delete or erase have popped up. I'm having to commit to things at work this summer that I originally didn't think I'd be here for. We've made plans to travel and go to concerts, things I didn't think would be possible with an infant. It's bittersweet though; whereas I'm excited to see Lady Gaga or go to North Carolina, I wish I wasn't. I wish I had the excuse of "we've got a one month old at home" or "we don't have a sitter for the night".
We've somehow managed to get through the last three months and we are stronger for it. We got a new puppy and we got married, both things that didn't happen instead of Reese but because of Reese. The next three weeks might be our toughest challenge yet. Hopefully, the last three months were preparing us for these next three weeks and we've learned what it takes to be resilient and how to cope with our sadness.
Wish us luck over the next few weeks. Pray for us as we continue to figure out what our life is suppose to look like. Beginning on June 8th, we enter a new phase of mourning. Whereas I'll always be grieving over the pregnancy I didn't have and the pregnancy I lost, I won't be mourning something that was suppose be to occurring in the present---I'll be mourning something that occurred in the past. That almost sounds worse.
We will be ok. We have each other. We have Gracie and Clara. We will have little brother or sister one day. And we have our perfect boy watching over us. We will be ok.
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