Making Room

I have never been to the cemetery in the early morning or the late afternoon when the shadows are longest.  The shadows cast by Zoey and Gus were always long enough. Especially when it came to trying again and—finally—this subsequent pregnancy.  The premature loss of Zoey and Gus made our later infertility that much crueler.  It promised a greater chance of future premature losses, so we were not supposed to hope for twins again.  Discovering M. was carrying twins again (another boy and girl, no less) made this such a close parallel to a year ago, we could not let this pregnancy become its own entity.  Not until 22 weeks, 4 days—an arbitrary milestone to most, but one day longer than Zoey and Gus were with us.

With this pregnancy, I was less afraid that something would go wrong, but more certain.  From blogs and our support group, we derived much healing, but also something darker: the knowledge of what is out there.  Cord accidents and stillbirths and premature labor and even the killing space between the bed and the wall.  It could be harder to take in than it would have been a year earlier.  Having suffered does not immunize you from later suffering.  Indeed, judging from some of the stories we heard unfold, it just might make you a gravity well for it.

But it was larger than that.  Losing Gus and Zoey reoriented my sense of how nature operates.  It left me knowing what everyone else does not: that the sun rises in the west, that rivers run the other way, and that the young are not born to bury the old, but to be buried by them.  Call it the Natural Reorder of Things. 

Of course, I know this is not how it works intellectually—but what difference does that make?  One day, listening to Bill Bryson’s scientific survey A Short History of Nearly Everything, it strikes me: imagine witnessing the impact of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and nearly seventy percent of life on Earth.  Now imagine a survivor, one of those scurrying little mammals, peeking out from its burrow to behold the lava flows and the earthquakes, the wildfires and the ash, and the gone-ness of the sun.  Ask yourself if this little creature believes you when you say, “Don’t worry.  The world isn’t usually like this.”

M. put it more directly.  “We can’t go back to being those naïve, happy pregnant people.”  I would laugh when she said this.  I belong to a line of award-winning worriers (Best Free-Floating Anxiety, Best Worst-Case Scenario, Best Achievement in Hand-Wringing), so even though my attitude toward pregnancy had become more apocalyptic, I was never that naïve person to begin with.

Before Zoey and Gus died, I worried.  After M. became pregnant again, I waited.  This was both a subtle difference and a seismic shift.  Whatever would take these children away was an inevitability, and I could be only as passionate about it as I am about the fact of the sun setting.  After all, they belong to the same natural order.

---

When we reached 22 weeks and 4 days, and then 24 weeks, and as we passed 28 and then 30, M. allowed this pregnancy to become its own pregnancy, and not only an extension of our loss.  Then so did I.   Soon, I was thinking less about how Zoey and Gus were affecting my experience of this pregnancy.  Instead, I was thinking more about how this pregnancy was affecting my experience of Zoey and Gus. 

There were many details and decisions to consider—some we never got to make for Gus and Zoey, others that we had, and for that very reason, had delayed for too long.  With my attention so insisted upon, Gus and Zoey seemed to be getting further away.  Background and foreground had moved toward each other, through each other, and were now switching places. 

This may have been the only real inevitability.  Because, as I discovered, you cannot keep all things equally close at all times.

Sometimes, this feels right.  Other times, it feels—not quite wrong, but regrettable.  Late one morning in the last weeks, hungry and sleep-deprived, I see the names we have picked out as blocks of the colors that, for some reason, I associate with them: a midnight-blue and a translucent silver.  Then, for the first time, I see Gus and Zoes’s names in sienna and lavender, and sense that I am being severed from whole parts of the color spectrum.   

But there is also a way in which this pregnancy has helped me keep Gus and Zoey closer by.  Historically, I have never been one for change.  When I was twelve, my mother replaced the silverware without telling me.  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded. 

“Because I knew how you’d react,” she said. 

“You’re right,” I said. 

So, change.  Never my thing.

One night, around Week 24, I am alone in the house, in the room that is our once and future nursery.  I am thinking of the twins to come, and remembering the babyhoods of my nephew and niece.  Knowing how quickly and constantly infants change, I am already a little sad for how momentary all of the twins’ phases will be.  For how each advance, each step forward, however wonderful, also makes their previous selves irretrievable.  I know that we are really talking about newness, about life, but I see it as farewells, one after another, a constant stream.

Then I think of Zoey and Gus.  First comes a stab of guilt, but then the balm of suddenly knowing how I will make room for all four of my children, how I will give each set of twins its privileged place.  The children M. is carrying, should we be blessed with their arrival, will always be people in flux.  They will not be like their siblings, Gus and Zoey, who will always be what they are now.  This, I decide, is to be my compensation for the strangeness of having a son and daughter who live and change, and a son and daughter who are gone. 

This is to be my unique comfort.

Zoey and Gus: my children who never change.

How have subsequent changes in your life been colored by your loss?  How has your grief changed to accommodate new circumstances?



Well, How Did I Get Here?

I know for many (most?) of you, the decision to have another baby after the death of the same is as innate and natural and "Well, DUH" as drinking a glass of water or breathing. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that for many it's hardly a "decision" at all, but a compelling force or internal drive. Or something.

And not that it's easy for anyone to go back down that road, but for some, like me and a few others in my shoes who have more than just "Well, that was just a fluke of (really fucking abysmal) luck, really" it's not quite so easy to jump back into the saddle. It is, in fact, a decision. Maybe you have some grim odds to contend with on the next go-round, or a few more rounds of reproductive nonsense ahead of you, or perhaps you're just scared out of your mind. Or maybe some ugly combination of those circumstances. In any case, rather unlike, say, Elizabeth McCracken who averred from her hospital bed -- freshly blown apart by the death of her son -- that she would (!) indeed have another baby, I loudly proclaimed from the NICU: "Hell to the No."

So it's rather sheepishly that I stand here before you, three years later, 23+ weeks pregnant. What happened?!

Someone here asked me recently how I did it, how I made this decision, what my thought process was, or how I otherwise found my way from A to B, and I thought it would be useful to dissect my route in case anyone else out there had to face similar circumstances. And yet I sit here with my hands levitating above the keyboard and burping up the trail of breadcrumbs I've unfortunately consumed instead of leaving for the next traveller, because quite frankly, I honestly don't know how I got here. I'll set my water glass down, now.

I can in fact point to a few issues that -- when refocused through my new sporty Grief Goggles -- altered a bit and allowed me to sit somewhat comfortably where I am now as opposed to where I was almost three years ago now.

The primary contributor to this shift, you'll probably be sorry to hear, is simply the passage of Time. I remember when I first stumbled out my door to walk the dog in a haze of tears and blackness, one of my neighbors said something stupid like "It will feel better with time," and I wanted to punch her. (And oh my god, is she ever one of the sweetest women who said and did some simply lovely things for me a few days later.) But it turns out, it's one of those trite little sayings that I now agree with, I just think I should have the power to say and not a bystander.

Time does help. For starts, Time gave the doctors opportunity to fully and completely research what on earth happened, the results being: They have no fucking clue. But. They ran (and I found out last May continue to run) Maddy's samples through the Genome project multiple times, and presented her case at conferences, and with each day (month, year) that passes without a genetic hit, it looks more and more like the Ockham's Razor death rationale: undetected placental abruption and/or infection. Because the odds of a never-been-seen before autosomal recessive fuck up between two people from different ethnic backgrounds are apparently outstanding. And not to say our luck isn't piss poor, and those recurrent odds for the abruption/infection aren't daunting, but sure beats the hell out of 1:4.

But you know, the geneticist could still be right. And again, here's where Time has helped to an amazing degree: I have transformed from a pre-Maddy cautious optimist, to a post-Maddy pessimist, to a neo-post-Maddy realist. I no longer think in terms of odds, nor do I "hope" or "wish" or envision things. I now rely on the basic premise of probability, stripped of statistical odds: Either something will happen, or it won't. Either the baby will live, or it will die. I will get in a fatal accident on my way to buy groceries, or I won't. The chicken will catch fire under the broiler, or it won't. And I know for many such an oversimplification probably reeks of negativity and a 50/50 coin flip, but for me, in my circumstances, it has been remarkably freeing to simply let statistics go and deal with the end game. I used to mull over things like genetic testing risks for example, and now I simply throw my hands up: Either it will be fine, or it won't. (I did decide on genetic testing because I don't want any surprises this time around except for the big one at the end, but I certainly didn't sweat the odds of problems arising from said testing.)  And you know, if it isn't, I've been there. I've hence liberated myself from months of stress over minutia, and will simply wait until the end to find out what's going on. Thankfully, I'm a patient person.

Which leads me to Time and the fear factor: I was so completely afraid after Maddy died that I couldn't have sex let alone think about eventually bearing another child. And there was a time after I climbed online and realized all the other ways in which babies die when I wondered how we exist as a species, and how I could ever be talked into that again. I completely understand people who almost grow more fearful rather than comforted after reading other blogs -- just think, you could escape problem A and fall head first into problem B. There are those here who have lost babies more than once. Support groups can be sobering reminders that lightning indeed strikes twice.

But enough Time has passed that frankly I feel as if I now know all the ways in which babies can die (or at least the big group headings -- sometimes the subgroup can be a surprise). As I wrote to someone recently, I recognize all the bogeymen now. It's not that I feel immune to them, or don't think they won't pop up, it's that I no longer fear them, and they won't surprise me. I see them, lurking there around the corner, and in that way they've totally lost their power. Should one jump out, I'll say, "Oh, it's you," and know exactly who to contact for support. I've mentally walked my way to the end of almost every bad dream, and I'm strangely very comforted by that.

I want to put in an aside here that is too important for parenthesis: Some people here are dealing with the odds and the fear that not only will future babies be at risk, but their own lives as well. There are women reading here who (sometimes barely) averted death due to preeclampsia (and other complications), and the odds of recurrence of that particular problem go up steeply. I consider myself thankful that when I ponder my outcomes, I am alive at the end of each -- in fact, it was a huge factor in my ability to move forward. My worst case scenario has already been lived through, and I feel confident that I can and will make it through intact again should I have to. Others do not have this luxury of (at the very least) being able to envision themselves at the end of a process that goes horribly awry for the second time. And that is a whole other debate and discussion and risk taking endeavor that Time probably does nothing to ease. If you've had to make a subsequent decision that involves your life, I -- and I'm sure others -- welcome hearing from you in the comments.

Back to my final breakthrough: Enough Time passed that considering another child became it's own debate, not one necessarily connected anymore to the discussions we had about having another prior to Maddy. This was both a blessing and a curse as it turned out. We had moved since the last decision was made, we have new social lives, Bella is older and our parenting has changed dramatically along with her needs.  Thus, it was easier (and sometimes actually fun) for three of us to move as a unit, and yet it was also easier to imagine going through a (probably) stressful/problematic pregnancy.  We had come to the place in our hellish aftermath where we felt like doing things again: traveling, eating out, relishing time for the three of us, for the two of us, for me. My grandmother died last summer, and I saw my mother and my aunt work and grieve together and realized I wanted to at least try to give that to Bella -- no one should have to to deal with a senile me by themselves. And in that way, in this jumbled mish-mash of plusses and negatives, I feel as though this child within me now -- should he live -- will be his own person, with his own identity. He was discussed and planned and brought at least this far for a separate set of reasons, through different rationales. He will always be connected to his older sister -- it's hard to say if I would have had a third, and yet it's hard to say I would have ever had another.

I am not kidding myself here -- this will work, or it won't. I cannot claim to be learning anything about myself five months in, nor am I undergoing emotional shifts in my missing because I am pregnant, but frankly that's not why I decided to try and get pregnant again. I did this simply because I wanted another child of our own genetic make-up, and we'll know if it was a good idea -- or not -- come mid-May.

Did you decide to have another child after your babyloss, or was it more of an instinctual feeling that really didn't warrant discussion or debate? If you did have a decision to make, what went into your decision? How much time passed? What were the mitigating factors? What if anything shifted inside of you (or happened externally) to make a subsequent pregnancy possible? Did any of you decide "Hell no," and remain in that place?

Of Birds and Bees

We all bring a set of issues to the table of grief, whether it be a side-dish of marital problems, a salad of anxiety, or an appetizer laced with previous tragedies which this seems to compound. There's the bottle of money woes, the dash of low-esteem, and perhaps even (hidden under the napkin) the telltale odor of previous bouts with depression. All of these shade and color our experience, and shift our individual abilities to cope with babyloss. I'm not here to rate which are at least edible, and which could stand to be thrown into the compost, but I am going to discuss one particular problem many bring to the table and set down with a thunk, with the grace of an overcooked, 25 pound stuffed turkey.

That would be infertility.

Babyloss after -- during -- infertility is it's own peculiar injustice. For starts, infertility in and of itself can create it's own side excursions into mental trauma. As one avid reader here said to me in person recently, infertility is its own kind of grief.  For starts, what comes naturally in the pickle commercials and to your friends who seem to just look at each other naked and procreate, for you is not meant to be.  Frankly, that alone deserves some mourning.  There's the monthly reminder of failure, which you try hard not to internalize, but it's hard to go through more than a year without getting a bit mopey about overall body image and capabilities. Add to this the strain on marriage, which you try and avoid by making sex fun! And unto itself! But seriously, you're both eyeballing the calendar and know and wonder when it will be fun again, and secretly debate who exactly is letting whom down. Meanwhile all of your friends are pregnant and having babies and wondering what in hell you're waiting for? Time's a ticking! You go to your thousandth baby shower with a stiff upper lip and cry on the way home.

You finally go to an RE (that's Reproductive Endocrinologist) who runs you through a pantheon of testing. If you're lucky, you've climbed online and read up on this stuff so you're prepared for the discomfort of mulitple blood draws on various days of the month, watching radioactive dye run through your fallopian tubes, or having your uterus filled with liquid and monitored via ultrasound, or an uncomfortable uterine biopsy. There's the indignity of going in on day two of your menstrual cycle for a vaginal ultrasound to check the status of your ovaries, and the ever-popular post-coital testing where you run into the office when you should be lounging naked with a glass of something and a cig, and have them take a sample of everything that you didn't leave on the mattress to see if sperm can indeed make it through the secretions that you produce. And don't get me started on the discussion with your husband, which starts with "Honey, I really want to have a baby" and ends with "And so you need to go into the office where they'll hand you a jar. If you're lucky, this office may even have some inspirational magazines for you as well."

And that's just to get a diagnosis. If there is one to be found. Like so many things medical, after all of this, the answer is often "unknown."

Because now we know, maybe, or at least have an idea, there might be surgery to rid of endometriosis or fibroids or a blocked tube. Or IUI (Intra-Uterine Insemination -- you know, the old fashioned way, except with a turkey baster). Or if your husband presents a problem in the equation, IVF with ICSI (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection. Say that 10 times fast). Drugs are dispensed, often to yourself with syringes and detailed instructions on what needs done intramuscularly. Sometimes you skip right to IVF (In Vitro Fertilization), and sometimes there's a mind-blowing discussion about dead or absent sperm or a lack of eggs or a misshapen uterus that ends with the RE telling you about gamete donors and/or surrogates. Sometimes there's the unexpected surprise that all of these miscarriages you've been having are caused by a genetic problem carried by you or your spouse. Sometimes there's simply a vial of pills, sometimes there's the fluke of luck while waiting for the next round of shots to start, and sometimes there's the hellish conclusion that this will not end the way you intended when you walked in.

I should pause here and remind people who are staring at this jumble of acronyms and procedures like hieroglyphics that much of this testing and prodding and medicating and inseminating is not covered by insurance. Unless you're lucky enough to live in a small handful of states (or countries) that have rightly deemed infertility a medical problem necessitating treatment and hence coverage (and you're lucky to have insurance to begin with!), you're paying for this out of pocket. According to Resolve, the average IUI runs $865, depending on the medication needed; IVF's average (that's average) $8,150K, NOT including medication (which runs, on average, an additional $3,000-5,000). (For the record, I just used some banal progesterone, apparently necessary to keep embryos attached to my uterus but not covered by my insurance. The cost per 4 weeks of a daily single dose was $800, and I needed 8 weeks. And I consider myself lucky that's all I needed this time around.)

I know people who took out second mortgages for ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology), and people who used inheritances, and people who drew out of their retirement accounts and/or borrowed from family. All to achieve what many can do after turning off the late night news and climbing under the covers.

But let's say you get lucky, and get pregnant.

Worth it, right?

And now let's say your baby dies.

:::

Back up for a moment to what this reader said to me: Infertility is it's own kind of grief. It's a monthly dash of hopes, a monthly reminder of promises gone down the drain, often with the checking account. It's the thought when an embryo is tucked safely inside you that this is it! This is life! This is our life.  This blob will be my child! Only to be greeted by one line and blinding white two weeks later. Multiply this over, and over again. Possibly for years. Possibly having set your limit -- your emotional and financial finish line on the next attempt: this one is the last one. This one works, or we grieve never having children of our own, and move on to something else. Hope and faith and trust and marital communication may have left the building long before the death of a baby. You may have been desperate, on that last attempt, bargaining, wondering if anything would work.

In that regard, the death of a baby is part of this winding vine already invading your life. It's another loss, another dash of hopes, but this time on a much larger scale because . . . well obviously, it's different to hold a dead child than to stare at a negative pregnancy test, but there's also the thought that That might have been it.

Because you can't simply wake up one morning and say, Let's try again. As hard as that discussion is to have another baby after the death of the last, if you're infertile it's more complicated. There isn't the subconscious knowledge that Well of course this will work again like it's supposed to.  You need to pick up the phone and explain to people what happened, and what you'd like to do next. You need to go through a lot of the rigamrole again. You may need to alter how many embryos you transfer, or depending on why your child died, move to gamete donation or surrogacy. Perhaps you need to now fork out for PGD (Pre Implantation Genetic Diagnosis) (Incidentally, another average of $3,500 on top of your IVF expenses) to make sure any genetic problems aren't being passed along. You need to set to set a new limit, a new finish line, and further deplete your bank account. And each month that passes with an HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadtropin) test of two or less, you sink further into a bleak place. Perhaps that child was it. The only time this would work.

And sometimes, that is it. There are people here in this community, who read here, who reached the end. The end of the line. The money tree dried up, their emotions were frayed after years of trying and failure, and they needed to stop and move on. Move on with another life than the one they originally envisioned when they simply set out to have a baby of their own making. And that, putting behind not only a dead child but the attempt to have another of your own, is it's own crucible of grief. Inextricably wound up with the death of a baby that we're all familiar with, but branching out and encircling so many other parts of your conscious and marriage and identity and being. And like any loss, this deserves its own moment of grief, too.

Did you seek Infertility treatments in order to get pregnant with your child(ren)? Are you having to with a subsequent child? For you, how does your babyloss fit in with infertility -- does it stand alone, or has it become a chapter or branch within a greater struggle? Do you have limits? Have you met them already? 

No News

It seems as though whenever I start to feel like things just might be a little bit okay the other shoe drops and I'm back to being an utter disaster.

The other shoe is always dropping.  The rug is forever being pulled out from beneath my feet.

The surprising thing is how surprised I am every time it happens.  I should know better.  And I do, in my head.  But it's my heart I have to worry about, it just doesn't seem to learn.

More bad news, you're thinking.  Someone's hurt or sick or dead or in trouble and the meager footing I've found isn't enough to keep me balanced in the face of more tragedy.

If only.

Just another baby on the way.  There are so many, always on the way, always fine, often unplanned or unintentional but a wonderful surprise every time.  Right?

But that's where I fall apart.  This good news not ours cuts me to pieces and then I crumple at how awful that feels.  

These days, I can handle bad news much better than good.  I'm like the welcome committee to Disaster-Land. I hear bad news and I'm like oh let me help.  A friend lost her father suddenly and it was the easiest thing in the world to ring her right away and share tears with her and hold her close and make sure she knew I was there for her if she ever needed anything.

I'm good at bad news now.  I can be sensitive and strong, caring yet practical, forthright and easy with the most difficult and painful of subjects.  But throw a little happiness at the people I'm close to and all I want to do is crawl away and hide.

We don't get to do that happiness thing anymore and that empty space where it should be swallows me whole.  It swallows my dignity.  It swallows my hope.

Everyone else but us.  Here we stand, frozen in the long, sad moment of our son's death, unable to achieve the only thing we want as everyone just zips on by, their lives moving forward with new children and new hope. 

It's the heart/mind divide all over again.  I'm thrilled for them in my mind, but inside my chest my heart cracks open and falls to pieces and I almost follow suit.

I want to be happy.  I want to be happy for them totally and completely.  I want to be psyched and loving and everything correct, but I'm not.  I'm twisted and shriveled.  I'm bitter and disgusted with myself and once again way beyond the edge of tolerable limits.

I thought the worst was behind me, literally.  I thought that the worst possible thing had happened to me and that from there it could only get better.  But instead it has been an endless slog through deep, smelly shit.  Obviously nothing is more painful than losing Silas but the problem is that we lose him over and over again in a million little ways.

The ripples of our loss continue to radiate outward from us, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.  Our tragedy causes pain in the people we love the most and prevents us from sharing in the happiness of those around us.  That is so ugly and revolting I can barely stand to be in this skin.  But there is no where else I can go and nothing else I can feel sometimes, besides sadness and anger and loss and grief, especially when the phone rings and it's good news at the other end of the line.

If this is a test then we are failing.  We are not excited when we get the wonderful news that someone is pregnant, and that just sucks.  The ring of that call is always a little shrill in our house.  So here's the deal, all of you that are currently pregnant now, you're all good, but after that it has to stop.  The rest of you, no more hanky-panky until we give you the okay.  We're up next.  We've been up next for so long.

***************

So what are your tips to help us get pregnant?  Tinctures?  Chants?  Meditations?  Roofies? And don't even think about telling us to just relax and let it happen because that's just not going to work.  Unless there's wine involved.  Should there be wine involved?

'tis the season

For every adult in the kitchen there appeared to be two or three children running between rooms, blitzed on sugar from the chocolate fountain and marshmallows they were using for dipping. Wrinkled party dresses and cheeks smeared with sweetness, they were enjoying the freedom granted by their parents’ own distraction – mainly champagne and a recently restored vintage jukebox. A head collided with the stem of my glass and kept moving, unfazed, back to his friends all up way past their bedtimes.

.::.

'Cardiomyopathy is a chronic and sometimes progressive disease in which the heart muscle (myocardium) is abnormally enlarged, thickened and/or stiffened. The condition typically begins in the walls of the heart's lower chambers (ventricles), and in more severe cases also affects the walls of the upper chambers (atria). The actual muscle cells as well as the surrounding tissues of the heart become damaged. Eventually, the weakened heart loses the ability to pump blood effectively and heart failure or irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias or dysrhythmia) may occur.'

.::.

One of the younger boys came in, crying over some rough play happening in the next room. He’d been wearing a toque the whole time and now pulled it off as he found his mother. He was soothed with some kisses to his cheeks and bald head before running back to the action.

“Yes he’s bald. He’s got leukaemia, he’s been in remission since March. We’ve got two more years of treatment.”

She went on to tells us about how she worries for his future; as a teen and adult will he lead an incredibly healthy lifestyle, or will he feel invincible having beaten cancer, and abuse his perceived strength?

The hostess, the wife of a friend, went on at length about how scary it must be – the thought of losing a child. How utterly terrible it would be to lose an only child.

It was right around the time the walls began to close in on me.

.::.

'Cardiomyopathy is nondiscriminatory in that it can affect any adult or child at any stage of their life. It is not gender, geographic, race or age specific. It is a particularly rare disease when diagnosed in infants and young children.'

.::.

He found me on the front porch, trying to regain control of myself, tears streaming down my face. I was as embarrassed as I was upset and wanted to scream when he asked me what was wrong. I stared through the picture window at the enormous twinkling tree he and their two kids had decorated that morning. I forced some deep breaths and pulled out my mobile to call a taxi.

.::.

We finally received Sadie’s post mortem report a few weeks ago. Any hope I had been holding on to that it would reveal some extraordinary insight about her condition was dashed. Waiting had given me a reason to tuck that part away; I could put off thinking about future children because I didn’t yet have all of the information I needed. There had to be something else, some tiny scrap of information resembling an explanation for it all. Going through the document with her doctor made me face what I have been refusing to believe since he told me so on the day I met him. We would likely never find out the cause.

With nothing left to wait for I know I should be thinking about what I expect from the future. Our genetic counsellor told us that based on what information they do have, the odds of us having another child with cardiomyopathy are 1 in 10. She chose to pitch it as a 90% chance that any future children will be perfectly healthy.

My husband asked me afterward whether I’d buy a lottery ticket given those odds. My answer was simple. Of course I would. Because I know I would survive losing.

We’ve all become much too aware of the fragility of life, regardless of what took our children from this world. I would like to hear how other babylost mamas who went on to have more children came to the decision to try again. How long did it take for hope to outweigh your fear?

replacement

With our surrogate, Kyrie, just a few weeks away from what we hope will be the safe delivery of our son, I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between this possible new baby and the twins we lost a little more than two years ago. Of course, this new child can't be a literal replacement for the twins. But there's less to distinguish them than one might think.

 Part of that is simply the mechanics of IVF. One afternoon in April 2006, on the third floor of a big hospital in the Northeast, ten embryos were coaxed into being. Curled in their petri dishes, cells dividing, the embryos, from my point of view, were interchangeable. I hoped that at least one of them would grow to be my child, but I didn't care which one and I didn't give much thought to what would happen to the others.

The doctors chose two embryos -- call them A and B -- to transfer and froze the rest. A and B became the twins and we all know how that turned out. So, in April 2008, they unfroze embryo C, which is now, at least theoretically, the baby due at the beginning of January.

Although the selection of which embryos to transfer wasn't entirely random, chance clearly played the guiding role. Right now, I could just as easily be mourning the loss of embryos D and E or cautiously celebrating the impending arrival of F. And that cascade of contingencies make it that much harder to attach significance to the individual identity of any of them.

Moreover, over time, the twins themselves have become mostly an abstraction. I have almost no actual memories of them -- a positive pregnancy test, a dozen increasingly ominous ultrasounds, a month or two or flutters and kicks. What memories I do have are really about myself, my hopes, my wishes, my painting an imaginary future in pastel shades of pink and blue. And, though much more hesitantly, I find myself now thinking almost the identical thoughts, transferring the old dreams to this new child and wondering whether I can see this child -- at least in some non-literal way -- as one of the twins returned to me.

Because I tend to think in metaphors, and extended and heavy-handed ones at that, let me put it this way. Imagine you're looking into a series of lighted kitchen windows at dinnertime. In one lucky house, all the chairs at the table are filled with cheerful family members. In the house next door, there are chairs with no-one sitting in them, but you notice that they're drawn close to the table, still part of the family circle. In yet another house, the table at first seems full, but if you look in the next room, you'll find the unused chairs carefully, lovingly stored away.

And then, in the house I hope one day to live in, there's a chair that, in the manner of Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously occupied and empty.  And in it sits a little boy who is at once here and, well, absolutely elsewhere.

Your thoughts on the concept of the replacement child? A dangerous or unfair idea? An understandable rationalization? Something in between?

What does your dinner table look like?