Thrown into a new reality - and back again
Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again.
As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right to know that too and, in either case, to process those emotions together.
And so, that is where we are today. I write this partly to process it myself - yes, I'm losing that baby, at just over seven weeks. Apparently 1 in 5 pregnancies are miscarried, usually because something is wrong with the baby. It's not an experience I've ever had before, and I have yet to tell the kids. We will grieve together. Until I've told them, it doesn't feel quite real that this is over... I know I had got used to this new reality already, embraced it, full of hope and looking forward to another little one to cuddle.
Yet in a strange way, our future was only different for a month or so. Now we're back to where things were in mid August - our lives, continuing as before. I think we'll look back at this time as glimpsing a surreally different future... we'd have managed it and loved it, a day at a time, but really objectively speaking it is certainly easier to have our lives back to 'normal'. Except that there is now a new citizen in Heaven, who we have yet to meet but whom we will always ask to pray for us.
Deo Gratias.