11 Years and Counting

Before I had my first missed period, I knew my pregnancy with Turner was different.

 
I was sick alllll day and alllll night, waking up in the midnight hours of fall in Georgia to take a nibble of a granola bar and pray for relief. I spent most of the Halloween season lying on the apartment floor, trying to “homeschool” Parker and Reagan, while a baby Drake crawled over my listless body. 

I remember thinking, “This is killing me.”

By some miracle, we made it back to California that November, and I felt hopeful that, as the first trimester came to a close, I would start feeling better and things would become more manageable.

 
As the extreme nausea finally tapered down around 20 weeks, the pain began. My round belly was enormous, measuring weeks bigger than it should. I couldn’t sit at a 90 degree angle without intense discomfort. I literally could not bend. 

The weeks dragged on and I was scheduled to see a high risk OB to get to the bottom of all the extra fluid that continued to grow exponentially. Jeremy was out of town so I made the trip to the downtown office solo, destroying the side of his brand new truck on a cement pillar in a tiny parking garage on my way (that’s a story for another day).

 
All the stress and worry seemed as superfluous as my amniotic fluid: the 3D ultrasound revealed another wild Braun baby doing backflips in my belly. All was well.

 
I remember thinking how crazy it was that I couldn’t feel any of those movements anymore because of all the extra fluid.

 
The weeks became even slower and more excruciating. By 32 weeks, I could no longer sit up at all. I could ride in the car in a full recline. Or lay down on my side.

 
I remember Bible studies lying sideways on the couch. Park birthday parties and little league baseball games laying on the ground on a blanket.

 
As the countdown to 40 weeks drew nearer, I kept telling myself all the pain, all the suffering, would be worth it. 

I remember, in the hours when I couldn’t be upright, reciting Romans 8:38-39 in my head, thinking I’d need it for endurance during labor: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

As 34 weeks came and went, the unrelenting ballooning of water in my belly seemed to recede for a moment, and I felt slightly less miserable. I chose to focus only on the gratitude I felt for the respite from pain. And ignore that persistent, nagging feeling that something was different. 

At 35 and a half weeks, I went to a routine prenatal checkup where I measured 43 weeks. Dr. Yang was having trouble capturing the baby’s heartbeat…it was really low, he said…in the 90’s…so he sent me downstairs for a more formal non-stress test and ultrasound. 

When the nurse glided the ultrasound wand over my belly, all I could think was how badly I needed to go to the bathroom. When she turned my way with a look of unspoken pity, a part of me wasn’t surprised. On some level, I already knew that for which I had been preparing all along: there was no heartbeat anymore. 

I’d been on the receiving end of those ultrasounds before: a blighted ovum at 7 weeks, a dead fetus at 9. But learning that my full term, 35 and a half week old, viable for life in the outside world, baby boy was gone was different. 

I immediately wanted a C section (which I did not get). For 9 months I had suffered. I refused to endure the cruelty of childbirth on top of this ridiculous pregnancy. 

This pregnancy that, from the start, I knew was different. The one that, no matter how many well-meaning friends or doctors or specialists told me was going to be fine, was not right and not normal and not ok. 

I knew the pregnancy was different. But I didn’t know how different it would make me. How much it would change me. Harden and soften me. Strengthen and weaken me. Steal from and give to me. Mold me into the best and worst versions of myself.

Turner’s life and death have become the things around which everything else is classified as Before or After. That moment on my soul’s calendar that cannot be scratched out, no matter how many years pass. 

11 years later, I still weep for his little life and the loss of it. And I weep for myself. 

I weep for the naïveté and trust I placed in the people around me, when my own knowing told me something was not just different, but terribly wrong. 

For the guilt I felt over the anger I felt at the amount of physical pain I experienced during the pregnancy. The self-chiding that it could be worse and I shouldn’t complain. 

For the use of treasured verses on repeat, not to bolster me through labor, but through the death and loss of a child and of faith. 

I weep for my inability to be present for the grief of my children mourning the loss of their brother. For losing my tolerance of trivial conversations and the option of being carefree anymore. For the sheer volume of energy required to carry such a burden around and onward in this world. For the ways in which I am judged, by myself and others, for not grieving right or getting over it fast enough. 

All of it, every single moment of it, was so overwhelmingly different. I am so different.

 
Would I choose it? Never. Can I accept it? Sometimes. Do I see the beauty in it? Often. Will I continue to remember and honor him? Always.