5.15.17
“The concept of Mother’s Day is hard. I get wished a happy Mother’s Day, and then I pray I’m going to be a mother at the end of all this.”
I don’t know what people thought when they looked at me on Mother’s Day last year. Were their wishes hesitant? Did they make a conscious decision of what to say or not say to me before they even saw me? Did they wonder, like I did, if I would actually be a mother? I was in the darker side of the grey area that is a woman pregnant with her first child on Mother’s Day – with child, my body threatening to be without.
I’d lost two gushes of blood in the night – a bad night. It felt cruel that laying down seemed to be the cause of blood loss when I was, indeed, on bedrest. I propped myself up on pillows. It was not the first time I tried this trick. While it gave me peace of mind, allowing me to loosely fall in and out of sleep, I was, yet again, in another uncomfortable sleeping position.
For 27 years, I’d only slept on my stomach. In the last 10 weeks I’d tried my back, my side, propped up, wrapped around a pillow – all with no success. I was uncomfortable. I was losing blood. I loathed nights.
But a redeeming quality of the early hours of Mother’s Day last year was this: On Mother’s Day, my husband felt our little girl move for the first time. Maybe it was the lunge into the bathroom that awoke her and got her moving. Maybe it was just God rubbing my back and telling me it was ok – she’s still moving, she’s still alive.
Mother’s Day was hard. I cried more days in this pregnancy than those I didn’t, and this day was no exception.
Please God, please let me be a mother.
In the stats:
Gestational Age: 21 weeks 2 days
Days of blood: 21
Days of bedrest: 40
Doctor’s Appointments: 7
Ultrasounds: 3