TW: This post discusses pregnancy loss. If this is not the post for you today, please take care 🩵
Despite my bouts of prenatal anxiety this time around, my July due date has always felt so natural. So meant to be, from the very first day we found out we were expecting. Of course the baby is coming in July.
I can’t say the same for my first pregnancy.
When I got my first positive pregnancy test in early February 2023, estimated due dates landed us somewhere in the mid-October range. An October baby. I tried to connect with the magic of the timing: that my due date would be right around (if not exactly on) my mother’s or brother’s birthday. That we’d be adding another little Libra to an extended family of majority October babies. The synchronicity of my, my mother’s, my mother-in-law’s, and my maternal grandmother’s first pregnancies all having the same progression through seasons, spread across different decades in time.
But the idea of an October baby still felt so unbelievable and hard to imagine. As we celebrated that unseasonably warm day in February, something in me just couldn’t picture the next nine months ending with a baby in our arms.
In the moment, I chalked it up to just being overwhelmed by a life and body change I had never experienced before.
I know now how that story ends. And I look back on those moments in time still trying to piece it all together: did I know? Did I intuitively know this pregnancy would be so fleeting, that just when it would start to feel real it would slip away?
Reclaiming the wisdom of my intuition has been a huge part of my healing journey after pregnancy loss.
At a time of immense shifts in hormonal and bodily rhythms, I’ve never felt more pressure to temper my own feelings and emotions. Share your worries, but don’t be the hysterical first-time mom. Ask questions, but don’t come off overly informed. Come in to the hospital for the bleeding, but walk out laughing off your naiveté. Show the doctors that you’re strong, that you won’t be a problem patient, that you won’t be another nuisance during their rounds.
I remember all the times I’d say to my partner, my mom, my friends—I don’t feel anything. It’s like there’s nothing there. My circle of support was well-intentioned in their reassurances, batting away my negative thoughts to calm me down.
Even my OB assured me the the light, brown bleeding I began to experience was normal. It was simply old blood. And when an empty sac appeared on the ultrasound screen, he asked me again the date of my last period. I could see him doing the math in his head, calculating exactly when we should be seeing something more than an empty sac in my uterus. I noticed his pause. But still, he launched into all the reasons why there was still nothing to worry about—the first being that I simply must be wrong about my own menstruation and ovulation.
That was on a Friday in early March. I relaxed into the passenger seat on the car ride home from the hospital, letting myself believe the things I was being told. I shooed away the worries. It was just too early in my pregnancy. That’s all it was. Surely we’ll see something more in next week’s ultrasound.
I woke up the next morning with every ounce of me internally screaming. That everything was not all right, that there should have been more than an empty sac on that ultrasound, and that it was only a matter of time before the real bleeding began.
An hour later, it did. Bright, red, and gushing.