Don't Want, Don't Expect, Don't Plan, Don't Hope

I went to a baby shower this weekend. To my surprise, the friend who had been expecting a baby at the end of the month had delivered nearly 3 weeks early, and had tiny (5 lb) baby in tow for the shower. I asked to hold her (the only person who seemed to dare) and spent nearly an hour sitting, listening to others talk and letting myself experience my own emotions.

It has been 8+ years now since I lost my own daughter at birth. I thought when it happened that I would struggle with friends who delivered babies around the same time. I imagined that I would look at their children and conjure in my mind the image of what my daughter should have looked like at the same age. And that happens occasionally. Not the conjuring up part because I am apparently lousy at that kind of visual abstraction, but a tiny pang now and again when I remember that my daughter was “supposed” to be that age.

But mostly, the fear I continue to experience hits me when I see pregnant women. When pregnant women talk about having named their babies already before birth, I want to stop them and say—wait a minute, not so fast. When they talk about plans for the future with the baby, I am tempted to step in and warn them that the future isn’t always what you expect it will be. Of course, I have never done that. You just don’t do such things to other people, no matter how well you know them or how well they know you and your own experience. You can’t ruin their joy by reminding them of your pain.

It isn’t really a sour grapes impulse, though. I think in my heart that I want to help other people. I don’t want them to think about me. I just have this idea that somehow if we are less invested in what we want, then not getting it will hurt less. When I look at that set out so baldly like that, I know it’s not true. I know that you can’t just stop wanting to be happy, stop wanting anything. That’s not the way you avoid pain. But that is still my impulse for myself, and it is my impulse to advise other people to do the same thing.

The other thing that happened while I held this baby was that I kept finding myself falling back into the “what if” thinking that nearly killed me that first year. I spent so many hours living a life that wasn’t mine, my mind going off in the direction that I had planned for life to go, but that it hadn’t. If I had delivered three weeks early, this is what my baby would have looked like. If I had known there was a problem, everything that happened in the last eight years could have been prevented. I struggled to stop that thinking then and I’m still working on it now.

My daughter will never grow up into the 5 or 8 or 16 year old I wish I knew her as. She is forever halted at the pre-baby stage. And accepting that is still a little hard now and again. I know that this is my life. There are part of the this life that I am glad about (and feel guilty about being glad about). There are parts of this life I hate because of all the many branching problems that came into my life as a result of that loss. I wasn’t strong enough to deal with it. I broke, and things broke around me. I am still rebuilding.

I want new things now. That is OK. I am allowed to walk away from the grave. I am allowed to let go of the wishes of the past and embrace new wishes. I am a new me, and that is both good and bad, but mostly it just is. I will have new wants, new hopes, new expectations and plans. Because that is what life is. New, every day.