Starting the road to our rainbow.

This is a post that I have been dreading. Going back, reflecting and writing about what we have been through over the past year… The start of our journey to our rainbow baby and how we got to where we are today. Writing is therapeutic, it helps me process my grief, but it also can take a toll on me emotionally and mentally as I relive those moments… It’s hard, but I know I have to do this… For us, for our babies and for others…

After we lost Brooklyn, I was on maternity leave… I had gone through the delivery just like every other mom, but I was home, in an empty house, without my baby and I was absolutely broken. Luckily Marcus had quite a bit of time off with me and we tried to adjust to this new, painful reality as best as we could. But I would be lying if I said our life went back to normal. It didn’t. And it never would. There were countless days where my friend would stay on the phone with me for hours – she would talk me through my tears, tell me to breathe and help me fill my time while Marcus was at work… Countless nights where I would sleep at my parents’ house while Marcus was at the fire station because I couldn’t stand to be home alone… Countless days at work when I would sit in the back and just cry with my co-workers who cried with me… Countless times when people, who didn’t know what had happened, would ask us how our baby was…

And that time in between not having Brooklyn and not being pregnant was maybe the most difficult… There was an emptiness and longing in our souls that couldn’t be fixed. But when we were ready, we talked with our doctor about trying again. I had multiple doctor’s appointments filled with ultrasounds, blood tests and discussions of what we could do to have a healthy pregnancy the next time. I would be referred to a Maternal-Fetal Medicine (MFM) specialist – MFM specialists are high-risk pregnancy experts. I would have a preventative cervical cerclage placed to help keep my cervix closed, have weekly intramuscular progesterone injections to prevent preterm labor, and possibly be on bedrest. We were told about how successful all of these things were for treating an incompetent cervix and our doctor was pretty positive about it. They were going to help us get our rainbow baby and we were finally ready. The worst had happened to us and we weren’t scared anymore… We were willing to do whatever it took to get our family…

A few months passed, filled with ovulation prediction kits and eventually two rounds of Clomid… And the frustration and disappoint would grow every time we didn’t see those two solid lines. But in July 2017, I felt different… I had fallen asleep in a movie, felt nauseated in the car, Maggie was being extra clingy, certain foods tasted weird to me and I had dreamt that I was pregnant… All of those signs, but it was still just a little early to take a pregnancy test. So to try to avoid another disappointment, I waited… Until early one morning. It was still dark out… And as Marcus was waking up, I snuck into the bathroom to take the test…

Those two lines were something that we had been waiting for for what seemed like an eternity. I came out smiling and laid the positive pregnancy test in his hand… And we just laid there… Crying, sobbing and holding each other… We went through every emotion imaginable. Brooklyn would always be our missing piece, but that positive pregnancy test had filled some of that emptiness back up… And we had faith that everything was going to be okay this time… Never once thinking that we would go through the pain of losing our baby again…