Two Months and counting….

Ok, so it is one week from today that it will be exactly two months until Isabelle is born but it is coming up nonetheless. I have such mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I can’t wait to see her little face, hold her and kiss her little cheeks. On the other, I dread handing her over to the nurses, being alone while Chris goes with her to have her echo and whatever else she needs, and ultimately hand her over to a surgeon who will have her life in his hands. It’s scary as hell. Words can’t describe how this feels and it isn’t all of the time otherwise I would need to be hospitalized or seriously medicated. I’ve been pretty fortunate thus far. Some days I even ‘forget’ that she has HLHS but as the end of my pregnancy is near, those moments of reprieve are becoming shorter and shorter. I think the worst part is knowing that eventually after she is born she will be made to suffer to no fault of her own. We made the decision to continue her life, but whether she lives through this or not is not up to us.
My life experiences have taught me that faith allows us to walk through the darkest of moments and that without it, the world is indeed very dark. The struggle with faith continues to get harder as the days get closer to August 8. Fear is the opposite of the faith, and I am full of it. I can’t have one with the other. I also can’t seem to get over my anger at Gd so asking for help to walk through the fear is next to impossible. My mind keeps thinking of the mothers who have recently lost their babies without warning. What if that happens to me? How am I going to recover from that? Can I even recover?For the most part, I like to prepare myself for the worst case scenerio but that may not be a good plan with this situation. Instead of gathering my strength, I am knocking myself down which is the opposite of what I am trying to do.
I was chatting with another Heart Mom the other day and let it slip out that I felt that I was being “greedy” in wanting another child, and maybe I shouldn’t have been. I do feel like I have brought this upon us, that if we didn’t have another child we wouldn’t have even heard of HLHS never mind dealing with it. We could have just carried on with our lives and been happy with what we had. Problem was, I felt like something was missing.
I wanted a third child because it was something I had always wanted. When I had Liz I wasn’t in a good relationship to welcome another child into and I knew that. When I met Chris and we had Adeline, I knew that he was someone I could enjoy raising a family with and so after Addie’s first birthday, we talked about adding to our family. We were both on board and happy with our decision. I look back at the blissful ignorance we were in for the first three months and long to have that excitement back again. After the lines appeared on the pregnancy test, we shared giggles of excitement and hugs. Walking into the exam room that day in March, holding hands and smiling at each other seem like it was another lifetime ago. 24 hours later we were walking into the Advanced Fetal Care center and learning about Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. That morning I turned to Chris with tears in my eyes and said “I would give anything to have yesterday morning back.” We just held each other for a while in silence, mourning the loss of that bliss and trying to move forward with our circumstances. I keep returning to this time because I am still mourning the loss of having a normal pregnancy and that is ok. I am not going to push myself to get over this quickly, because I know that is unrealistic. My feelings have never been able to be shut off on a whim like that. It takes me time to get to the point where I need to be, and as angry as I am at Gd for saying “No” on my request for a healthy child, I have faith that He will bring me to where I need to be because underneath it all- I am the daughter of Gd and He loves me.