I’m supposed to be at a birthday party today.

Four years ago, I was pregnant for the first and only time, and December 30 was my due date.  Today, of all days, I feel my lack so keenly.

I never got to experience what it’s like to feel a baby move inside me.  There will never be a little human running around who looks like me.  We didn’t even know if the baby was a boy or a girl, but I think she was a girl.  Or at least, that’s how I’ve come to think of her.  My feelings are all I have to go on.  All I have are a few black and white ultrasound pictures and memories. 

These are the thoughts swirling in my mind as I sit on the couch with my dog.  Since I work from home, he is my constant companion.  He sits in my lap when I read my Bible in the morning, he tries to do Pilates with me, he follows me all around the house.  He’s my buddy!  I’ve even prayed for him a time or two.  Yes, I know he’s only a dog, but I said a quick prayer for him when we dropped him off at the kennel for the first time.  I couldn’t stand it if he got loose or hit by a car because I just love him so much.

If this is how I feel for a dog, how much more would I feel for my child?

Love’s Long Ripening

I can imagine that love – a love I had for my children before I even got married, a love accumulating inside me over time.  It was a love I poured out in prayers, journals, letters to my children.  It was a love expressed in preparation; I stretched myself, worked on issues, and grew so I would be the best mom I could be for them.

And that love for my baby didn’t end when the pregnancy ended.  Only now I don’t have anywhere to bestow it.  It’s just hanging in the balance.  A love years in the making not come to fruition. 

I think of how great that love could be if it had been able to be fully expressed.  If it had a recipient – a living, breathing child of my own.  How amazing would it be if the love that had incubated in my heart could have been finally released? 

I’ll never know what it’s like to love someone as a mother.  And in the four years since the due date that never was, I’ve come to terms with that.  I have grieved the loss of motherhood in general, and I’ve also grieved the loss of that individual life.  I have mourned, and I have healed. 

A few years ago, when the pain of miscarriage was still raw, when motherhood was a dream I was still hoping to attain, and when I was in counseling, my therapist suggested an activity to aid in healing.  This was my journal entry from that time: