Shame On Me

I can't believe it has been 2 months since Clarence was born to Heaven. It snowed a ton today. Someone told me that when it snowed it was the angel babies playing on the clouds in Heaven. Or something to that affect. It is a nice thought. What do our babies look like in Heaven? Do they look like they did on Earth? It is hard for me to picture him any way other than "sleeping". How sad that I will never see his smile. Or his eyes. I will never hear his cry or his laughter. I will never know what he looks like doing anything other than sleeping. And even then I don't truly know what that looks like either. Because if he had been sleeping his little chest would've been rising and falling. That's what a mother looks for when she watches her baby sleep.

I feel angry. I feel cheated. I feel sad. I feel .... numb mostly. The whole experience of being pregnant and giving birth to my dead son feels so surreal. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it happened to me.

I haven't pulled out his little gowns and hats to look at in awhile. They smell like him and the hospital. It is a smell I both adore and despise. His gowns have blood and fluid stains on them. So do his hats. Part of me wants to wash one set and save the other set just how it is in hope to keep his smell forever. But then I don't know which one to wash. The first set he was in that is the most soiled? Or the last set, that isn't nearly as cute. So I do nothing. They sit up in my room in a Ziploc bag and a box we got from the hospital. They sit along with all the other mementos from the hospital. I need to get a nice big box to put all of these mementos in and the little things that we had bought for him while I was pregnant. Funny how I conveniently forget to do that whenever I am out. Something else I keep "forgetting" to do is to look for an urn. I don't even know where you buy one. Can you look online? Do these things make me a terrible mother?

I miss my baby boy, even though I never really knew him. Every time I hear of someone that has children close together I get upset. Or if someone with a child around Kensi's age is pregnant, I am jealous. That is supposed to be me. My children were supposed to be born 20 months apart from each other. Instead my son only lived for 20 weeks inside my womb. I don't live a very structured life. We are not on a tight day to day schedule. Bedtime is about the only routine that we keep. I don't make many plans for the future. The one plan I did make, to have my children close in age, was taken away. I felt so blessed and so lucky to find out I was pregnant with Clarence after only 3 months of trying. Some women with PCOS try years. I knew how lucky I was. I feel like fate took one look at me and decided I didn't deserve to be so happy. Like it wanted to wipe that smug look off of my face as I made jokes about my husbands "super sperm". I feel so humbled by this whole experience. Knocked to the ground and kicked in the gut several times over. Like I am being taunted and laughed at. "Oh your life is finally going the way you have always dreamed? Oh you are finally to the part you have wished for since you were a little girl. The part where you get to have a family?" I feel like the rug was jerked from underneath me, all my dreams stolen. What did I do to deserve this? What did I do to deserve to have a dead baby? I loved that little guy. I wanted to keep him safe. I couldn't do that. I feel like my body has failed me. I failed him. And I don't know why. I will never know why. Why did my placenta not develop properly? Why? Why? Why? Shame on me for thinking I was invincible. Shame on me for thinking I deserved the happiness I had.