Close to seven months into this journey and I am only just beginning to think that you may live. You move so much now. I never mind. You rock back in forth while I sleep, waking me at dawn with kicks that come just in time to ease the panic that you are still. You're alive.

Close to seven months into this journey and I am only just beginning to think that you may live. I may actually walk out of a hospital with more than just a card with faint footprints. I may actually have a lifetime to spend with you. The idea pushes me under, like when I guide your brother's heads back in the tub to wash their hair and they panic at the water rising above their ears. Your sister left this hole, this emptiness so vast and cold that the thought of you warm against me makes the cold feel even colder.  It pushes me under and the water rushes to cover me.

Seven months in and I'm just beginning to think I may need to wipe down the crib and car seat, and pull out the sleepers your three brothers have already broken in. Seven months in and I'm growing so hopeful, so attached, so in love with this fourth son. Please live Ben. Please be perfect. Your brothers are the most delightful cacophony of noise and dirt and kisses. They smell like wind and they run and wrestle and scream like banshees and they need you to join their ranks. So don't leave littlest boy. Please stay with us. Please be my bookend and finish our family.

4-

I hate it when people ask if ill try for a girl. I have a girl. I had one. And i want to say your name, Grace Elizabeth, to put life into you, but they cant handle hearing about you. They dont want to listen to how I grew you for five short months and then you were gone. They cant understand how I never saw your face, but still I look for you in the eyes of every dark hair, brown eyed girl I see. How when I'm counting the boys, 1- Solo, 2- Eli, 3- Jonas, 4-             , I always balk at 4 and that split second of panic catches in my throat because I don't see you and just where did you get too? And then I remember- Don't count to four when counting heads on the shore. Don't count to four when calling the kids for dinner. Don't look for a fourth hand to hold when walking through a parking lot. Don't think about buying a fourth winter coat or budgeting for four kids at Christmas. Don't think about leggings and boots and cute shirts with glitter or anything pink because you aren't here, and I know you can't be here, but the spot you should be in is visibly vacant. I see your absence in their photographs where you should be nestled between three big brothers and where your seat should sit between them at table, between their spilled milk and boisterous banter. I can feel the warmth and weight of where your arms should cross behind my neck with every hug and it's warm like my face when I sit near the fire even though my back is always cold.

 That's what I want to say when people ask me if I'll try for a girl. I had a girl. I have a daughter. And like her Daddy says, we will have her for all of eternity. Just not today.

Women always say that after childbirth you forget the outragous horror of delivery. I haven't labored and delivered to know. After one labor over 19 hours long I ended up with my first c-section to retrieve my fat, wide shouldered first born who never fit in new born clothes and had feet so big that all footied jammies had to be cut to accommodate them.

However, I suppose it's similar to forgetting the nervous energy that walks me to the O.R. for the other deliveries; the fear of being cut open, seeing nothing, hearing only nurses and doctors chatting about their weekend plans.  Of course all that fear is totally worth it when they lift that sweet new face above the sheet.

Similarily forgotten, is the horror of morning sickness. It's always bad. Puking all day, all night, and growing worse each pregnancy. Although it may just be the three boys already here that make it seem so much worse.

This time though, I'm a tangled mess with headaches and nausea and for the first time, fear. So much terror. It's  like nothing else to stand in the shadow of the Strongtower and still be afraid.

I can't figure out how to grapple with losing Grace and doing this again. Morning sickness has always abated about the time we learn the gender. And there's this amazing shift physically and emotionally when you see him or her on a sonogram and can name them,and prepare for them, and all the energy that has been drained by morning sickness is replaced with a joyful drive.

But we didnt have that last time. Five months of puking and exhaustion and then her heart just stopped.  I never got to deliver her, or see her, or hold her. It just ended. It was 20 weeks of all the hard parts and it didn't end with a new face above the curtain. It ended with a burial in a field and a stone angel marker that I can't avoid finding when I look out the window. 

So weeks into this morning sickness I am terrified. I force myself to remember, I am not growing Gracie. But i wish that I was. And in the same breath I'm so thankful for a new son or daughter. And I am so hopeful, so desperately hopeful that this baby will not die. And one day this morning sickness will pass and we will know the gender, and the name and we will move forward in preparation, believing that I will have the privilege once more of feeling the nervous energy as I walk to the O.R.

Faith Proved

The test came back positive; two pink lines confirming that we are indeed running this course again. Im relieved. And terrified. I look out the window and follow the curved tree line hedging the field until I find the crepe, the bench and the stone angel. 

Chanting scripture like a mantra to still my racing heart; casting cares, running for a Strong Tower, and begging for this baby to live.

Even still, I have little expectation that in less than 8 months time I will have another son or daughter. 

We told them about you today. We debated on when to tell them, but you're here right now and growing, and if we have you for 20 weeks and then you're gone, then we will have one more chance to point our sons to Jesus, to Hope. My boys have hope. It resonated in their eyes in the seconds they first knew. They've prayed a million prayers for you to come and they have hope because He answered. They're dreaming a million dreams of you and praying for you to live.

Little one, I'm desperate for your heart to beat. I am desperate for you to hear your brother's rowdy yells and hear them singing and laughing and playing. I am desperate to carry you to term and fufill the vision of delivering you into the hearts of family and friends that have walked this road with us. I am desperate for your biggest brother to hold you in his arms and smile at me with that know-it-all look in his eye, because he was confident this momemt would come.

So tonight I'll choose hope, and faith, and peace. I'll choose to rest and trust that a year from now my fear will be faith proved. 

I should be lugging your carseat in and out of the van, over your brother's seats and snack wrappers and random socks and the umbrella wedged by the door.

I should have had to change the batteries by now in your swing, the one that swayed your brothers into slumber.

I should be behind on laundry, your pink things a shocking contrast to all the blue and brown and comoflauge clothes in the pile, because we are up all night and all day and you and I are sleep deprived.

I should be almost recovered, my scar a little thicker, another ring in a tree that tells another year's story.

I should be over the PUPS rash, and losing weight, and packing up the tiny premie clothes and exchanging them for the 0-3 months.

I should be tired of the vigilance in keeping you safely out of reach from the kisses from well meaning brothers, who would wrestle their way to you, inevitably bumping you out of the sleep you resisted.

I should be wearing you in the Mobi, wrapped tight against me, keeping your heart's beat in rythm with mine. God, what I would do to have you there, on my chest, with a heartbeat.

I shouldn't be a wreck at every baby picture on facebook. I shouldn't ache for days after holding another baby. I shouldn't think about how I will search every other new sibling for traces of you.

I am weary of this grief. How did you leave such a hole when we never even held you?

On Your Birthday

Its been four months. Today is your due date. One brother arrived on his expected day, the others were early. I like to think you would be here by now. To save my sanity I limited the time that I allowed myself to ponder that you most likely would have been here around Christmas. Just like when carrying your brothers, my blood pressure would have spiked and the fetal moniters would have tied me to a hospital bed, and you would  have been cut from my belly early, but precisely when He intended.

But you won't fill my arms today, and the chasm in my middle feels grander. So I occupy my hands with soil and seeds, forget-me-nots from your Aunt who eased my grief with a million texts and calls to make sure I was still breathing, and getting out of bed, and missing you but not getting lost.  

Your brothers will decorate pretty pots for the seeds to grow in, and pray a dozen prayers today, as they do most days. They fall from their lips at every meal, before bedtimes and in the trips to your tree.  They are perplexed at why God won't being you back, angry because they want you so much and passionately miss you, even though they never felt you kick.  Yet, no matter how much we love you, we can't wish you back from Heaven, and honestly, I wouldn't want you to trade the Splender your eyes first saw for this fallen earth.

But Gracie girl, I am desperate for you; fall out on the floor and sob until my body is weak and my throat hoarse, desperate.  I can not yet fathom a day when that desperation will ease or if I even want it to. At least today, on the day that stops the endless anticipation of waiting for you not to arrive, I am still breathing, and getting out of bed, and missing you, but I am not lost.