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.