Scarred

Scars.  I have several on my legs, mostly remnants of my aggressive soccer-playing style as a kid.  But one.  One on my knee.  The freshest.  The darkest.  I got it a few days before we Lost The Baby.  We were at an indoor pool with Scarlett and I took her down a three-foot slide and landed on my knees with that awkward grace only top-heavy, pregnant women can have.  It hurt.  It hurt like hell.

Three days later, in the middle of the night, I woke up because of a “gush.”  An incredibly tiny sensation that a small amount of water had gushed out of me.  So tiny, it may have been imagined.  So tiny, it couldn’t be important.

But many hours later, as I sat in a pool of relentless, briny, amniotic fluid on the hospital bed, Mike and I were being told that my water broke.  It’s called PPROM (Preterm Premature Rupture Of Membranes) and it’s pretty rare -- it occurs in 3% of pregnancies.  And because our baby wasn’t viable, there was very little hope that he would survive.

We then spent the next several hours talking to people.  High-risk OB’s, neonatal doctors, labor and delivery nurses, hospital social workers.  Percentages and statistics rained down on us.  Surrounded us.  Suffocated us.  But the only thing that mattered was this:  We were losing our son.  A son we had never met.  Never held.  Never heard cry.  A son that was otherwise healthy, but who couldn’t survive.  And even as I sat there, barely able to comprehend, to acknowledge, to FUCKING GRASP what these people were telling me, I could feel him kicking inside of me.

I spent three days in the hospital, but it felt like years.  Years of torture and emotional hell.  And now, I want those days back.  Those days when I was pregnant, and I had my baby inside of me.  Even though he would soon be lost, I had him.  Right there, in my womb.  He was alive and he was mine.  And now.  Now I have his footprints that I haven’t even gotten the courage up to look at.  They’re sitting in a box in our closet amongst cards and ultrasound photos and my hospital bracelet.  And his ashes.  A tiny, silver urn just two inches high with a blue bird on it.  A bird taking flight.  Leaving us.

It’s been three months, and I still have this scar on my knee.  Dark and purple and blotchy and utterly painful to look at.  My son is gone.  He was in and out of my life in five months, but this scar is still here, hanging on.  It will probably fade.  Eventually.  But for now, it’s a part of me and my body and my story.