Spring.

It is Spring, time of rebirth, and I am bleeding death. Still. A week later. This is “normal” I am told.

It happened suddenly, without any warning. One moment I was listening to the Impling awaken from her nap, and suddenly, simultaneously, a gush between my legs.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Spotting is normal. This was not. I lay on our bed, flipping through my pregnancy book. Some bleeding is normal. I'd heard of women having periods into their pregnancies. Maybe that's all this was. But I knew, knew it wasn't. The Impling draped herself over me in one of the longest and warmest and most loving embraces I will likely ever know. I lay under her, smelling her corn silk hair, feeling her toddler weight and her quiet breathing, while I bled out what once was a hope of a sibling.

I didn't want to move. Somehow, I thought that I could keep that little life inside of me if I didn't stand up, didn't encourage it. Don't DO this, little one. Stay here, stick around...there's so much for you to see...

But reality won, and I hauled myself from bed to get the phone and call my doctor, and press the number for emergency, and listen to the nurse tell me to come in as soon as I could for an ultrasound. Then I paged my husband, and he listened to my thick voice, and said “I'll be right home”.

Dress Impling. Pull on pants over my wad of kleenex, since I had optimistically kept no pads on hand. We lay down again together, and sang songs. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Favorite Things, Rubber Duckie. Then the sound of the key in the lock, and I was walking to the car, carefully...carefully, as if I could keep my little one inside. As if there was still hope.

The traffic lights lasted forever. I watched the lights, and felt my body bleed, and sang to the Impling and felt that sinking in my center. The feeling that I had lost. That we all had lost. That it was my fault. That I was a failure. That my hopes for this little one were just that...powerful longing and dreams that were never really a possibility.

Because when the day was done, and I'd passed most of what had been the hope of a child into that wad of tissue, and onto the doctor's table, I knew that it had probably never had a chance from the very beginning. The chromosomes were probably all wrong, and there was nothing I could of done. I was powerless to stop it.

And maybe that's where some of this rage is coming from. That I should be able to control this, that I am only a vehicle, a natural vessel, and the ultimate creation, for the most part, is out of our control. I look at the Impling now, and realize more than ever how miraculous she is. How miraculous that she is here with us. Brilliant, and full of wonder, and laughter and life.