The Age Gap

I am the mother of two boys, aged 11 and 4.  That’s quite an age spread, huh?  People say it all the time.  We got through the tough years and started all over again?  Yup.  New marriage?  Nope, same father.  Accident?  Not at all.

Sometimes I brush it off, but sometimes I tell the true story.  I have become a lot more open with friends and even sometimes with strangers about the true story lately.  I am years past it and feel less raw emotion and less shame.  But here’s the real reason behind the age gap.

I got pregnant very easily with my first son.  I had a fairly blissful and naïve pregnancy with him, and had an unmedicated birth in a birth center in NYC, an experience which I absolutely adored and empowered me in a way I didn’t think was possible.  I couldn’t wait to do it again.

But a year and a half later, I found out I was pregnant slightly sooner than I had planned on.  I told myself it would be ok.  Two years apart would be fine.  I would survive.  I started planning a homebirth but was seeing my hospital-based midwives at the beginning and they ordered a routine ultrasound at 12 weeks.  There was no heartbeat, and the baby had stopped growing a few weeks before.  We talked about a DNC but I went home and that night I started to bleed.  I think once my brain knew, my body decided it was ok to let go.  The miscarriage was painful – physically and emotionally, but all these years later, after I have been through the rest of the journey, it feels like a drop in the bucket.

But because of that loss, even though it was an unplanned pregnancy, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer to have another baby.  So I got pregnant again. And I miscarried again.  Earlier.  Easier.  But harder. 

I started seeing a fertility doctor to see if he could figure out what was going on.  But just a couple visits in, before he could do much, I was pregnant again.  He followed the pregnancy until 9 weeks when he said that the baby was perfect and I “graduated” back to my hospital midwives.  (Again, I was planning a home birth, but we were moving to California half-way through the pregnancy, so I decided to stick with them until then.)  Everything was going well.  I was horribly sick.  My belly was growing and growing.  I felt the baby move very early on, which was obviously reassuring.  And then the midwives sent us for our 20 week anatomy scan.

In the scan, they noticed that the baby’s brain looked strange.  The ventricles were measuring differently.  The doctor explained that it could be because of a number of different causes, ranging from some that were deadly to the possibility that the baby just being pressed up against the uterus and the ultrasound measurement was off.  We went for an MRI.  It turned out that there was an Intercranial Hemorrhage that basically wiped out ¾ of her brain.  She would probably not survive the pregnancy, and if she did, would not survive long after birth or would basically have zero quality of life.

We made the heart-wrenching decision to end the pregnancy.  I won’t go into the details – they’re still too hard to talk about, even after all that has happened since.  It was definitely the most traumatic experience of our whole journey.  Of course I questioned our decision, and of course I still have guilt and shame to this day about it. I don’t know anyone who has terminated a pregnancy that doesn’t.

We moved to LA.  I was a shell of a human.  I don’t remember much about that time at all.  I went through the motions.  Our son started pre-school.  We started our new life.  And since we were told that the brain bleed was most likely a fluke and it wouldn’t happen again, we got pregnant again, about 4 months later.  

Again, things went well.  Again, I was horribly sick.  I was worried but not debilitatingly so, and we were being monitored and receiving very good care.  But again, we went for our 20 week scan, and they saw exactly the same thing.  Devastating Intercrannial Hemorrhage.  

This time we took our time before terminating.  I wanted to make sure we explored every option and did every test and knew everything about this baby before we did it.  I questioned the doctors over and over again, asking if maybe it could possibly still be ok.  I wrote letters to the baby every night and connected with her in a way that I couldn’t with my others.  I took photos of my pregnant belly.  But finally, we had exhausted every possible test and scenario and there wasn’t any more time left.  We terminated, but in a much more humane and private setting and it wasn’t nearly as traumatic as the first time.  

Obviously, there was a problem somewhere.  It was not a fluke.  There was something about the combination of our genetic make-up that was causing this, and it was explained that it would happen in 1 of 4 pregnancies.  We had our DNA mapped, our chromosomes scrutinized, my blood checked and rechecked (and rechecked) for antibodies that could have been attacking the babies. But the doctors couldn’t come up with anything.

So we kept trying.  We got pregnant again, and miscarried at 11 weeks.

A lot of people would have stopped after five losses (or even after one loss) and I wouldn’t blame them. Each loss was completely devastating.  But giving up was even more devastating to me.  The thing I wanted most in life was to give birth to another baby, and I was just not ready to stop trying.  I think the hope that it would one day happen was my coping mechanism.  In the darkest days, it was the one thing that I could hold onto.  

In October of 2014, we got pregnant one last time.  I was an anxious wreck.  But 20 weeks came and went and everything was fine.  Everything was fine at 24 weeks, and every 2 weeks after that, and at 41 weeks our rainbow was born. 

Giving birth to a happy, healthy baby didn’t erase all the pain.  I am still anxious about him being taken from us.  I still grieve my other babies.  I still hold a little resentment that I never had the baby girl I always wanted.  I still feel guilty about not being a good enough mom, not appreciating him enough, losing my temper, and feeling like it is all too hard for me, when all I wanted was him.  It should be sunshine and butterflies all the time, but it certainly isn’t, and there’s a lot of guilt and shame in that.  But, as time passes, the pain of the 5 years that led to him becomes a little more dull.  And being a source of comfort, guidance and inspiration for others going through similarly horrific journeys also helps me.  I definitely have a story.  And it’s one I need to share.  

~Anonymous