31 Weeks

I would have been 31 weeks today. P-SIL is coming over with the kids, and I broke down at this news. She is a trigger. Little C is a trigger. Little K is a trigger. Monday’s visit doesn’t change that. Tuesday’s news makes it worse. Good thing we were already going to the beach today. Hopefully they won’t stay all day, like last time.

For a while, around week 23, I lost track of what week it would have been. Then I reinstated my Fertility Friend membership and there was my pregnancy, long lost but still being tracked, in a section of the app. I can’t bear to delete the data. I want it to be replaced by a second, more successful, pregnancy.

I occasionally peek at the information, to see how Bean would have developed by now and learn about his milestones. I see what changes I would have experienced in my body. No tears, but it feels like my chest swells and would explode if it were pricked with a pin.

Last night I looked in my Filofax. I hadn’t noticed until then that the week of the year exactly matches the gestational age of my pregnancy. So I don’t have to count anymore. I can just look in my diary. I can’t forget how far along I would have been, even if I wanted to.

Sometimes I want to forget, and sometimes I want to cling on. I am so very sorry that my pregnancy is a fading memory, punctuated by the dizzying horror of that fateful first ultrasound. Sometimes I look at the peace lily and have to remind myself that I buried little Bean in there. I buried almost all of the placenta, save for the part that had to be removed via D&C, so there is part of my body there too. It’s not an exaggeration to say that when Bean did, part of me died too. It’s not meant to be a melodramatic statement: I like the idea that part of me was buried with him, to keep him safe.

A couple of months ago I noticed the tiniest of bugs, no bigger than a pin head, swarming over the terracotta pot and the lily’s earth, and I knew my Bean had been returned to stardust.