Pregnancy dreams are a thing.
For me, they are almost always nightmares. Someone's trying to kill me and the kids. Bad things happen to one of the little ones. Zombies. Lots of zombies. The occasional evil vampire. That sort of thing.
I thought I had escaped that this pregnancy. I have not; it's just come on later than I expected.
I used to have dreams about birth too. Nearly every time I've been pregnant, I had a dream--usually more than one--where I had the baby and she turned into a kitten. Doug is the only one where I didn't have those dreams, but I still dreamed about having him.
This time...this time the two types of dreams are intertwined. It doesn't take Freud to interpret these dreams, you know? (I've always thought fantastical interpretations of dreams were ridiculous anyway.) I always act out, in dreams, my fears of what's coming up.
Last night I had a dream I was at home, asleep, and was awoken by blood and water and birth. And some how in this dream the baby had both legs, and a head of hair, and was a beautiful little baby girl. And I said "Oh, she's got both legs! Maybe the doctor was wrong, maybe this is just an omphalocele that can be repaired!" and I started working on getting us to the hospital. There was this weird period of calm where I guess we decided to dress the baby and hold her and she got hungry so I fed her and then at some point her omphalocele fell off and I called for an ambulance and yelled at them to get her, to take her and give her some oxygen because I understood she was dying but we needed to get her to the hospital because her dad wasn't at home and we needed to keep her alive long enough for him to see her.
It was an odd dream, and upsetting. And not the first one I've had. I had another dream a few weeks ago where the baby was born far too early and we expected her to be stillborn and yet she was just kind of hanging around, omphalocele and one leg and all, because she just didn't realize she was supposed to be dead.
I mean, that much is accurate. Most of these babies are miscarriages. The ones who live on, who get anywhere near birth, are the ones who just don't realize they're supposed to be dead.
I know my brain is trying to work itself around this, to reconcile what I know will happen with what seems like it should happen, still, in spite of everything. I have been feeling very raw and very sad today, back to the crying and telling the baby I'm sorry my love just isn't enough to save him/her; I really do love the baby as much as I can, as much as I have all my other children. This baby isn't wanted any less, isn't welcomed any less, isn't loved any less. I understand, cognitively, that these things happen, but inside, my soul and my heart are confused and upset, because shouldn't love be enough? I mean, I know it's not, but it should be.
***
I posted as a status, a short while back, a very brief version of my last post. That I realize people pray for miracles out of compassion, but I'm glad I don't have the sort of friends who do that, because the only miracle possible at this point is Erik and I get to tell Psalm-Angel we love him/her.
And someone said something about how miracles can happen; she knows it because her son was a miracle. He was supposed to die, but didn't. And I said nothing to that, because there is really nothing productive to say that would not risk being hurtful.
But really, y'all, there is a difference between a severely ill child, between a baby born very prematurely, between a baby with heart problems but otherwise whole and a baby who is missing a leg, and a pelvis, and a diaphragm, and has all of his/her internal organs on the outside of his/her body, that has a spine bent at a 90˚ angle. God's not going to make another leg, or straighten out the baby's spine, not going to replace all these missing things. Or even do a fraction of that. There's nothing to be done here. Things are made as they are, and God doesn't go back and say "Oops, forgot a few things" and then make them survivable. Yes, Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead, but Lazarus was all there to begin with. Yes, God gave Sarah Isaac, but Sarah had all her parts that were able to make Isaac. Jesus performed miracle after miracle after miracle, but that was a couple of thousand years ago, and still there is nothing in the Bible about sprouting limbs and straightening spines.
And if the baby could live with all of these problems, would that really be fair to him/her? I mean, a missing leg is nothing. Prostheses totally exist. Omphaloceles can sometimes be repaired. But the rest of it? It's not just that one leg is gone, it's that the other leg is severely displaced because of the scoliosis. Without a pelvis, I don't think a prosthesis would be even possible. With a fucking L in his/her spine, I doubt a wheelchair would be reasonable. With a diaphragm either gone or so small or so out of place it couldn't be found on the ultrasound, with a severely underdeveloped chest because of the ompahlocele, how could the baby even breathe? At best it would be necessary to inflict surgery after surgery on this child, pain and pain and pain...and for what? For some unknown outcome? I'm not an ableist; I don't believe that without everything, nothing is worth having, but at the same time I'm not willing to make my child into a medical experiment just so I can say I never lost a baby. I've got to love...and then I've got to prove that love by letting go.
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