And So It Begins. . .

I’ve been preparing for this for a while, and here we are—the time when we’ll start to hit all of the 1 year marks for Vivienne. It all starts today. One year ago today, we found out we were pregnant.

I cannot begin to explain how painful it is to think about where we were just one year ago. All of the hope, anticipation, anxiety, and preparation. During this early time, we were so afraid we would lose her—worrying about miscarriage and test results. In cruel irony, we actually got over the miscarriage fears just a few weeks before we lost Vivienne. We feel kind of foolish to think that our greatest fear was that she would have Down’s Syndrome. How silly that seems now, and what we wouldn’t give for her to be alive and have Down’s—that seems like a dream these days.

One of the hardest things for me is that I feel like things should be getting better right now, and instead, they are getting harder. It’s been just shy of 8 months, and I was starting to feel like I had my feet back under me again. But now, I come to the time where one year ago, I had her with me, and I’m right back into the pain.

These milestones make it all so fresh again. And because so much time has passed, there isn’t much leeway for having a bad day. In the days and weeks after she died, people understood that I was having a hard time. But eight months later, I appear fully functioning (it’s all an illusion), and I hide the bad days a little better. Today is a hard bad day to try to hide, but it’s not like I can walk around announcing that a year ago, I found out I was pregnant.

So I guess this is my announcement. There are countless milestones over the coming months that will create some very painful days. I will think about a year ago and seeing her for the first time on an ultrasound, hearing her heart beat for the first time, feeling her move, finding out she’s a “she.” All happy moments that one year later are so bittersweet and make the pain of losing her all the more difficult.