Heartbeats

My biggest fear in this life is losing my children. In fact, I'm certain that no one has visualized more horrible ways their children could be hurt than I have. I have a very vivid imagination, and random strangers snatching my children from my very arms is only the base level of my imaginings.

I don't know how I would survive their loss. They are my love, my life, my dreams, my compassion, my everything. It's not just about me, though:) These nouns are what I wish for them, as I try my best to guide and teach and love them for the day I have to set them free. (Not that I won't call ALL. THE. TIME.)

About a month before Ella's birth, my dad and I took a trip to the East Coast for fun. New York and outward. As we were leaving Gettysburg, Pa., we were seriously rear-ended, shoving our rental car into the back of the one in front. We all got out, the driver behind a young college girl profusely apologizing. Then I saw the passenger in the car ahead get out: She was very, very pregnant. Due, in fact, in a week.

The poor college girl had rammed into two pregnant women. What are the chances? Then all her friends started walking by the accident scene on their way to school. Poor thing.

I went to the hospital as a precaution, not really believing anything was wrong but also worried about back issues because we were hit HARD. The nurse brought out a stethoscope and listened for my baby's heartbeat. And couldn't find anything. A couple more nurses came through, and a portable heartbeat-listening-machine (the scientific name for it) still produced ... silence.

Despite their gentle reassurances about old equipment, my terror grew. And tears. The kind, kind, kind doctor came in, told me he was certain the baby was OK, but that they were bringing over a better device and they were going to do an ultrasound as well. That he wasn't at all worried but because I obviously was, he wanted to do what would make me feel better.

It. Took. Forever.

I was so scared, and for the first time contemplated what it would mean to lose the pregnancy I hadn't yet accepted. It's so common a scenario as to be stereotypical: Not knowing what you have until it's gone.

Obviously, the heartbeat was found, the baby once more vividly alive on the ultrasound, another set of pictures for the scrapbook.

How do women who lose their babies cope? How do they survive? It takes a strength I simply cannot imagine. So often after Ella was born and came home, I was lucky enough to be told the stories of strangers, strangers who in the course of telling me their pain and joy became mothers and members of my circle of family.

Rhythms of connections to the past and present and future. Understanding. Of the babies born too early who did not make it. Of the extraordinarily close calls. Of the past losses that present technology would have saved.

Thank you, to all of you, for sharing your beautiful, intimate stories. I hope that my being there for you for those tiny, tiny moments is accepted by the universe as a way of expressing my gratitude and giving back in so many ways I have been given. All of these heartbeats — gone, beating and still to come. I hear them and I feel them.

And on that hospital gurney in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I felt my own baby's heart beating. And I fell in love with her for the very first time.