A Mommy… Bio kids and miscarriages

I’ve had many, many different jobs in my life. I’ve been a cashier at a meat market and worked in the school cafeteria. I was the premier babysitter for Huntington Beach residents. I worked at a florist making corsages, boutonnieres and running deliveries. I was a nursing assistant, a school bus driver. I was a prison guard at the men’s maximum security prison in Oklahoma and even worked on death row. I went back as a prison nurse after I became an RN. I was a nursing administrator at an old folk’s home. I was a NICU nurse, a pediatric nurse, and a labor and delivery nurse. But the hardest job I’ve ever had was being a mom.

This story will take several blogs about many different adventures on my road to motherhood.  I have 2 biological kids, 2 step-kids, 2 adopted kids, and 2 babies in heaven waiting for me. Today I’ll just talk about my 4 pregnancies.

The plan was to start our family after I graduated. But, I found out I was pregnant my second year of nursing school. Graduation was to be in the beginning of May and the baby was due in June. It was a bit early, but I was so excited! I started dreaming about all the things I would see during this baby’s life. I imagined the sleepless nights, the joy of the first smile, and the feel of the baby’s skin. I imagined the first crawl, the first upright moment without my help, and her first step. (I always felt it was a girl although I don’t have data on THIS pregnancy.) I imagined the first day of kindergarten all the way through high school graduation. I dreamed about her wedding and eventually my grandbabies.

Once the first trimester ended, I felt safe. But during my 13^th week, I began to bleed and it never stopped. At week 15 the doctor finally convinced me there was no longer a heartbeat and I allowed him to do a D & C. It was the first big hurt of my life. I felt like my soul had been removed, trampled over, and then put back into my body. If you’ve never had a miscarriage, you cannot begin to understand the pain. People wanted me to just go back to normal. The pregnancy was an accident after all. These things happen. Now I could focus on graduation, the NCLEX-RN, and finding my first nursing job. But to me it was the end of a dream. It didn’t matter if I had 20 other baby’s after that. THIS one was dead. People just don’t get how this was a family member who died, but you don’t even get to have a funeral and a burial site to visit the baby at. Only my faith in God could bring my joy back and He did but it took months... It took until I was pregnant again and made it past 13 weeks! She’s still dead on earth but I know I’ll see her in heaven and that gives me hope.

Right about her due date, I found out I was pregnant again. This one was planned. I’d been trying  since graduation. It was amazing! I LOVED being pregnant. Some people don’t. I thought it was the best feeling in the world. The thing I kept thinking about was that if I hadn’t lost the other baby, this one would never have been. I’m now living all those dreams I had. I named him Matthew… it means “God’s Greatest Gift” and he is. He’s getting married in 6.5 weeks and I love his fiancé. I couldn’t have dreamed up a better mate for him! Now don’t think it’s all been butterflies and bubble gum because there have been many roadblocks I’ve walked through with him. That’s for another day though. Today I celebrate his life! Thank you God for your great gift to me!

When he was about a year old, I started thinking about the next one. We wanted them close together so they could be close friends growing up. Their dad was close in age to his siblings and he’d loved it. I have a 6 and 8 year gap between myself and my siblings and it made me feel like I was from a whole different family at times. I got pregnant the second month I tried. This made them 17 months apart. My dreams came true when I had a little girl. I’d always prayed for a boy and then a girl. It happened. We named her Laura. I’d always loved the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder and imagined this child having her adventurous spirit and joyfulness about life. From the very beginning she was adventurous and curious! She had questions about everything and loved to talk. I loved listening to her. It was amazing to see how the 2 were so alike and yet so different. And again, there are roadblocks there too. But today I celebrate her life! Thank you God for this second great blessing!

I loved watching those 2 grow! I loved doing everything I’d ever imagined with or for them. Girl Scouts, boy scouts, ice skating lessons, karate lessons. We went camping, hiking, on vacations and explored together. During all of this, the next most painful thing that ever happened to me occurred in my marriage. That’s for another time. I only bring it up now to be able to talk about my 4^th pregnancy.

With my second husband we tried almost from the beginning to have a baby together. We loved raising all 4 our kids with our first spouses together, but they we’re only there half the time. So we wanted a child we could raise together who could be a part of our big blended family but would be ours alone to raise . With how fast I’d gotten pregnant the previous 3 times, I thought there’d be no problem. After a year we started looking into what could be stopping us. To my surprise I found that my right fallopian tube was practically nonexistent and the ovary on that side was misshaped. The ovary on the left side was further away from the fallopian tube than it should have been. HUGE ROADBLOCK! The doctor said it was a true miracle that my previous babies had been conceived without medical intervention. Matt and Laura are true miracles! Did you know that there’s only a 15% chance of getting pregnant each time you ovulate and that’s only if you have no medical issues, know what you’re doing and do everything right. I’d had many medical issues before then, had been grossly obese most of my life, and this time I was in my late 30’s.

I will tell you all about my experience with infertility issues and medically assisted attempts at becoming pregnant another time. What’s important for today is that we tried that and it didn’t work. We gave up. About 3 months after I stopped taking hormones, I found out I was pregnant. Well I was incredibly surprised and excited! I figured NOTHING would possibly go wrong because this was another miracle! I again made it to week 13 and started bleeding. I again found there was no longer a heartbeat and had a D&C. This time I got the report back on that baby. It was a girl (I knew it!) and she had one extra chromosome. She didn’t have a chance. Well if I thought the first miscarriage was bad I was wrong. This one took all the wind out of my sails! I went into a deep depression. I couldn’t understand where God was during all of this. I felt like this was a roadblock I couldn’t figure a way around. I know I have 2 babies in heaven waiting for me, but dang!

NOW I see where God was leading me. What I thought was an insurmountable roadblock turned out to be a fork in the road. That a long story but I’ll give you a teaser today… My husband got a gig working on an internet adoption site for overseas adoptions… and ever since that first baby had come over from Russia, (you remember the headlines… “From Russia With Love!”) I’d wanted to do that. I’m half Polish! I’d always loved Eastern European history! It lifted me out of my depression. But that’s for next time! But know this… God puts forks in the road when you think you’ve hit the end of the road. You just have to know how to look for them! I’m hoping eventually to help you find answers to your roadblocks as I work through my own.

Till next time,

Tink

(Note from Tink: If you’re reading my blogs, could you do me a favor and become a follower on BlogSpot or leave a comment on Facebook? I want to know if this is interesting to anyone other than me! Thanks!)