Exhaling

*picture from my six-week ultrasound

Well, many of you already know...there's a bun in the Murdock oven.

I've been thinking about the effects of disappointment and loss.

There is something that happens, that is beyond words, when you've been through life experiences that disappoint you or bring pain to your life. You walk with a certain degree of dread, knowing that there could be something poised around the next corner, ready and waiting to jump at you. It becomes easy to let that dread taint your experiences and rob you of the joy that could be felt today. I felt like, for weeks, I was holding my breath as I waited for the 12th week of pregnancy. There is something about losing a baby through first trimester miscarriage that makes peace in the first trimester of subsequent pregnancies nearly impossible. The first trimester becomes 12 weeks of waiting...waiting for a heartbeat, waiting to pass that magical threshold when you can finally exhale.

While I never enjoyed the all-day sickness and nausea that accompanied the first trimester of this pregnancy, I gloried in each day that I was sick. Being sick meant something was still right. It meant that there was continued life, continued growth, continued progress. Yet I was still holding my breath, because I remember. I remember the one pregnancy that didn't make it to 12 weeks. I remember the day I woke up and thought "I feel really good today!" And I remember the time I learned that my feeling good was the sign that growth and progress and life stopped. So I continued to hold my breath, waiting for week 12.

And yesterday when I heard that heartbeat, at exactly 12 weeks, I finally exhaled.

It feels so good to breathe.