We’re Expecting Our Third Baby!

The day after I found out that I was pregnant with our third baby, I emailed myself this note: 

May 20, 2022

“Dear Baby, 

I found out about you on a rainy morning in May. Just the night before I had taken a pregnancy test and thought that it was negative – I thought that you weren’t in the cards for us. And perhaps our time had come to allow this dream to pass.

And then while casually talking to a friend on the phone glanced down at that same test and saw a faint line! And my heart instantly knew you were there – like sunshine and coziness. Calm. So much calm. 

We love you already and thank you for choosing us.”

I write notes to myself like this on my phone about all sorts of things. I keep tiny sentences listed out on “sweets & funnies”, which are things that my kids say and do. I have notes titled “perfect day” when a day is just start-to-finish exactly how I hoped it would be – or better yet, turned out beautiful when there was no intention set at all. I savor the tiny tiny glimpses because I find so much beauty in them. 

I think often about a question that my father once asked me. It was three weeks before he passed and we were sitting out on his deck in matching wooden rocking chairs made out of thin logs. He was in pajamas with a blanket draped over his lap, drinking coffee. We were silent. Choking on the knowledge that his time was short, and though we’d said what we each needed to say, there was still so much we wanted to talk about. So much our future selves would want to ruminate over together. We loved to process the world together, with discernment and debate. 

“When you write, is it something you think a lot about and then try to make sense of, or do you just get a download out of nowhere?” he asked me. 

I was so surprised by the question. It wasn’t until closer to his passing that he shared with me how much he liked my writing and thought it a gift that I would use to help people or simply bless the world. 

“A little bit of both I guess…” I thought about it more deeply. “But mostly the latter.” 

I love my gift, especially when it comes to motherhood. Because it helps me process how much I deeply love these little beings. I get these sparks of divine intervention that help me pin into my mind and memory the things that I want to keep. The things that help me start each day again with a fresh heart, pushing past any weariness from the day before. 

This third pregnancy is not actually my third. It’s my fifth. And the pregnancy before this ended at 15 weeks, which is over three months of carrying a baby that you think will be someday in your arms. It was heartbreaking. Harder than losing my father, though different. Now, with more experience in grief, the acceptance is easier to manage a bit. However, as we come up to that exact 15-week milestone in this current pregnancy, I find my anxiety collecting, like the building of a rubber band ball. Each day a new band added to the mass of worry. Throughout the day I find myself taking deep breaths and just praying that it will all be perfectly OK. 

We are indeed blessed in many ways, myself and my family that is. You too, I would imagine.

But the layers of our humanity are thick with nuance and more recently I’ve begun to realize just how much our own paths are made just for us. 

Getting to bring another child into the world, with a path set out just for them, is an insane privilege and I am quite simply honored to get to do it again.  

More to come on baby three – we are waiting to know the gender and going day by day with the hope of a happy, healthy, perfect little soul joining the family.