My Little Saint's Birthday

In July of 2009 I got a positive pregnancy test. We weren't avoiding or trying to achieve a pregnancy, so it was a pleasant surprise. Well, more than a pleasant surprise... I was over the moon ecstatic!

My world was forever changed when we found out the following month that I had miscarried.

My due date had been set for March 15th. If my pregnancy would have progressed we would be celebrating our little Gus' 3rd birthday this year.

There has always been something going on each year that has numbed the sadness. I was around 13 weeks pregnant with Joe when Gus' first due date anniversary came around. It was strange to mourn a lost pregnancy when I was pregnant again.

The next year I was busy with a 6 month old and packing up to move.

Last year when his due date came around I was again packing up to move to where we live now.

This year... we're packing up to move again and I have two children, I'm going to school and I'm under a lot of stress with numerous things.

You'd think that this being the "third year" and being so busy that I wouldn't be so upset.

But my heart breaks today. More than it has in a very long time.

My Gus has been on my mind heavily these past few weeks. I had a dear friend call me shortly after she went to her 20 week ultrasound to tell me her baby had passed away. I think her level of pain is much different than mine, since I lost my baby at only 6 weeks, but when I heard her sobs... it brought me back to the day of my own ultrasound where I was hoping to see an 8 week old little baby jelly bean with a fluttering heartbeat... and there wasn't.

My heart is breaking for my friend and her family, but to my shock I started mourning my own miscarriage. I know the pain never really goes away, but I was doing so good for so long. Why now am I getting so upset?

It's because I feel a lot of guilt. I feel so guilty because there are weeks, months maybe that I don't think about my child in heaven. What kind of mother is like that?

I feel guilty that I didn't do something to honor Gus. I could have had a Mass said. I could have done something- anything. I am thankful that someone pointed me to The Shrine of the Holy Innocents in New York, where they have a Book of Life to put the names of babies who have died before birth and that have no grave. I take comfort knowing that in those moments where I slack thinking about Gus, there is someone always praying for him, thousands of miles away. His name is memorialized. I guess that's something.

I know this is nothing I can help, but I hate it that there's no real resting place for Gus. My miscarriage was simply a very heavy period. Somewhere in all that was my child... I do remember seeing a very large, I guess you could say clot, but it looked different. It was grayish and when I saw it, maybe in my grief, my naivety, I thought maybe somewhere in that mass was the little beginnings of my child. I grabbed it out of the toilet and wrapped it up and sobbed, sobbed, sobbed. Later, when my husband came home we buried him next to a bunch of yellow flowers. We marked it with a rock. I went to visit it quite often, but mysteriously, when we moved, we couldn't find the rock. My husband comforted me by saying that Gus isn't in the ground in Waverly, MO by the Bartlett Grain elevators... he is always with us. But now, I so desperately want to visit him. I cannot imagine the devastation to plan a funeral and make burial plans for a small, precious baby, but I wish I had some of that closure... and a place to honor my baby. Who knows if that mass of tissue contained Gus. And now I have this gut wrenching feeling that he was just flushed away. I know there was no possible way I could have kept any remains of a miscarriage that early, but it still makes me feel helpless.

The weird thing to think about is if Gus were born, there would be no Joe. I got pregnant with him just two months after my miscarriage. He wasn't a consolation prize for having a miscarriage. That's just how things happened. Sam probably wouldn't be here either.

I cannot imagine my life without my sons. But I still mourn the loss of what could have been with Gus. God's plan in mysterious and always good. It doesn't always make sense, but someday it will. I find hope in that. Despite my first loss I have two living, breathing, drive-me-crazy blessings right in front of me.

I'm trying very hard to stop the guilty feelings today. I know those feelings aren't from God. Today I want to focus on how lucky we are to have our own saint in heaven praying for our family. I want to focus on being a better Christian so I can get to heaven to see him (or her...) Today I am going to teach my boys that they have an older sibling watching over them. When Ryan gets home we are going to go get three balloons to send up to heaven. I know some people were upset when I announced to the world that we had a miscarriage, and some people may be upset that I'm still talking about it and plan on talking about it to my kids. But I want to honor my first child. Because Lord knows I haven't been doing it lately.

Happy birthday, little one. 

Pray for us dear Gus.