A Love Scene

There are a lot of photos of me pregnant with Nelle.  We took a family trip to Hawaii when I was around 11 weeks.  I announced the gender to my parents, siblings, and uncles on that trip.  I was nauseous every day.  At eleven weeks, I can see my shape in the photos.  Blissfully unaware.  It is incredibly hard to look at those photos now, as I can never erase that she was in the pictures with us.

When I was pregnant with Iris, I avoided photos like the plague.  I wanted no reminders, “just in case.”  On February 6th, we attended a brunch at a friend’s house.  I was 15 weeks pregnant.  Friends were asking me how I was doing and I was petrified, every day, so I could only respond “Well, physically I feel fine.”  Quentin somehow managed to get into my phone during the brunch and took a photo of me, which I found later.

Six days later, we found out Iris was gone.

Over the weekend, Quentin commandeered my phone again.  He snapped a picture of me after we arrived home from a trip to the museum.  The very next day, a photo showed up from one year ago in my social media: a different photo that Quentin had captured while I was pregnant with Iris.  His thumb is covering most of the picture, so I had thought it was funny and saved it.  Two similar photos, one year and one day apart.  A year ago, thirteen weeks pregnant; now, ten weeks pregnant.  It was an eerie deja vu.

But there is a lot of love in those photos.  My son loves, and wants pictures of his mommy, even when I do not want pictures of myself.  He is capturing those moments.