Spiritual Understanding

Recently, a friend drew an oracle card for me: spiritual understanding.  Pay attention to the signs, information that comes to you.  I have been watching.  Then another friend posted this the other day:  Spring equinox will bring a brand new celestial chapter into your life.  The challenges you’ve been facing the last season are about to be behind you.  As you draw nearer, a new phase in life is about to unfold like the petals of a lotus.

So many signs.  New chapter in life.  Challenges.  Lotus.

The first day of spring.  I remember hating the changing of the seasons last year after losing Iris.  Love and hate.  I hated the newness around me, but was grateful at being forced out of the darkness of winter.

With each day, I become more and more desperate to believe that everything is ok.  With everything that we have done, every precaution that we have taken to mitigate the unknown risk, with all of the extra monitoring, a loss at this point or later – 18 weeks – would feel like a betrayal.  I have already pictured myself in the hospital, refusing testing to determine the cause of the loss.  What would be the point?  Knowing would not make it better and this is decidedly the end of the road for us.  Knowing could bring in questioning and that would not help.

I can actually picture the final moments in the alternate ending as well.  Me, at the hospital, begging the doctor to please just deliver my baby via c-section.  Waiting, feeling that tug on the operating table, terrified, and hearing that baby cry.  Crying myself because it has been such a long, long road.  Taking my baby in my arms and whispering “we are so glad that you are here.”

I couldn’t even finish writing those words without breaking down.  I can picture it in my mind, but by picturing it, I’m allowing myself to believe it can happen and that is such a difficult catch-22.  Hope versus no hope.  What makes more sense at this point? The future ends at that scene.  I cannot picture an infant at home, or a toddler, or anything beyond.  I cannot picture bringing that baby home.  That “family of five” is permanently blocked from my mind.  I’m so tired.

Feeling so helpless, I have had a strong urge to declutter my house.  Spring cleaning as it were.  What I cannot control in my pregnancy, I can control in purging the unnecessary extras in my life.  I made lists today of each room, and each drawer, shelf, or storage in each room.  Will check them off one by one as I complete them.  I want to get rid of furniture and make the rooms more sparse.  It will keep me occupied, for a few weeks or months anyway.

And I’ll continue to watch for all of the signs that I can absorb.