May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
-Neil Gaiman

These coming months will be the hardest.

Since I was mid-pregnancy with Nelle when I lost her, we had already bought furniture, clothes, and stuffed animals. I had to pack everything away. With Iris, I planned nothing. I bought one teddy bear for her, and now I sleep with it. The bear has become flat under my weight. For this little one, I will also buy nothing. Plan nothing. If I make it to the end, I’ll be buying furniture on Amazon and relying on two-day shipping for deliveries before I am discharged from the hospital. My only plans are my lack of plans.

I think of everything we have stored for a baby. Toys. Books. A high chair. If I make it to the end, we have many things we need. If I don’t… I’m going to have to sort through everything and sell or donate it. That thought is incredibly taxing. Giving up on what “should have been” and admitting “no – it cannot be.”

The other day, I was in a little local shop. I bought a stuffed animal for this baby. Iris had the bear, so this baby should have something too. I came home and shoved it into the farthest depths of my closet so that I will not need to look at it until I have to.

I think of the maternity clothes. Packing them away. Packing them away at the end of a full-term pregnancy versus packing them away after a loss, like I had to twice before. There would be items lingering in the laundry that I had missed and continued to find for weeks after.

I was so hopeful for a period of time, after my amniocentesis when the doctor told me that it feels different this time. Now I am back to despair. I am reminded that without a reason for losing my baby girls before, that anything could happen, at any time. The countdown has begun to the next appointment, the next milestone.

Past 20 weeks. Past the point of problems and endings in both of my previous pregnancies. Moving past the next appointment, then the next, then what?