Due Date

Kaylee's due date (July 12th) has come and gone now and this past Tuesday would have been two weeks past her due date, so there is no possible way she wouldn't have been here by now if things had gone like we had hoped.

I wanted to journal about it more, but it just hasn't happened and neither has blogging, so this is my chance to process and kill two birds with one stone. As tempting as it is to keep these thoughts private, I really have nothing to hide and maybe someone out there will benefit from something in here at some point. If not, oh well, this is 95% for me and 5% for the rest of you. :)

The week leading up to Kaylee's due date was pretty rough. For me it felt a lot like losing her all over again. Any progress I had made in my grieving over the past 4 months came to a temporary halt. I cried several times throughout the week and dreaded the approaching day. I dreaded the day because for me it would really be the proverbial nail in the coffin for her life here, or lack thereof. As much as I fully understood that my girl was gone now, this meant that I could no longer think about her as a baby in my womb.

I had a pregnancy app on my phone that I never deleted. I enjoyed checking to see how far along I would have been with her. Now that app simply says, "You are past your due date" and lists her gestational age as 42 weeks and 6 days. There will be no more updates that say "your baby is the size of a ______." It will forever be stuck on a 6 to 9 lb pumpkin, not our 1 lb 9 oz baby girl.

The actual due date went better than I expected. I generally don't do much grieving for my little girl during the day. There is just too much going on with two toddlers running around. I met a good friend in the morning and we took our kids for a walk around Minnehaha Falls. It was a nice was to be with another adult and just do normal stuff.

Many of you reached out to me (and Joey too) on or near that day I cannot thank you enough for remembering Kaylee and remembering us. The cards, prayers, emails, text messages, etc. meant a lot to me and most of the time my eyes were welled up with tears as I read your messages.

I have no idea what that afternoon or evening looked like, so I assume it must have been uneventful. After the kids went to bed and some semblance of order was returned to the house I was ready to do my grieving. The hard thing about grief is that it is different for everyone and can sometimes be completely unpredictable. I pictured Joey and I going through Kaylee's things together, crying, hugging etc. Well, that's not what happened. If I say, "I'll spare you the details" it sounds much more dramatic than it was, but I want to keep some level of privacy here, so I'm going to spare you the details of our conversation. :) When it was determined that my picture of the evening wasn't going to be quite how I envisioned, I moved ahead with what I needed to do and headed upstairs.

Next to my bed is a giant Pampers box and in it is most of Kaylee's things. The rest are in various places throughout the house. Every so often I go through it and remember her. I have yet to be able to remember her without a significant supply of Kleenex nearby and this night was no exception. I looked through a small photo album I have of her from the memorial service and smiled at the memories. I snuggled with her blankets and lavender-scented stuffed animal lamb. I pulled out the little molds I have of her hand and foot and ran my fingers across her tiny little prints. I'm so glad I have these! The prints are barely impressed into the clay, but it's the only 3-D like thing I have of her and I love to be able to feel her in some way.

We have some pictures of her face that I rarely show to anyone, including myself. To be blunt, she was in tough shape and it's hard to see her that way. It's not how she was supposed to be and it's not how she is now, but it's all I have of her, so I pulled them out, looked anyway and allowed my heart to break all over again.

I even pulled out the blankets from the hospital that she was born into. The nurse at the hospital made sure we took them home with us. She told me that I would be able to pull them out later and smell her. Honestly, I hated her smell, so I wasn't sure if I'd ever pull them out. I think it was mostly because we never gave her a bath due to her fragility, so she smelled rather fleshy and birth-like. (Sorry, I know that's probably TMI, but it's part of the deal for this post.) I'm thankful she never smelled like death, but I do wish she would have smelled like a baby. When I pulled the blankets out, I truly tried to smell her, but I couldn't smell anything other than the plastic bag they were kept in. (The one other time I tried to smell her it was with some hesitation, but I was still able to smell her.) I imagine most moms would be really sad about this, but I was somewhat relieved because I didn't have to be reminded so vividly that she didn't smell good to me. I say "to me" because I think I'm the only one that thought she smelled badly.

So, after a good long look at her things and lots of tears later I was ready to be done for the day. You can only grieve for so long and then you just need to be done. At least that's how it is for me. I carefully packed her things back up and went and found my hubby. There was no one else I wanted to be with and I'm fairly sure he felt the same way. We snuggled, watched an episode of one of our favorite shows and laughed together. It was a good ending to the day.

Lastly, the picture at the top of this post is of a gift we received recently from dear friends who also lost a baby. The figuring is called "Forget-me-not" and it's just perfect. I haven't decided where I'm going to put it yet, but I love that it is a fairly unassuming object that will always remind me of Kaylee.