Letting it out

4.14.14

      Sometime that week, I started telling people we were expecting again. I felt like I had finally gotten my anxiety under control and that I could address anyone's questions about that anxiety without completely losing it.

      The first to know were the people that I work directly with at the hospitals. Some of them may have been suspicious anyways because I was hiding behind walls anytime an X-ray was engaged, but now I was actively telling some people that I had to seek out.

      Some of those people were in the clinic where Kaitlyn worked.

      

      I feel like I should address something first: Kaitlyn had reached out to me around November to tell me that I really hurt her when I wrote my post about jealousy. She said that I had personally and publically called her out, and she felt attacked. To be honest, she's right. I didn't ask her permission to write about her birth, or to re-post some of the things that she wrote on facebook, and I certainly used her name which is probably a violation of her privacy rights in some way.

      But in my defense, this blog has been about me and my reaction to things, it was in no way about her. I know that she did not post the things she did to hurt me and that she wouldn't do that. However, the emotions that I went through (and still go through) in relation to being green with envy that her daughter lived and mine did not are real, and I have to be truthful to that otherwise I may as well just stop writing this blog all together. There are many moms that have been in our situation that have read my blog, and if I leave out those key ugly moments, the authenticity of this blog is lost. It becomes a facade for how well I am dealing with everything instead of the truth that to this day, losing Kaitlyn is hard. It still hurts. 6 months later it still hurts, and in 60 years (if I'm still around), it will still hurt. But working through those emotions in a public way has helped me cope, and I know that it has helped others. 

       There were a variety of different reactions that people had when I told them we were expecting: some were outwardly ecstatic, others were cautiously happy, and others had a reaction I wasn't really expecting. 

       "How far along are you?" one person asked.

       "10 weeks." 

       "No offense, but I wouldn't be telling anyone yet."

       That one caught me completely offguard. I get that you're not suppose to tell people that you're pregnant until 12 weeks, but I had seen the ultrasound and was confident that we would make it to the 12 week mark (and beyond).
       Not only that, but even if we didn't make it that far, this child deserved to be celebrated. I wanted to tell people so that they could know that God is faithful, and that He was already redeeming His promises to us.