The things I didn't know then... Mel's 74th Show & Tell

Today, while looking through some things, I came across a set of pictures of hubby and I from a vacation in August of 2007. What struck me most about them, was just how young we looked. I am only twenty nine, but feel a world away from the girl in the pictures with her happy smile, tan skin, and blissfully naive outlook on life. There was one picture in particular that really affected me. In the photo, I stand on the beach looking over my shoulder at hubby, smiling, a  hand placed gently across my stomach. I was pregnant in the picture, we had probably conceived a night or two before the photo was snapped, and in my heart, I remember just knowing. This child, the one just below my hand, was our first pregnancy, our first child, and a month later, became our first loss.

Photo Courtesy PBinderPhotography

That's what hurt the most about seeing this photo. The memory of how excited we were at the time to start a family, and the realization of how much the process has taxed us physically, and emotionally. None of it has gone as we had imagined it would, when standing on the beach, looking out into our future.

In the time since the photo was snapped we have been pregnant twice, and still, we have have no living children. Only twenty six months separate me from the girl in the photo, and yet, in looking back at myself, the "me" of two years ago, I felt like a voyeur glimpsing the life of a stranger. Her life was good. Her possibilities seemed endless.

The "me" in the picture, didn't know what it was to bury and grieve a child. She didn't know that a baby could pass every prenatal exam, could be deemed "perfect" at birth, and still go on to be diagnosed terminal just moments later. This "me" didn't even know that infant leukemia existed, or that grieving one child could keep you from conceiving the next. For the "me" in the picture, life was simple, and all was right in the world.

Looking at the image I couldn't help but wonder, did the "me" of that time realize how very blessed she was?

There is an old song, Something to Believe In, that has been playing in my head lately. I was in fifth grade when this song came out, and I probably haven't heard it in at least fifteen years, but for whatever reason a portion of the very last line has come to mind, and it speaks perfectly to this experience. The song says: 

Sometimes I wish to God I didn't know now
The things I didnt know then... and give me something to believe in.
 ~Poison

I wish I didn't know. I wish no one ever had to know... what it is to lose a child, and with that child, what it is to lose so much of oneself.

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