At 22 weeks, I went to my gynae for a check up. As for all these appointments, I went in armed with my latest list of questions. At this point, I was thinking about the fact that I needed to be ready to go into labour and given that this could happen anytime. I wanted to find out about labour, how the hospital works, whether you were given a chance to hold the baby once you’d given birth to it etc. From what I had read about mothers who had had late miscarriages and stillbirths, the opportunity to hold your baby and have time to say farewell seemed really important to the grief process.
My gynae looked at me as if I was mad! She said to me that the biggest concern she has is that I would not go into labour. That the baby would die and somehow we are going to need to get it out. It was a hard consultation with her and a rather abrupt reality check. She told me the baby is not going to look very nice and would I really want to see it? My sister came to the appointment with me, and asked the gynae how long you would stay in hospital for after delivery. She said you would need to be there for 6 hours after giving birth for observation, then you could go. That was that. She had a quick look at the baby and admitted she didn’t see it getting to viability.
That night I didn’t have time to chat to Rich about it as I walked with a friend after work and then I went out to lifegroup (church small group). I cried myself to sleep. I didn’t want to wake Rich up to talk things through with him as I knew he really needed his sleep and was dealing with a lot of pressure at work. But then I felt Sarah Hope move… it was so beautiful. She kept me company through the night, moving about inside me. I felt so loved by God for having her and greatly appreciated her presence.
Sometimes I wondered how many people I interacted with, be they medical professionals or friends and family, believed that deep down this was unwanted pregnancy that I did not have the courage to terminate. That was NOT the case! This was a life we had been blessed with, we WANTED her. We wanted to experience her life, we wanted her life to be afforded the opportunity to touch ours, we wanted to meet her, hold her, comfort her and enjoy her. Sarah-Hope was NOT a religious principle, a law we had to obey, a duty we needed to carry out regardless of how we felt about it… she was our daughter, who had been knit together in my womb, whom we loved.
I met up with the pastoral counsellor and told her all about the latest scans and what the sonographers and gynae had said. I explained what I was hoping for in terms of having the opportunity to meet my child, and create memories with her even if she wasn’t alive at the birth. The pastoral counsellor had worked as a midwife years ago and graciously and helpfully explained to me the reality of giving birth to a baby who is no longer alive. She said that there is a chance (and she had some terrible images in her head that she didn’t want me to have) that there will not necessarily be a whole body that comes out at birth because of the disintegration that takes place after death and during delivery. She suggested that we prepare for birth and the grieving process in such a way that was not dependent on being able to hold or see the baby as these images may not be what we want to remember our child for. There would be grief related to seeing the baby and grief related to not seeing the child, and we needed to ask God for guidance as there were no clear cut answers. We were encouraged to journal, taking pictures of us during the pregnancy and collect those of her in the womb and in so doing make memories which did not rely on that moment after birth in case the circumstances were such that it would be best to not see the baby. She was very encouraging, however, about the fact that we are battling for the dignity of our child to the glory of God.
So I set about the task of creating memories in the pregnancy stage in case we were not able to do this after the birth. Often before a scan, never being sure whether Sarah-Hope’s heart would still be beating, we would do something special with her. Rich was hilarious in this. For instance, we’d walk up the mountain and he would put his hands on my tummy and talk to his daughter about the stunning city we live in, turning me around as if she could see the sights through my belly button!
We specifically asked for pictures and dvd’s of our future scans (we realised this had not even been offered to us because of the abnormalities!), we amused the sonographer as we asked to hear Sarah-Hope’s heart beat again and again so Rich could record it for his phone’s ring tone, Rich ran the Table Mountain Challenge for Sarah-Hope with her name written on his arms and legs, and we organised a pregnancy photo shoot. I also asked my mother if she would make a blanket especially for Sarah Hope’s birth – something that I could wrap her in once she was born. This is the blanket she made:
We were so enjoying her life inside me and being deliberate about celebrating and capturing it. At the same time, we were able to appreciate that we would need to make flexible plans regarding the birth and what we might do after this in terms of memory making. We did not need to have additional disappointments around her birth if things didn’t work out the way we imagined.
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