4761 - and the first bit...

Thursday, September 6th 2007
I’m not even pregnant.
I got home from work tonight and I found this package – from Jack – sitting on the table. He wasn’t home. I knew he was working night shift tonight, but he left the lights on. Every single light in the house was burning. He has a hard time telling me he loves me – in words - but he knows I have begun to hate the dark and that I would laugh when I saw the whole house lit up like that. So, I’ll take that ‘I love you’ and I’ll tuck it in my pocket along with the thousand others like it.
He left the stew bubbling in the crock pot and a wrapped package on the table. When I opened it, I found this pregnancy journal... and a box of my favourite black pens, the ones with the fine felt tips.
I feel bereft of words. I’m incapable of expressing where I have been – and where I now find myself. I feel odd writing in a journal with a picture of a rounded belly on the cover – and the words, “40 weeks” inscribed beneath. I have always been the wordy one – finishing Jack’s sentences if he pauses too long, writing him long love letters and filling his ears with chatter the moment he walks in the door. He told me he ‘misses my noise’. Part of me feels like laughing at his teasing and letting myself fall back into our normal patter. And yet, I feel like it would be the most offensive lie to try to act like I’m the woman I was, when I know I’m just not her anymore.
So, I’ll write. I’ll write for the husband I can’t speak to.
I have been a mess lately and I know it. I can’t seem to get my feet back under me. Jack knows I’m lost, but he seems a little lost too and in this darkness, it has seemed impossible to find each other. Silence winds around our evenings till it’s so thick, we turn on the television to escape its stifling oppression.
I lost our baby.
Even writing that, I feel the shame flood my body and my leaden hand finds it difficult to even pen the words. I know that Jack gave me this journal as a sign of hope. He keeps saying that we’ll try again – that we’ll have a baby... and while there’s a part of me that believes him, there’s another part that just doesn’t want to let go of my first baby. The baby I feel like I failed. The baby I lost.
It has been two months. Two months and I still don’t know how I’m supposed to act. Sometimes it amazes me that I can be walking around, going to work, coming home, cleaning house... continuing on like nothing happened – when my womb became a tiny coffin. Seems my body doesn’t quite know how it’s supposed to act either. I have been avoiding going back to the doctor, but I’m starting to wonder if there’s something not quite right.
Kind of adds a great big sigh on a sea of sadness.
So, there it is. The first pages of my pregnancy journal filled in. A journal that should be filled with expectancy has begun in sorrow.