While eating my lunch of macaroni & cheese and cut up apples (I revert to childhood when I'm sick), I watched TLC's "A Baby Story" for the first time. It was about a mother who had metastatic breast cancer and discovered she was pregnant in the midst of chemo. She had a healthy baby girl at 34 weeks and at the same time, found out the cancer had spread to her liver and bones. At the end of the show it was revealed that she died less than a year after the filming. I was sobbing. I can't imagine how bittersweet those months were- enjoying your time with your baby and husband while knowing its not going to last very long. My eyes are still watering as I type this.
Since becoming pregnant I've become much more aware of JP and my mortality. I worry about things that never used to concern me before- like JP driving his 40 miles to work when the weather is bad, when he doesn't answer his cell phone, or when he says he'll be home at a certain time and is late. I've noticed that he'll call when I'm not home from the library when I said I would be- something I don't think he did before. For him, its concern over his wife and baby, but for me, its more of a crippling fear of doing this alone. So much of what I'm looking forward to in being a parent is being a parent with him-- seeing him play sports with our kids as soon as they can make contact with a ball, seeing our little girl(s) wrap him around their little fingers, and seeing him scare off any boy who even thinks about dating one of his daughters. I want to be at our kid's high school and college graduations together, relish having the house to ourselves again, and then count down the days until the kids and the chaos come back to visit.
Hopefully we'll both live a very long time together, but I think about the "what ifs" a lot more than I used to.
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I saw the same show, all the while wondering what will happen to this mom. The end dates moved me as well. What moved me most was actually the stepdad saying "How will I go on without my wife? I don't want to lose my wife," then breaking up in tears. I wonder what happened to this family?
ReplyDeleteIf you have some free time on your hands, check out the same channel at 10 am for a show called "Surviving Motherhood," which touches on a variety of topics on raising children. It's not a great show, mind you. The women sometimes appear to be dunces. But then, I think maybe I appear dunce-like also to an outsider as I try to navigate the day with my children. It's just something I watch during the 10 am feeding and nap these days.
You're pregnant, and highly emotional. Everything will be alright.
The dad is what made me start the sobbing... I couldn't even write about it while posting because my eyes were threatening to spill over again.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tv tip- If I'm home sick again tomorrow I'll definitely check it out. I feel like a dunce on all things baby.
I know what you mean. I couldn't even imagine having a baby and then my husband dying. That's just not part of the deal! When I was pregnant the first time I would cry from commercials:)
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