Aftermath

My last post seems to date to exactly two weeks before the roller coaster of finding that we were expecting again (joy), later expecting twins (anxiety & awe), still later expecting twins of which one was not growing properly because of random placental complications and we were likely to lose both (shock, confusion, grief). More than ever, in the wake of these painful months, which ended with our terminating the pregnancy while one baby still looked great but the grim prognosis for the other one doomed both of them, the blog title seems appropriate. Though we never got to meet our daughters, the brief weeks which we spent agonizing over whether or not to give their incipient lives a chance felt like a slow painful journey up a very fast and unrelenting river. Now, almost exactly a month after we lost them, I feel like I have been a mother my entire life, possibly even for eternity. My mind is hardly ever free of thoughts that have something to do with parenting, and I think about every decision, doubt, dilemma--however minor--in terms of how it measures up to the pain and uncertainty of choosing to lose one's children. The comparison is always humbling, since pretty much nothing else seems to matter--or at least nothing seems to matter in a way that makes much sense.