Trying

In November last year, I saw a negative pregnancy test for the first time in about ten years.
I have seen quite a few of this variety since.

I had taken about two or three pregnancy tests when I was younger, back in that strange and distant land known at the 1990s. I remember my hands shaking and my stomach churning, hoping and hoping and pleading that there would be no second line. Unsuitable boyfriend. Degree to finish. Inability to look after self, let alone child. All the usual reasons.

Then, like most women I suppose, there came a time when my hands were still shaking and I was still hoping and pleading. But now I was pleading for that second line to please, please, please show up.

I've been so very 'lucky' up until this time, the so-called third time lucky. I fell pregnant with the twins on the first cycle we tried for a baby, I fell pregnant again the first time we decided to try for a third child. But then I miscarried a few weeks later.

Since then. Still trying for that elusive third. Nothing.

I worry. I wake up in the night and worry. Worry away at the idea. Until I am worn away.
Perhaps I've left it too late.
Perhaps I will never have another child.
Perhaps I will have another child, another child born too early, another child who dies.
Perhaps the brief 'half' pregnancy I had with the twins will be my only pregnancy.
Perhaps I will never feel a child move in my womb and know it for a baby and not indigestion.
Perhaps I will never move with the slow consideration of a heavily pregnant woman, my husband will never feel a child of ours kick from inside my body.
Perhaps this is all I will ever know of pregnancy and motherhood.
A hovering.
A circling around a plastic box of wires and machines.
A slow, slow, slow cessation of breath and the faltering beat of a heart that fades away to silence.

Endless waiting, waiting, waiting.
Seemingly endless on one hand.
On the other, yes, endless.
I will be waiting a very, very long time to see Georgina do these things.

Waiting to touch my daughter.
Waiting to hold my daughter.
Waiting for her to feed, to fight infections, for ducts to close, for eyes to open, for ears to form, for unruly growths of blood vessels to die back, for protruding organs under the skin to be swept back in.
For her to take a breath.

And I am still so very, very angry and bitter.
That this is the hand that I was dealt.
That this is the hand that my children were dealt.

And I hate myself for that bitterness and anger.
Because I have no right to them. I have a living, breathing child.
A child who should be a ghost. Who should be with her sister.
A child who, in all honesty, has no business being alive.
In my mind's eye, I still see that tiny human that was Jessica.
Certainly that dainty, red body was my very own Jessica beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But my brain seems to have trouble taking it all in, even now.

If it were up to me she would be dead. For all my love, for all my care, for everything I might fancy I know.
If it had been left up to me, I would have watched both my daughters die.
Those early faltering breaths and cries would have been their whole lives.

Because love doesn't mend broken things.
Love can't act as surfactant for immature lungs.
Love can't work it's way through a body to clear infection, to fix faulty circulatory plumbing.
I've obviously been wired incorrectly, as part of me believes that it might have done. If I could just have tried harder. What a cruel state of affairs.

And I wanted two. I wanted my two tiny, broken daughters to survive. Both. And now I want more.
Strange to think I would have been almost eight months pregnant if I hadn't miscarried.