Videotapes

I might have wrote about this before- I can't remember.

A good friend of ours asked to videotape us when I was about 7 1/2 months pregnant.  He spent over an hour at our house, asking us all sorts of questions. We received the tape of that interview and I am not sure what I want to do with it.  Josh turned it on for a few seconds, and the two people I saw on the screen were so different from the two who watched it now.  I looked at my big belly and the naive smiles on our faces and asked him to turn it off.  

I am grateful to have the tape, because he did a great job interviewing us-it is a testament to how much our little girl was loved.  For the few seconds it was on the television I just stared at my belly.  I could do that for hours.  I constantly look through the pictures of me pregnant in amazement.  The farther away we get from the pregnancy, the more surreal it seems.  

At the beginning, it all seemed like a dream.  Everyday I had to remind myself, "You were pregnant, you had a baby, and she died."   The reminders need to come less often now, but the enormity of it still has the tendency to shock me.  I am getting used to this new life I live, and the death of our daughter is part of that.  Now I have to remind myself that this doesn't happen to everyone, that people mostly have healthy babies, that getting pregnant is not an impossibility.

The loneliness is more common now.  Josh and I both feel guilty if we don't mention her in conversation, but she is not the first thing on everyone's mind when they see us anymore.  At first I wanted to be able to explain how I felt to everyone- have them really see where I was coming from.  Now I realize that, unless you have lost a child, you can't understand the way I feel.  On most days that is okay, but on others it makes Josh and I feel very isolated.   I try to be more forgiving.  I try to say, "They just don't get it, and I hope they never will." 

 But at the end of the day, all of this forgiving gets very tiring.