Yesterday, driving home from work, I put in my loss soundtrack and just had a good cry. It’s confusing now to grieve for my daughter, because I have another daughter who I love and want just as much, who I never would have met if Avalon had lived.
With the Walk to Remember coming up, and having just watched “First Comes Love”, a documentary of a Single Mother by Choice that films her pregnancy and birth, I have been thinking a lot about the person and the mom I would have been if my first biological child had not died. While watching the birth, I cried. I miss being pregnant so much. I ache for the third trimester that was stolen from me. I hunger for the experience of excruciating pain that dissolves into extraordinary bliss and empowerment at having created a life and brought it successfully into the world.
I felt robbed of that experience, I felt robbed of getting to know my firstborn, and something else… I wished so badly that I had given birth to Jo Jo. I wish I had had that experience with the baby who is as much my own as any I could’ve conceived.
If I’d had an uneventful pregnancy and birth, and my daughter had entered the world alive and healthy:
-I would not be living under the shadow of the knowledge that death is always near and ready to devour.
-I would not be living under any preconceptions that “It won’t happen to me”.
-I would not have put my new daughter on an apnea monitor until age 5 months at night.
-I would not live every day with the fear that one word from a judge could take my daughter from me.
-I would not question if I should buy clothes for my daughter for next year, or put off planning her birthday parties, until just before the day.
-I would not be mentally debating if I should ever try to get pregnant again.
-I would be living in blissful ignorance.
-I would not be a baby loss mom, or a foster mom anymore.
-I would be happier, but not necessarily more whole.
-I would take more for granted, especially the joys of motherhood.
-I would say more stupid things to people fresh in grief.
Mother of All Things 
It’s just HARD, isn’t it? The parallel universe.
You always write so eloquently about what I feel so ineloquently.