About twenty weeks on, I thought I was miscarrying. Lower back pain...cramping...but no bleeding. A quick scan revealed just one baby, our son lying healthy in my womb, his little heart pumping. It even looked like he waved at us. That scan failed to detect the second placental lobe, so despite a 'feeling' early on that perhaps there were twins, these miscarriage symptoms, and some dreams of multiples, there was nothing that occurred during the pregnancy that should have led us to explore the possibility of the existence of a twin.
Wondering if you had another child, but not knowing for certain, is bewildering.
An uncertain grief, a tentative grief, feels like I am playing make-believe with my heart, and it will have none of it. Yet with no chance in this world to ever know for certain, it remains a quiet, unresolving pain.
I have had the strange honor of welcoming five babies in my womb who died in a way that would make each of them especially easy to discount. My first two babies were each a "blighted ovum"--a bizarre name for an equally bizarre condition in which the fertilized ovum implants but the part that is supposed to form into the embryo never develops. Only the placenta grows for a time until the woman's body realizes that something has gone wrong, and begins the process of emptying the womb. My next two losses were "chemical pregnancies"--another odd name--a situation in which an egg is fertilized (...tiny human person created...), begins to produce the hormone hCG (...positive pregnancy test...) but something goes wrong very early in development and the woman has her period (...actually an early miscarriage). And with this recent loss, it isn't clear what happened, but it appears that, assuming that the second lobe and possible remnants of the cord were from my son's twin, there was a little human person who died fairly early on after implantation. And then his / her little body was completely absorbed.
I grieved my first two babies with a pain so intense it was debilitating. My next two losses were much less painful for me. But this one is so very different from the other four. I look at my beautiful son and I see his beauty and his intoxicating little person who draws me into love for him. But I also see a shadow. I see someone who should have been there, with him, but isn't. I look at twins and I wonder what his twin would have been like. Was his twin a boy or a girl? Would they have both had the same color of hair? What color would this baby's eyes have been? Would he or she have snored and snuffled at night, like our son does? How could I possibly have nursed them both? How could I have not? All I know are questions. All I feel is an empty cavern, with the pieces of my heart, my broken heart, cascading ever down.