When life hands you lemons…

Sometimes life hands you lemons. Sometimes it hands you the whole friggin’ orchard!

Seven years ago today we lost our first baby at fifteen weeks gestation to a congenital birth abnormality. It was a little boy. And when he died, a piece of me died too.

His condition was called Megacystis, which in simple terms meant he had an enlarged bladder. In reality, it meant death was inevitable. We made an impossible choice.

At the time I felt like a spectator watching a car spiralling out of control and slamming into a tree. Except I wasn’t a spectator, I was driving the car.

I tried desperately to crawl out of the wreck, grasping at anything that could help me escape my situation, but when pregnancy number two (another son) ended abruptly at fourteen and a half weeks gestation for an unrelated chromosome abnormality, I was emotionally spent.

It must have been some overwhelming instinctual desire that took over after that, because there was no good intellectual reason for trying again – the odds were certainly not in our favour. In that time I juiced thousands of lemons.

My third pregnancy was different from the beginning, but the vice-like grip around my chest never really allowed me to believe it. My focus was always on the finish line, and when I found out the due date was three days before today’s date, I knew my baby would be born late.

As I laboured through the night, I realised my prophecy was coming true - my first living child was going to be born on the second anniversary of my first son’s death.  I felt the planets align that morning.

Five years ago today I gave birth to a daughter. She was my daughter and she was tiny and pink and breathing, and when I held her to my chest, she urinated down the front of me just to let me know that her little bladder was working.

And now she is five, and she is one of the sweetest, most complicated little people I know. When I look at her I see myself, which both delights and terrifies me.  She is creative and inquisitive and caring, and at the core of her being is someone who loves with her whole heart – and I love her with all of mine.

Five years ago today, with the scars from the squeezing indelibly etched, I learnt how to make lemonade.