The Secret Garden Meeting

The Secret Garden Meeting is a wonderful blog for women who have lost children. It asks them about their experiences and then allows them to post and read about one another's experience. This is my experience- August.

If you created a bedroom for your baby tell us what it was like. Did you have it ready for them before they were born?If so how did you cope coming home to it without your baby?Did you pack it all away?What is your baby's room now?If you lost your baby after they had come home what is it like going into there room now?If you are trying to conceive again, or are pregnant again how do you feel about setting up another room before your baby is born?

The bedroom.
Yellow walls- green bedding- a dresser full of clothes- a shelf full of books- two cribs- and the chair.

Yes it was ready- it had been ready for weeks.
The days passed, and yet they didn't come.
But the room was ready.
So very ready for two little babies.

But then they came.
One week late.
They came on September 15, 2003.
They came- But one left.

Only one baby would sleep in that room.

In the hospital my father and brother asked me. What did I want...
And I wanted it gone.

I didn't want to see the crib-
the empty crib-
I thought it would haunt me to see it there.
But it wasn't the crib-
Its absence in the room...
It was the chair.

The chair was what broke my heart.
I wrote of it here.

The chair.

http://momentsofpause.blogspot.com/2009/02/chair-days-before.html

And we have been blessed.
We have had others-
But they have had no room.
No clean clothes in a dresser-
No crib-
No chair.

Just prayers.
Prayers that soon, we would build another room- full of love- hope- and dreams.
Dreams that wouldn't be taken away.

My daughter was born 15 months after my heart broke, but if you came to our house and looked around, you would have no idea that someone else was expected to come to our home.
Because I didn't expect it.
I couldn't.

The pain of seeing things gone.
Of knowing a baby wouldn't sleep there-
Wear those clothes-
Be read to in that chair-
Was too much.
And too fresh.

And so went the instructions: IF the baby comes, please take out the appropriate clothes from the bins in the basement. Please find the car seat and the bassinet. IF...
IF...

And so now- six years later- a baby is expected to come home in October.
October 9th.

But you wouldn't know it by walking in our home.
But perhaps you would feel the prayers- the love- the hopes- the dreams-
But you won't see things.
But there are things in the basement.
If.