Hope

After my miscarriage four years ago, I bought a small silver bracelet with a lotus charm on it. A symbol to remember that first baby, and also to remember to be hopeful. Ironically, within a few weeks, I noticed the charm had fallen off. I tried to get a replacement charm, but never was able to. Eventually, I stopped looking for my lost symbol of hope.

Hope and I have a complicated relationship. I view hope as a mean girl from high school. The kind who is nice to your face, but then goes back to her friends and laughs about how she tricked you into believing she cared about you. Every time, she cons you into thinking you must have misjudged her - she must not be as dangerous or cruel as you remember. Inevitably, though, she burns you and leaves you feeling even worse than you did before. You kick yourself for trusting her again. And yet...you can't help but fall for it every time, believing this time could be different.

Hope defies logic. If you look only at the evidence, the facts, the events that have transpired as we've attempted to grow our family over the past five years, they all indicate we will not ever get to actually raise our children. Still, hope stubbornly hangs on. It continues to whisper in my ear after each loss ... maybe, even as the realities of our life are screaming no.

Many times, I have insisted to myself that I will stop being hopeful. I will stop trusting that mean girl, who has broken my heart so many times before. I insist I will learn from my mistakes and protect myself from her next time. I tell myself if I just choose not to hope, it won't hurt so much when things go wrong. Despite my efforts, though, hope remains a tiny ember, burning in the back of my mind, leading me again and again to believe next time could be different. I have as little control over my hope as I do everything else in my life.

Since Reed died, I find myself regularly feeling angry that I spent my pregnancy believing we would be a happy family of three. You fool! I have yelled at myself. Didn't you realize this wasn't meant for you? Why did you let your guard down? Why did you believe? I can't believe I allowed hope back into my heart, after she had already broken it so many times. After all, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice...well, you know the rest. I find myself back in familiar territory, swearing to never again be fooled by hope.

A few days ago, I packed up Reed's room. I kept out a small crate of all the things that were truly his - the blankets we wrapped him in, his unsurprisingly enormous socks from the hospital, books we read to him. I sit in his room all the time, and it makes me feel better to have reminders that he was real. These things will always belong to Reed, and will always be special to us. But everything else - the clothes, toys and blankets that I had so recently carefully organized - none of that ever really became his. So it was all lovingly re-folded and put into boxes I bought just for this purpose. Things with tags still on them. Things I can't bear to give away, even though I know I should. Instead, I slid these new boxes full of new things for my new baby who is already gone into the closet. I did this because, even though I keep telling myself not to, I hope. I know Reed will not use these things. But I hope someday his siblings will.

This isn't the first time I've packed some of these items away. There is much more now...hope stuck around for much longer this time, slowly and cruelly teasing me into believing this time would be different. But some things - a tiny pair of basketball shoes, a small stuffed rabbit, a Winnie the Pooh snow globe from my own childhood - these things have now been packed away twice. Destined for two different babies, neither of whom ever got to use them.

As I finished packing everything away, I wrestled with a lot of difficult thoughts. I used to wonder if we'd ever get to be parents. Now, we are. Reed will always be our son, and we will always love him fiercely. He will always be the little boy who made me a mom, and there will always be a little child-shaped hole in our family where he belongs. But, despite the fact that I am not yet ready to answer them, I still find myself asking what has now become a more complicated series of questions. Will we ever get to bring a baby home? Will we ever get to watch them grow up? Will we ever get to tell them about their brave brother, who made both of us better parents than we might have been otherwise?

Underneath each of those questions, though, my fear of hope is rising back to the surface. I am really asking myself: How many more times will I unpack these boxes, only to put them away again? How will we lose our next baby? What will it take for me to accept we don't get to raise a child, no matter how hard we try? How many more times will hope fool me into believing I should hold on...just in case?

I suppose my answer is, as always, at least once more. As much as I want to shake that stubborn hope away, believing I have finally learned my lesson and can no longer be hurt by it, hope hangs on. Hope is why things once meant for Reed are packed in the closet, instead of given to someone who could use them now. Hope is why we have met with 6 different doctors in the past two weeks, exploring our options for the future, options we are not yet ready to pursue and which are much more complicated than most people realize. Still, I can hear hope laughing at me, whispering behind my back, taunting me into believing. I know I shouldn't trust it, but I just can't help myself.

As soon as I had finished packing up all of Reed's things, stubbornly hoping against all evidence that I might still need them someday, I went downstairs to run on the treadmill. As I was tying my shoes, I saw something small and silver shining on the floor.

It was my lotus charm. My symbol of hope that has been missing for nearly four years, lost in plain sight all this time. Stubbornly reminding me...maybe next time will be different.