“Is this your first baby?”
It’s a question I’m asked often on days when I’m alone. If my oldest daughter, Emmarie, is bobbing alongside of me with her bouncy towhead pigtails and sticky little fingers, I’m asked if it’s my second child.
It’s a natural question. I’m 33 weeks pregnant and look every bit of it. My body knows what to do. It’s on track to give birth to three full-term babies in two years and ten months.
I sat in the nursery rocking Emmarie, her 17-month old legs spilling out over my belly as her head nestled against her sister sleeping in my womb. I thought back to our 33-week appointment. No one actually said the words “Clara is going to die.” I wish they had. I would rather hear those words than know them. They had never proven true; they had always cracked open, leaving a glimmer of hope.
It was the date circled on the calendar. The date I had been praying we would reach. The arbitrary number doctors assigned to us as the ‘you-can-finally-start-to-plan-to-maybe-meet-your-daughter’ date.
I started to exhale, imaging our lives with Clara in it for the first time in thirteen weeks.
The Wonderfully Made Life 