18 Weeks

Today i hit 18 weeks in my pregnancy, and in a few days I'll be nothing.

I keep trying to figure out where i lost control of my body and my life. A friend of mine has a blog about her daughter and she wrote a post a while ago where she wondered at what point did her pregnancy change that ultimately made her whole life change. When i read it, it really affected me (and this is long before i experienced it first hand) and even though i didn't understand how that thought could make her feel, i now have an idea, because that single thought has taken over my mind. I can't help but think if i wanted children so bad then why didn't I do more to make sure i was healthy before conceiving? I did take pre-natal vitamins long before we got pregnant but i know i could have done more. I could have started working out sooner so i would be in better shape when it came time for delivery. I could have taken more supplements to compensate for the meat i don't regularly eat. Tons of things could have been different.

The doctors keep telling me that there was no way for us to know, no way to prevent what is happening to our son but its in black and white in all the research: moms who take more folic acid before conception dramatically reduce the risk of neural tube defects. I know that i can't obsess about this, but it just keeps popping up into my mind. No one in our family  had a history of spinal bifida so how in the world would we know to take extra precautions to prevent it? This is something I'm going to have to find a way to be OK with, the not knowing part and learning to forgive myself for it.

I got an e-mail from one of the baby websites i subscribed to about the stages of grief and I cant help but feel like I'm going to be in the angry stage forever. Each day is different, some days i wake up and feel fine, and others i just want to go crazy and destroy everything i see. Sometimes i feel like there aren't any words that sound good to me, so i don't say any and other times I just cry and try to figure out the gibberish coming out of my mouth between sobs. Other days its somewhere in between, like today.

On that same website I saw a forum where moms posted what they did to remember their little ones and one of them said that they wear black on the same date every year. I liked it, but i imagine our son is like us, and he wouldn't approve of black so i brought the idea up to my husband and we settled on blue. I told my best friend and she said she wanted to wear blue for Mason too and it made me so happy. I didn't expect that reaction from myself but it touched me, knowing that the day i will face the hardest decision i ever had to make, my best friend would do something as simple as wear blue and i know it will comfort me.

Last night when i was going to bed i was convinced that it would just be better if i didn't wake up, if i could sleep through the day i turned 18 weeks and wake up on Tuesday and deal with my feelings then. However, when i woke up my wonderful husband was sleeping next to me and i felt OK. Not good or bad, just OK and that gave me hope for the rest of the day. They say to visualize your future and it will come true and I guess there is some truth to it because i wanted to feel better and be better for my husband and today it was a little easier than yesterday.

Like i said before, we haven't even gotten to the hard part yet, that's on Thursday but hopefully things will keep going this direction, every day a little bit clearer, a little bit better.