Less Than Two Weeks Left with Our Abigail Réileen

We made it! 35 weeks is considered term. Abigail Réileen is still inside, growing and kicking with those beautiful feet. She is every bit as strong as my other babies. We still have more than a week until the scheduled C-birth. I'm happy for that because we aren't emotionally ready to say goodbye yet.

Our last ultrasound of Abigail at 35 weeks, her right foot from heel to toe

Two days ago we had our last appointment with Dr. Feltovich. She is a doctor of maternal fetal medicine at the hospital where we will be delivering Abigail Réileen. She's the one who diagnosed Abigail with ABS and helped us to plan the right birth for her. Her kindness and understanding have been indispensable over the past few months.

This week I started packing our hospital bags, which I haven't had to do in 13 years! Abigail has a whole bag separate from mine because we have so many special memories we plan to make with her. I'm grateful for that opportunity. There are people from three different organizations coming to help us make memories, just out of the goodness of their hearts: ❤️ Angel Watch, Common Bonds, and Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.

Less than two weeks remain.

In the last trimester of every pregnancy up to this point, I have always reached a point of physical discomfort that made the upcoming birth a can't-wait-for-it moment. In some cases, I got so impatient, I took matters into my own hands and tried to spur labor with natural remedies. Of course it never worked because babies have their own ideas. Sam was due on Valentine's Day, which is his great Grandma Joyce's birthday, but instead he came a week early when my water spontaneously broke. Corbin, our current youngest, was due on my birthday but decided to stay on the inside for three extra days, much to my chagrin. The only child who came almost on his due date was Daniel, who was born more or less on his due date, the morning after Memorial Day. We sang Amazing Grace and Danny Boy during the night-long labor.

Five natural births, four of which were home births and one of which was unassisted, have taught me that I am much stronger than I ever could have imagined, and also less patient. Waiting on the baby is one of the struggles of the last trimester. It feels very strange this time to be scheduled for a C-section and to know when that day is going to be. It's also different because, rather than hoping to see the end of this pregnancy soon, I wish it would just go on forever. Even feeling braxton hicks contractions makes me nervous. We are still actively making plans for the birth.

I asked the mothers and grandmothers in the anencephaly facebook support group for children's book titles to read to Abigail on the day she is born. Whether she is born alive or sleeping, we want to read to her on her birthday. Someone suggested the book On the Night You Were Born. My first thought when I saw the title was that she will be born at 7:30 in the morning. I know that. The pattern for most of my children's births is that I labored for a day and a night and they were born near dawn, between 3am and 6am. The one exception was Layne, who was born at 1:30pm, but that was just because he didn't want to go to church that Sunday. (I kid, I kid.)

I think the book I'm going to bring is Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. That's the book I've been reading to my children all along, and it wouldn't be right if Abigail missed out on that tradition. I recently learned that the author actually wrote the song for his own babies who died, and then built the story around the song. Isn't that amazing? The grief and love of one father resonates in a song that millions of parents and grandparents around the world have sung to their little ones!

It goes so well with a message I've been getting from heaven lately, about ripples. I think we all think it would be so amazing to change the world. How many songs are written with that very theme? Change the world! We want to feel powerful and meaningful, like our lives mean something. It's one of the hardest things about infant loss--having a child who has rocked your world and yet nobody else even knows he or she existed. That feels wrong because meaning is meant to be shared. Robert Munsch found a way to do that in his book that has forever enshrined the lullaby he sang to his two sweet little babies who didn't stay long enough to utter a single word.

But the concept of ripples operates on the understanding that it doesn't take a big splash to make an impact. Even a tiny ripple, stretched out across the water, can reach distant shores. Somehow we are all impacting one another in this way, with a smile, a phone call, or a thoughtful gift. Even with a disagreement and forgiveness. We are forever touching each other's lives. Even just hearing about one person choosing a higher path can inspire some stranger to do the same.

On Sunday I couldn't go to church. In addition to my body being just plain uncomfortable at 35 weeks and 185 lbs, I'm getting over some congestion in my sinuses. When my husband came home, he handed me a book, lent by some church friends. It was Blaine M. Yorgason's book, One Tattered Angel.

I read it all on Sunday, finishing it by dinner that night. It's about a baby girl that comes to them as they are serving as newborn foster parents. She has hydrocephalus. The story is all about ripples, how each person who meets baby Charity is lifted and changed by her sweet spirit, and even how preparing to receive Charity as a family brought them closer together. I could relate to this on some levels, though their story is fundamentally different from ours because they are adoptive parents and their journey with her began after her birth.

Also, our Abigail likely won't live nearly as long as their Charity did, and that means that all of Abigail's impact is being made in the very short time of her growth in my womb and her birth. Maybe she will continue to have an impact in our lives, if we are attuned to more spiritual things, since she will be with us in spirit. We take it on faith that this is true. It hurts that Abigail won't have much time to make an impact on others, but I have been touched by the few people who have told me that learning about Abigail's situation helped them to see their own children in a new light.

The way ripples work, we will probably not even know all the people she has touched with her short life and with the stories we tell about her. It's another thing we'll have to take on faith. We do know that every child of God has a purpose, and Abigail is a child of God. She has changed me, and I believe our whole family will be forever changed because she came to our family. If the song is true that claims, "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return," then at least Abigail has learned the greatest thing. And any parent who has lost an infant at any stage of development can have the peace of knowing that their babies were loved and that they also learned the greatest thing.