Due Date

My due date was on Sunday, April 22.

For some reason, there was a plethora of births this month, and more to come. I guess everybody was getting busy in August.

It was floating there on the bottom of my consciousness for the first couple weeks of the month, and then it felt like I was a nail and it was hammering me into the ground and I did, of course, have my own special little breakdown on and off for several days.

I don't want to self-indulge. I don't want to express my want for a baby; it's obvious. I don't want to cheapen anyone else's experience or my own. 

I just want to acknowledge the coulda-been-baby that would've been keeping me up all night, this week, if everything had gone as planned.

And I want to acknowledge the women in my life who have miscarried. I had no idea what you'd been through. If I'd known, I'd have shown more compassion and poured more wine. There's so little importance placed on miscarriages in our culture, for some reason. And perhaps even some kind of shame attached to it. I don't want to examine why, I just want to say: I get it now.