Eight Weeks Was Long Enough to Love You

We saw the second line on a Tuesday. By Saturday I had already imagined your whole life — your first day of school, your wedding, the way you might tuck your hair behind your ear like my mother does.

At the eight-week scan, the room went quiet in a way I will never forget. The doctor was kind. She used soft words. But the screen was still, and so was the room, and so was something inside me that had been singing for three weeks.

What no one prepares you for is the loneliness. People didn't know I was pregnant, so they didn't know I was grieving. I went back to work. I answered emails. I smiled in the lift. And inside, I was carrying a goodbye for someone the world never got to meet.

My husband grieved differently. He went quiet, fixed things around the house, held me at night without words. For a while I thought he didn't feel it. Then one evening I found him sitting in the dark in the room we'd half-started planning, and I understood. He was just trying to be strong enough for both of us, and it was costing him everything.

We started saying your due date out loud to each other. We planted a small money plant on the windowsill — something living, something we could tend. It helped, in the way small rituals help when there are no big ones.

It has been a year. I am pregnant again, and I am terrified, and I am hopeful, and both of those things live in me at the same time.

If you have lost a baby the world never met, please know your grief is real. Eight weeks, eight days, eight months — love doesn't measure itself in time. You are allowed to mourn. You are not alone on the bathroom floor.