Reflections of a Princess

Since losing the baby things have been up and down in many respects. There's always reminders of the baby we were planning for and then realizing we don't have the baby anymore. There's people not knowing how to react to the miscarriage. Sometimes resulting in not saying anything at all. No "I'm sorry" or "How are you doing?" It's' not that I feel I deserve those things, but there are some people you'd expect to say those kind of things, but who have kept silent. That's one of the things that hurts the most. Of course, there's the baby conversations that take place and where I use to be included I'm now ignored.

But none of those things prompted this post today.

I realized as I was posting the fire updates from last week that there are likely many little baby reminders that have yet to be taken down. This one was on my profile:

I'm a wife, soon-to-be mommy, teacher, writer, and etc. living life and chronicling it in some sort of way. Enjoy!

Ouch! Soon-to-be mommy. Soon-to-be mommy no more. That's sad. And you know what? I'm not ready to take it down. But that reminded me of the blog I started to keep our family informed about the baby...still haven't deleted that yet. Partly because I want to print those posts and save them, but the other part just wants to avoid that completely.

I did think of something else sad/baby related. My sister-in-law's baby shower is this Saturday for their second little one (a girl...hopefully! The last time the doctor said that it was a boy!). This will be my second baby shower since we lost our baby, and those are hard for me.

But it reminded me of Mother's Day. What am I going to do for Mother's Day this year? Our due date was about a week before Mother's Day and my sister-in-law and me had talked about how cool it would be to dedicate the baby on Mother's day. And now this Mother's Day I won't have a baby. What do I do when Pastor Joe asks all the women who are mothers to stand up to be honored? What will I do? In some ways it doesn't sound like a big deal, but in other ways it's HUGE! When do you become a mother? Once your baby is born or when you find out you're carrying a life within you.

It's just one of those things that I think about now...

am I a mother?