Head vs Heart

Getting these diagnoses is all very well, and perhaps the medical profession thinks we should be jumping for joy at having averted such a terrible life with a disabled child, but the reality is not as neat as that. The reality is that in ending the life of a baby you want and love, a part of you dies for ever. It may be ‘for the best’, it may well be the case that you are saving him or her from a life of suffering, but what’s right on paper is not necessarily what’s right in your heart.

Today, I still torture myself that I should have carried him to term. At least I would have something to do, something to focus on, instead of the utter emptiness and pointlessness I feel in my life currently. But then, if he’d suffered as we’d feared, then that would be quite selfish.

What this sort of experience does is utterly destroy your relationships with others who’ve managed to have children with apparent ease. Between our first baby and our second, my sister in law announced she was pregnant. My rage was extreme. I just thought, HOW DARE SHE!!!!! Why doesn’t she get to sit in a bath while it fills up with her own blood? Why doesn’t she get told that her baby’s brain is f***ed up???? Why does he get to live???? While most of my rage has been aimed at her and the baby, it now extends to all friends and family who have had a baby. We are being left behind, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. I do everything I can to have as little to do with them as possible. The pain is too great.

When you’ve taken the decision that we have done with our baby, then outsiders are obviously going to think the following: that the baby was unloved, unwanted, an inconvenience. When in fact, the opposite was true. Both our babies were loved, both were wanted, neither were an inconvenience. Yes, I am angry. With life. With fate. With myself.  I miss them and wish I’d kept them. I wish both had been ok. But they were not and we thought it best for them, *not for us*, that they not suffer. Someone once asked me why I wanted a perfect baby. I hadn’t realised I wanted a perfect baby. But on reflection, a baby within the ‘normal’ range? Yes. Until our experiences it hadn’t occurred to me that any other outcome was possible.