Baby Girl

What's it like to hold your own chubby pink baby girl? What's it like to buy all sorts of pink and fill a room with girly cuteness? What's it like to hang and fold the sweetest of dresses? What's it like to paint tiny finger and toenails? What's it like to attend playful little tea parties, and watch your little girl breeze through the room dressed like a princess? What's it like to braid her soft hair on her small head, or give her a ponytail? What's it like to have your daughter?

I am left only to imagine what all of this is like. I've spent countless hours imagining all of this. The absence of this. The loss of this. I ache for my little girl. The one I lost. The one I can't have. I never dreamed I would never have the chance to have another girl after we lost Avery. I thought surely we could fix this monstrous defect inside me. That medical intervention would be all we needed to get the rest of them here. The sweet little lives I dreamed of bringing into this world. The ones that will never be. Who would they have been? I'm sure at least one would have been another girl. I still desire that so much. I ache to raise a little girl. To have the sweet relationship I share with my own mother. To watch her grow into a beautiful woman.

I had my heart set on raising my little girl. More than halfway through my pregnancy, I never thought I would lose her. I didn't know I'd be faced with a future without her. I believed she was my future, for the rest of my life. Then the rug was pulled out from under my feet, taking her away with it. All the plans and the dreams that were planted in my heart the moment she was planted in my womb. I have a daughter... but I don't. I have my daughter waiting for me and I will be with her again one day in Heaven, but here, my arms are aching for her. Aching for a little girl.

Sons are amazing. I would know, I have one. He satisfies my desire of having a son. He fills my heart with joy. He is exactly the son I dreamed of raising, when I named my first son Jude long before I even married his father. His entrance into this world was not what I had in mind, but I'm just thankful he made it here at all. If given the impossible ability to have more sons, I would accept them in a second and be grateful for them and love them completely as well. But still, my heart would ache for what I was supposed to have here.

I just wish so badly I could have another daughter to watch grow up. I think about it so often. I feel so incomplete. It's so difficult to have already lost what you wish you could have.