By the author of Sam and Finn and our Loss Books series – Kate Polley.
From the moment Sam died, I knew I would have another baby.
I had spent eight months pregnant with the twins, planning our crazy beautiful life together with four children. But the chance to mother all four was cruelly and unexpectedly snatched away from me.
In that instant, our family became incomplete.
Of course, I knew the gaping wound Sam‘s death had left meant I would never truly be whole again, yet still, I had an overwhelming desire for another child to band-aid my broken heart.
Falling pregnant again was the easy part. The complicated range of emotions I experienced was not.
When I fell pregnant with my eldest daughter, I was elated. We had been trying to conceive for some time, and I had started to worry that it might never be. Nine months later, my second daughter made her unexpected presence known; and once the shock that I was pregnant again had worn off, we were thrilled. Fast forward seven years – with a mix of apprehension and excitement, I showed my husband the distinct double lines which appeared on the pregnancy test. Our ‘third baby’ quickly became number three and four as we learnt at our second scan that we were expecting twin boys. We were overjoyed.
But with Jude, my fifth baby, it was different.
I watched the two blue lines form on the test stick, and I felt numb. Not numb with fear or anxiety but numb with nothingness.
You see, Jude was conceived by another mother – not physically, but in every other sense of the way, a completely different person.
He was given to a scarred woman, one who knew the pain and despair of baby loss. To a mother who no longer enjoyed the luxury of blissful ignorance and the security that everything would definitely be okay. He was given to a mother who was grieving for another boy, for a baby who should have been. He was given to me a mother who had so much to learn.
For several days after taking the test, I kept the pregnancy to myself. Finally, a few days later, I shared the news with my husband. At 13 weeks, we announced the pregnancy to our children and extended families. Everyone was over the moon.
Still, I felt nothing.
Then my nothingness grew into resentment. It twisted around my being and thrived, along with my growing baby inside me. It occupied my thoughts and kept me awake at night. The thing was, I wished the baby growing inside me was Sam. The ugly truth was I didn’t want this new baby; I wanted Sam. I wanted my twins; I wanted the life I had planned out in my head.
Unlike my other pregnancies, I didn’t ask my obstetrician about the baby’s gender. I didn’t dream or plan a life with my newborn, nor imagine how they would be or might become. I didn’t prepare a nursery, and I refused to celebrate the impending birth with a baby shower. Whilst everyone around me breathed a sigh of relief that I was pregnant and all would be well again, I couldn’t bring myself to be the happy pregnant mum I was expected to be.
Then, at 33 weeks, taking us all by surprise, Jude arrived.
At birth, he bore no resemblance to the brothers who had come before him or to his two older sisters. He was unsettled and colicky, and I struggled to adjust my romantic notion that he was supposed to have been sent to heal me.
The months that followed were a blur of helplessness.
I cried. He cried. I got angry, and so did he.
Then finally, we declared a truce.
He was Jude. He was not Sam; He had no intention of ever being his brother’s replacement.
I accepted it, and he thrived.
Jude blossomed into a lively happy toddler, brimming with character and a zest for life.
Today he is three. With the heart of a lion and the gentleness of a lamb, he has taught me acceptance – not of the life I had planned, but of the life I have been given.
I will never stop loving Sam or wondering who he might have been. But I have another beautiful, perfect little boy who came after.
He has not been the healer of my forever wounded heart, but indeed he is a balm for my soul.
