This Day in History

I don't talk about this much.  In fact it is never a topic of conversation.  But every year there are two dates I think about this.

One is in early December 1979.  It was around the 5th or 6th.  The previous few weeks had been exciting for us.  I had learned that I was pregnant for the first time. Not only was this our first child, it was also the first grandchild on both sides of the family.  Everyone was so excited.  However, in early December all of this changed to sorrow. I started to spot.  There were clots.  Large clots.  Gary rushed me to Home Hospital Emergency Room in Lafayette.  I had lost the baby.  A miscarriage.  A D&C.  An overnight stay in the hospital - down a quiet hallway away from the newborn babies.  In fact the hallway was so quiet that the nurses forgot about me for several hours.  No food.  Nothing to take a shower or even a sponge bath.  Just me. Alone in the room.  Knowing no baby would be coming into our family.

I was just shy of ending my first trimester.   Dr. Wolfe told me later that it was probably the red-headed boy I had hoped for.

Every year in early December I am so sad, short-tempered, I cry, and I don't know what is wrong with me.

Then I remember the date.  And I cry more.

My due date for the baby was June 13.  I remember I had to check the 1980 calendar to see when that date fell and I was hoping it wouldn't be a Friday.  I am not really superstitious, but Gary's Aunt Hattie had a 'thing' about the number 13.  The story was always told that when the Illinois aunts came to our wedding and joined other family members for breakfast the next day, Aunt Hattie moved to a different table because there were 13 people sitting at the same one.

Christmas was difficult in 1979.  We had a couple of gifts for the new baby under the tree that we had to put away.  My mother decided also that a good gift for me would be a box full of all of the fabric she had purchased to make me some maternity tops, along with the patterns, just in case I wanted to make them later or use the fabric for something else.  She never did understand why I burst into tears and ran upstairs at their house after I opened that gift.  That spring was hard because there were other people who were pregnant at the same time and I seemed to always run into them.  Of course I would think instantly that I would have looked pregnant, would have been wearing cute loose maternity tops, would be preparing the nursery, would be the guest of honor at baby showers. But no. I had lost my baby.

The worst was when one of the tellers at the bank, who was also pregnant and with whom I had discussed possible baby names when we first learned we were pregnant at the same time, named her daughter Megan.  That hurt me so much since Megan was the name we wanted to use for our first daughter--and she had taken it.  It took me a long time before I could see that Megan's name or see a picture of her in the county paper without cringing.  Finally when she came into my Purdue English class I could look past that hurt from 18 years earlier and see her for the sweet girl she really was.

The fall of 1980 I became pregnant for the second time.  I was nervous.  I didn't want to tell anyone.  I was afraid every time I used the bathroom that I would find blood and lose this baby too. When I made it through the first trimester I was cautiously happy.  The end of the second trimester was a thrill. And the closer the April 4 due date came, the more certain I was that we were indeed to become parents.

Megan Elizabeth was born on April 8, 1981.

Hilary Rose was born on April 19, 1984.

Looking back now I realize that if we hadn't lost the first baby, Megan probably wouldn't have been born.  I am not sure that Hilary would have been either since we wanted to space our children by 3-4 years.  I can't imagine our lives without either one of our precious, beautiful daughters.

But in the last few years a couple of things, coincidences maybe, ironies perhaps, have occurred to me.

On December 5, 1979 a baby boy was born in the Frankfort Hospital.  In 2010 he married our daughter.  A baby boy born at the same time as my miscarriage.  Not the same hospital.  But the same date.

Three years later on August 21, 2013 our grandson, Cooper Matthew Scott was born.  And he has bright red hair.  My red-headed little boy.

Tonight as we were driving home from Landon's baseball game at Michigantown, after stopping to see Cooper and Lynnlee for a few minutes, I reminded Gary that today was a date I would never forget.  June 13.  The day our first baby was due.  We could have been celebrating his or her 38th birthday today.

But instead we are preparing to close on a new house so that we can move closer to Megan, Matt, Cooper, and Lynnlee and Hilary, Blaine, Landon, Tessa, and Owen.

And I wouldn't wish it to be any other way.  But I still will remember.