Halfway there!

Finally, I made it to 20 weeks. I know there is still a long way to go, but I guess I just never thought I would make it to 12 weeks, let alone 20 weeks. It's amazing how confident I was with my pregnancy with Owen, never doubting for one minute that I would carry the baby to term and have a healthy child. Then, I had a miscarriage, and the confidence was gone. Not a day goes by that I don't think something might not be right, which is a pretty awful way to feel, except that I'm not allowing myself to dwell on it. Doesn't it annoy you when you talk to those people who say that there is nothing you can do, a baby will survive or it won't, and it doesn't do any good to have those kind of thoughts? Usually, it's someone who has never been in your position and can't identify with you. So they should just keep their mouth shut, but that's my humble opinion.

I have felt the baby move, but not all that often, and it's strange how this would never have occurred to me as something to worry about before, but once you know someone it has happened to, it's as if you internalize all the different scenarios that could go wrong with your baby. No longer do I feel exempt, from anything. When we first had Owen and he was diagnosed with Down Syndrome, my first thought was, "well, I don't have to worry about it happening again, since this usually doesn't happen twice." But for every person I talk to, there is always someone who wants to scare you with some story of how they know a family who had two children with Down Syndrome (and they usually don't know if it was a translocation Down Syndrome, which menas the male is a passive gene carrier, or if they adopted a second), but they always get me. Then I start thinking, well, it happened once, what's to say it won't happen again? Or, maybe it will be something different, or worse, this time.

It's funny how this pregnancy has pushed me in a whole different direction. And maybe it's not this pregnancy, maybe it's the birth of my son, and the miscarriage and now this pregnancy. But, I am learning that I have to rely on my gut feeling, my instinct, and block out everyone else, their advice, their stories, their concern. I have to rely on my own intuition instead of piecing together my knowledge from other people. I think we have forgotten that being pregnant and having a baby is a primal thing, not a learned thing. It is an instinctual part of nature. If I can keep that awareness in my mind, communicated from my body, things may be okay.