Have you ever had a dream, a close one to your heart, that you’ve had to let go? A dream that you carried around with you, not being able to explain why it was important to you, just that it was? That’s where I am right now. I’ve carried around the dream of having this child at home for quite awhile. There are many factors going into why this dream started and why it’s important to me. Those reasons, however silly or not understood they are, are still valid and worthwhile. But it appears that it’s just not to be.
I’m not giving up hope just yet. But I’m forcing myself, for obvious reasons, to realize that it is very possible that a home birth for this child is just not going to happen. Now I’ve always known there was no guarantee that a home birth was going to happen. Life is not perfect, things go wrong and it certainly doesn’t always come out as we had hoped/desired. So I have always kept that in perspective (well, as best as I could anyway). And now here I sit, it’s October 28 and the baby was due much earlier in the month. There’s not much left to do.
I guess you could say that I’ve started the grieving process. Not because I’ve thrown in the towel on this one, but because I need to emotionally and mentally prepare myself for the very likely hood of a hospital birth. I know that most people would think “so what?” to having your baby in the hospital. There are certainly worse things that could happen and you have a baby in your arms at the end. These things are true. It’s just painful when you realize that a dream is dying and will not come about. I’ve always said, through out this pregnancy, that God is in control and what His will is, is what I want. I’m not going to insist that God necessarily cares where a child is born for the most part. But in this instance, He obviously knows something that we don’t and perhaps He knows it would be best for the child, and maybe me, to not have the birth occur at home. I have to allow that possibility, for why else would my body stop and go, stop and go so many times? Yes, this has been the pattern for the other childrens births, but never to this degree. It’s not that contractions won’t start, it’s that they won’t keep going. Something is stopping them.
So I’m beginning to let it go. I’m still grieving and I’m still hurting that this could end in the setting I was trying to avoid. My time is not up just yet, but it’s running out very quickly. I still trust Him, though. I trust that He knows what’s best, regardless of my dreams and desires. I’ll continue to hope that this child is born at home until the very end, for all mothers know that labor can begin at any moment and for any reason. But I won’t hold on to it so tightly that if Monday rolls around and we still haven’t had this baby, I’m not able to handle it.