I'd walk a thousand miles if I could just hold you

My beautiful daughter, C, is a mess. C is all of 16 months old and she is a climber. She climbs on anything and everything, smiling broadly as she achieves her lofty heights. C is also a major klutz. Which means that for every lofty height she achieves, it is usually followed by a loud thud and some screaming. Sometimes she is helped along, like when 3 1/2 year old Q pushed her off the chair tonight. Sometimes she does it all by herself, like when she fell off the stepstool earlier today whacking the side of her eye and giving herself a nasty bruise. Much screaming and wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued, though truly it looks worse than it is. So she is basically a walking bruise and I half worry, as I'm sure most parents of toddlers do, that someone is going to look at her and think "what the hell is that mother doing to her?" Really it isn't me. She does it to herself and no amount of keeping an eye on her every second of the day will totally protect her from the occasional bruise.

I was thinking about this as I was reading a bedtime story to her tonight. C is VERY into babies right now. So the other day I picked up this book for her about baby angels. She, not surprisingly, loves it. It is rather cute with adorable little baby angels watching out for this toddler who is obviously a climber who gets herself into trouble. Eventually the baby, unbeknownst to her parents, climbs out of her crib and goes outside. One angel whispers to the baby's dad who then runs after her. It reminds me a lot of C except her angels let her fall way too much.

I'm not sure that I believe in angels, not in the traditional sense anyway. I certainly don't think that there are little baby angels following my children around watching out for them, though I wish there were. But looking at those little angels makes me think about the babies I lost. I had two miscarriages between Q and C.

My first one was the day before Q's first birthday. I only found out that I was pregnant the day before. Having had so many problems getting pregnant with Q, we just assumed we couldn't get pregnant without serious help. Surprise! I was devastated for a variety of reasons. (There are all sorts of horrible things you really don't want to know about going through an actual miscarriage.) It seemed like such a cruel joke to realize we had miraculously gotten pregnant only to lose it the very next day. But we waited a month and a half and managed to get pregnant on the very first try. I had two dreams during this pregnancy. In one I gave birth to a baby boy but realized that he was too small to live. In the other a little blonde girl, perhaps 6 years old, came to me and told me that I would lose this baby but that the third pregnancy would work. Seven weeks into the pregnancy it became clear I would lose this baby too. It was a very difficult time for me. The only thing that kept me going was Q. I have no idea how people who have no children survive multiple miscarriages. Q was my world. As long as I had him it was okay.

When I got pregnant again I seriously thought that if I lost this baby, I would not try again. Q would be enough. But I believed that girl in the dream that said that this pregnancy would be okay and amazingly, she was right. She was my baby angel in a way. And C was born. With time the pain of those miscarriages has faded to a dull ache. And of course I have my two living angels (devils?!) which makes it easier to live through.

My mom had two miscarriages when I was a teenager. She and I had dreams that one baby was a boy and one was a girl. She named those lost babies and I know she still thinks of them. I never really found it useful to name my lost babies. I don't really believe that "life" begins at conception and it seems like both of my babies had serious chromosomal abnormalities and could not have survived if they had come to term. I thought of them more as lost possibilities. To be honest the second miscarriage, where I knew I was pregnant for much longer, was much more difficult and due to my dream, I am convinced that baby would have been a boy. I had always loved the boy's name Riley. Since I never got to use it, I often think of that little boy baby as the Riley I never had. So I guess in a way I did name him. But when I look at those baby angels in my daughter's book, it reminds me of those babies and it makes me smile. Now if only they could keep C out of trouble.