The last picture I took before my son was born was of my husband, Mark, wading into the lake at the cottage. It captures the perfection of a clear sky and dazzling water. If the camera had been turned the other way, it would have revealed me standing on the shore, smiling serenely, with an almost-full-moon belly filling out my maternity swimsuit. I was 28 weeks pregnant, and after months of worry, I was finally starting to relax and enjoy the wonderfully bizarre experience of growing a human.
Even before this pregnancy, I?d been nervous?in a way, I knew too much. I had spent the previous five years researching the cultural and social aspects of reproductive loss for my Ph.D., studying how western society handles and makes meaning of miscarriages, stillbirths and neonatal deaths. I?d been fully immersed in the medical history of reproduction and the stories of bereaved parents?how their losses aren?t always discussed or supported, as well as what helped them heal. When I began my research, I had never been pregnant. Then, as I wrote the last chapters of my dissertation, I suffered two miscarriages. So with my third pregnancy, it was a massive relief to make it through the first trimester. It was downright thrilling to be finishing up the second; I started to daydream about what the third trimester might be like and caught myself visualizing the actual birth. I imagined the call to the grandparents and what it?d be like to bring our baby home. This time, it was really going t...