Isabella

Isabella: A Letter to my baby

Falling through a deep blue ocean I was dreaming when I met you. Afraid of feeling the loneliness and scared of what might attack me out of the dark, I felt exposed, vulnerable and waited with anticipation. Then you were here, on a giant manta ray gliding majestically towards me as if flying in slow motion through the water. Like an angel you shimmered in golden white light.

“Hi mummy!” You waved as tears filled my eyes.

“Isabella? Is that you?” I asked although I already knew with all my heart.

You smiled at me my gorgeous girl, “It’s ok mum I’m happy in the spirit world I belong”.

My heart filled with longing as my arms reached out towards you. Your message told me to stop blaming myself, that it was all meant to be and that you had come through first to make it safe for your baby brother. I had so many questions.

I could have stayed forever wanting to hold you tightly and never letting you go. My soul yearned to connect for longer but you turned and said it was time, then faded into the distance telling me not to worry. I watched as you rode away on the back of this huge ray, so proud of you with long golden hair streaming down your back until you were just a mere speck of light as if a star in the night sky.

I was alone again in the dark ocean of my emotions but this time I was no longer scared, I felt comfort, acceptance and most of all, love.

*​​*​​*​​*​​*​​*

I first heard your name as I sat cross legged on a camping chair on the balcony of my Sydney apartment. We were surrounded by my exotic plants I had rescued over the years with the sweet smell of incense close by. The birds were talking in the trees which seemed nearer as I was on the third floor as I closed my eyes peacefully. Sunshine yellow wrapped a blanket of warmth around me as my hands cupped my belly where you lived.

“I will love and protect you so very much” I said out loud as I sent you love, imagining you growing inside of me, holding you gently in my arms fresh from birth and then sharing all phases of our lives together. I was so happy and content with a smile so wide Buddha would be proud.

Suddenly the name came so clearly ‘Isabella’. My eyes popped open. This was not a name I’d considered before as I was already set on ‘Lily Rose’. I closed my eyes again and heard only the lorikeets.

Then a feeling so strong it overwhelmed me, ‘Isabella, my name is Isabella’ your soul was telling me. ‘Your spirit is determined, it looks like it’s been decided!’ I remember thinking. ‘I hope I’ll be able to handle you!’

*​​*​​*​​*​​*

Then, as if I was traveling the journey of life in a high performance sports car, the road took a U-turn and started to speed up. Reality set in of how rapidly my life was changing, my thoughts went into overdrive and my head spun with questions of possibilities, what-ifs, how’s, doubts, insecurities, worries with anxious feelings and an underlying intuition that things just weren’t right.

I had only just met my partner. It was all too soon even though I wanted to be excited. I wasn’t in love with this man as fully as what I thought I should be. Will he take of care of me? Will he be the best father to my baby? Thirty eight years of age I had waited to have a baby with the right person. Thirty eight years of preparing, feeling ready, dreaming of the day I’d finally become a mother, and when I finally did, I had never felt so unsure.

I remember one morning going for a swim to try and clear my mind. But the pool was no friend that day as I completed each length with less enthusiasm and energy than the last. I got dried and dressed with dread and into the car afterwards just as confused. He handed me a hot chocolate as I smiled wordlessly.

‘This is all wrong’ I remember thinking but kept my thoughts hidden from the outside world.

Working in the city I felt the common pressure to keep up with the pace. Racing around in my car, swerving chaotic traffic, carrying oversized bags, running to appointments, teaching, jumping, crunching, sprinting and working through exhaustion. I couldn’t let on to my clients I was pregnant so early- it wasn’t the thing to do. So I had to carry on my active duties as if I wasn’t. With the smell of exhaust fumes mixed with wafts of take away food, I taught boot camp in the evening light at the park when I felt pang after pang in my womb. ‘I must be tough, I must stay strong’ was my mantra to cover up my visceral fear. But looking in my own eyes of the car mirror, I wasn’t fooling myself.

Early Saturday morning I was demonstrating core work by the pool when my clients asked “can you show us how to do that again?”

I looked down to disguise my grimace. “Yep ok so it’s like this” I replied as I crunched and twisted, tensed and held. Pang! ‘Ouch, there it goes again’. I can still smell the chlorine and sweat from the morning sun. ‘Just get through this, you have a long day’ I told myself.

As one session ended, another begun as I changed from sports clothes to my therapist uniform in their bathroom. Fresh T-shirt on first then I sat down to pee, ‘oh no’ there I saw it; red spotting between my thighs. ‘Don’t panic’ I had read up on normalities ‘this can happen, keep calm and keep working’. Positive mind-set had always got me through in life but it also paved the way for denial to creep up on her tip toes.

I had to visit three more clients and another four back in the clinic so I faced the busy streets determined to get them all done. But the bleeding was relentless followed with bouts of cramping. It became heavier and more intense with each client but my heart wouldn’t give up hope.

‘Don’t do this to me body, you are healthy, you are strong’

But I couldn’t ignore sensibility any longer and finally made the call to cancel the rest of my day: I had to face A&E, I had to know for certain.

With a few simple tests the male nurse spoke calmly and oddly upbeat

“You’re still pregnant! HCG levels are high. But if it worsens please come back”

I left with mixed emotions. I was sure I was losing my baby yet I’d been positively reassured.

‘I must hold on’ I decided, ‘I must rest and look after her’

Sunday the pain and bleeding grew worse. Cramping and soreness took procession of every cell in my body. I stayed inside of my apartment convinced that if I could hide from the world than maybe I could hide the truth to myself of what was happening. I couldn’t face hospital. I wasn’t ready to be poked and prodded under glaring lights and noisy machines let alone contemplate an outcome other than life being created inside of me. An appointment had been made for the women’s clinic on Tuesday so I had to hold on until then. I daren’t risk any further harm by taking any kind of medicine to ease the pain, so I curled up on my bed closing my eyes trying to focus my thoughts on just getting through. Sleep wasn’t easy and I gripped hands to my lover. Somebody save me from this hell I was in.

Monday arrived with worse pain but my stubbornness stayed true in confining myself at home. My partner left for the day to look after another woman’s child (in his previous relationship he had promised to). As he walked out the of door he took his companionship and support with him: it took all the remaining strength I had to pretend not to be hurt by this as I bottled up emotions even more. The waves of pain increased and crippled me over: My only relief was a warm bath but it didn’t last for long. All day and all night I cramped and bled and cried. I either bled profusely with a calm of pain or the bleeding stopped and the pain overtook. ‘This isn’t normal I’m losing her but I must hold on one more day.’ I don’t remember eating or anything else from that day, only that is consumed me in red darkness.

Tuesday the clouds were grey and I thought I’d find relief arriving at the women’s centre. But after waiting for over an hour trying to walk through the cramps, I could hide the unbearable pain no further. I either crippled over chairs or crouched awkwardly in the corridor as tears with streamed down my tormented face.

“Somebody come see her NOW!” My partner demanded at the front desk.

Soon I was rushed into a room and laying on a table for the inevitable poking around, instruments inserted, my insides scraped and a blood test sent for testing.

“You’ve probably miscarried” a nurse said so matter-of-factly she had no concept of how crushing her words were.

“But then again I couldn’t really detect anything major in the swab, so maybe you still are.”

Useless, still no clarity, one minute no then the next minute no. I couldn’t yet grieve but had a thread of hope left. I just needed to know, this was the fourth day now.

I was sent to another area to wait where minutes seemed like days. Conflicted with agony to hear the truth was the feeling that not knowing was at least postponing devastation. Finally, I was called into a new room.

“We have your latest HCG levels” a new woman said followed with a solemn, “please take a seat”. The sterile smell still plagues me along with the sound of the cheap plastic chair as I sat opposite her.

She didn’t need to speak, I could see it in her eyes and hear it in the tone of her voice the reluctance of imparting the next set of words. My nervousness was like that before an exam you haven’t prepared for; and nothing prepared me for the next message I heard. She leaned forward with clenched hands

“Your levels are too low, we can confirm you have miscarried”.

The world stopped, my gut wrenched and on that last word my heart imploded into a million of fragmented shards as if it were a glass globe sent out into the vacuum of space. There was no going back on that sentence and no way to freeze time to pretend it wasn’t true.

Shattered; I felt I had failed as a woman but worse, I had lost my baby.

I don’t remember anything else said after that except something to do with my age being a risk and some statistics; it was a foggy meld of prose as it took everything I had to stop from falling apart right there and then.

All of my dreams for my entire life came crumbling down around me. Standing at this precipice of entering motherhood, I felt the joyous moment of being pregnant ripped away from me like a flimsy rope bridge across a cliff cut down and falling, cascading into ragged rocks. The long search in lovers trying to find the ‘right one’ to build a family with, only to have this happen. Was I being punished for something? Did I not deserve to be a mum? What did I do wrong? What if I’m unable to have more children? My mind was running into an ugly spiral of self-hate and blame, angry at the world and silently screaming as darkness poured in like tar. I couldn’t take any more of sitting in this room I had to leave this building and get outside.

At the end of the long corridor I could see the glass door being my exit. My hurried walk turned into a running pace towards the seemingly diminishing portal in which to escape. I had to get out into the fresh air, I couldn’t breathe and I could only contain my emotions until I reached that door. As soon as I pushed it wide open my wretchedness burst free into the world. My hands cupped my face to distort my sobbing cries as I broke down from the inside out. Buckling over again as my partner tried to hold me up. The tears wouldn’t stop as I felt loss, anger, shame, guilt, frustration, hurt, despair. “When was it going to be MY time? When will I ever have happiness??! Why didn’t I stop and slow down? It’s all my fault, all my stupid, stupid fault. I should have protected her, stopped feeling so stressed. I don’t deserve to be happy, I’m a failure!”

Our internal dialogue can be harsh at the best of times and right now I held nothing back in turning inwards on myself.

*​​*​​*​​*​​*​​*

A week later you’ll find me on the cycling track still trying to exorcise these feelings. My tactic was to smash myself as hard and fast as I physically could as if it would successfully drive out my demons. I was pushing 30kph as the speedometer measured me around the circular park. It was a busy Saturday morning and I was squeezing in a 20k ride after work and before a shopping date. Faster and faster overtaking pedestrians, cyclists and the cars on the inner lane. Music was pumping through my headphones with a motivating app telling me to push harder and harder but the thought of my loss still afflicted me

‘I just want the pain to STOP!’ I thought when suddenly I crashed into a car sending both me and my bike into a summersault.

It was more than a symbolic wake-up call as to how I needed to change something.

Wherever I looked I saw memories of where I had built up my hopes of being a mother. The park I used to walk in talking to my belly, the pool I swam in so anxiously and the centre that revealed my loss. They would haunt me every place I’d go. I tried to outrun them but it was no use. This place I had called home for five years gave me no solace anymore, and the bike accident only confirmed it was time for a new start.

Moving two hours north gave me hope and excitement. Within just four more months I was ready to try to conceive again. This time I felt really ready and I have never wanted anything so much. We didn’t have to wait long as nine months later my baby boy was birthed with no complications or pain relief. He snuggles into my arms every day, every morning a blessing, every morning I’m so grateful.

“I want a cuddle mummy” he says as my heart glows warmly so complete and fulfilled. Nothing could prepare me for the loss I had felt before, but nothing prepared me for the love that would flow an everlasting waterfall of adoration that is my son.

His favourite colour is purple, as he so often paints. But some days he chooses sunshine yellow after talking of seeing his sister come home to stay.

How would that look?

What would they say?

Would she protect him?

How would they play?

For you Isabella,

I hold dear in my heart

I feel on a soul level

We will never be apart

You live true within us,

I carry in my arms

Not one child I dream of

But two I keep from harm

Each year I pick a flower

To remember the deep blue

I’ll find you in the ocean,

To tell you I love you

Until then dear daughter,

Riding on the Ray,

Please know that I sure miss you

Every single day

Love Mum x