Another baby?

It has been about six weeks since I lost my pregnancy and with it, the hope for the baby that was going to be. At first, I was doing all right: these things happen, you move on, and you make the best choices you can moving forward.

A few days ago, my husband and I decided, there would be no more babies in our future.  It was an easy decision, requiring little discussion.  Our kids are growing and in preschool, which avails us of the opportunity to gain financial stability that got lost somewhere in the last few years' economic markets. We are starting a business - a real thing - in a few weeks, we'll be leasing an office and hiring engineers and sales people to propel it forward. We do have a perfect family: a boy and a girl, both intelligent, healthy physically and emotionally. I've been lonely the last few years; happy but lonely, cut off from society, friends and intellectual peers by the task of parenting. Honestly, I am looking forward to being in the middle of a bustling business, full of ups and downs, people, conflicts, celebrations and shared achievements. It all adds up to just about perfect. 

Only today I was crying.  Crying hard about the baby I lost. It's not the fetus whose body I saw and touched at the hospital, but what that the image of that tiny thing represents to me now. Would I never get to put a baby to my breast again? Rock an infant to sleep on my chest while walking around with a baby carrier? Will Alex never have "another baby" he has been so excited about? Will the family I have been imagining at Thanksgiving twenty years from now lack this new person that would have been?

This is the first time I have ever faced a heart-mind dichotomy, the phenomenon where what you believe is right is at odds with what you feel. I have always made each decision in my life with my eyes open, understanding my feelings and integrating emotions with reason. Is it because I never wanted anything this badly against all odds? Or because I am so busy wanting to prove to myself that I can make the right decision with ruthless precision at each turn, I was in a hurry to write this one in?

Whatever it is, the error was immediately clear to both of us as we sat discussing our future. Having a child is a decision that has to be made with one's heart. To put it another way, the only reason to have a child is because you want it so badly, it becomes paramount to your happiness. Raising and providing for a child require solid reason-based eyes open clear-cut decisions and I'll have the opportunity to give myself a chance to do all the computations necessary when the time comes.

In the meantime, we are giving it another try!