Vanished

12/12/2017

I had a dream. It’s all I can think about. It was such a beautiful dream, and I can’t bear to think that I might forget it. Though, I’m not sure that I ever could. 

He was so beautiful. When I dream of someone I’ve never met, I can never picture their face, but I saw his face as clearly as my own hands. He was so happy; the happiest human being I’ve ever met. He was so smart and I was so proud of him. 

He was my son. 

His hands were so soft and so small—I can still feel his tiny fingers when I close my eyes. I can feel his soft little temple under my lips as I’m writing this. His eyes are grey like most babies, and his hair is still deciding what it’s going to be: brown like mine, or strawberry blond like my brother. I can hear his little noises; they’re louder than the music filling my bedroom. Ive never heard his voice, yet I heard it clear as day last night. 

I don’t want to wait for him any longer. 

Seven months later, to the day, Louis was conceived. 

It wasn’t until he was lying before us in our bed, just a month after I gave birth, that I remembered this journal entry. I remember thinking that he looked so familiar, like I had seen him somewhere before. That’s when I frantically flipped through my journal for this entry and read it aloud to Ryan. When I was finished reading, we sat in silence for a time. 

Ryan told me that his mother dreamt about him for years before he was born. 

My aunt dreamt of a son for ten years, and finally he was there, just a year before Louie. 

I KNEW dreams like these happened, but, even after all the evidence, I had never expected them to be a real thing that could happen to me. It happened to other people and they told you about it at Thanksgiving dinner.  

Nevertheless, Louie had called me. Clear as a bell ringing. 

Just Louie. 

A pregnancy test(or two, for good measure) a nervous call to the Women’s Center, and a frustrating conversation about how you don’t get “assigned” to an OBGYN(for hell’s sake woman, just set me up with the next available OBGYN, I was just trying to be clever) and many sleepless nights later, I was only a week away from my first appointment. I sat awake, day and night, scrolling through Pinterest, as all newly found-out mother’s do these days, planning my baby’s nursery and pinning my favorite maternity outfits. 

But I soon found myself searching “twin nursery ideas” and I wasn’t sure why. I kept teasing Ryan that we were having twins. I started searching google for symptoms of a twin pregnancy. As my appointment grew closer, I grew more and more sure. I knew. There were two. 

The day we went in for our very first appointment and ultrasound, I was nervous. Because I KNEW he was going to find two babies. 

As I watched the screen light up with the black and white image of my womb, my heart skipped a beat. This was it. I clenched Ryan’s hand as he documented everything on his phone. 

It only lasted ten seconds, but I felt my doctor hesitate. We watched him skip over what looked like a little black hole. “There’s one baby.” He said, as he settled on Louis. He was kicking and wiggling and we couldn’t get a good read on his heart because he just seemed so excited that we could see him. For a moment, I forgot about that empty space. But it was still in the back of my head. “There’s one baby” I could feel my heart still sinking, despite my excitement. 

The doctor went back to the tiny black hole that was slowly chipping away at my heart. 

“It looks like you had a twin gestation, but the second sac is empty. This means that you must have lost the twin early on in the pregnancy.”

I wanted so badly to break down and cry but I kept telling myself “you’ve got one you’ve got one you’ve got one.”

That’s more than enough, right?

I said “Oh. Okay.” 

“The placenta just absorbs it. You won’t birth it.”

“Okay.” 

But I felt it. I knew. I knew I knew I knew. I wanted to throw a tantrum. I wanted to tell him that he must be wrong. 

But... it had vanished. 

Poof.

Vanishing Twin Syndrome is surprisingly common. It can occur without symptoms(aka: no bleeding), as mine did, but some researchers suspect that it can happen even before an ultrasound can detect it. 

Vanishing Twin Syndrome happens in 36% of multiple gestation pregnancies, and 50% in pregnancies with three or more gestations. 

Researchers don’t fully understand it. There are speculations as to why it may happen, in some instances it’s a matter of chromosomal abnormalities. Otherwise, the cause is unknown. 

The biggest mistake I made, that entire pregnancy, was playing it off like it didn’t matter that I lost one. I still had a baby. 

But I wasn’t okay. I was awake nights staring at pictures of two cribs side by side. I was still googling symptoms of twin pregnancies. I still felt like I had two. My body was confused and my brain didn’t want to admit the truth so that we could heal. 

One day, I decided that I should draw how I felt. So I drew this picture. It’s still unfinished.

When I showed Ryan, I cried. We both cried. We held each other tight and let ourselves finally feel the pain. Heartbreak over a miscarriage is of a different kind. It hurts terribly to miss someone you never met. To have loved them so fiercely and so all-at-once and to know that you’ll never meet them. 

Except, then we started to talk about Heaven. 

Ryan told me that he believes that when you die, someone is there to greet you, to accompany you through the gates of Heaven. He told me how his dad imagines that heaven would be every dog he every loved greeting him with slobbery kisses and wagging tails. 

He said “maybe our baby will be there to greet us” 

As comforting as that was, it still hurt. My baby was all alone, while all three of us were here together. They were waiting and waiting, and they were going to keep waiting for a very long time, all alone. 

However, I tried desperately to tell myself that it made me feel better anyway. And to do that, I had to talk about it. 

So I told my family about that conversation. 

And I don’t know how to tell you about nagging thoughts. How sometimes, in the middle of the night, they make you feel chilly and you have to pull your covers up to your chin to sleep. About how they don’t ever go away. How they appear while you’re brushing your teeth, or when you’re sitting alone on a bench. I don’t know how to tell you about the significance of the empty space beside you. And I don’t know how to tell you what it feels like when something is missing but you don’t know what that means... but you do. 

I don’t know how to tell you how relieved I was, how it felt like a great big sigh, how I felt the weight of that nagging and nagging lift and come to light when my mother told me 

That 

I was a twin. 

And suddenly, there was a bit of calm. The storm in my heart found a bit of relief, and all I could see were two hands, interlocked. Two silhouettes. Waiting. 

Together. 

There’s a certain longing that can’t be cured.

Would we have the same eyes? What would they think about? What do they sound like? What is their name? 

I suppose, after that dream, I should have known that two were not meant to be. After all, it was only Louie who came to me. 

Losing a baby, no matter how early, is hard. Losing a baby, even though you still have one, is still hard. It’s all beyond difficult. Coping with losing one baby and still giving birth to a perfect, healthy baby, is very confusing. You’re over the moon for the beautiful baby that you’ve just brought into this world, but filled with massive sadness at the loss of the other. Even if it did happen at six weeks pregnant, and even if you forget to remember that sadness until the midnight feedings.
My pain is not any less significant than that of a singleton miscarriage, and it’s taken me a long time to realize that. I loved that baby. And I never even got to feel it’s movements.

As I’ve scrolled through articles and studies about the loss of a twin and the affect it has on the mother and the surviving twin, I’ve seen so many of the different ways that people cope with the loss of a baby, or try to anyway. 

But only one thing helps me: 

My baby is home, waiting for me with my own other half, and I will reverently remember them in my heart.

And someday, when Louie is old enough, I’ll tell him about his twin too. 

7/14/19

I don’t know what their names would have been, or what they would have looked like, how they would have sounded, or what their personalities would have been like, but I don’t want to assign any of that to them. That’s their own secret, and someday I’ll be in on it too. I imagine they’ll both be there, waiting for me, when I pass away too. Holding hands. Smiling warmly. Waving me over to join them.

My father in-law says that heaven would be every dog he ever loved running to greet him with wagging tails. 

That’s not my heaven.

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Blog: @smalltown.squirrel

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