My husband was a youth pastor for many years and we had a friend who we did youth ministry with whose brand new baby has heart problems and has to have open heart surgery. She is a week old and fighting for her life and I find myself feeling jealous. I am jealous that their baby girl gets to fight for her life while mine never got that chance. If only she had been born alive, we would have had those precious moments together and the chance to pray and hope for her recovery. We were given no warning, so there was nothing to pray for except the impossible - that God would somehow miraculously bring her back to life. I sometimes feel like the fact she was "stillborn" invalidates my grief, or at least people use it to invalidate me. She was ready to be here and we were ready to have her. Alive or not, I gave birth, held her, kissed her and loved her. I'll never forget the friend who responded, "Oh, she never took a breath? I didn't know that." As if somehow that made it less hard, less painful or less real that she was here. I find myself needing to prove that she was alive, a person. There is really no reason for this post except that my feelings for our friend's baby took me by surprise. I do care and want his baby to live. But his family is probably going to have this "deep experience" and think that they have been through the worst, yet I know they have not. I really do hope this is the worst that they will ever experience, but part of me is so jealous that they get to have it. I feel cheated.
I didn't have anywhere to take these feelings, so I've brought them here. I love that MISS exists, that you get it and that I have a place to go, even years later, when my grief is triggered and I feel as raw as I did in the beginning. Thank you for listening ...
