Happy 8 weeks, blobby. I am freaking out

We are 8 weeks pregnant today, Baby C. Our MFM believes that if we make it to 10 weeks, we will be looking at a viable pregnancy. I have already decided to opt out of prenatal testing for you, like with Conner and Benjamin.  I haven't had it in me to take a belly picture yet.  It is too late to take a "before" picture - you are already starting to show.  Either that, or I am eating way too much, which is highly probable since you are not giving me any nausea.  Thanks, by the way.

I am freaking out. I am too scared to announce that you are making your appearance in just over 7 months.

People will treat you like you are my first baby.  You are my third.  I won't be having a baby shower, because I cannot stand the thought of people treating me like this is my first pregnancy.  They'll ask me questions and be all over my belly and I'll be thinking, "no one is asking me how it was with Conner and Ben."

People will think that I feel better now that you are coming.  Like now that I have you, I can stop grieving over your brothers.  They'll think, oh, now she will be having a real baby.  Well, screw them already.

They will think that since we were trying to get pregnant, we were obviously moving on with our lives.

I've been doing a lot of psychological research on subsequent pregnancies after loss, mostly because I am curious and also because it is part of my graduate research for my thesis project.  Women who get pregnant less than one year after their loss show signs of PTSD, clinical depression, and pathological anxiety.  So, it turns out that getting pregnant doesn't make you feel better. It makes you feel worse.

But, little blobby, I don't want you to think that I don't want you.  I love you already.  I'm going to try to be the mother I wanted to be to your brothers; the kind of mother that Conner and Ben could be proud of.  I just wish that I could have you and have your brothers, too.  Or, because I know I can't have that, I wish I could have you and have the people in our lives recognize that you are our third baby and not our first.

I know that I'm jumping the gun and assuming this is how people will act.  But we've learned a lot about how people think after we lost your brothers.  They asked if their memorial brought us closure (it didn't).  They said I would feel better if I had another baby (how the hell would they know?).  They never recognized me as a mother.  I'm like an eclipse.  They won't look directly at me.  People have called losing your brothers a miscarriage.  No.  They breathed and moved and made noises and I have their birth certificates and social security cards and I labored and all that shit for days and I gave birth to them.  People don't realize that your brothers lived. I guess they don't think those two and a half hours counted.  What is the cutoff, then?  Can someone tell me what counts as life?  Two hours? Two days?  Two weeks?

When we tell our friends and family about you, I want the same reaction we had with the boys - excited screaming, phone calls back to back, our phones blowing up with people offering their congratulations.  I have a feeling people will be more cautious this time.

Nevertheless, happy 8 weeks Baby C.  We are still anxiously awaiting your arrival.  Someday the world will know you are coming... whether that be in an announcement a few weeks from now, or whether that be through phone calls when I'm in labor.  I guess the only thing that is really important is that you know all about your brothers and you recognize the life they had in them as well as the lessons that they still have to teach us. I think that you'll be a better person because of them.

** I should probably add here that in no way do I want to minimize the impact of a miscarriage. The grief would overwhelm me, too. I simply feel that when people say I miscarried that they are not acknowledging what really happened.**