On the Ides of March

I had two very vivid dreams last night. In the first, I was bleeding. Copiously, with large clots. And I knew I was miscarrying. I lay down in my dream and willed the bleeding to stop. That is where things went fuzzy. Later in the night, I imagined that I spanned my hands across my belly and felt the baby’s strong movements. I’m pretty sure I smiled in my sleep.

Tonight I am spotting. Not much. It may have even stopped by now. I intellectually understand that this is fairly common and can have no significance whatsoever. And that if this is the worst case, there isn’t anything I can do to change the outcome. But the little voice in my head is panicked. “I never spotted with Scooter.” “I’d already had an ultrasound by this point in my last pregnancy, had proof that the baby was there.” “What about the dream?”

That first dream is, of course, the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the blood, and I told Trillian about it as I told her about the spotting. It was not until after I called the midwife—and established that she will get me in for a walk-in ultrasound tomorrow—that I remembered the second one. I am clinging to that right now, the fact that it was so real that I could almost swear I really felt the baby kick.

I will be figuratively holding my breath until I can see my answer on the ultrasound screen tomorrow. Trillian tells me this is the younger one’s way of upstaging her older brother. He gave us a scare at 6 ½ weeks with slow-rising HCG levels, so she’s going to wait a little longer and make me bleed. He got his picture taken at 7 weeks, so where is hers already? And this is what I will try to focus on in the meantime: the stories I will be able to tell my second child about the grief she caused me even before she was born.