Kissing pure love

"Mummy, popcorn.......mummy buggy, walk.......popcorn".  Sitting reflectively on my own, like a statue in a great open hall, is a thing of the past.  My wild 21 month old toddler hurtles around the house shouting and pushing his buggy aggressively (in every possible direction, mainly at me) at a wicked 4mph and I jump.

I knit my eyebrows together and gulp back the sketchy plans we had begun to hold gently, yet deeply, in our layered hearts. I look wistfully at the sky, storks flying overhead.  I breathe, Leo runs, arms held aloft, catching the smoke from next door's bonfire in his hands. I close my eyes.  I breathe.

Chris had to leave for Murchison this morning, a hire car packed to the brim with supplies and a ladder of ridiculous length tied to the roof.  If I need him he'll come, if something like a whoooosh happens then he'll be here faster than a shooting star, but the whoooosh I'm waiting for is unlikely.  My history knows it.

Last night alcohol passed my lips for the first time in several weeks.  I wasn't trying to forget but none of it feels real.  Like waves reclaiming the shore, memories get erased over time and I feel this happening now, but it's too soon, too quick and too sudden.  But life is like that.  My history speaks it.

I'm one of those statistics, or at least that's what everyone who calls themselves a Doctor has told me over the last 4.5 years.  I'm not supposed to be able to fall pregnant without the gloved arm of modern science, but I continue to buck the rules.  I don't walk the line and I don't follow the trends although I wish I had a haircut that turned heads.

Raising a finger to modern science a matchstick of a pregnancy test delivered the ultimate shock in December.  It was positive.  Chris and I wowed, stalled, cried, laughed, planned and hoped.  Trying hadn't been on the proverbial cards, we thought it near enough impossible, so I left the contraceptive blister pack unopened as my golden uterus proved otherwise.

We pressed lips against the winds of festive change, we only told my GP, a Dr and my mum.  Leo pressed his lips to 'mummy's tummy'.  What did his magic and wise soul know?  We spent Christmas in Murchison.  It was hot, it was busy, we fed over 40 people and the Lodge was manic.  I slept on Boxing day, a deep sleep I have not known since before Leo was born.

The New Year we celebrated with a handful of close friends.  We lay on blankets around a fire in our garden and lit candles, a lantern and ordered a take away curry.  We raised glasses to the year of 2013 and all that she would bring - she kicked her bright heels and nodded discretely at us.  I drank soda water with a twist of lemon and booked a date scan for the 8th January.

On Tuesday Chris, Leo and I visited Alice (who has long been part of my pregnancy history here in Uganda) for an ultrasound and as she moved her wand over my stomach Leo shouted 'mummy noooo' and wriggled in Chris's arms.  My pregnancy symptoms had been nothing but filthy and there was no spotting.  We were nervously hopeful.

But I know not to look Lady Luck directly in the face for she cares little.  Alice took too long to locate a heartbeat.  I knew it.  I felt it.  I saw it from the strain of her face staring into the screen.  She used more pressure on my lower abdomen.  Leo fidgeted and climbed onto the padded bed and lay across my chest.  Chris smiled.  A smile worth a thousand wishes.

My uterus revealed not 1 but 2 egg sacs, but only 1 contained the very beginnings of a pearl.  I measured 8 weeks and 1 day, but the tiny seahorse fetus had stopped growing at 6 weeks.  What do you say, what do you do?  You conceded and admit defeat because there's absolutely nothing else but to cry.

I visited Dr Busingye that afternoon (he performed a d&c when I miscarried in 2009) and he gave me my options.  I requested the drugs, the thought of having my uterus touched so soon after surgery in September made me wince.  I started the course on Wednesday and again Thursday.  Nothing of significance has happened, no whooosh.  I have another scan booked for Monday and if everything is intact I will need a d&c. 

I'm willing my body to turn itself inside out.

I shared my news with a girlfriend who has known me longer than I dare remember and has a pained history of her own.  I poured out my anger, my fears for Leo being an only child, the sadness of right now and the whole fucking unfairness of it all.  She replied immediately with words of tenderness and love, finishing off:-  I raise my gin and tonic with you.  To the wretchedly cruel turns life can take and the unbelievably beauty that still happens every single day.

It's often so hard to see the beauty in anything when you just want to envelope yourself in pure sadness, but beauty remains in the eye of the beholder and it surrounds us constantly.  We just need to prise the flip flop from the mouth to kiss pure love squarely in the face.  And to never, ever let the beauty go.