An ever present, ongoing internal battle

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide to forever have your heart go walking around outside your body.” ~ Elizabeth Stone

You may be wondering why I chose that particular quote for today’s post since we decided to have a child roughly 24 months ago. Well, lately, I’ve been doing a lot of pondering and contemplating and fighting an internal battle over whether or not we, or I guess I should say I, will ever be ready for another child.

I have such mixed emotions about pretty much the entire situation and frankly, I’m scared to death of a repeat. As you have probably read or know, I had a pretty complicated pregnancy last time, what with my cervix being short and thin and dilating early, being put on bed rest at 28 weeks, 3 separate stays in the hospital, pPROM at 33 weeks and then a week in the hospital being pumped full of IV antibiotics. While yes, all of that was scary, that was just the tip of the iceberg -Brianne was born 6 weeks premature and spent 3 weeks in the NICU and all the apnea scares and the reflux and the sleep deprivation and everything that comes with having a newborn baby. I honestly don’t know if I have the strength to go through it all again.

I have done my research too. Only between 1–3% of pregnant women experience pPROM, and of those 1-3%, like 99% deliver within 24 hours of the pPROM. So, I fell into the 1% that was able to stay pregnant for more than 24 hours but that’s twice in the same pregnancy that I ended up in a very small minority. And women who have experienced pPROM have a 30% chance of it happening again. In hindsight, I could totally do bed rest again, although it would be more difficult with a child on the outside as well, but it wouldn’t depress me the way it did last time. I know the signs and symptoms of preterm labor now so at least I would be more vigilant about calling the doctor when something seemed off. But no one knows what causes pPROM and there really is nothing they can do to prevent something that has no known cause. What if next time it happens but it happens earlier? 22 weeks? 26 weeks? Wouldn’t I be tempting fate and if to get pregnant again? Especially since I am going to be 35 next April?

But then I think of all the positives: another child to love, a sibling for Brianne (which would be awesome since I am an only child), the wonderful parts of being pregnant again, the opportunity to experience a normal pregnancy and a full term birth, buying cute baby clothes again, picking out names... I guess I have alot of things to weigh because there is also one more big negative - paying for 2 kids in daycare!

We have discussed this before and both agree that if we are going to do it we want to wait till Brianne is at least 3 because it would just be better on us with daycare costs and would be a nice age diff. So I guess I have some time to think all of this through and dicuss further with Jase. But, if we do it, and we have a boy, I like the name Soren...