Almost

I almost could've been a 26 year old mother of a 5th grader.
I almost could have asked for more ultrasounds, more monitoring, if I had known certain things weren't quite right.
I almost could have died, hemorrhaged, or ended up with a hysterectomy at 17, if the doctors had not been able to get out the pieces of placenta, that remained attached to my uterus, in time.

I almost could have remained ignorant about sheer agony that the loss of a child brings.

But I didn't.

Now, I'm 26 years old, newly married to a man who's my best friend and who I'm madly in love with. I think about the future and I see a growing family, overabundance of love and camaraderie, adventure, hope....all the things that an ecstatic newlywed feels. I think about the past and the "what if's", the things I didn't know because of the incompetency of others, the things I wish I'd done if I wasn't filled with such a raw, unfamiliar pain, and the things I miss, the person I miss. I think about the now... and it's filled with so much uncertainty. Here's to trying to swim through muddied waters... to never forgetting the mother within me... and to finding discovering motherhood in the future.