No, not me, I’m not having a baby.  I saw a friend's pregnancy announcement on Facebook. It happens all the time. I just happened to notice this one. What affected me about this one is that she is my same age. We started having kids around the same time and she’s still married to her same husband. 

The announcement read:  We’re having a baby!  They’re holding one another in the picture.  I think about how many years they’ve been together, uninterrupted. This is baby #8 for them.  So when I saw this particular baby announcement, the first feeling I had was that of a sad longing…

I felt happy for them of course, but it was a new feeling of loss for me. What was it though really?  I was surprised at my sadness, why was I feeling sad?  As I thought about it and leaned into it, I realized that the happy couple’s announcement represented another loss for me.

This loss I hadn’t thought about or realized yet, until now.   I had just realized something else I lost.  Usually when I see baby announcements it’s a young mom and it’s a first or second baby.  I usually think, ‘Gosh, I’m glad I’m out of that phase.’  

So it’s not that I didn’t feel happy for my friend or that I’ve desperately wanted to have more babies.  Nor is it that my actual physical ability to have children is gone. No, it’s just that with the death of my husband, I also lost my choice to bring more children into our family, a new realization.

I then remembered that on one of the last dates we went on, we actually talked about the possibility of having another baby.  In my heart, I do still want a little girl.  I would have loved to have tried for that girl.  We probably would have had another boy, but I’d have been happy with another boy too. 

Now that choice is gone and has been gone for years. Those years have passed and I’ve gotten older too.  Even with the possibility of a new partner, that’s an unknown future.  Without any prospects that make my heart flutter,  I feel that chance slipping away.  

As my youngest gets further and further away from that precious phase, I want less and less to even think about going into the baby phase again. If I was actually going to do that,  I would have liked to do that sooner than now. And sooner than now is as gone as my husband. 

That choice was also taken away from me. Nobody asked me if it was ok.  I had no choice in the matter.  I still have no ability to change that.  But for my friend and her husband, because they’re still together, they have that choice. They can and I can’t.  Awe… that’s sad and that’s the sadness I felt.

So that’s why I felt sad.  Yeah, it makes sense.  It was just a realization.  Something I hadn’t thought of yet. It hit me about yet another loss that keeps the grief of things that come from loss. This is why I keep asking myself, when does the grief and loss end?  Well it doesn’t seem to and now I’m beginning to see that. There will probably never be an end to it. It will continue to surprise me where the loss and the grief (that follows) will pop up.  I don’t know when or how or where it will come from.

It’s now just a part of life, I learned in another way. I’ll need to learn to manage it, expect it and figure out how to deal with it in a healthy way. It’s a new way of life.  You don’t get over a loss like this, you feel it every day, over and over. You learn to live life in a new way with a “new normal.” It’s not a “normal” that feels normal and it’s all ok.