This Is My Baby Girl

This is the first time I saw my little girl.

This was the first time I held her hand.

This was when we were still fighting to save her life. She was drowning in her own blood and in so much pain even high doses of morphine would not stop her thrashing. She had to be restrained so she wouldn't cause more damage to herself.

This is when the fight had ended. Minutes after this, her breathing tube was taken out and she passed away in my arms.

This is her in her burial gown, lying in her teeny tiny coffin. She's wearing the gown I was blessed in as a baby. It  was huge on her, as I was 7 lbs and she was 1 lb 15 oz.

This was one of the last times I got to hold her. I had to put her in her coffin and watch as the top was sealed shut forever. 

This November she would be turning 3. I would be getting ready to enroll her in ballet lessons this fall, or maybe I would wait until spring depending on how she was doing developmentally. I would be buying cute girl clothes - she'd have an adorable swimming suit and we'd be playing in the water all summer long.

Instead, I'm growing frustrated at the lack of Independence Day decorations there are at my local dollar store. So I can decorate her grave. You know, this place:

Because that's all I can do for her now. 

So excuse me that I'm not jumping for joy that my sister is having a baby girl. The "first girl grandchild." This baby won't be the first. Everyone will get to buy her frilly things, and she will get to take ballet, and do all the things that I will never do with my baby girl. But she will never be the first female grandchild, because my baby girl was first.

Excuse me that I take offense when my sister hopes that, since her due date is in November, that she will have the baby on 11/11/11. It's a "cool date." She doesn't remember, but B would have been 3 years old that exact day. That's my daughter's birthday. Furthermore, 11/11/07 was my wedding date. B was born on our first anniversary, and the man I married just had a baby with another woman. When he has nothing to do with our son. Who I stayed in the hospital on bed rest for six weeks to get here, sat every day in the NICU with him for another 45 days praying every minute that he wouldn't die like his sister, and pumped breast milk for the first twenty months of his life, because I just knew if I didn't and he died, it would be my fault. He simply abandoned us after all of that and is having a wonderful life with a woman who can clearly produce full term babies. I call mercy. I am inferior, and I know it.

Excuse the fact that all of this information is overwhelming to me. Excuse me for being heartbroken over everything I have lost. Excuse me for letting that heartbreak be exacerbated by everyone else's joy.