McKenna Joi: A Memoriam

Today marks the due date of my third pregnancy. That's right, my third. It started sometime last June and ended tragically 9 weeks later: August 29th, 2006. No bigger than a peanut.

My miscarriage was one of the hardest things I've ever gone through. Okay, maybe the hardest. But to tell you the truth, I never felt alone...and I never felt that no one cared. I had my God, who was there when I needed a lap to crawl into and a chest to lay my head upon. I had my dear husband, who was feeling many of the same things I was, and was there to cry with me and to pick me up when I physically couldn't move. And I had a great network of friends and family who showed me support and love.

But I had to wonder what had caused this tragedy. Was it something I had done? My doctors assured me that there was nothing I could've done to either cause or prevent what had happened. Heredity may have played a part. My mother had 5 miscarriages. What made me think that I was safe? That I would never suffer the same heartache? I may never have the answers.

And maybe the most disheartening of all? Eight weeks is probably the earliest you can detect a fetal heartbeat with a "primitive" doppler heartrate detector. But lo and behold, my doctor was able to detect the heart tones during my 8th week of pregnancy! Extremely rare! How mind-numbing that only a week later, I was carrying my precious, highly anticipated little offspring into the doctor's office in a Cool Whip container.

How do you memorialize such a short life? To be true, we didn't know the gender of this baby. But I will tell you this: during my short pregnancy, I did have an attraction to all things pink. It is this that I cling to for some sort of vitality. So we picked out a name for this child, like we would have any other one of our children. And she will be remembered in our hearts forever:

Our little McKenna Joi