Heavenly Possibilities

I'm going to do something I've never done before. I'm copying and pasting from Facebook. Am I lazy, no, I just felt like it would be good to share with two different audiences. A friend of mine shared a post from the blog Rage Against the Minivan it was about how today, October 15th is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. I was kind of taken aback, because I could have sworn it was October 17th, and I had been planning to say something about it.....and now, now I've all but missed it. And so I decided to share something with the world that I've not talked much about........and here it is.

Our Babies. Let's talk about our babies. Would you find it strange if I said that I don't know how many children I have? I really don't. The records of the government and of my church say that I have 3 children. I love those 3 children with all my heart. But I've had 5 pregnancies.

I've never been certain why, but a friend once asked me about family group sheets (genealogical records) and when a child's name could be added to it. I've look at a lot of family group sheets in my life (Thanks Grandma Turner!) and I know that I've seen stillborn children on them, so I told her that I was pretty confident that if a child had been stillborn they could be added to a family group sheet. She then asked how old (Gestationally) a baby would have to be, to be considered stillborn. I really didn't know. 23 weeks? Maybe 20 weeks?

According to all medical knowledge, the two babies we lost were never viable, so they are not on our family group sheets. We have not named them. And like I said earlier, I don't even know if they are my babies.

This summer I sat next to a woman on an early morning bus to a half marathon. I don't remember how the subject came up, but we started talking about pregnancy loss. She had experienced it and so had I. As a member of a local Pregnancy and Infant Loss facebook group I've read a lot of differing beliefs about when "life" begins, when a baby is, well, a baby. One woman said something about how Brigham Young (a Prophet and President of my church a long time ago) said that when a woman feels the quickening (or the movements of her baby) that is when the child's spirit has entered the child's body, and she
(the facebook poster) hadn't felt her baby move but she had seen it move on an ultrasound and she fully expected that she would meet that child in heaven.

Our church doesn't really have a hard and fast teaching about WHEN a spirit enters the body, when it becomes a soul, when that child will most definitely be with you in heaven. I do believe that my family can be eternal, and that I will be with them forever, and I found myself expressing to my bus mate that morning (yep, we're back on the bus), that I really didn't know how many children to expect in heaven, but if I find myself in heaven someday, and someone walks up to me and says "Mom, it's me! You made it" I will be overjoyed and I will say "How awesome are you! You only needed me to make and carry your body for 10 weeks, and then you got to go straight to heaven! By the way, do you like the name Bubbles, because that's all we ever called you." It could happen, I guess but, I really don't know.

And so I just try to be the best Kate I can be, so that if I do have one or two Angelic Children waiting for me, that I'll be ready and able to be with them, AND the rest of my awesome family, forever.

And those are my thoughts on this day. National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day.