The Cone of Uncertainty

The month is almost over, for which I am very grateful. I am back from a 2 week vacation that has left me depressed for reasons uncertain. I am struggling to understand why. We had an enchanting time, but did spend much time wet and cold, but didn't seem to mind, although neither of us could convince the natives of this. We tried explaining the 100 degree weather we had left here in Texas, but only those who had actually experienced such could comprehend that choosing which sweater (heavy black or heavy green?) to wear each morning in August was not a problem.
We spent a magical day in Crieff, Scotland where I celebrated my 45th birthday and attended the Highland Games. Crieff is also the home to the home to Ewan MacGregor and The Famous Grouse Whiskey. While Ewan wasn't in attendance this year, his father and brother were and there was plenty of Scottish Whiskey. We also went to the Isle of Skye, rode the sleeper car to Aberdeen and shopped at all my favorite stores. ( Almost every store in Scotland is my favorite, even the ones with the really trashy Nessies.)
We also spent some time in London and spent a whirlwind day on a bus tour that took us to Stonehenge, Windsor Castle and Oxford England. Stonehenge was strangely disappointing and I am not sure if it was the crowds of people or that it seemed so diminished by it location in the middle of fields, or by my increasing depression. It just was not as I had imagined it, after all these years of watching television specials and reading articles and books. I felt detached and without the imagined magic.
I have felt this way before, this detached, survival mode, but didn't expect to feel it in England on vacation, surrounded by multitudes of strangers. It is only now, with a few days to think that I realize that my inner clock had understood what I had traveled half the world to escape, that this particular month of August marked the anniversary of the birth and death of our child.
It is only recently that I told my oldest son about his second sister, as he was just a toddler when she was born. He was sad and said he suddenly understood the age gap between him and next sibling. He and his older sister are only 14 months apart and there is a considerably bigger gap between him and his next living sister. I have not yet told the other kids about their sister, as we are suddenly dealing with another health related revelation that affects their future in a very negative way and I do not want to add to the girls' burden.
The pregnancy with my daughter over 20 years ago was not a planned one nor an especially welcomed one. This of course causes me all sorts of guilt and angst even 20 plus years later.
At the time I was in my mid 20s with 2 year old and a one year old and my husband had just gotten out of the Navy after 4 years. I spent 6 weeks living in Stephenville Texas in a hotel while DH drove to his new job as a nuclear engineer at the nearby power plant. I lost 25 pounds in 6 weeks due in part to stress, I had quit college to marry, and could see no way clear with a very unhappy husband, I was stranded in a hotel without a car during the week and frantically looking for a place to live during the weekends.
We quickly made an offer on a fixer upper in a small town, moved in without our furniture, which was in storage and set about finding an ob/gyn. Then as Tash would say the wheels started to come off. The dates never matched on the ultrasounds, and I kept telling the doctors that the baby was too small for dates. Instead of listening to me, I was just told that I must be wrong and that my doctors in Connecticut were wrong, that I wasn't really pregnant when I thought I was and that I got pregnant much later.
Of course, if you have a daughter that turned two in March and a son that turned one in May you don't keep track of you periods as if your life depended on it and know exactly the morning that you woke up to find the diaphragm in the sheets? I know, too much information, but I had a very early blood test as soon a possible so I knew exactly how many weeks pregnant I was by dates. However, because I conceived and got my early prenatal care in Connecticut it was as those early weeks of care never happened.
We went to specialists for more comprehensive ultrasounds and the results were the same, my dates must be wrong. When confronted with my positive pregnancy tests there was only puzzlement, until finally my baby died in utero and then all the experts agreed that okay, there must have been something wrong.
21 years later there is a sort of mind numbing amnesia around that time. New friends took the two children so that I could go and deliver my tiny child. We didn't tell our families, embarrassed by my accidental pregnancy and not wanting to share our very private pain, and the Midwestern sense of privacy from his family and the intrusive questions from mine.
We grieved for our little girl and have always felt an absence in our planned family. Even now, with a possible diagnosis of Vascular Ehler Danlos Syndrome likely to ring the death knoll on our plans to finally add to our family through donor IVF, I can't help but wonder if this diagnosis is what killed our little girl. I go for genetic testing on September 25th, so I will let you know.