Given this baby is having a wriggle free 24 hours, I’m finding even thinking about writing this down very hard. But I promised myself I would keep notes and the only reason this isn’t on my other blog is because I’m not ready to raise the girls hopes yet.

I had a scan on Thursday. All the important, truly important, things are good. Heart looks good, stomach is visibly full, growth is good. Baby was moving and wiggling and kicking, things I’ve felt reasonably often for a week or so now.

I’m 17 weeks and dear, lovely L had said she would look for the baby’s sex at 16 weeks plus. If Freddie had lived, in the unlikely event we’d have gone for number 6, I think I wouldn’t have wanted to know. It was odd, I found knowing who Freddie was in advance a strange thing after never knowing with the girls. And I think the loss of the boyness of him was greater, because we had so much time to prepare for him as just that, rather than a baby. But as it is, I needed to know because I miss my boy and I miss knowing I was expecting to see a boy grow up.

Of course the baby was feeling coy, with a foot tucked up in the relevant bit. L thought she saw, then she thought maybe she saw the other. I wriggled about a bit; she thought again but still, knowing how important the outcome was to me was, she didn’t want to call it.

“I think I know but what if I tell you wrong?”

“If it’s a girl, tell me. Then it’s over. If you only think it is a girl tell me, then changing is a surprise and I’ll be okay with that.”

“But what if I think it is the other?”

“Hmmm…..”

Back I got on all fours and wiggled my bum in the air some more. There is truly no dignity left. She looked again, smiled and said “Okay, that’s a leg, that’s a leg, that’s cord…” and then she pointed to a squashy thing with a little bit poking out the top.

“Boy?”

“I think so.”

I don’t know what I thought I would do. Actually I reacted how I thought I might react if I heard it was a girl. I breathed in, my eyes filled up and then I gritted my teeth. Because I’m not going to believe it for a while and I wish like anything I had a photo of that view because I made the stupid mistake of coming home? and googling. I googled boy and thought “yes, I saw that” then googled girl and thought “but what if I saw that?”

The truth, the real truth, is that of course it doesn’t matter. I want one that makes it full term and screams the house down when it arrives. I want to watch all the rest of my conceived babies grow up and then still be alive when I am not. But the other truth is that, having never wanted boys at all, I just really looked forward to the idea of a son. I liked the thought of different, I was excited by the idea of change and something fresh and being a different sort of mummy. The truth is not that I want to be summoning Freddie back, the truth is that when we knew him, ‘son’ added a piece of family jigsaw I didn’t know was missing, that Max didn’t know was missing. We can’t have Freddie back, his jigsaw piece will always be lost, but I so wanted to heal as many hurts as possible with this baby. I wanted Max to have a son who might want to go car racing with him. I wanted to release Maddy from trying to shoulder that burden. I wanted to release us all from flinching when we see little boys and talk of brothers and sons.

I know that on arrival, a girl would fill a new hole we also hadn’t spotted was thus far empty. But I don’t think it is wrong to acknowledge you can’t fix, but want to fix as well as possible. Not a new face in place of the burned one, but plastic surgery as good as possible. I feel guilty for hoping for boy really, but oh… I do hope for boy. I know that now, with that little piece of burden lifted a tiny bit, I am a tiny bit more joyful, a tiny bit more hopeful. I so much didn’t want to have to swallow my soul and choose to be glad.

Now, of course, I am terrified. I’m terrified we are wrong, even though my heart had been saying “maybe boy” for a week or so. I’m terrified that we don’t about something that makes our boys sick. I’m afraid, so very afraid, of losing another son either because in two weeks someone says “girl” or because this one dies too. My girls come home. What if my boys don’t?

I wish I’d got her to take a picture of that view so I could keep looking at it. I need to know again and be sure before I let go and enjoy. I need to know this one will come home. I need to know that I’ve got the strength to mother a new son and I need to know I’ve got the courage to accept if actually this is a girl and stop anyway. Because how ever much we want a boy to heal the pieces that can be healed, I don’t have the strength to do this again. I’m all chewed up and wrung out. I’m all done. This is my chance, my last chance to say “my girls and my boys” to always have the right and confidence to acknowledge Freddie as one of us.

I promised that if it happened again, if I got lucky, that I wouldn’t do silence. But I am silent, because of course the girls don’t know – we’d rather protect them from the worry and I can’t deal with the constant checking up on me – and so I’m not writing. I’m not keeping a record of how this feels, to be pregnant again.

I don’t feel like I have had a worry free pregnancy; the closest was Amelie I think, when I wasn’t fretting about a defect, or another C/S, or a baby dying after it was born. The first three weeks of knowing this baby was in there were petrifying, I was an absolute shaking ball of panic. Every trip to the toilet was terror, waking up was frightening. And then, I went for a scan, to ease my mind – and there was no baby. I had blood tests – and the results weren’t as hoped. I wrote it off, stopped worrying, got back to running and waited to miscarry.

A week later, against the odds, there was a baby to be seen, measuring 7 weeks, the very bottom end of what was possible. I didn’t believe it, I thought it would go, but a week later, the middle of this week, there is was measuring 8 weeks. I still expect it to go. I don’t know why I think that but it comes down, I expect, to some innate belief that a baby dying is a punishment. I can’t really get past that, even though I don’t believe it. I just think it. I believe it with a part of me I can’t reprogramme, instead of with a piece I can. I don’t know when I might believe that a baby might result in this and come home. I looked at a picture of a baby in a bath today and all I could think of was “Perfect. How the hell do they come out perfect?” It’s a cousin of a thought I had when Freddie was still alive and I spent a snippet of a morning with Josie. “How the hell does she just breathe and move?” Or watching Robert Winston’s programme the day Fran came home. “How the hell do all those cells ever do the right thing?”

I might ask it about birth. How do they survive it? How do we survive it? What if one of us doesn’t – again? What if one of us dies because I choose a c-section? If I do, I am saying I believe I killed Freddie with his birth. Or someone did. How the bloody hell am I supposed to do another 30 weeks anyway?

Funnily enough, the miscarriage that wasn’t helped a bit. It broke the cycle of fear and panic and it hasn’t come back. What will be will be. It’s out of my hands, more or less. The consultant gave me quite a disapproving grilling about Downs. I’ve always had a bit of a thing about Downs, never felt I could be sure it would pass me by. Here I am, 37 with a baby who seems to have had an odd start. What are the chances? What would I do? Where do you draw the line in what level of disability you would choose to bring home?

It’s not possible to think as far ahead as February. I’ve barely managed to book myself as pregnant. I can’t begin to imagine this can end well. There is a flicker of hope, but what I can’t sense is who or what this is. I knew Freddie was a boy by 8 weeks. I think I already knew with the girls too. With this one, all I can sense is white. I’m frightened to hope and far too scared to plan. I’m just assuming that this is more potential heartbreak wrapped up in genetically replicated cells that we made.

Both scans, I brought home a picture. Both scans with a baby. I caught myself thinking “what is the point of a picture if it dies?” But of course, that is all I have of Freddie and it is enough to go on. I do hope we get to be able to have hope. If I can just get past Nuchal scan safely and as far as movement, perhaps I can hope. There is so much wrapped up in a baby that was hard to conceive though, just so very much. I don’t think I have it in me to do this again. I really don’t.

I’m glad now though, in a way, that it took so long. My grief for Freddie has come to an abrupt and powerful cessation in terms of tears. I can’t worry about this and cry for him. But I miss him, I just miss him so much. I’d rather have never had to do this again. I wanted him. I have no idea what to do if this is a boy or if this is a girl. Perhaps that is why I can only feel white.

So. I’m pregnant. Again. For the 7th real time and for the first time in 14 months. Fourteen long months. If I’m lucky this will be our 6th child and the 5th one we get to bring home from hospital. Lost among those numbers are a child I should have fought for, a child I knew not to fight too hard for and miss every day, 3 very early miscarriages and the baby who was, we think, Freddie’s twin. Too much loss, even if I do have my four girls.

I was completely taken by surprise. There were signs, sickyness, tiredness, getting up in the night – but I missed them all. Utterly. And then one Friday I found the knitting pattern I hunted for when pregnant with Freddie and a few minutes later, there was a rainbow out the back. I went upstairs and did a test. I didn’t even look at it; I put it down and walked away – but when I went back a few hours later, there was a shadow of a line, the next day it was darker, now it is actually pink.

I’ve never had a natural miscarriage, but I can’t rule out that fate will twist that out for us now. When I found out, I breathed the words into Max’s ear. He held me tight and said “I’m so happy for you.” A few moments later he said “So, the first step on the next stage of the adventure” and a few moments after that “I am happy. I am really happy. But it just isn’t like other times.”

That’s enough for me.

On the first real, tested in the mornig and really got a line day, all I thought was “Whatever happens, I can still get pregnant”, shortly followed by “If it can’t do well, I know better than to hope it hangs on”. Yesterday all I could think was “Shit. If I get really lucky, I just get to be terrified for 34 weeks and I still might not bring it home.” Today I’m trying to focus on the positive changes that perhaps brought this about; 10 days of antibiotics, 2 Canesten tablets, endless painkillers (argh!) and AD’s. Maybe, just maybe, one of those helped. Maybe if I lose this one, all we have to do is some combination of those things to make it happen again.

I still can. I still can.

Breathe.