by JoAnna Donkin, as told to Lizzie Heiselt (listen to JoAnna read the essay here) A healthy baby has 10 little fingers and 10 little toes, 2 little eyes and one little nose. But I was not going to get a healthy baby. An ultrasound at 11 weeks hinted that something could be wrong. And after weeks […]
stillbirth
Bonus: A Beautiful Heart
In the days after Gina gave birth to her stillborn son, James, she wrote a record of the event on her blog. It was a beginning of her mourning and rebuilding process and captures both the grief she was feeling at the time and the hope that she had that her life would be made […]
#13: The Full Human Experience
The full human experience includes this: pregnancy, birth, life, death. And if all goes well and normally, the pregnancy is 9 months, the birth takes a day or so, the life is decades long, and the death neither sneaks up nor hovers for too long. But the normal order is sometimes confused. The pregnancy is too short. […]
Bonus: Jodie’s Journal
Lots of us turn to writing when life gets tough. It’s a proven form of therapy and it let’s us understand and experience our emotions so that we can untangle them and—sometimes—make something beautiful with them. As Jodie was pregnant with Anna, and realizing that she was not going to be able to raise her, […]
#4: Incompatible With Life
You’re 20 weeks pregnant and it looks like something is wrong with the baby. How do you spend the rest of the pregnancy? Jodie and Adrian tell us how they handled a worst case scenario and came out of it feeling strengthened, loved, and grateful.