Amelia Stewart-Short

I am nearly through the first trimester, and I am very much still in the thick of it.

The day a child comes to you was never yours to choose. A soul picks its own moment. The exact week they need to be conceived ripples out across a whole family and far past it, into a pattern already laid down and waiting to unfold. You are not the author of that timing. You are the one it happens through.

Easy enough to write. Another thing entirely to live with your hand open while you wait.

This is my first pregnancy after a miscarriage.
Pregnancy after a loss asks something different again. There is a version of it where you hold the baby at arm’s length, love it a little less on purpose, until it feels for sure, keep something back so that there is less to lose. It looks like acceptance from the outside, but acceptance and surrender are so different in my experience. I decided to fully claim and own the pregnancy, for however long it may last, as we never have certainty in life, and my trust in my body has certainly been tested. I chose to feel all the deep feelings- joy, awe, excitement, dreaming, right from the beginning, with a grip loose enough to know it’s already written and perfectly unfolding. The build up to the moment in gestation that I gave birth prematurely to my baby was a time of active surrender. Once I passed that moment it became easier. To become pregnant is such a deep miracle and blessing, for however long it lasts. And I do believe this pregnancy is here to stay the journey.

The intense violent nausea day and night and flooring exhaustion have been reminder that baby is growing and the hormones are increasing. I had no symptoms in my last pregnancy that ended in release.

Real surrender is the opposite of holding back. It is opening your hands in the exact moment every instinct in you says close them. Not less love. More, and without the guarantee.

So here I am approaching the end of the first trimester. Riding the waves of it all, fully surrendered to the sensation, the exhaustion, the mess and the beauty.