Thoughts

This post is in part related to the last one.

I have stated before that Kelvin and I experienced difficulties conceiving Sybella. One of my biggest fears, apart from the fear that we would NEVER conceive, was the fear that the age gap between Jack and a new baby would be very great. I am going to discuss this fear in greater detail in a future post, but for now, it serves as an opening to this particular story.
I am a teacher. I dont work anymore, but when I did, one of my duties was morning playground duty. You know, supervising that kids arent falling out of trees or throwing glass. One particular morning (during the phase of infertility in my life), I noticed a pregnant woman, probably in her second trimester, dropping her daughter off at school. Her daughter was in Kindergarten, so five or six years old. I was comforted by the fact that this woman obviously had a large age gap between her children, by the time her baby came, her older daughter would be nearly seven. Okay, so I felt better about that. I wasnt the only one.

Time went on. The woman had her baby. A little girl. She was sweet, I saw her most mornings in the pram. By this time, I was pregnant with Sybella. As time dictated, Jack was going to be 4 years and 4 months when she was due to be born. That age gap was okay with me.

After Sybella died, I found myself fearing age gaps again. By now, Jack will be at least five or six by the time we had a third child, maybe even older if we experienced infertility again. I found myself thinking more and more about the little girl at school, who was in Year One now, and her sister, who would be nearly a year old. I thought about them to comfort myself about the age gap fear. In fact, I thought about them A LOT. I would sit outside in the sun, and think about these girls. They popped into my head all the time. It was strange, because I hadnt given them a moment of thought since I finished teaching to have Sybella. It started to become strange, even to me, just how often they would pop into my head, especially the baby. I thought about the baby often.

A few weeks after Sybella died, I was having lunch with a friend, who was a teacher at the same school. She asked me if I remembered the little girl (just out of the blue...my friend didnt know that I had been thinking about her) and her baby sister. I nodded. My friend went on to tell me that the baby had died the week before, at approximately 10 months old. I immediately got goosebumps and my heart ached for that mother. How do you keep going after losing a baby at nearly one year of age?
I now wonder if the reason the baby had kept popping into my head was because Sybella was sending me a spiritual message. Maybe she had welcomed the baby into Heaven, and was looking after her. maybe she wanted me to know that she and this baby were all right, together.

Why else would I think and think and think about this little one?