To my baby,

I would give anything to get to meet you. I want to know you and hold you and watch you grow up. I’ve thought about you every single day, practically every minute, since I found out you existed two months ago.

May 27^th will always be one of the best days of my life.

July 20^th will be one of the worst.

Today we found out you don’t have a heartbeat anymore.

I don’t know how to grieve you. I want you to be safe and alive inside of me. I want to feel you in a few months and find out if you were a son or a daughter. I want to celebrate you with your ‘aunties’. I want to see you with your Dad. He loves you so much.

I want today to start over, for us to go to the appointment again, and for it all to be different. I was so excited to see you, so excited to hear your little heartbeat.

I wish there was something I could do to save you. But you’re already gone. You have been for a few weeks now and I didn’t know. I’m so sorry I didn’t know. I’m so sorry there was nothing I could do.

You were so wanted. And you’re so loved.

I don’t know how to mourn someone I didn’t even get the chance to make memories with.

I hate that I won’t get to meet you.

Your Dad and I think you were a boy. We’ll never know now, but it was so easy to picture you. I like to think you would have looked like your dad – big hazel eyes, hair as straight as a ruler. I wanted to take you to the beach next summer. You would have been 5 or 6 months and it was so easy to picture us at the coast with you strapped to my chest as the wind whipped my hair and your Dad holding us both so tightly.

There’s so much I wanted to do with you, so much I have been picturing. When I go on walks around our new neighborhood, I imagine you in a stroller. We would walk down to The Optimist for a latte and you’d start to notice the light in the trees. I imagined you strapped close to me in your carrier during church. I imagined you running around the backyard and trying to pick the flowers. I imagined you playing with your cousins. You and Judah and Titus would have been so close in age. I imagine finally getting you down for sleep and collapsing on the couch with your dad…only to sneak back in and check on you because I missed you.

I bet your Dad would have made you laugh so much. I hate that I won’t ever hear you laugh.

You should be here.

I imagine I’ll always feel this loss, always imagine where you would be sitting, always know how old you should be. I’ll wonder if we would have shared a birthday.

I don’t feel like a mother. My arms are empty. My stomach barely has a bump. And I still have miscarrying you ahead of me. I don’t feel like a mother, but I know I love you more than anything in the world.

I wish I could fix this. I hate not being able to fix this.

I love you.