unlucky seven

Seven years ago today, I married the love of my life, with visions of a future that wasn’t to be dancing in my head.
We’ve spent more than half of our marriage trying to bring a baby into our lives, and experiencing heartbreak after heartbreak.
He’s still the love of my life. I couldn’t imagine walking this road with anyone else by my side. Dead babies have a way of either pulling a couple together, or pushing them apart, and I guess we’re lucky that we’ve been cemented together like we have. We have an intimacy that people who have been married three times as long as us lack.
I’d trade all the closeness, though, for one of my babies to have lived; I’d trade it for sleepless nights and stress and dirty diapers and spit up and stretch marks. I’d trade that intimacy to not have to see the look of pain on my husband’s face when idiot family members make stupid comments, and tell him that babies don’t like him because he’s not a daddy.

He IS a daddy, in his heart.

In fact, his seventh baby would have been due today, on our seventh anniversary, a day after Father’s Day, if my utesaurus hadn’t killed it.
And so we struggle on, and whisper “Happy Anniversary” to each other yet again, while neither of us is truly happy or in the mood to celebrate, not while the thoughts of our seven dead babies – one for each year we’ve been married – haunt us. Oh, the irony! We have the big family we always wanted, only they’re all dead, all of them.
My heart hurts today.