I still vividly remember the way I felt on that spring morning when I watched in surprise as the second line on my pregnancy test slowly began to appear. My husband and I hadn’t been trying for a baby at the time — in fact we’d only recently decided to press pause on the idea of growing our family so we could get more financially stable — yet there the news of our third baby was, all the same.
While I was nervous and scared (I didn’t have enough money in my bank account to cover the copay when I went to that first appointment with my OBGYN) I was still excited about the prospect of another baby. Although we already had two perfect little girls at home, I’d always imagined having a big family.
I’d been somewhat heartbroken when I felt like that wasn’t going to be in the cards for us, so this surprise pregnancy felt like a sign from the universe that everything was going to be okay. My anxiousness quickly turned to excitement and we started planning for our future as a family of five.
When I started bleeding a few weeks later, all I could think about was how much I wanted this baby. I sobbed my way through phone calls with my doctor and trips to the hospital for lab work. In the end, I lost my pregnancy just a few weeks shy of the end of my first trimester.
There was a lot of grief at first, but then just as swiftly as the sadness had come it was pushed aside by a second set of double lines on a pregnancy test. After losing our “surprise” baby I realized that I really did want to have just one more child — another perfect blend of all of the best parts of me and my husband that would fill our home with laughter and conversation — and we decided to give it another try.
Still, the miscarriage was never far from my mind. Not just in a way that made me afraid of every moment with my new pregnancy, but because it all happened so quickly and unexpectedly that I almost felt like it never happened at all. The idea that we could gain and lose so much in such a short period of time and then just… move on with our lives didn’t feel right to me and I struggled to come up with a way to memorialize the loss for myself.
That Christmas, when it came time to go out and get our tree I floated the idea of getting a living tree that we could plant after the holiday had ended. I made the suggestion because it’s something that we’d always wanted to do, but also because I wanted something to remember this particular Christmas by.
We went out and picked up the cutest little tree (and I mean little; we couldn’t even use half of our ornaments that year) and covered the pot with our tree skirt. Every day I’d tend to the tree and make sure it wasn’t too drafty by the window, or getting too dry from the heater we had to run to fend off the December chill. As both my belly and our Christmas tree grew, I started to think of the sapling as more than just a symbol of the holiday, but also a symbol of what I’d been through.
I came to think of it as the baby’s tree, and imagined getting to visit it in our yard as the years went by. I’d never get to watch my baby grow up and play out in that space we had so carefully curated for our kids over the years, but I could watch the tree grow.
And when I was feeling particularly sad about the missing member of our family I could just look out the window and see a physical reminder that it all really happened.
We planted that tree in the winter of 2019 — and then a lot of things changed. A pandemic completely shut the world down less than two weeks before I gave birth. Like so many others, I’d been forced to make a pandemic pivot, and I turned my part time freelancing gig into a full-time job that now supported our (new!) family of five.
Then, after nearly two years at home, I realized that this space we’d worked so hard to make our own had become just a little too small to fit our needs. Faced with a choice between making expensive renovations or moving to a bigger house, my husband and I ultimately decided that we’d be better off finding someplace else in our neighborhood.
I’ve felt a lot of emotions since we started talking about moving and preparing to list our house for sale, but none of them compare to the feelings that bubble up painfully into my chest when I think about leaving that tree behind.
What if the new owners don’t take care of it? Or worse, what if they cut it down altogether?
What if we leave this house and I leave the last piece I’ll ever have of my baby?
What if moving away and not seeing the tree causes my memories to fade and I forget how a few short weeks in the spring of 2019 changed my world forever?
Of course, as frequent as those feelings come, I know they’re mostly irrational. No matter what, I’ll never be able to forget the pregnancy I lost. Because much like the tree in our yard, that baby is rooted in my heart, and that’s something I’ll carry with me always.
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