Caroline's Journal

Keswick DriveSeattleFriday, January 142:00 p.m.Present DayDarling Baby,It's your mom--your mom!--greeting you for the first time...in writing that is. I welcomed you inside me three hours ago. I'm hoping--oh, I'm hoping--you'll decide to stay.I bought this journal a week ago. I knew then (I'd known for a month) that you and I would meet this morning.I planned to begin the journal today. But I didn't know, until I started writing, that I'd be writing to you.I'd imagined a Dear Diary, I suppose. Or random thoughts.But this feels right.We're a team. Already.Three hours is early in a pregnancy to be certain.How's that for the understatement of the century? But I am certain about you.We've been trying for a while, your dad and I. Six years, two months and twenty-four days to be exact. But who's counting? We are. Obviously.Counting and praying as we've tried the old-fashioned way and the newfangled ones.Don't worry! I have no intention of sharing details of our old-fashioned attempts.I don't know how old you'll be when you read this, or if you'll ever decide to read it at all.Whatever the age, it's information you do not need.What is relevant is that it's a new in-vitro technique, and there's a physician who's made it her specialty. Dr. Kathleen Collier isn't the reason we moved from Denver to Seattle three years ago--although she would've been reason enough had we known. More than reason enough.For now, little love, we have you.Caroline looked from the handwritten words to a cloud-covered sky. Rain would be the logical conclusion.But there was something about this sky that made Caroline think snow. The lacy whiteness, she realized, at the edges of gray.Meg was four when she'd identified the telltale sign, named it and explained with Meg Gallagher certainty what the laciness meant.When the sky wore a petticoat, this petticoat, it was going to snow.Caroline had never been very good at discerning the snow petticoat from other shades of white. But Meg had been unerring.Was she seeing Meg's petticoat sky now? Or was it merely wishful thinking--as if the drifting to earth of even a single snowflake would be an indication that what she'd done was right.Or wrong.Caroline fought the sudden misgiving. Jeffrey would be thrilled. And he'd agree that he'd been so involved in preparing for the trial, so consumed by the myriad details demanding his attention, it was best for her to make this decision--and act upon it--without consulting him.He'd have said yes if she'd discussed it with him--wouldn't he?Of course he would have. He wasn't any more ready to give up than she was. His sole concern would have been her welfare. He would've been willing to risk more sadness...provided it was medically safe for her.This was what Jeffrey would want.Will want, Caroline insisted to the lace-edged sky. And he'll know it's the only choice I could have made for the eleventh embryo.Dr. Collier's protocol called for two embryos--at blastocyst stage--per try. Over the past three years, and in couplets, the leftover embryo's ten siblings had been transferred.And loved.Lost.Mourned.For a while, in three of those five attempts, there'd been life. Seventeen days. Then twenty-two. And last summer, the possibility of joy had clung for thirty-four.The embyos'grasp had been precarious. Cramps and bleeding gave worrisome--but not inevitable--warning that they weren't finding Caroline's womb an hospitable place to grow.Hope drowned in a massive gush of blood a few minutes after 1:00 a.m. on a balmy August night. Jeffrey rushed her to Queen Anne Medical Center, where an emergency D & C had been required to stem the flow. Following the procedure, in the predawn hours until it was safe for her to go home, she and Jeffrey held each other--anStone, Katherine is the author of 'Caroline's Journal', published 2007 under ISBN 9780778324768 and ISBN 0778324761.