I can’t stop thinking of my own baby shower. A year and a half ago (I’d say where has the time gone- but this past year has been like ten- each day filled with more fears, joy, intense emotions than 24 short hours can hold), I was given a surprise baby shower. I was beginning my sixth month of pregnancy. Feeling wonderful-proud of my swollen belly that had not yet become cumbersome. I look at pictures from that time and the cliché in my case was true: I was glowing. I opened my gifts, given with such love and hope. The tiny little pants and shirts- how can they be so small? I remember thinking. All the ordinary and thus, extraordinary, accessories a wanted child deserves.

I guess I am a little superstitious. I made some flip comment about the shower maybe cursing things. Now what if something happens… It was laughed off, of course, and I know in my heart that I wasn’t having some sort of premonition. It was more like knocking on wood. If I say it, it cancels the possibility out. I was wrong. Two weeks later my son Harrison, merely 26 weeks in my womb, was born.

I look at pictures from that shower for signs. How could this monumental event be roaring towards me like a twister, and I felt no atmospheric changes? Was I so detached from my own body, in anticipation of this child? How could I have changed things? What could I have done differently? I want to shake the smiling girl in the photos. Why are you smiling? Don’t you know lives are at stake here? Does she in no way sense the way the world will turn upside down? That they will spend three months in the Neonatal Intensive Care unit with Harrison- at times not sure that he would live long enough to fit into these tiny clothes that are initially, almost comically too large for his wee, premature body? I have to put the pictures away for another year. I am not that girl anymore.

I want so badly to go to this baby shower and be full of hope and happiness for this new child. I hate this untrusting person I have become. I used to be such an optimist. A Glass Half Full type of person. Now I’m not sure what that means. If I keep being fearful for this new baby, will that make bad things more likely to occur…or less? I know it is arrogant of me to believe I can effect the outcome of this pregnancy. How can that be possible when I could not protect my own?

A baby shower is so much more than playing silly games, eating cake and receiving gifts. I realize now that a baby shower is a total leap of faith. We are welcoming the unborn- the unknowable being into the world, with absolute confidence that he will arrive in miraculous perfection to wear those tiny adorable clothes and be carried around with pride in the glorious new carriage. We believe these things because we must.