4. Where do we go from here?

Kari Gabrielse
May 6, 2017
3 min read

May and June 2017

We went home to Madison that weekend, and met with both of our families. We told a few people, but mostly took that weekend to try and process what was happening. How were we going to tell people? All of our friends, family, coworkers, Facebook friends, acquaintances, EVERYONE knew we were pregnant. Many people also knew that on Wednesday we had found out if it was a boy or girl. People were continually asking us all kinds of questions like boy or girl? Do you have a theme for your nursery? When are you due? And we know that everyone was trying to be supportive, and that they cared, and had no idea these questions were hard to answer. No one knew, and we were stuck in the hard place of who do you tell, and when. It was exhausting telling the news over, and over and over. We didn’t mind sharing out story, but it was hard. So we tried to take life day by day, and tell people as we felt it was appropriate. We tried to do our best to to keep on living life as normal as we could, and focussed on giving our little baby the most experiences we could in the little time that we had with him.

The week after our first ultrasound was the first time I felt our little boy kick with my hand. I had felt his first kicks as the fluttery sensation in my stomach, but this was the first time I was actually able to feel him with my hand. It was so surreal, it took me a few seconds to realize that was what I was feeling. It made him so much more real to me. Even though all of this was going on, he was still doing something so normal as kicking and moving around. I think that is what made this so hard, was that everything seemed so normal. He looked to us normal on the ultrasound. He kicked like a normal baby. I was having a completely normal pregnancy. All of these firsts that are so normal, I was experiencing with him. I loved feeling him kick. It reminded me that he was ok, and that hopefully he was happy and moving around. It was something so blessedly normal to be happening during the time when Justin and I were talking about the plans we had to make for our little baby’s birth. Instead of making plans for our nursery or where our child would go to daycare, we now had to have the hard discussions of where do we bury our child? How do we plan for a funeral? Is our baby even going to be born alive at all? These were the questions we had, and the decisions we were beginning to make and talk about over the first few weeks. And having our little baby boy kick just helped remind me that he was still a little baby, experiencing new and exciting things every day. He started hearing, he was able to start seeing things. He loved sucking on his fingers (which we could see on every ultrasound), he could hear me singing to him, he could hear the lawnmower and feel the bumpiness of it as I rode it around to cut the grass. He was able to taste things, and I hope experience all kinds of things. Even though I knew his life would be short, I wanted to be able to give him these things, to let him experience whatever he could.

So over the next few months we tried to share with Davin some of the normal parts of our lives that we would have loved sharing with him once he was born. We took walks with him, I sang to him, I was able to give him his first ride on the riding lawnmower. We wakesurfed, we paddle boarded, we went on boat rides, we biked. He got to meet lots and lots of his family members, and spend so much time up at the cabin in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin.