I went out and bought chicken soup, orange juice, and some more potent cold pills. These pills aren't helping much either, but I'm not nearly as dizzy. Perhaps I can make it through another night, and I'll be able to breathe tomorrow.

I hate it when I blow my nose, and my right ear squeals, then pops. I'm not even blowing terribly hard, either!

I waited an hour and a half, and nobody came. I sipped my green tea, worked on my afghan, repeatedly blew my nose, and wrote a letter.

Dear Baby,

I know you'll read this someday. Rather, I know that you'll be here to read it. Not an ounce of me is willing to have any doubt that one day in the future will find you here with me, smiling and laughing as if to say that you, too, never had a doubt. I write this letter, therefore, with the confidence of one who is sure of her audience.

You will come. You may be born of my body or not, but you will come.

Will you ever be able to fathom just how much you were wanted? When I someday hold you in my arms, will the desperation still linger, or will it have faded into the backs of both of our minds, leaving only the acceptance of the situation, tinged with none of the grief that preceded it? Will the struggles that your daddy and I now face alter us permanently, for good or for bad? Did it have to be this way for us to truly appreciate you when you finally arrive?

I have been trying to be patient and wait for you to come in your own time, but I'm sorry to say that I'm not doing a very good job. I've been crying a lot and yelling a lot - even (especially) at your daddy, who is a much better waiter than I am. I even got mad at God for a while. (Someday, maybe you'll understand that, but I hope that you'll never have reason to try.) I'm feeling a little better now, but I still feel as if a very important part of me - a very important part that has always been there, in the bottom of my heart - has been taken from me, and I don't know how to begin to get it back.

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of you. You would arrive, peacefully and easily, in the third year of my marriage, no matter when or to whom that marriage might be. You would have red hair, naturally, blue eyes, and the same stubborn nature that served me so well as a child. You would be a girl; later, I'd have given you a brother with the same ease with which I produced you. You would be smart, sweet, and, above all, musical.

Isn't Mommy a dreamer?

I've known you for so long that your absence now feels almost like loneliness. I miss you, even though I've never held you in my waking hours. At night...at night I've birthed you, nursed you, rocked you, and changed your diapers. In the past year, you've been a little brunette named Isabelle, twin boys named Nathan and Joshua, and countless unnamed infant faces that have haunted me in the pre-dawn moments, leaving me alone to cry when I awake.

For a year, there hasn't been a stretch of more than an hour that you've escaped my thoughts. Month after month I wait, trying to convince the egg that you might be to stay with me for jut a little while longer. We've done all the things that mommies and daddies do when they want a baby (I've eaten so many herbs that I'm surprised my skin hasn't turned green), and still you haven't come. Why are you taking so long, my little lamb? Why are you waiting?

The doctors are telling us that you may never come on your own; they think that you might need a little bit of extra help to come into our arms. That idea made your mommy cry some more, but I know that I'll get through whatever I have to do in order to bring you here. We all know that you are coming, remember? No matter what it takes, we will find each other.

Someday you may want to be a mommy or daddy to your own little lambs. It is my fervent prayer that your babes will come peacefully and easily, just when you dream them, without any grief or struggle. If I could give you one gift tonight, it would be the strength to make that, and all your dreams come true. Pray the same for me.

I love you, baby. See you, soon!

Mommy

Pleasant dreams.