Empty

Friday night I heard from my sister who got married in July. I've not shared, because of how my pregnancy went, that she is pregnant. She's due 2 weeks after I would have been. She called yesterday to tell me that she had been to the doctor and they heard the heartbeat. Honestly, I was amazed at how genuinely happy and relieved I was to hear her news.

That sounds terrible. Of course I don't want what happened to me to happen to anyone else! But life just isn't fair, and this is one of those examples. They weren't trying, we were. She had no health insurance at the time, I did. We'd been married for nearly 7 years at conception, they'e been married for negative 2 weeks at conception (the moral of the story is, don't have your husband-to-be drive you home from your bachelorette party). So I was glad to know that I could just feel happy that her pregnancy was going well, and not haul along the rest of that baggage.

See, Annie and I haven't always gotten along. When she was acting like a rotten little wench, which was her specialty in days gone by, she used to say, "I know I'm going to have Mom and Dad's first grandchildren" because Carl and I weren't getting to it fast enough, and she thought this was a serious flaw in me and our plans. So of course I desperately wanted to have the first grandchildren, not only because it was my right as the firstborn, having had to blaze the trail for the rest of my siblings, but also to prove that my plan was just fine. And also maybe to spite her and her nasty self.

She's changed a lot. Sometimes I want to tell the body snatchers that they can keep my sister, because we like this person much better. We've made our peace, and I think I can thank Jason (her husband) for a lot of the new groundedness we sense in Annie. I really am happy for her. Sure, they were scared when they first found out: scared of what their parents would say; scared about what it meant for their brand new marriage; scared of what it meant for them financially. They're excited now, and that's good. I still feel a twinge of jealousy that she's going to have the first grandchild, but that's really more insult to injury, because I was much more concerned with the loss of my pregnancy than proving my sister wrong for something she said years ago in the heat of the moment.

But once I was off the phone, I cried. How could I not? I so wanted to go in for my first ultrasound and see a little embryo with a beating heart! Instead, I saw an empty round sac. So now you see where Friday's art piece came from.