Nine

Nine months ago I became a mother. At this moment, back on that day, August 5, 2011, I was in a daze, conscious but not really there, in shock and riding the waves of oxytocin charging through my system. Aliya and Bennett had slipped silently from my body less than 30 minutes before. If I recall, this particular moment of time was the decision point - are those placentas coming out or not? Will I stop bleeding or not?

The answer was no to both, and I was whisked through the quiet hallways into the operating suite to be put under and cleaned out, breathing through a tube, the mint green walls the last things I saw, the narrow table I was asked to slide over onto making me nervous because it was so skinny ("So are you!" they said...which was weird, because I wasn't.)

Nine months...36 weeks...the bare minimum amount of time I had hoped to grow and nourish my babies inside my body, and now the length of time we've lived without them. Nine months and our lives have been forever changed.