“I’m expecting,” I told my four-year-old daughter as we trudged into the leafy woods around our home. It was a cold September day, and in her hands she held two dozen seed packets of bluebells to scatter into the rich soil beneath the trees.

A happy face on a stick transforms me. My breasts become tender, fatigue overwhelms. It becomes part of my being. Growth sprouts into a grain of rice, a blueberry, and a raspberry with duck feet. By spring, a plum dangling from a tree branch—fingernails, toes, bone.

I am waking from a dream. No, a nightmare. My temple leans against the cool, foggy window and the sudden movement of the car shifting into gear pulls me forward, causing my head to lift. Consciousness rolls in and I remember why I am here. This is not a dream.

A lot can happen in ten years. You lose a baby, or choose to lose a baby, though at the time, it doesn’t feel like a choice, more like a pre-ordained outcome. You spend time blaming everything outside of you—your OB, your job, your husband. Blame comes easily; it’s a ready distraction from the blame you hold close to you, like a secret: you were not brave enough, not in love with the baby enough, not selfless enough. When your water broke months too early, you panicked, you decided against hope.

I’m a mother. And yet, I’m not.

My dream, years in the making, has and yet hasn’t come true. And even if I could ignore this and live as if my life is the way I want it to be, there are daily reminders everywhere I go that women the world over keep getting my dream for themselves while I am still left grasping for it.

It is ingrained in my brain like nothing else has ever been. I can still smell the gel that they put on the ultrasound wand. I can still see my husband’s tears as he hears our baby’s heartbeat for the first and what would be the only time. I can still feel the anger at the ultrasound tech, who was so joyful at our first appointment and called my baby our little bean.

It was 3 o’clock in the morning when I attempted to rouse my husband.

“Um, baby, I think I’m pregnant. There are two lines on this thing I peed on.”

This lack of interest and compassion still haunts me to this day. I keep on wondering if I am entitled to my pain. Am I just carrying on? Am I being overly dramatic? I was and am hurting. Right after my loss, I was sad. I was angry. But above all, I missed my baby and all the things that could have been. Yet, it was just I, missing my little bean. And I still miss my baby. Maybe not everyday but I think of my little bean a lot and try to imagine what it would look like now. I keep these thoughts hidden from most people and they feel like a guilty pleasure that no one should know about. In these instances, the thoughts about being entitled to my pain and grief creep up on me again.

Because earlier today the promise of growing life in my belly was silenced just like the exam room as the nurse searched again and again for the heartbeat at a routine prenatal visit. "Is this how people find out?" I thought, suddenly floating though a cloud of emotionless reality, confused why I had felt kicks just last night in bed.