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This is one of my favorite pictures. It’s me and Big J when Big J was about 3. We were camping in the mountains. I believe we were at Tweetsie Railroad when this was taken. I believe that’s a mini golf club in my hand. Tweetsie, if you don’t know, is this cowboy/country/Appalachian amusement park that every kid from this part of the world should visit at least once, even though I think it’s ridiculously expensive for what you get.
Anyway, you can’t see this in the picture, but I happened to be 8 weeks pregnant that weekend. I say weekend, because the next weekend I wasn’t pregnant any more. This was my second miscarriage. It marked a period before we thought anything was really wrong, but also a time when we started to worry.
My first miscarriage was easily explained away. The books and the doctors said that at least half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, maybe more. I could understand that math. I had one pregnancy, one child, now I had another with no child. Half, right?
But then I had the second miscarriage, then the 3rd, and then we started to worry for real. But in a sense it was the second one that started us on the road to adoption. Twinges of doubt began to set in. We started to wonder, what if?
What if turned into Little J. So although that’s not literally my second son hiding in that picture under that well-worn green jacket, the idea of him is there. That’s why this picture is one of my favorites.
