Changing Tides

A Mother's Love

I was pregnant.

It hadn't been confirmed but I knew it to be true.

I didn't realise it straight away. My body hadn't begun altering for the new life and I felt no weaker nor did any nausea plague me. I was perfectly normal.

Yet I knew I was pregnant.

The thought had been jiggling at the back of my mind the moment I had glanced at my sickly pale skin. Cheeks gaunt and body waif like, pale stringy strands pushed back from my shoulders to give me a ghastly view of that thing.

His mark.

I had felt the dread sink into my being the moment I realised what the implications of me holding his mark where, especially after what we had done. The truth had glared me in the face but I hid from it.

Running to the furthest corners of my world all in avoidance of this moment.

Our truth.

He had let me run. Whispering soothing words of patience and understanding. What did he really understand though?

That I was still clinging onto the memory of my dead husband? That I was both excited and petrified of moving on. What did he really know?

Nothing.

As I stood back in the home I had made with my late husband, my daughter sleeping soundlessly in the room adjoined to the bathroom, I knew I could run no longer.

Reality was catching up to me and soon I would have to face the truths that made up my world.

The truth being that I was undeniably pregnant. No more than one month along but definitely pregnant. The missing of a cycle was what triggered me. I was intune to my body and though as of recently I had lost my way, I knew when my body was not "normal".

Small things that had been present in the early phases of my first pregnancy were now reminiscent in the present me. I carried a life inside me that was not my husbands.

It was too much to accept.

My hands shook as I leaned agasint my bathroom sink, I felt faint. My world spinning and my stomach churning.

Pale skin, deep bags under my red rimmed eyes, my hair was scruffy and my clothes hung off me. I looked dead but that was not what had my skin beading with sweat and my heart palaptating.

This couldn't be.

I felt sickened to my stomach, knowing that I had conceived with another male but even more so that I could not find the needed energy to despise this growth inside me. My emotions were conflicted. I felt nothing but pure love and joy at the life I harboured but his father, though a better and more deserving man now, was still not my late husband. Carson would never be my Meilan. How would I explain this to Winter?

How would I tell Carson?

These thoughts weighed me down daily, taking all the joy of this journey from me. Even now as I stared at my still flat stomach, I could not completely say I would be exited for the moment my stomach started growing as that would mean my days of hiding would be forced to an end.