Birth of a bug

I am in the weeds of hell week (Adelaide’s death day 10/12 and her birthday 10/17) and surviving. I learn something new each year about how to best muster through, but at the end of the day, these anniversaries just suck. As much as I try and turn them into celebrations where appropriate and allow the emotions to surface and be expressed, it's just a really freaking hard time of year. So, I push through because it is one week, and I have yet to find a fast-forward button for life.

So, since my thoughts are never far from Adelaide right now anyway, I’ve decided to lean in and share her origin story of sorts – or at least the origin of her name and nickname - I’m assuming you all know where babies come from at this point. 

I have always known that I would name my first daughter, Adelaide. In my parent’s bathroom when I was growing up, hung a gold oval framed black and white photo of my great grandmother Adelaide Lucy. She was my mother’s grandmother, though neither of us ever met her. She passed away when my grandma was a teenager. I don’t know much about her except that she had two children before her husband passed away and that during the Great Depression, she found family for my great uncle to live with, but she had to place my grandma in an orphanage in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City because the job she found as a live-in housekeeper wouldn’t allow her to bring her daughter with her. She would visit my grandmother on the weekends until Adelaide fell ill and passed away.

It’s a fairly tragic story but wow, the strength she had to muster to survive and to make sure her children survived is impressive. When I learned that Miguel’s vibrant, compassionate, and also incredibly strong mother’s middle name was Adele – it felt meant to be on so many fronts.

I became pregnant with Adelaide four months after we lost Elvis. Basically, as soon as my body had healed enough to carry another baby, there she was. Unlike with Jackson, and earlier in my pregnancy with Elvis, my naivety had been popped. I now understood the multitude of things that could go wrong while you were growing a baby inside your body. I was terrified (rightly so) that something else would go wrong, but I was more afraid of letting my fear get the best of me and never trying for another baby again. I guess I figured it was better to just pull the Band-Aid off quickly.

Ultrasounds during my pregnancy with Adelaide were particularly traumatic since it was during my 20-week anatomy ultrasound that Elvis’ fatal anomaly had been discovered. I was torn between asking to do fewer ultrasounds to protect my mental health and requesting additional scans to be sure that if there was anything amiss we caught it early. I settled on having the typical amount but doing them all at the hospital instead of at my local clinic. We were pulling out of the hospital parking lot when I opened the envelope letting us know our baby would be a girl and from that moment on she was our Adelaide Grace.

Regardless of the baby’s sex, I had decided to keep the safari-themed nursery décor I had purchased for Elvis’ room. It was neutral, adorable, and already tucked away in a closet. That is until I had a dream while taking a nap one afternoon.

Some people have prophetic dreams. Dreams that give them direction or premonitions about what is to come. I have had two prophetic dreams… that I can remember. One was that I was going to own a pair of yellow galoshes. Actually, that one may count more as manifesting. Regardless, I still own, adore, and wear them whenever the sky is sad. The other prophetic dream I’ve had was that the baby I was carrying inside me was a ladybug.

Perhaps I could have read it as a sign that my baby would be beautiful but that she wouldn’t live very long. Or that her life would coincide with unimaginable luck for our family, but that it would come at a great cost. Instead, I took it to mean that I needed to scrap the safari-themed nursery and design a ladybug one instead.

Tomato, tomahtoe. 

I called my mom as soon as I woke, told her the new plan, and started making a ladybug-themed Pinterest board while we were still on the phone. Before I ever held her, she had a ladybug rocking chair, onesies, Halloween costume, and wall decals. At the time, I was grateful for this healing path forward that allowed me to separate Elvis and Adelaide in a healthy and productive way. I never imagined what ladybugs would come to mean to everyone who grew to love Adelaide. All the love, pain, and strength they would come to symbolize.

So that’s the story. I’m struggling to tie this post up with a bow. So I’ll share that over the last hour as I’ve been writing this blog, two people have texted me with pictures of ladybugs. As one friend told me, “There are no coincidences.”

I see you my Adelaideybug. And I love you too.

ID: A content baby wearing a white onesie with a large ladybug fabric stitched on the front and the word “Adelaide” embroidered underneath.