Hanna let us know we were going to become parents on August 25, 2022. Those two little lines filled us with illusions and fears. It was a very simple pregnancy, without any complications. Hanna’s father wanted to wait for the birth of our baby to find out if it was a boy or a girl but we agreed that I would know and so I could plan the clothes and so on. When I found out that it was a girl I cried with happiness, I had always wanted to have my little Hanna and I had been dreaming of her for a long time. At Christmas her kicks woke me up at night, she was a very energetic baby.
April 8 is my birthday. That day I woke up and Hanna kicked really hard just as her dad put his hand on my belly, I thought she was wishing me a happy birthday. I spent the whole day answering messages and calls. We ate late for work reasons and had childbirth preparation classes in the early afternoon. During the class I noticed that Hanna was not moving, I had contractions but our daughter did not respond as always. I told our midwife who tried to find her heartbeat without success, that’s when I started crying. We went to the hospital and there we heard the worst phrase “there is no heartbeat”. Our world fell apart.
We both live away from the family so that night we spent alone, crying and talking to our little girl.
My mother managed to get to the delivery and the midwives let both her and my husband be present throughout the process. They let us hug her for as long as we needed, even though I would have been in that room all my life with her in my arms. I was able to read the letter that I had wrote to her just a few days before and we sang her song “You’ll be in my heart”. I burned into my head every part of her body: her father’s eyes, her doll’s face, her little feet, her strong legs and arms, her soft skin, her little nose… Hanna was better than I could have imagined. She is my little princess.
Leaving the hospital without her and coming home with empty arms was heartbreaking.
Since then we have walked the hard road of being empty-handed parents, trying to help other families like us through Spanish NGOs, and with our hearts filled with all the love we feel for our daughter.
Her brother Marco did not come to fill his sister’s void but fills our lives with smiles and all the colors of the rainbow. He was born looking at the stars and with an angel’s kiss on her forehead, undoubtedly a gift chosen expressly by her sister in heaven.
Our two children are the best thing that has ever happened to us, each one has taught us a different way of being parents but both show us every day that love is infinite and does not understand times, distances or heartbeats.
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