Babies! Babies everywhere!

I feel like I am watching Oprah somedays.  Everyone is in her audience and everyone gets.... BABIES!!
"You get a baby! And you get a baby! Everyone gets a baby!!!"

However I am just watching, not participating.  Oprah does not have a baby for me, or at least I missed the form to sign to keep mine.  But everyone else signed all the forms, initialed in the right spots, listened to the show lawyers telling them how they get to keep the babies Oprah so graciously got them.  Everyone has babies, or that is what I feel like.  My professor is having a baby.  Probably already had it.  It was due a day before Marcellus.  Every other lady at Parent Care had a child except us.  I see babies at work all the times.  Mothers pushing their little bundles of joy around the store as they find the perfect dish to complete their wedding gifts they got two years ago.  Even grief parents on the web I am following are having their babies again.  I watched a video put up of a 4 year old boy who died and the second half of the video was focused on their little baby boy.  I am happy for these people, even more happy than for normal people who get to have babies.  Through some bizarre way of thinking I feel that people who have lost children are more deserving of subsequent children.  But those are not the happy people with babies I see all around me.  So many happy people participating in the ill conceived 'right' of having a child.  Everyone get a baby, everyone expects a baby.  It is not a right however, it is a grateful privilege.

A grateful privilege that I wish to partake in again someday when we are ready.  How will we know when that is?  My wife says a sign may be when we stop wishing that the new baby would be Marcellus and we could pick up where we left off.  I agree with that.  I do not think that Marcellus is going to come back as a do-over but I worry about me being disappointed in any subsequent children that they will not be able to fit the perfect image that I have made for my son.  If our children survive past infancy and we are grateful enough watch them grow up I know they will make mistakes, and I will make mistakes with them.  They will disappoint me some point in my life.  Marcellus never disappointed me, I cannot be disappointed at him for dying, that would be unfair to him.  He is perfect in every way to me.  A grief book stated that grieving parents often transform their dead infants into saints.  And that is true, you have to die to be a saint.  Even Marcellus's uncle is calling him the patron saint of time.  

I know Marcellus is not crawling around the streets of heaven garbed in the robes of sainthood.  There are no Cathedrals being built in Italy or Ireland to house his bones.  Marcellus is just another baby, one given to us not by Oprah but God.  We did sign the forms, we did initial in all the right spots.  We just never wanted to sign those forms giving him back to God.