Love & Loss

Tomorrow is Pregnancy & Infant Loss Remembrance Day, and I will be lighting not one, but two candles at 7:00 P.M. as a way of simultaneously grieving and celebrating our sweet babies. You can view the original post about my miscarriage this summer here. I feel compelled to write this post tonight because I just have an intuitive feeling that someone needs to see it. Of course I may be wrong, but when I originally wrote about my miscarriage in June, I heard from dozens, even scores, of my friends and family about their own miscarriages. So many beautiful, precious women in my life had gone through the same visceral, oppressive grief I was experiencing, and I cannot tell you how sincerely blessed I felt to hear each of their stories in my time of need. Each story and baby remembered gave me comfort that I was not alone and that there was life after loss. 

I feel like I've processed the loss of this baby much better than I thought I would, but there is no getting around the fact that at some point during each day I poignantly remember that I should be seven months pregnant right now. To say that I've been in a sort of denial up until this month would be untrue, but it is true that this month has brought a new challenge for me: what would've been the third trimester. When I was pregnant, I imagined trick-or-treating with Lucy while I was as big as a house, moving slowly and awkwardly about the kitchen while preparing Thanksgiving dishes, and having my hospital bag packed over Christmas, knowing that we could very well have our baby before we even had a chance to take down the decorations. It was going to be a magical holiday season, the best yet. And then I would spend all of January and February, the bleak, ugly, cold months that I'm not ashamed to say I don't love, holed up in my cozy house loving on my new, sweet little baby. Yes, 2015 was going to be awesome. But I don't have any of that now. 

That sense of nothingness has been, for me, the most difficult part of this experience. I have nothing. No grave, no place to put flowers, no keepsakes, not even memories - not really. I have a whole lot of hopes and dreams that now amount to nothing and some medical bills still to be paid off because they don't charge you less for those kinds of things no matter how sorry for you they feel. 

Except. 

Except I do have something. This experience has taught me a great deal about a lot of things, and while that may not be something, it still matters. 

The first baby we lost was Lucy's twin. We honestly didn't even know we'd ever had her until Lucy was born. I had to change providers during my pregnancy because my original OB/GYN had stopped providing OB services a few months before I became pregnant. The process of transferring all of my files took weeks, so I had my first ultrasound later than usual, and by that time (a week or two shy of the second trimester), we'd already lost her. The remainder of my pregnancy progressed beautifully, and I was blissfully unaware of what had transpired in the weeks before. Minutes after Lucy was born beautiful and healthy, my doctor looked at me from across the room and said, "Did anyone ever tell you about the twin?" I was floored. I was in a kind of physical shock and mental fog from the birth anyway, but that query pulled me from the mist rather quickly. I don't remember what I said - undoubtedly a simple No or What - but he began explaining that there had obviously been two babies based on what he was seeing. Everything was there for a second baby, but the second baby was gone; this is referred to as a vanishing twin. My doctors have told me that it's not technically a miscarriage because the body reabsorbs the twin, but that doesn't change the fact that I would have identical twin girls right now had everything gone differently. 

Because of the way we learned about Lucy's twin, I did not grieve for her the way I did for this baby. Because we didn't know we'd lost her until long after she was gone, she didn't quite seem real for a long time. Because I was overwhelmed with simply one newborn, I didn't long for another right away. But the grief eventually came, quietly, privately, as Lucy became older and new motherhood wasn't as daunting. I believe the delayed grief was one of the contributing factors to the postpartum depression I developed within the months after Lucy's birth. Even in the deepest sadness for what could've been, I knew why it wasn't: I truly could not have handled twins at that time in my life. New motherhood rocked me. It was hard. It was lonely. Having twins would have been sheerly overwhelming physically, financially, and psychologically at that point in time; however, as Lucy has gotten older, I've found myself wishing and even longing for her sister. When I lost the second baby this summer, the sadness was magnified because I found myself grieving both babies. 

My miscarriage over the summer brought me to my knees. I've been a Christian for a long time now, but I am terribly obstinate and try fecklessly to solve my own problems. I feel like there are a million problems in the world more pressing than my own, and so I do not trouble God with my burdens, but I am wrong, oh so wrong, and He shows me that. I have traveled through some incredibly dark places in three decades, and I have turned toward, called upon, and clung to God through all of them. I was shaken to my foundation by the loss of my baby, and all I could do for weeks was lie in my bed and talk to God. As I mentioned in my original post, I was angry at first. I'd only asked consistently for two things since I was a child; one was for God to heal my mother, and the other was that I would not lose any children/babies/pregnancies that I might be blessed to have. Illness, hardships, burdens, I knew they would come, but I'd been begging God for years for healthy pregnancies and a house full of healthy children. So why? That's what we always want to know, isn't it? My feelings of anger quickly faded though because anger truly does no good; it only harms the person harboring the anger, and I'm already damaged enough. It takes a lot of energy to be angry, and I had no energy left. So I let go of it. And then amazing things happened. 

After the loss, I found a post entitled "What It Looks Like When God Plans Your Family." The post was from a woman who'd lost multiple pregnancies, and it presented her outlook on her own situation. Her post put clear, coherent words to the message God had been trying to reveal to me. It was only after I stopped being angry and thinking, "Why me?" that I was able to receive His words. I'd always imagined myself having four children - two boys and two girls. I've longed to be a mother since I could play with baby dolls, and I'd always felt such a strong desire to take care of anyone and anything around me. But I now know I won't have four children here on Earth, and I'm starting to become okay with that. I have blessed assurance that I will see my daughter and my third baby again; I'm still very much their mother, just in a very different way. I have three children, but I've only been blessed to have one of them walk alongside me in this life, and that's okay. That's more than okay. Because (to channel Tennyson here) mine not to make reply, mine not to reason why. I could spend a lifetime wondering why, being angry and mourning what I could have instead of looking at what I do have. I have a beautiful, healthy daughter here on Earth, and that is everything. I still pray that God will allow us to have at least one more healthy child because I very much want Lucy to know the joy that a sibling brings. I want her to have that. But I know that my timing is not God's timing, and that all blessings happen in due time.

As shattering as the experience of losing two out of three babies has been, God has brought good out of it in more ways than one. I felt led to reestablish a relationship with God through worship by seeking a church. Within a month of the miscarriage, we found ourselves sitting in the most wonderful, perfect church that has already blessed us so much. During a service over the summer, our pastor said something that really sealed the whole idea of God planning our family in the way that is best for us. He said that everything that God does is done out of love, and (as cliche as it sounds) my inner voice immediately thought, "God took my babies out of love." It was truly an epiphany for me. I almost started weeping right there in church. They weren't healthy or Lucy wouldn't have been healthy if her twin survived or I wouldn't have been healthy or...whatever. I don't need to know. And that is huge...huge for me to utter. I know that I will always be a little bit sad; I will always miss them, and that's okay.  But I've faced one of my absolute worst fears, and I've survived. There is so much indescribable power in that realization alone. I may have hurt worse than I've ever hurt before, but I survived. And I'm stronger, more thankful, more cognizant of the blessing that is the now, the banal, the calm rhythm of every single day. There is so much beauty in that alone.  I love these lines from Mary Oliver because they so aptly sum up this terrible, beautiful experience:

Someone I loved once

gave me a box

full of darkness.

It took me years

to understand

that this, too,

was a gift.

And so, sweet babies, when I light those candles in remembrance of you, don't think for one minute that I don't still want you or think of you or even miss you, but know that I am confident in the knowledge that we will enjoy each other in another life, in another way that I cannot even comprehend at this moment. Thank you for allowing me to be your mother in this life, no matter how brief our time together was. You've brought me so much in your own way.