Tag: pregnancy loss

April 1 – Baruch

If my first child had been born on his due date, he would be ten years old today.  He would have dark hair and light eyes – blue like Steven’s, or hazel like mine.  He would be ten – full of boyish charm and sweat and dirt and ten – almost a teenager, almost a middle schooler (my favorite awkward age to teach), almost…  What kind of big brother would he have been?  I’m sure he would have been tall like my husband, with the same magical, mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

It seems wrong not to acknowledge his loss today, but I am at a loss to appropriately mark his passing.  There was no body to bury, no headstone to lay flowers on, no record of his life at all except for in my medical history, as the first of many “recurrent spontaneous abortions.”  My body is the only place he lived.  And died.  Am I a walking graveyard?  Somedays it feels that way.

Today, my body is weary of marking the passage of these lost children; my soul dark and void and chaotic in the face of their memory.

I named him Baruch, Hebrew for “blessing,” because I intended to wrestle like Jacob until God blessed me in spite of this horrific loss.  I wrestled through loss after loss after loss, and I have been blessed, though in none of the ways I intended in the early days after Baruch’s death.

I wonder what God’s name for my child is.  I wonder what his name for me is.  Is it a name I’ve grown into, the way a tiny child saddled with an enormous name or a chain of forefathers will?  Is it a name earned by what I’ve endured?  A name reflective of the magnitude of grace and love that allowed me to endure?  Some days I’m ready to trade in my earth-name for my God-given heaven-name.  I long to know as I am known, to see God’s face, to see the faces I’ve lost.

But I still have work to do here – to love as I am loved, to know God and to make him known, to carry the memories of children I never met, to endure and thrive and encourage as many people as I can to run with me across the finish line.  That is how I will mark the passing of my Baruch.  My blessing.

Sideswiped

I wrote this in September, but I wasn’t ready to share it I guess.  Today feels appropriate on Pregnancy and Infant Loss Memorial Day:

Eleven years.  Our first pregnancy loss was 11 years ago last week.  On Labor Day weekend 2007 (You see the wretched coincidence, too, right?  Believe it or not, it only just occurred to me.), I checked into the hospital for surgery, my husband protecting me when I was too small to speak up for myself, a pastor friend praying with us before the procedure – like last rites for a tiny soul we won’t meet this side of eternity – and then me looking up at my doctor’s masked face and hoping that it was all as unreal as it felt.

Eleven years ago, I woke up from anesthesia and went home to recover from surgery, and eventually over the last eleven years, I’ve recovered emotionally and spiritually, too.  At least I think I have.  It’s hard to feel “recovered” when I feel like I do today.  I usually feel the weight of the magnitude of our ten loses on that first baby’s due date, which is April 1, so to feel the sudden heaviness of it now was an unwelcome surprise.  I can prepare for what I know I’ll feel each April.  I couldn’t be ready for this fresh hell.  I don’t know what else to label this depth of sadness and grief.

It felt important to write out and to share, even though it hurts, and even though I may short out my laptop if I cry on it any more.  I don’t really want to talk to anyone about this moment of pain, but I know I must express it, or it will fester and kill me slowly from the inside.  I’ve locked away the grief before, and that’s a miserable way to exist.  So I am letting it go.  I am letting myself feel the pain so that it can run its course and heal up again.  I am not letting myself wallow in it or letting it stop me from living; retreating for a day or two is fine, probably even healthy, but more than that and depression brain will take over.  I am at least in a place that’s healthy enough to recognize that what I’m feeling now will pass, and that I know living in a fleeting feeling for too long will put me in an unhealthy place.

I’ve been saying that we have dealt with the pain of loss and grief for ten years, but to realize that it’s now officially over a decade is… hard.  I’m a writer – I know there should be more words, better descriptors, something more than hard… But that’s all I’ve got.  Right this minute, it makes my brain go numb to think about.  It feels like every emotion associated with grief pops up at one time, so my brain shuts down.  That’s why it’s taken me almost a week to even mull it over long enough to write down the bones of this current pain.  Writing it out, now that I can, gives me a skeleton frame to flesh out as I purge the emotions.

I’m not naïve enough to think that I had finally conquered the grief, so it would just live in it’s little corner of my heart and never come out of its cage.  I know it can escape and jump into my consciousness at any moment.  I guess I just felt like I knew when to expect the regular intervals of escape attempts, so being sideswiped when I thought I had my crap together is… hard.  I honestly feel pretty broken.  What I don’t feel is defeated.  I know that feeling the hurt all over again isn’t a sign of weakness.  It doesn’t mean I’m losing ground.  It only means I’m human.

I’m a human who has experienced horrible loss and pain, just as many of you have.  It’s not more horrific than anyone else’s pain, but it is unique to my experience.  And my experience of learning how to heal the gaping wounds is what tells me I’m going to be fine in a few days.  It may hurt like hell, but I can use the tools I have assembled to cope with this fresh outbreak, and I can grow through it.  I can use this reminder that time won’t erase grief to feel deeper empathy for the people around me who are struggling through a new loss or mired in an old wound like me.

This moment is reminding me that my only hope is in Jesus.  He is very literally the only true hope I have that I will not only see my lost children in heaven, but that they are safe and loved and cared for in his arms.  The are whole and perfect and wonderful, and one day we will praise God together.  Their lives, however briefly they physically existed are important to God, and their story matters.

I can express all of this through the artistic skills God has given me, which turns this clump of words here into catharsis, healing, and a way to shine the little light I have on the path for anyone else who needs to find their way through grief and depression.  If that is you right now, reach out and grab a lamp; find a foothold, no matter how tiny, and climb up a little.  Ask God to send you more light, more air, and go seek it out.  Write out your pain to release it.  Draw whatever emotions are running under the surface so you can address them.  Bring them out into the light and tell them the truth: you are stronger than the pain because God is for you.PILM Graphic

On a Dime

I find myself unable to dwell in other people’s misery, even if it’s just a sad movie. Maybe I have had too much misery of my own, and now I am doing my best just to keep up with daily life. I find that I avoid any sad story that doesn’t directly touch my life. Friends are a different story; I celebrate and mourn and empathize with them. But I cannot make myself follow any of the sad/tragic FB pages, even if I am terribly interested in the outcome. I desperately want each and every one of those stories to have a happy ending, but I can’t invest any of my heart in them. I will pray over the situation when I see an update in a friend’s feed, but they haunt me if I linger too long.

A friend of ours lost a baby early in her pregnancy several months ago, and I cried for her like I cried for me. She was in the all too familiar position of having to rescind such good news and replace it with devastation. On a dime. Overnight. That’s how instantly her life changed, as did mine the second we heard the first bad news being delivered. At some point in our loss history, I think the bad news ceased to be life changing in the drastic, on a dime, kind of way. Loss became our story – just part of the landscape.

Now that Engelberta is here, the landscape has changed, though the possibility of a new and even more devastating type of loss hides around every corner, every “Pray for (Insert Name Here)” FB page. I’m sure every parent panics a little bit when they hear of a tragedy striking another child because it just might happen to them, too. I’m sure they respond in the usual “hug your kids a little tighter” manner and move on. I force myself to move on. I have to fight too many demons to invest serious thought or prayer in anyone I don’t know. Maybe this makes me a bad person for deliberately ignoring a need for prayer. But I just can’t handle the thought that my life could again turn on a dime.

There are stories all around me of babies who need organ transplants, babies who will die of terrible diseases, children who have been severely injured and face years of rehab. I know that these stories are statistically unlikely to happen to most children, including my own, but we’ve been statistically challenged up to this point. One story particularly haunts me. Not long ago, a little girl in our town died of heat stroke after being forgotten in the car. Her mother forgot to drop her off at daycare, and the little girl was sound asleep in her car seat when mom arrived at work. Everything about this story was familiar to me: the couple struggled through years of infertility before they finally had a beautiful baby girl. They had a family-owned business with all of the extra work and crazy hours that go with that responsibility, and one day the mom was particularly overloaded and skipped a single step in her routine.

Oh, God, how this story breaks my heart. I am this mom; I survive a lot of days on ritual autopilot, so a single skipped step will end in some sort of disaster later in the day. Fortunately, my skipped steps usually involve some sort of coffee brewing calamity or lack of deodorant or a cell phone launching from the hood of the car. But this family’s tragedy feels too close, too familiar, for me to let go. I can’t imagine how this mother feels. I can’t imagine the guilt and shame and horror she must combat every moment. Merely imagining her pain swallows me up, and I am consumed with thoughts of “What if this happened to me?” What if Engelberta died? Could I ever recover from that after everything else we’ve been through?

I know we’d survive somewhat intact, but that would be a labor of grace and faith. I keep telling God that there’s no way I could live with a hole that big in my heart. I keep turning a blind eye to the losses I don’t know personally, and I keep praying that my life is through turning on dimes for at least a little while. It hurts enough to know that someone I love is experiencing that kind of pain. That said, if you read this and need to talk, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or to anyone else who will listen and love you. Never, ever feel that just because someone has dealt with a lot that they shouldn’t be burdened with your problems. Most of the time someone who has been to hell and back is more than willing to help someone else through. For me, most days, the only thing that keeps me from breaking down is knowing that sharing my story has helped others in some small way. It’s the only thing that gives reason to the otherwise incomprehensible mess of the last several years.

The Even Keel

In case you noticed the giant lapse in blog entries and wondered why, we had our little girl at the end of January. I actually went into labor on her due date, and our little Engelberta was born the next day. Also, in case you wondered, I am not going to use Engelberta’s real name here. If we are friends, then you have likely already seen her name and pictures on FB a few times. If you are Joe Public reading my blog, I hope you’ll understand that I’d like to give Engelberta some privacy since this isn’t her blog.
If you know me or my husband well, then you know that neither of us are overly excitable people; you know the type – they scream loudly on roller coasters, they squeal with delight upon seeing old friends, and they may actually jump up and down with glee. We, on the other hand, are not quite as demonstrative even though we may feel the same depth of emotion. I am the person who smiles (silently) on a roller coaster and who screams (on the inside) without making more than a little “ha!” noise. Through our whole pregnancy, people constantly asked us if we were excited, and most of them were squealing and/or jumping while asking the question. We always replied calmly that of course we were excited, while the interrogator looked dubiously at our lack of exuberance. I often felt like maybe I SHOULD be physically jumping for joy even though I was jumping, silently, on the inside. Our labor and delivery nurses kept remarking at how calm both of us were through delivery, but we kept laughing and saying, “You don’t go through everything we’ve been through and then freak out over delivering a baby.” You don’t freak out over much at all, actually.
I have realized that one gift the last five years’ events have given me is an extraordinarily even keel. Our circumstances can be all over the map, but my emotions don’t have to live on the peaks or in the valleys. Of course I feel the highs and lows, but my heart is anchored in the hope of Christ, and that gives me a solid place to stand no matter what life throws my direction. God gave us the lows of each miscarriage and the high of this successful pregnancy. The constant in every circumstance is that God gives us himself, and we have found our joy in his presence and not in our circumstances. That is freedom. That is certain knowledge that whatever happens, it is what it is, and it doesn’t define me; God does and what I do in the moment does.

All the Time

You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing.
You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy,
that I might sing praises to you and not be silent.
O LORD my God, I will give you thanks forever! (Psalm 30:11, 12 NLT)

That pretty much sums up how I feel this week. I may seem a little quiet compared to some of my friends about praising God for our good lab work. Let me pause right here and say, God deserves all the credit and glory for continuing to give us good news about this pregnancy. Let me continue by adding that he deserves all the glory from every situation in my life, including the losses. Any good that has come from that pain has all come from him. Any good that comes from continuing this pregnancy will all come from him.

I hope that my faith has been acted out in my life plainly enough that anyone reading this would know that my faith is in God all the time. I have been exhorted more than once this week to remember that God can do anything and that we should never doubt his power. If I didn’t forget that through nine pregnancy losses, I’m not going to forget it now. What I don’t want to happen is for my focus to shift from relying on God to letting my faith rest on what he can do for me. I don’t want anyone else to be shaken in their faith if our desired and prayed for outcome doesn’t come to be. I praise God for keeping me whole and sane and for giving me great news about this pregnancy. I will not stop praising God if our good news changes – “O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever!” No matter what.

This has to be your prayer, too, if you are praying for me. I would love nothing more than to find twins on our ultrasound in a few weeks; I would love nothing more than to see a single heartbeat; I would love nothing more than to experience a complete pregnancy and hold a squirmy baby early next year. Any part of that dream coming true would be a blessing from God; none of it is a measure of his love for me. We tend to be if-then thinkers: if God gives me a baby this time, he loves me a lot. Wrong. There is no if-then with God except that he loves us, and IF we accept the sacrifice his son made as the ultimate sacrifice for our sins, THEN we become his children and will live to praise him forever. The good things he gives us are gifts – wholly undeserved, and absolutely no reflection of any goodness we may have demonstrated in our lives.

This baby is already a gift from God; born or unborn it’s his creation, and it’s part of my life forever. Have no doubt that I am giving God the glory for this gift and our joy. Have no doubt that God is good all the time, when you can see his good gifts – like our lab work this week – but even when it hurts, even when you’ve lost, and even when you mourn. ALL the time, God is good.

Period. End of Discussion.

This was the title of the post that was running around in my head last week. It was going to say that I hate the period after a miscarriage. As if the miscarriage wasn’t loss enough, you spend the month (actually, the rest of your life) after trying to cope and return to some sort of normalcy when you are hit with the ultimate normalcy of your next period. Maybe I’m weird (okay, there’s no maybe about that one…) or alone in this feeling, but the period after a loss can be harder to cope with than the moment of the loss itself; you can autopilot through a few weeks or even a month, and you can imagine that there was some sort or mistake in the lab work – or that it was all a nightmare that you’ll wake up from – until you start your period. (Squeamish folks/guys, skip to the next paragraph now.) Nothing feels more final or fatal than blood when you lose a pregnancy – it’s a constant, graphic reminder of your baby’s death. The return of a normal cycle just nails the coffin shut on your dead dream with the same bloody fatalism.

Here’s the rest of the story this month. Generally, I am only moody when I’m extremely stressed or my hormones are running amok, and my expression of moodiness is either to be angry at everything for no apparent reason or to cry at everything, also for no apparent reason. This was how I felt Monday last week, along with all of the general aches and pains associated with periods, so I consulted the calendar and discovered that I should be starting at any point. By Thursday, I was beyond cranky, so I decided to psych myself out with a pregnancy test – I could take it, see that it was negative and my imagination was running wild, and then feel free to start my period. God clearly has a sense of humor. That was the fastest changing, darkest line we’ve probably ever had on a home pregnancy test. I had just been waiting for my period to start so I could start taking the pill again so we could do the second opinion appointment so we could have a better idea of what steps to take next so we could… apparently watch God laugh at our attempts to plan.

I really considered not telling anyone, including my husband, until sometime next week. If it didn’t work out, I would only be a week late starting, which would probably not be all that unusual after an IVF cycle. As the opening paragraph indicated, I was already set to be a grump anyway, so who would notice if I was more of a grump? If it did work out, then I’d be far enough along to confidently yell “Surprise! We’re pregnant!” at random. You may be wondering why I considered not sharing this at all since I’ve been pretty open about everything we’ve dealt with. Honestly, I felt a little embarrassed. We spent the last two months dealing with IVF and another pregnancy loss – how could we have let yet another pregnancy happen? How could I possibly tell anyone without feeling like an idiot? I even hesitated to go to the doctor’s office on Friday. The staff would surely think we were nuts, and it’s hard to date a pregnancy that happens the cycle after a miscarriage, so… There were a million little nagging thoughts like that.

Of course, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The nurse gave me several huge hugs, and the lab tech drew a souvenir pig on the test (I told her about inheriting my grandmother’s pig collection since they had pig stress balls to squeeze for blood draws last month…) which the nurse brought out and gave to me. My friends have been just as surprised as we were, but they have been amazing and supportive – as if I should expect anything less! You guys are awesome! My mom may win the best response award this time. She decided that we are having twins – one for me, and one for her. When I said Steven may not like that idea, she amended her decision to triplets – one for me, one for him, and one for her. I think there was a “Friends” episode like that: “There are three of them – surely they won’t miss one…”

The blood work Friday looked really good. The progesterone level was good, and the hcg level was 263, which might be the highest first test we’ve had. I know it’s the highest first level we’ve had in the last few years. If all is well, by Tuesday’s re-check, the hcg level should be at least over 600, and maybe even close to 1000. I’m hoping for 1000 tomorrow because that would be the best-possible-case scenario. It looks like we are right at five weeks, and this is where we always run into trouble. Right now, everything looks great, and I am hopeful that I have faced my last post-miscarriage period. Right now, I have no idea what God’s plan is, but I have no doubt he’s in control of every circumstance, regardless of the outcome. Period. End of discussion.

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Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is not my favorite day to deal with, and this year it had the added sting of following so closely behind a loss and sharing the date with my birthday. I have often skipped church on Mother’s Day to avoid dealing with it – the awkward (for me, anyway) invitation to stand as an acknowledgement of achieving motherhood, the awkward (for me, anyway) gift that I can’t gracefully accept or decline without losing it a little, and the simple recognition of a day that I can’t really participate in even though I have children. It’s just not the same, and it’s a reminder of loss and unattainable dreams. The absolute hardest Mother’s Day church service is definitely baby dedication. It’s a sweet tradition – if you’ve had babies to dedicate – otherwise, it’s a good day to sleep in.
This year, there was no baby dedication during the service, and we decided to brave it. (Actually, I decided to try it, and my sweet husband who wouldn’t have been too affected by the day agreed to support whatever I felt like I could handle…) There was no extra standing ovation for the moms present this year, but there was a request during the greeting to hug a mom near you while greeting the people sitting around you. In the choir loft, mass hugging ensued, but I noticed one of our sweet older ladies on the back row had tears forming in her eyes while she tried to keep her face still. She and her husband have been married for over fifty years, and they never had children. She’s never told me so, but I get the feeling that she probably lost at least one pregnancy; she’s told me that people her age just don’t talk about things like that. I went over to give her a special hug, and she said, “It’s just a hard day.” I said, “I know” and spent the next song trying not to cry when I realized what I needed to tell her after the service.
After church I caught her in the ladies robing room before she had a chance to get out into the crowd so I could tell her this: “You are just as much a mother as anyone else here today who actually gave birth. You count today for all the time and love you have put into the lives around you – including mine. You are a mom, and you deserved a special hug today and to know that.” We were both crying by then, and she said, “It’s so nice to hear that you count.” It is nice, and it’s hard to feel like you count on a day like Mother’s Day when you have failed the simple biological task of becoming a mother. You feel like you shouldn’t count because you failed. It’s silly when viewed logically, but that’s the emotional toll.
I had the honor of helping another hurting lady through that day, and I was reminded less than five minutes later almost word for word by a sweet friend that I count for the same reasons I gave my choir buddy. Mother’s Day was still not an easy day for me, but it was a sweet reminder of how the body of Christ should work: serving and being served, building up and being built up, encouraging each other in love.

Signs and Wonders

Yesterday was obviously a difficult day; after a week of waiting, we found out that our suspicions were correct and our pregnancy had not continued. One thing I always question God about in this situation is why he doesn’t perform a miracle for me. It’s selfish and a little silly to compare what God is doing in my life with other people who have had miraculous intervention that saved their baby when the pregnancy was endangered. But it’s a hard pill to swallow if I look at it too long from my human perspective without considering that I can’t see the bigger picture of what he’s doing through our losses.
Here are the miracles that did happen yesterday: two people separately and specifically prayed that
God would be enough to sustain me and my husband through this loss; a whole mass of people sent us love and support and prayers through messages and phone calls; we were directly loved by God through an amazing network of family and friends who will continue to hold us up with prayer and physical comfort through the next weeks and months. We have been the body of Christ supporting others, and now we are receiving the support of the body of Christ.
God could have performed a miracle and continued our pregnancy, and he would have received glory from that. It would have been a great story. But what’s the better story? Which ending gives more glory to God? I don’t know, but I am grateful to be able to see that his love being expressed through dozens of people is also a miracle that not everyone will experience. Any loss can be isolating, and miscarriage tends to be even more so because people don’t share it or family and friends feel uncomfortable discussing it. We have the blessing of feeling the wagons circling around us and isolating us from the loneliness instead of the other way around.
I heard more than once yesterday that I should be a bigger mess than I am because of this pregnancy loss and because of the sheer volume of our losses. There are two reasons I haven’t fallen apart yet. Right now the news, even though expected, doesn’t feel real; it will become real and painful soon enough. And, I can confidently say that I have faith that will sustain me, and I have the love of Christ expressed in so many ways in my life that I have no reason to fall apart. This walk would be impossible without that knowledge; logic alone would give me the right to give in to the self-pity and depression. Faith and the sacrificial love of Christ demand and empower me to work through it (trust me, there will be depression and anger and every other stage of grief in its time) and not let it cripple the rest of my life. The song “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger” has been extremely popular, probably because people cling to the thought that just surviving a trial makes us stronger, better people. I won’t pretend to know enough of the words to claim that the song as a whole has any sort of biblical message, but the title certainly does. God uses our weaknesses to show his strength. When we can demonstrate his strengths rather than rely on our own, we are stronger, better people who thrive rather than just survive a trial.
While it certainly isn’t the miracle I was hoping for, God is showing us signs and wonders of a different sort. The weeks and months to come will certainly hold different perspectives for me, and most of them will not be this reasonable or faithful. Once survival mode ends later this week or next week, the even greater miracle will be continuing to seek God’s face through the pain.

October 15th – How You Can Help

You are all invited to the October 15th Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day memorial service (details here https://mabbat.wordpress.com/october-15th-memorial-service/).  If you can’t come but would like to participate, here are a few ways you can help:

PRAY!!  Pray that women and families who need healing will come to this event and find comfort and acceptance.  Pray that those who need help and/or counseling will have the courage to ask for it through our registration cards.  Pray that God will use this time to draw people into relationship with him.

Light a candle.  And tell someone why you’re lighting it.  There is an “official” Wave of Light you can participate in by lighting a candle on October 15th at 7:00 p.m. in whatever time zone you live in and letting it burn for an hour, the idea being that there is a continuous wave of light that begins that evening and covers the whole country as an act of remembrance.   Even if you haven’t lost a baby, if you read this blog, you know someone who has.  Given that 10-15% of all acknowledged pregnancies end in miscarriage, and some estimates put the actual number at 40% of all pregnancies (March of Dimes statistics), you know someone else who has lost a child this way.

Give back.  Donate time, supplies or money to an organization who is working to save lives, like Sav-A-Life (www.savalife.org).  Or a non-profit foster care and adoption agency, like Agape (www.agapeforchildren.org).  I mention these because I have friends who work for both of these agencies, and they do a lot of good work in the local community.

There are lots of ways to help out even if you can’t or don’t want to attend an event.

October 15th Memorial Service

October 15th is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day.  If you live in the Birmingham, Alabama area, I would like to invite you to a memorial service at Oak Mountain State Park (Bluejay Pavilion 10:30 am).  I won’t repeat everything I just added to the page, so look to your right and click on “October 15th Memorial Service” under the Pages tab.  I am also (I think) posting the publicity flyer at the end of this post, so please print it out and invite anyone you know who might be interested.  If I do it right, there will be both a PDF and a Word 2010 file.  I would love for anyone who reads this blog to come, whether you have experienced a pregnancy or infant loss or not.  You have been a tremendous support for me, and I would love for you to share in this special time of remembrance.  If nothing else, come later and bring a picnic lunch – we have the pavilion reserved for the whole day.

 

October 15th Flyer

October 15th Flyer (PDF)