Cedar N' Steel

While everyone celebrated motherhood on Sunday, I drove home from Florida in a complete fog, over seven hours of silence and solitude just wanting my bed. All my symptoms pointed to another miscarriage and yesterday my doctor confirmed it. I’ve miscarried…again.

In the book Horton Hears a Who, Dr Seuss says “A person is a person no matter how small.” A baby in the womb, whether 4 weeks or 40 weeks, is just as much a person as you or I. I have now lost 7 children, 6 to miscarriage and one ectopic pregnancy. The fact that I’ve never made it past 8 weeks doesn’t make it any less tragic. It’s the loss of a potential life. The loss of hopes and dreams. The loss of someone already loved beyond measure.

I could not have written this following either of my first two miscarriages. After the first one I was too depressed, hardly able to get out of bed and make it through the day with any purpose. After the second one I was angry, punishing my body on the treadmill or in hot yoga and intentionally avoiding God. This time I feel resigned. This may not work. I am inching ever closer to believing it won’t.

Don’t worry about saying the right or wrong thing to us. There is no right thing to say in this situation. Whatever comes to your heart to say is fine. I don’t have bitterness towards anyone who says the wrong thing; I just mentally forgive their ignorance and keep smiling. The only one who can comfort us is God. We must go through the grieving process with Him by our side and allow Him to heal us.

Right now my goal is to love and be gentle with myself. I’m letting my to-do list sit for a while and doing things I love like reading, watching movies, listening to music, running/lifting/yoga. I get to take a break from fertility treatments and just feel normal. My energy level has sky-rocketed, alleviated from it’s melting pot of supplements and artificial hormones.

Some people keep saying “I know it’ll happen for you.” I just smile and say yes maybe, but no one can know whether it’ll happen or not. We’re conditioned to believe everything has a happy ending because movies, shows and books tell us so. Naturally we desire a happy ending to every situation, but I’ve learned a happy ending may not necessarily mean getting what I want.

The only way to start healing is to expose my real feelings about all this. I must not hide from God or isolate myself from others because that just delays moving on. Writing this blog has become a significant coping mechanism because it forces me to open up to everyone about our struggles. Burying pain behind a smile leads to physical, psychological, and spiritual illness. Our natural inclination is to hide pain and difficulty because our world expects happiness and perfection. Instead, I’m intentionally choosing honesty, openness, and vulnerability. I’d rather people know the real me than a faux facade.

I finally understand what God’s been trying to teach me the whole time; that I can wish for things to go as I want them to, but hope is reserved for only that which is absolutely certain. He’s taught me how to put my hope in God alone, and not in things of this world. I must keep pressing forward in what He’s called me to, leaving the results up to Him. My happy ending is not necessarily a baby, though that’d be a good side-benefit if God sees fit. My happy ending is a deep, unshakeable, hope in God. A hope that someday all the heartache and chaos will be over and He’ll make me whole and perfect. A hope that when I’m standing before Him entering the gates of Heaven, He will read my life story, look me square in the eyes and say “Well done good and faithful servant…”

2 Corinthians 4:16-18, John 16:33