This was supposed to be the first ever photo of our baby. Instead, it’s a blank screen. We should have been 8 weeks pregnant this week, and soon announcing that our bundle of joy was on its way. Instead, those announcement photos mark a time of pure joy now overshadowed by deep sadness. June 7th was supposed to be one of the happiest days of our lives. Instead, it’s a day that will come and go without a baby in our arms.
Miscarriage is something that isn’t talked about enough, but I’m going to. I’m a sharer. I like talking to people and sharing stories and feeling a closeness to others. It’s lonely enough to feel your baby vacate your body without enduring it in silence and secrecy, clouded in stigma and feelings of inadequacy. To not have many people to talk to because you hadn’t announced it to the world yet, despite wanting to shout it from the rooftops every waking second. We did tell people, though. And in these first few days after the loss, at times it has felt like too many people. Too many people to have to share our heartbreak with. But today, it feels like not enough people knew about our greatest joy to date.
I was exactly 7 weeks. 7 weeks is a long time to dream. To tell loved ones and to catch their precious reactions on video, reactions I’ll cherish forever and ever. To plan how we were going to announce it to the world. To window shop online. To check week by week what fruit size the baby was. To imagine the rest of their life. I woke up on my 25th birthday and could sense the baby’s presence, while knowing he or she wouldn’t show up in the way of a second line for a couple more days. It was the greatest birthday gift imaginable, only to be taken away a month later.
We had been trying for seven months and during that seven months our love for our unmade baby had already grown. When we saw the faintest of faint second lines our hearts burst with seven months worth of love, and only amplified as we watched the lines get darker and darker, and then finally getting the digital read out: “Pregnant.” I’m so grateful for that test; that word can never be taken away from us now. Despite only knowing for four weeks, it felt like a lifetime of love and dreams and hopes and excitement had built up and found its home in our hearts. I enjoyed every second of feeling like I had been hit by a train, because I knew that monster headaches and extreme fatigue were physical proof of our growing baby. Those wonderful headaches have now been replaced by cramps and backaches, as if the emotional torment isn’t a sufficient reminder.
Our baby was only the size of a poppy seed the week we got all those second lines, and had graduated all the way to the size of a raspberry in its short life. I know, scientifically speaking, that the baby likely did not make it due to chromosomal abnormalities incompatible with life. As someone who earned a degree in science, that comforts me. It’s nature doing what nature does. Our sweet baby, however loved and celebrated, would not have been healthy. Part of me wanted to keep all the baby apps I had to check in and see how big he or she would be if they had made it, but I just can’t. I painstakingly signed out of all the baby apps I had, feeling like I was abandoning my baby on a doorstep. Like it would continue to grow in some lonely place without me watching it and cheering it on. Nevertheless, I deleted the apps, unsubscribed from the emails, finished the second month in my pregnancy journal, put the few baby things we had purchased and been gifted away, sorted photos and pregnancy tests into bags, wrote a letter to the baby, and put everything away in a box. It was heartbreaking, but therapeutic and necessary.
This isn’t meant to be a pity party. We just want everyone to know, we were going to have a baby. We were deliriously excited. And now we are devastated. We just want this baby to be known and celebrated and remembered. We want everyone to know the joy we felt over this new life. I’ve been working on this post since Thursday, when we confirmed the miscarriage. I’ve been trying to perfect it ever since because I knew immediately that I had to share our baby with the world, that this sweet gift wasn’t something I could hide away. These are some really difficult emotions to process, but I’m so incredibly grateful for my husband and our families and close friends. We’re getting through it together. We’ve been going on lots of walks and lying around and just talking through our endless thoughts. Milestones like the baby’s due date and the upcoming holidays when we would have been announcing our growing bundle of joy are going to be hard, but each day’s burden is somehow becoming more manageable to carry.
Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we heal and chase our rainbow baby. We are so very sad, but also so very hopeful for what’s ahead. We firmly believe that the best is yet to come.
“The Lord is close to those who are brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.” Psalm 34:18 NLT
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