I’ve debating on writing about this, but I feel like it might help me and others, and so I decided to try.
Our Christmas cards are delayed this year. I never meant for them to be early, for once. i intended to mail them on December 20, because I would be 12 weeks pregnant, and they were going to announce the happy news. Thursday I was at the doctor for a checkup and she could not find a heartbeat. I was shocked because there had been a heartbeat at 7 weeks, and that is typically the time to worry about such things.
Now I’m trying to make sense of it all while I wait for my body to “catch up” and figure out that the baby has passed.
It’s “that thing” that happens to so many women, but no one talks about it. Maybe because it’s sad, maybe because it’s taboo…I think it’s because we are expected to accept that miscarriages just happen, and to move on. Which I will. But it’s not easy. I remember the small flickering dot I saw in April of 2010. I had no emotional connection to this dot. I remember thinking how much such a tiny creature wanted to live, and that it was my job to facilitate that. If it already had a beating heart at 6 weeks, when only centimeters long, couldn’t I just do my part and allow that little creature to continue on? Of course times have changed. Today I live with this amazing, bright, funny, loving child…and I know now that the flickering dot was his will to live. I know that the tiny little gummy bear I saw on those early sonograms is now the person I can’t imagine my life without.
And so excuse me if it’s hard to move on.
I know it’s taboo to mourn this loss like one would a “person,” but what was that little creature but a small version of a person? If you are to become a person with time, aren’t you one in the beginning? Sure, I hadn’t met this person, I have no memories of him or her, but I had ideas and plans. So as I struggle to decide what is right in all of this…what is respectful to that pre-life…and letting go of my hopes and dreams for this tiny person who never will be, I find that I just don’t know what to do.
As I contemplate this, here is a song to think about…please say a prayer for us on Wednesday. 🙂
Make sure to listen to the end…
Josh and Korey 