Broken-Hearted. Again.

I am struggling to find the right words to share what I’m going through right now. When you experience a loss in pregnancy, you lose your hope along with your baby. It took us so long after losing Angel to get to the point of being brave enough to try again for a child, and now here we are again, having lost this second pregnancy this past Sunday. Our loss this time was certainly different from our first pregnancy: we were only 5 wks along instead of 22 wks, we never heard a heartbeat, and we will never know if little Punkin was a boy or girl. But even though the pregnancy was alive to us only for a week this time, that week was full of the hopes and dreams of what the future had in store for us and our family. And as the days progress and the remaining traces of pregnancy leave my body, I feel my hopes and dreams leaving too. I keep wanting to rewind time somehow and go back to last Saturday, when all was well and I was happily pregnant. Back to planning how to tell people this Christmas, to share my baby shower with loved ones during my week off in March, and to welcome our son or daughter in June. But this will not play out as we hoped, prayed, or planned for. For whatever reason, God has other plans for us. And of course, there comes the inevitable shouting out “Why?!”

We will probably never know physically why we miscarried, and we’ll probably never know why this was in God’s plan. But just as when we lost Angel, I HAVE to believe that there is a greater purpose in all of this- some reason we have had to go through this- otherwise, I‘ll just drown in the grief. I try to tell myself that it is better that it happened this way, so early in the pregnancy and especially before hearing a heartbeat. I try to tell myself that God was saving us from having to go through the same thing as with Angel- finding out so far into the pregnancy that we’d lost him. I try to tell myself that the Lord knows what He is doing, and this was not the child we were supposed to care for, love, and parent. But we DID love our baby and we didn't want a different baby- we wanted THIS one. I do recognize just how much worse this could have been; after all, I haven’t lost my ability to have children. But when you go through what Dave and I have been through, you can’t help but wonder if it will EVER happen for you. Although the doctors don’t see the two pregnancy losses as linked in any way, what if they are- and Dave and I just aren’t able to create healthy children? What if there is something wrong with my fertility that is causing these defects? What if this is just the beginning of years of problems and treatments that may never end in us carrying and delivering a healthy child? I know in my heart that Dave and I are meant to be parents; of that, I have no doubt. But I’m starting to wonder if we’re meant to have our own biological children. Sigh. I know this is probably mostly just the grief coming through; as the sadness and emptiness of the loss consumes you, it‘s almost impossible to imagine a hopeful future.

I distinctly remember being much younger and dreaming of the joy and excitement of one day starting a family. I envisioned how fun and natural and effortless it would be, how all it would take is simply making the decision to have a baby and poof- I’d be pregnant, have a baby, and live happily ever after. When you first start TTC, you take it for granted that there won’t be any problems or complications along the way- after all, this is what nature made us women for, right? And then reality comes knocking and suddenly, getting pregnant and carrying a healthy child to term seems like an impossibly miraculous dream. I’m sure it’s hard for people who have never lost a baby to empathize with what I‘m going through, and I will forever envy how ignorant they get to be of this pain. I would not wish this on my worst enemy. But for those of us who have experienced pregnancy loss- or even those who have had major struggles in getting pregnant- we will forever view pregnancy differently.

I feel very blessed to have a few special people in my life who have been there for me during this whole process and especially over the past few days, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your love, support, prayers, phone calls, emails, hugs, tears, and especially for sharing this with me, because I know it’s been hard on you too. You lived it with me, felt the loss with me, and while I am so sorry that you are also suffering, it has meant the world to me to know that I was not alone in all of this.

I do intend to keep this blog going for as long as it takes to get a healthy little one, so I recognize that there will be some people reading this entry months after I’ve posted it, at a time where I’ll hopefully be well into a third/fourth/fifth pregnancy that is going along fully healthy. So for those of you reading this at a much later date, you may be shocked to read that we went through another loss- and maybe even upset that I didn’t tell you. I apologize if you feel hurt that I didn’t share my news of this pregnancy with you or if you feel upset that I didn’t reach out to you for support when we lost our second baby. Please understand that from the very beginning of TTC after losing Angel, the whole process has been so difficult for me that the fact that I shared any of this with someone other than Dave is surprising. However, I recognized that sharing this journey with a couple of women who have already been through it would give me the strength to face my fears of what could- and unfortunately, did- go wrong, in order to achieve my dream of becoming a Mom. I hope this makes sense, and I hope you can understand.

Per doctors orders, we need to take some time off of TTC to let my body get back to normal. I look forward to “talking” to you again in a few months when we hop back on the TTC train. Until then,

Love and Blessings,
Nicki