On Miscarriage

Miscarriage is a sort of silent pain.  Many women go through it and never speak of it.  But it is the loss of a child.  That sort of loss just stays with you forever.  It needs to be talked about in order to find healing.  But when I went through my loss I often felt like it was a subject that there was little information about.  I would search to find other women’s stories only to be left empty and wondering how mine compared.  This is not for the squeamish but this is my story.

My first loss was pretty devastating.  We didn’t want to admit it was happening but in the end the reality hit us like a brick.  I had a complete miscarriage in our home and it was graphic, emotional and one of the hardest things my husband and I have ever been through.

I thought the pain was over at 11 pm and I took a sleeping aid and went to bed.  At 2 am I woke to the worst pain I’ve ever experienced.  I didn’t know at the time that I was in a sort of labor.  I recently talked with a lady who had nine miscarriages (I know, right?).  She said the ones at twelve weeks were always physically the hardest.

I was twelve weeks pregnant when I delivered our child in our bathroom on June 8th, 2013.    My husband ran to get a jar and we cringed as we put our baby in it.  We couldn’t look but we saw enough.  Through the tears we took the shell of our child to the ER to confirm that I didn’t need a D&C.  As I lay there, exhausted, I asked Bill to put a towel over the jar so we didn’t have to keep looking at it.

The doctor came in and confirmed it was a healthy fetus but for some reason my body could not carry it.  There were no answers, no reasons, and no explanations.  I wanted to know why and there was just nothing to explain it.

For years I had put my identity in the hopeful role of being a wife and mother.  We dreamed of home schooling and raising children in the Lord.  We kept waiting for life to turn out the way we had hoped.

But the grief set in hard as we went home.  I’ve never experienced grief like that.  I couldn’t function.  I felt alone in a community I was relatively new to.  We didn’t really have a church group we felt close with or friends our age.  Everything sent me into tears.  Worst of all was the sight of pregnant mothers or tiny babies.  I remember watching the water go down the sink while doing the dishes and just being stuck there, like I was losing time.  The water reminded me of the toilet that dreadful night.  I don’t know how long I stood there but I had many moments like that.  Death is always graphic.  If you are there when someone passes, you know the intensity and loss of any grief.  They are memories etched in our minds forever.

We experienced the loss of a child but also the loss of the future ideal we had in our hearts for a family.  This was not the happy ending I was searching for.  For the rest of my life when people speak of the grief over losing a loved one I will always be near tears thinking of my unborn children alive in the arms of Christ but far away from my own.

We wanted a child and the life of a family so badly.  I felt hopeless.  I couldn’t speak of it without tears.  But the Lord would use my pain to bring me to a place of new identity in him.  My role was to be a daughter of the King and to know his love for me in much deeper ways.