Life After Loss
As I publish this, I’m fifteen weeks pregnant, eagerly counting down the weeks and days until I myself feel little Baby J kicking and growing within me. But I also sit here knowing that today is the due date for my first child, the one we lost a little over six months ago. Life is always a delicate dance between love and joy and grief, and some seasons intertwine those experiences more than others. This is one of those times.
Loss has changed my experience of pregnancy — with anxiety gripping my heart every day. Will today be the day that it all goes wrong again? I’ve wondered over and over and over. “Baby’s okay, right?” I ask Austin in the middle of the night. Since that positive test in October (which I’m still shocked we had, given it was my very first normal cycle following my surgery this summer), I’ve felt that I’m fighting against losing odds, even though the odds have always been in my favor. I’ve heard that grief is an expression of love in the face of loss. Pregnancy loss so perfectly expresses this. Even so, the loss doesn’t come close to eclipsing how excited I am to meet this little miracle Baby J bouncing around inside me now, but the fact that loss has changed me and my experience of pregnancy remains.
I’ve been able to process how pregnancy loss has changed me and changed my experience of pregnancy with the women in my life who’ve known this grief too. To say I’ve been blessed to have a community of women who know what I’ve been through doesn’t feel right, because no pregnancy loss is a blessing, nor do I believe that God ordained on high that those babies wouldn’t live. Instead, I believe that pregnancy loss is one of the many proofs we have of the brokenness of this world and that God can make good come from any brokenness, including pregnancy loss. So while pregnancy loss is never a blessing, these women have blessed me by sharing their experiences, as they reassure me that every fear I harbor and every hope I cling to is familiar to them. It’s also opened up a deep bond between us, one that I will always deeply cherish.
One of the more frustrating things I’ve stumbled across on the Internet is the world of crunchy moms and their thoughts on pregnancy and natural birth. Not to say that their choices are wrong — pregnancy is an extremely personal journey, and it really is up to the parents, especially the mother, on how to experience it, whether in a hospital or at home, with doctors or midwives, and everything in between. No, what rubs me the wrong way is the small handful that insists theirs is the only right way to do things, and that to do anything more than a natural birth is a rejection of femineity. I’ve stumbled across this idea that “Your body was made for this, it naturally knows how to do this, women have been doing this for thousands of years” as a way of putting down the need for prenatals, ultrasounds, medical intervention, hospital births, C-sections, and any example of modern medicine in pregnancy and birth. And on some level, they’re right, our bodies were made for this. And yet, that’s often not enough.
Perhaps these statements rub me the wrong way because so often things don’t go according to plan. It ignores the reality of the women who lose children during pregnancy or struggle with infertility. It rejects those women who need medical intervention to get pregnant or to have a healthy birth. On a personal note, it bothers me because, without modern medical intervention, I would have been one of those healthy young women who inexplicably died during pregnancy. My body did everything right, the way it was supposed to, but because of the errors in the genetic code, my body doing what it was made for would have resulted in my own death.
On this side of things, though, I’m learning to trust my body and this life growing within me. I’m letting myself believe that my body is made for this. For so much of this pregnancy with Baby J, I’ve questioned everything. The memory of loss was still so fresh in my mind, and as every week passed, the fear didn’t wane. Then we were at the end of the first trimester, and then we were several weeks into the second trimester. I look in the mirror now and see the proof of the life growing within me, as I shed my normal wardrobe and began to add elements of maternity clothes in. Day by day I’m learning to release that anxiety, and allow the anticipation to take over. Finally, I’m letting myself consider baby names, plan baby showers, and put together a Pinterest board with ideas for the nursery. Most of all, I finally am letting myself imagine what life will be like with our little one in our arms at long last.
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all the lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
Today I was thinking about this quote from Tolkien, and it so perfectly sums up with dance between joy and grief and the love that weaves between them. Grief does not poison joy, or at least it hasn’t for me. Grief, perhaps, as Tolkien suggests, allows my love to grow in a special way. While there is a soft sort of melancholy in remembering that today is the due date for that first child, there is still so much excitement and anticipation for the child growing within. Not to say that this little miracle replaces the life that was lost, but rather everything we’ve been through reminds me that love and life are so very tenacious. So today Austin and I set aside space in our hearts for grief at the same time that we celebrate and anticipate that summer day when our little miracle will be in our arms at last.
