Some days you’re strong. Some days you cry. Life after loss.

As many know and some perhaps don’t, my husband and I have been through lots of loss ever since we were married in September of 2019. We have dreamt of a life full of children for longer than we both could remember. We had everything the way we needed it to be to begin fulfilling that dream and it just hasn’t been in the cards for us. We have seen many loved ones growing their families. Some easily and some with challenges similar to ours. However, we still don’t have a child. We don’t know if we ever will. That being said, life after loss is unique and never the same as it was before these experiences.

Many days we are strong. Many days we are not. 

If you know me, you know that I am a talker, an over-sharer, and I will tell anyone my life story if they show interest or inquire about me. P.S. I also want to know about your life if you are also willing to share. So feel free to tell me about yourself. I’ll listen. 

I talk about my losses frequently. The first list of reasons for this being a frequent conversation is that these babies matter to me, my losses matter, my grief matters, and awareness matters. When people inquire I run down the, now very long, list of what has happened to us; this includes what we have experienced, what we are doing now, where our medical and fertility journey is going, and how real and specific these experiences have been. I speak of our many losses. I give great detail about the very real, raw, and emotionally and physically altering details of recurrent miscarriage, miscarriage at home, surgery, testing, and our now 5 babies that have died. 

After many of these conversations we get a lot of feedback. The greatest feedback is that we are so strong. We are strong for being able to talk about our experience. We are strong for smiling and caring for others when we have so much on our own plate. Though this is appreciative… we have no choice but to be strong. There is no choice but to cope and move forward. The difference is that we choose to talk about it. We think that there is an importance in sharing this information as we feel that miscarriage is something so heavily shadowed. It is real. It is real to many people that you probably are close to that may have never shared this experience with you. We live in a society that hides the realities of loss. 

These realities are what need to be shared. People need to know what losing a baby is like so that others don’t feel they need to silently grieve. Husbands and wives need to know that they can be as upset and sad as they are because that is normal and completely valid. Losing a baby hurts. It doesn’t matter at what stage that baby was lost. Your baby died. You are allowed to have feelings about this. No matter what the feelings are. These feelings exist because your baby matters and your baby is now gone. 

The topic of sadness. Sadness is a feeling I feel deeply. I feel this every day, every week, every month. This doesn’t mean that I can’t also feel happy about the other aspects of my life. I am so appreciative of the life that God has given me. I am extremely blessed beyond measure. Amazing husband, family, friends, career, and overall life. However, those blessings do not take away from my right and natural grieving process to feel sad. Many people will want to discuss the positive things in life when you are grieving. Their intentions are great but that doesn’t stop the sadness from losing a baby or in our circumstance losing many babies and not knowing if you will ever have that opportunity. We are allowed to feel sad. We don’t have to be optimistic but we can try if it helps us.

I personally am a very optimistic look at the bright side type of person. I tend to be happy far more than I am sad. However, I still get sad randomly throughout my day or throughout my week. These feelings come without warning. We never know when they will hit. We may be confident and happy in one moment and in the next feel great despair about everything.

One example is today. I absolutely love Christmas. This brings me so much joy I can’t even handle it most days but that doesn’t mean that the sadness of our circumstance wont creep in. As I was discussing Christmas plans with my mother today everything was going well until I started talking about what Christmas will look like in my future. I began my next statement with “when we have kids we may want to do…” and then it hit me. I may not have kids. I changed my statement to “well if we have kids we would want to do this…” then I felt instant tears swelling up in my eyes because that is our reality. Of course my mom calmed me down, reminding me that you don’t need biological children to have a family. This did calm me but it doesn’t take the sadness of the dream away. It doesn’t mean it will still happen as the adoption and foster care options are also VERY hard. 

To close, we aren’t ready to throw in the towel on the journey of conception and having a successful pregnancy, though we know we can’t continue this journey for that much longer either. This is a personal and challenging journey. A journey that we do like to share. Though we are strong with our abilities to share and move forward we are constantly facing the grief of our losses. We are constantly reminded through our daily thoughts and routines that we have five babies that have died and we don’t know when or if we will have a living biological child. We appreciate God’s blessings and place our trust in him entirely but that doesn’t mean that we can’t feel the sadness of our circumstance. 

Life after loss is hard. Life after loss is sad. Life after loss changes you. 

Life after loss is never the same. Your life is changed forever.

Early scan of our recently lost twins.

Is social media problematic?

Is social media problematic?

As I have thought about this many times, it’s been hard for me to know how to express what I was thinking about the topic of social media until now. Social media is great to stay in touch with family and friends. It’s a form of contact that is easy and can let us become a part of the world that we want to live in without us actually needing to go out into the world and actually experience living it. We are able to make bonds and break bonds at the click of a mouse with the use of simple words on a keyboard.

How can that be bad?

Social media and depression

Well though it is great that we can see updates on people’s lives that we care about; is it possible that we are also setting unrealistic standards for ourselves?  Can it be that we are viewing someone’s life on social media as perfect and aspiring because we see the perfect pictures of their perfect lives? If we are looking at people’s lives and comparing what “seems perfect” to our lives that we know still has a lot of work to be done, couldn’t that trigger depression? It’s easy for me to make my life look perfect online but that doesn’t mean it is perfect. I have my own battles, my own drama, and my own set of issues that I too have to conquer. Just because social media makes something look great that doesn’t mean it’s as perfect as it is being viewed by you. NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE, wants to put on their social media things that are going to make their lives seem mediocre or at all negative because that it isn’t uplifting to them. If it doesn’t look good or sound good then why would you want to share it? They want the perfect life just like everyone else does. One thing that we need to remember about all this is that though their lives look perfect and our lives may not seem to be, their lives have their own problems as well. It is important to be aware of how much we are allowing social media to determine our mood and demeanor about our lives. It seems to me that social media could easily trigger someone to struggle with their emotions because it is full of things that when compared to our lives could bring us down. Our real lives aren’t filtered the way our social media lives are.

Social media and people’s opinions

With today’s religious and political differences that exist across the nation’s people, you will notice that social media is an outlets for everyone’s opinions, judgments, and arguments. The bottom line is that everyone has a difference of opinion and everyone is allowed to freely speak their opinions. However, we are allowing people’s opinion to dictate our friendships and relationships through social media. We argue with people we do not know about topics that don’t even relate to us personally. There comes a point where we are so consumed by other people’s opinions and pushing our opinions that it completely engulfs us into an aspect of social media that is capable of running our lives. We start to forget that some of these fights aren’t our fights, and that we don’t have to agree with one another on every topic. I have strong opinions but that doesn’t mean that I should let a difference of opinion on social media become a problem large enough to let it consume my entire life. I can allow myself to move past something I disagree with to keep my own sanity. If we dwell on differences of opinions we can start being fueled by anger and arguments. We need to work on remembering that social media can be used for more than just arguments and agendas. Don’t let every opinion dictate who you are as a person, what you believe in, and how you feel about your own perceptions. Advocate for what you believe but understand that you don’t have to change everyone’s opinions because you never will be capable of such things. It can be emotionally draining if you expect an argument or discussion on social media to end in a positive light when everyone is going to be expressing their personal views and you can’t expect to change them nor for them to be able to change yours.

Bottom line

Social media can be a great resource for many things. However, I could see how it can be problematic. It can trigger reasons for depression and arguments when you dig into some of its aspects. It is important to focus on the fact that social media platforms are ONLY platforms. They aren’t real life. They may factor in to what people are doing and what large changes are affecting the world and how people feel about it, but it isn’t everything. We should attempt to make a change in letting go of people’s opinions rather than dwelling on them. Not letting the picture of someone’s life consume how are feeling about our lives. We get one life and we should live it, believe it, and act as we see fit. Everyone has opinions, challenges, and aspects of their lives that are different and what is viewed on social media isn’t everything.

Social media promotes more staged photos than that of real captured moment