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.
