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

On December 6, 2021 By admin

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.

Social media, negative comments, negative people, & the influence it has on everyone.

On December 18, 2020December 18, 2020 By admin9 Comments

Social media is full of many different topics and images for our viewing pleasure… and some for our not so great pleasure. These posts go from political, to pictures of babies, to meme’s, pictures of puppies, to the news, and endless other topics. As we scroll through our feeds there are NO topics or posts that warrant fully positive feedback. This is concerning as there are many things that are shared on social media with pure positive intent, yet negative comments and negative people still warrant a response.

Recently I have seen a news video that showed how a business spent lots of money on Christmas lights to give people something to go and see that would spread joy through their community at no cost to anyone but the business owner themselves.

That’s amazing and so very thoughtful and caring of such a company to offer that to their community when covid-19 has effected what we can and can’t do as well as many people’s incomes. Thus, these families may not even be able to take their children to a light show as it is too costly for them with their income changes, challenges, or struggles.

Do you think that this thread would have only had positive responses since it is such a selfless act of kindness?

Guess what! This is 2020 when someone somewhere is going to find a reason that this isn’t a good enough act.

Some of the not so positive responses are as followed:

Wow, they should’ve used this money and the money to cover the electric bill to feed locals in the area (yes that would be a nice gesture, but it doesn’t take away that this could also be the highlight of a child’s or families year as this year has taken a lot away from a lot of people).
They shouldn’t have done a light show because they should just help the needy (again not saying that isn’t important, but just because there are many more important things in the world, doesn’t take away that this act was still kind and filled with intentions that would bring happiness to their community.)
Waste of money. Should use it to lower the prices of their food. (Really. It’s nice to see that while you are worried about your pockets at a fast-food establishment, the establishment is more worried about using their prophets to spread cheer to their community.)

Another article I stumbled upon was about how an embryo was frozen and preserved for 27 years and then used to help a family have a child gave them their healthy and happy little miracle. The mother is 29 and thus the headline of the article stated that the baby is only two years younger than her mother based on the date the embryo was frozen.

That is incredible! Science has never known how long an embryo can stay healthy after being frozen. This family now has a healthy baby that they couldn’t produce on their own. Even better this 27-year-old embryo was the sibling of the family’s other child that was preserved for 24 years. Therefore, this family was able to have two children that are biological siblings. That is an amazing thing. This couple has become a family through an amazing medical miracle. Where should the negative be found in that?

Some of these not so positive responses went as followed:

The planet is overpopulated and this is acceptable? Our scientific knowledge and uncommon funding would be better off used elsewhere. (Wow! First off I hope you never have to struggle with infertility and child loss when you want your family someday. However, if you do I guess then you will see how much of a blessing it is that medical sciences can help families have families of their own that may not be possible the natural way.)
Stupidity in people these days. (Okay. I guess it’s stupid for people to want to find ways to have children.)
No one cares. (Then why are you bothered by it so much that you have to post a negative comment.)
Technically the baby isn’t 27 because the age is only to be calculated from the date of birth. (Just because you disagree with the headline, doesn’t change the fact this was miraculous. Bring your weird negativity elsewhere.)

Anyhow… My take away from all of this is that no matter how good-hearted or amazingly positive a post is on your social media; someone somewhere is going to have something not so positive or negative to say about it.

Social media. The blessing and the curse. There are many positives that can be made about how social media shares news updates, new useful products, connections with family and friends, promotes your small businesses and can be an escape from life that we need at times. However, the negative is always going to shine through. There is going to be a negative opinion on nearly every single post that you see if you look close enough. We need to remember that this negativity has the ability to instill so much negativity in our own lives. Such as me writing this blog about how much negativity is on positive intended posts. It triggered me to write this as I was so angry seeing such comments on something that I know was meant with pure and optimistic intent. I have personally felt this anger and hostility that this type of negativity can instill.

Takeaway.

We need to work on being better. Not just me, not just you, all of us.

We need to realize that not everything we see is meant to be an argument, conflict, etc.

We need to remember that we can just scroll past some of the things that we disagree with.

We need to realize that we live in a world where negativity is thrown all around us even if we want to avoid it.

We need to make sure we aren’t consumed with social media as it alone can alter our moods and ruin our day solely because of the words of strangers on a feed.

We need to remember that there is beauty, kindness, and positivity all over the world and that we shouldn’t use the lenses of social media to see it because all we are going to see is the brokenness of negative people trying to ruin positive things.

We need to step away from our phones, computers, etc. and see all of the positive that truly does exist in this world.

We need not to be consumed by the negative in the world.

We need to not let this type of negativity ruin our lives.

We need to not be the negative that ruins the days, weeks, and lives of others.

We need to by all means go back to our roots and remember that in many cases… If we don’t have anything nice to say, then we shouldn’t say anything at all.

Is social media problematic?

On October 12, 2018October 13, 2018 By admin

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.