Here, then gone again.

For the past few weeks I’ve been longing to write but have been without any words. At the beginning writing was too painful, seeing the words come alive on the screen suddenly made everything real and unavoidable. But as time has slowly passed I began longing to be able to express what’s going on in me, but every time I thought about writing my mind went blank and the tears welled up. Today is different though. It still hurts, a lot, but I have a touch more clarity and although I don’t know where this is going, I at least feel able to begin.

Three weeks ago we found out that we were 5 weeks pregnant. One week later I miscarried. Here, then gone again. After almost two years of trying to conceive, we were over the moon when that elusive second line appeared on the stick, making our dreams at last a reality. You hear that one in three pregnancies end in miscarriage, but even though that is a huge number, deep down you never think it’s going to happen to you. So as the line on the stick got fainter, and my symptoms started to disappear, we feared the worst but still held on to that shred of hope that surely, after how long it’s taken us to get here, this will never happen to us. But sadly life does not make sense, and happen to us it did.

As soon as the nurse looked away from the screen and said she was sorry, it felt like someone had kicked me in the chest. The longing for this not to be real manifested in a physical ache that was overwhelming. Our hopes and dreams were shattered in an instant as we were informed the ‘pregnancy was not ongoing’. They saw a blob on the screen, but to us it was and will always be our first baby.

We will never know if the baby was a girl or a boy, what they would have looked like or who they would have grown up to be, and that makes me sad. But I believe that our baby was a person, and as such had a soul, and so one day when I meet Jesus, I believe they will be there too. But until then I feel it is really important to never forget this baby. I know we will not always be in this much pain, and in a sense that will be us moving on, but moving on doesn’t mean forgetting. I realised within a few days that I had named the baby, a name that is too personal and precious for me to be able to share, but naming the baby helped me to grieve. It reminded me that the pain I feel isn’t the loss of a bunch of cells, but the loss of a baby, a real person with a soul and a heart. It makes me angry when I read about people referring to early miscarriages as a collection of tissue or a grain of rice, as that immediately invalidates the grief the parents feel, as who grieves a bunch of cells? But as soon as God breathes life into those cells, they become a baby, a person, however small, and that is why the grief we feel is so great.

And now, here I am, two weeks down the line. The bleeding has stopped but my heart is in tatters as I try to make sense of something that we will never understand. I have begun to see the small rays of hope in it now, in that it was good we were able to conceive so soon after starting treatment, and that gives me hope that in time we will conceive again. But that thought is swiftly accompanied by a huge amount of fear that this may happen again. I understand that this is normal though, and for now try to deal with 24 hours at a time.

We have also seen more than ever before how blessed we are with the friends we have been given. We feel hugely grateful for friends who we can cry and laugh with simultaneously, who drop anything at a moment’s notice to be with us, and who know what we need even when we don’t. I don’t believe everyone has friends like these, but we do, and we are immensely thankful.

So as we try to muddle our way through this pain and confusion, we’ve begun to see glimpses of light in the dark and murky fog we are surrounded by. Not enough to tell us we are through the sadness and out the other side, but enough to give us hope that in time we will be. I remind myself that although I can’t see God clearly right now, He’s like the sun, and even when you’re in the fiercest storm the sun still shines above it all.