As I scrolled through my Facebook while holding the hand of our latest miracle while he fought sleep, I was amazed again at how many women have experienced the loss of the smallest babes God could give us. It altogether fills me with a sense of belonging and immense sadness for my fellow mourning moms. Some lost babies very early on, others lost them heartbreakingly late. The common thread is the loss. The shared agony is for the ones we will never see grow up. We won't get to hold their hands as they drive us crazy NOT falling asleep.
Fortunately, the Department of Health and Human Services has finally recognized what my fellow mothers and I already knew: life begins at conception. Which means loss begins then, too.
We have lost at least three babies in the last six years. Our "last" miracle snuck in and somehow survived a battery of blood tests and whacked out hormone levels and 0 folic acid and incredibly low progesterone, etc etc etc. And we are incredibly grateful. And yet I miss my "Roos" that didn't make it. Our - and I say "our" because the loss was my husband's and mine shared - our second to last loss was the most difficult thing we've gone through. God Bless my parents, again, who came over at 10:00 PM when I couldn't stand the pain of the actual miscarriage any longer and didn't have the energy or emotional strength to go through it. (Yep - that's not usually mentioned. Many times you find out you've lost the baby then have to wait days or even weeks for the physical miscarriage).
We got to the hospital and were treated with incredible love. And God Bless the morphine. I managed three live births sans drugs (so dumb) but couldn't bear the loss of one without them.
Life is like that. We can go through so much pain if we know there will be light/happiness/miracles eventually but when there is only darkness, we beg for the drugs to numb us. All of our losses are unique - to each individual and each pregnancy. But the fact that there is a loss is not.
Nearly 30% of pregnancies end in a miscarriage, usually within the first seven weeks. That number could be far from accurate since many women don't know they're pregnant until around that time. So for some, the loss is in hindsight. For others, it becomes a roller coaster of "Yay we are pregnant" to "Holy shit. What do I do now?"
We experienced our last two miscarriages in "real time". My suspected third was in hindsight. Then, as I was speaking to my fertility nurse, she said if I looked back at my NFP charts, I would probably find months were I had early miscarriages. I always said there was no way I wanted to do that. Until I did. Over the past eleven years, we have experienced over a (suspected) dozen miscarriages. The only way I knew was because we charted.
My story is one of thousands who experience the loss of a baby or many in their lifetimes. My heart broke as I read one friend's post where she ended it with hashtags, one being #itsme. I wanted to reach out immediately and reassure her that it wasn't because of her and that we can't explain why these losses happen and things will be okay and all the other cliches that people wear out in moments like that.
Then I stopped.
Because it was her. And it is me. And it is you. We are the carriers of life so when that life is lost, it is nearly impossible to look anywhere else for an explanation other than #itsme.
And no cliche comfort or emoticon on social media will dissuade that motherly guilt we will carry for the rest of our lives.
Because for whatever reason - God asked us to carry that guilt instead of that life.
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