When It’s Not What You Expected

So…I don’t even really know how to begin this. This is not a post I ever hoped to write.

About a month and a half ago, Dave and I found out that we were expecting our third child. We hadn’t exactly been trying, but we hadn’t really been actively preventing so we weren’t surprised -- and we were thrilled. By our calculations, the baby would probably be due mid to end of March, right around the time of Dave’s birthday.

We had a trip planned to visit Dave’s family in New York the beginning of August. My parents were going to be with us as well and we decided to announce the big news to both our families then.  One night we ordered a pizza and had a message written out in pepperoni: Baby #3. It was a perfect, fun way to celebrate, our joy multiplied by the reactions of our loved ones.

Despite our anticipation, I had a sense of uneasiness. Something felt different, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I wasn’t even a little bit sick, and that worried me. But I really never had terrible morning sickness with either of the girls so I just told myself that I must have gotten lucky this time. And I had felt anxious and worried to a certain degree with both Lily and Sophia but everything had been perfectly fine, so I shoved aside my misgivings.

We had our first appointment the Tuesday after we returned from New York and we asked our family to keep things quiet until then. I wanted to hear the heartbeat to reassure me before we announced it to the world.

Unfortunately, I never got the opportunity.

The memory of that ultrasound will forever be etched in my mind. I saw the baby on the screen looking so sweet and small, it’s arms and legs barely popping out from it’s tiny body, and I felt my heart surge with love. The tech took measurements and we chatted about the difficulties of raising a two year old.

Then I saw those vertical lines pop up on the screen, the ones that are supposed to show the heartbeat, only they weren’t moving. They were only there for a second and then they vanished. I held my breath waiting to see if my suspicions would be confirmed but she just started talking about how the baby was 9 weeks 2 days developed and my due date would be March 17. Then she asked if I wanted some pictures. There was no indication from her that anything was wrong so I thought I must have misunderstood what I had seen.

I didn’t.

I headed to the room down the hall to see the doctor and that’s where all the fears I had pushed to the side were finally confirmed.

“You look like you’re about 9 weeks along but…”

But.

I knew there shouldn’t be a but.

“…but the baby doesn’t have a heartbeat.”

I have often wondered at the depth of pain I saw in the people I knew who had suffered an early miscarriage. It’s not that I doubted it’s legitimacy, it’s just that I did not totally understand. It didn’t seem like it would be “as bad” as losing a child whom you had seen and known and loved. And it’s not the same, I’m sure, but the moment the doctor uttered those words, I understood.

It is a loss you feel, not for the child you knew, but for the child you will never know. For the hugs you’ll never give and the kisses you won’t receive. For the personality you will never get to see develop and the color of their eyes and softness of their skin and the shape of their nose that you will never get to see or touch or feel.

As Dave said, “It’s like there is a part of our family that will always feel a little bit incomplete.”

I sat in the chair and listened as the doctor told me that it wasn’t my fault and I thought, “How does she know?” And even though I know that’s not a path I should allow my mind to travel, it’s hard not to wonder. What happened?

It is no coincidence that at the very moment I received that awful news, I also received a text message from my friend Ellen. Ellen, who has herself suffered through the loss of a child. Ellen, who was one of only two friends who I had shared our secret with. She wanted me to know she was praying for my appointment.

I swallowed tears and tried desperately to hold it together while the doctor explained my options and sent me to have my blood drawn. I walked through the waiting room filled with happy expectant mothers, trying not to look at their swollen bellies and hoping they wouldn’t notice my puffy red eyes.

And then I collapsed in the front seat of our mini van and let the tears come. Dave had left work the moment I called him and when he arrived we stood in the middle of the parking lot and held each other. I watched his shoulders shake with grief when I handed him the first and last pictures we will ever have of our baby and then we went home where my mom waited with our girls.

I cried more than I have ever cried in my entire life, until I felt certain that there wasn’t a drop of liquid left in my body.

And now here we are, two days later, and I am learning something about grief. It is not something that you can just have a good cry about and then it’s over.

I am learning that you can have good moments where you feel fine and then seemingly out of nowhere the reality will hit you, like when you walk past the maternity section in Target, or you hear someone else announce their pregnancy.

I am learning that it is a process, just like everyone says, and that there is still a long road toward healing ahead of me.

And I’m also learning that it is true that you can have joy in the midst of sorrow. I think it was John Piper that I heard say once that, “Despair is not suffering it is the absence of hope in suffering.”

I am so grateful for our families and the tremendous comfort they have been to us, but more than anything else, the truth of God’s Word has comforted me over and over and over again these past few days. God has brought verses and passages of Scripture to my mind continually that remind me that we are not those who must “grieve like people who have no hope.”

I think the passage I have read more than any other is Psalm 139. That famous passage that is often rejoiced over at a child’s birth has brought me tremendous comfort in my child’s death.

For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.

His eyes saw my baby’s unformed substance.  He had every day of it’s short life written in His book. He knows my baby, and He knows me. He loves me. He gave His Son for me and because I know the depth of His love and His mercy and His forgiveness, I know that He has a good purpose for even this.

And I have hope – a sure and settled confidence – that I will someday see my baby and know everything that I do not know right now.

Christy Nockels, in a song she wrote about a child she miscarried, put it this way,

“So baby, let sweet Jesus hold you
till Mom and Dad can hold you.
You’ll just have heaven before we do.”

There is no better place for our baby than where it is, right now, safe in the arms of Jesus, and I as I walk through the months ahead and work through the grief and the sadness and the fears that I know I will battle, that truth will comfort me.

God loves me. He is my hope.

"When my heart is overwhelmed;
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I."
Psalm 61:2