Beyond the Pink Lines

To many when you have a miscarriage or an ectopic pregnancy especially when it’s a first trimester pregnancy, or very early pregnancy around 5 or 6 weeks, you’ve “just lost a pregnancy” and should be able to move on pretty quickly because “at least it was early”. But pregnancy loss goes beyond that.

I didn’t just lose a pregnancy, we lost our child/children. We lost a beautiful little one that we created together. We lost a unique human. We lost witnessing all the “first”, we lost raising a child.

Some of the key “first” we lost: We lost seeing our child for the first time, both on an ultrasound and in person. We lost hearing the precious first cry. We lost the experiences of gender reveals, birthing classes, baby showers, birth announcements. We lost the crucial “skin to skin” in the first few hours after birth. We lost so much more than a pregnancy and birth experience.

We will never celebrate the first birthday of Landyn, Marli, Hayden and Riley. We won’t know who they looked like more as they started to grow. We missed out on all the milestones that come in the first few years of life; first smile, first giggle, first “mama” or “dada”, first crawl, first steps. Would they have loved the idea of a smash cake on that first birthday or would they have been freaked out and have a meltdown? Would they be fearless when it came to exploring the world around them?  What would their personality be as they grew?

Beyond the milestone firsts. We missed out on their first day of preschool, kindergarten, middle school, high school. We won’t get to celebrate accomplishments from kindergarten graduation, school plays and recitals, high school graduation. We won’t know if they got honor grades and full ride scholarships or if they had to work a little harder? Were they going to be into sports, music, speech and debate or other hobbies? Did they decide to pursue college or what career path would they have gone down?

We also missed out on shaping who they would become. James won’t get to introduce them to Star Wars, Jurassic Park or The Kansas City Chiefs. James won’t get to coach them. We won’t get to take family vacations or day trips to Kansas City to go to their first Chiefs game. I won’t get to try to influence them to be a “Swiftie” and “millennial music” while James would instill a bigger variety of genres of music.  

We missed out on them getting to grow and play with their cousins at cousin parties. Holiday traditions, matching pajamas, family photos, and so much more. Would they have gotten married? James won’t get to walk our daughters down the aisle, I won’t get a mother son dance. We won’t get to be grandparents.

Granted we might be able to have kids of our own in the future, we still have time but that’s the thing about infertility. You have to process and grieve that you may never have children. You may never get to experience the good, the bad, the ugly, the hard, and the joy of being a parent. And that is something most don’t acknowledge or want to talk about. That’s something when you find yourselves on this journey, you have to process and get to the point of acceptance. While pregnancy and children doesn’t define us and our marriage it is still an extremely hard pill to swallow. James always says he “didn’t marry me for my birthing hips” and reminds me if we are 80 years old and it’s just us that we have made it and he loves and appreciates that, but that doesn’t mean the possibility of not having kids, not seeing him be a dad doesn’t sting.

And as for Landyn, Marli, Hayden and Riley. The things above is what we are grieving and what we have had to work through. Losing them was more than losing a pregnancy. It was losing a whole future we envisioned. It was losing a precious little one that was a miracle and created in God’s image. It goes a lot deeper than what most think.

So if you know someone who has lost a pregnancy, no matter the stage, try to keep in mind that while yes they are processing and grieving the loss of that pregnancy, they are also grieving and processing losing a life, a child. A loss goes beyond losing “just a pregnancy”.

Psalm 139:13-14 (NIV) “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.“