It seems like there’s a national month or day for everything now, doesn’t it? At some point they all start to feel like someone just made them up yesterday. I was surprised to learn that national Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month was started by Ronald Reagan. This topic has been on the verge of making itself known since the 1980’s. Even still, it’s something that we don’t know how to talk about. How do we make something so personal a part of casual conversation? How do we prepare young men and women for such a devastating possibility without taking the joy out of growing their family? It’s a hard concept to normalize because it has so many different meanings to so many different people.
Sharing Our Stories
I wasn’t sure if I would ever share the story of our loss in a public way. Ive seen a few friends post on social media in very different ways about their experiences with pregnancy and infant loss. Some were very humble and vulnerable. They shared posts some time later and in a subtle way. Some posted long paragraphs and disheartened quotes every day for months while they grieved. Neither of these has ever seemed fitting for me.
So I have done what many women do – I have kept this experience private. It has been between me and my family….not a secret, just kept quiet.
So many people don’t realize that loss is a natural, and surprisingly common, part of growing a family. It has been so strange to me how many times I have told someone that we lost a pregnancy and heard “we went through it too.” It’s this sad, private club that no one wants to belong to. There’s a sense of understanding and comfort in knowing that the women around us know the feeling. I am not the type to follow celebrities, but in this case, I found solitude in words from Hillary Scott and Hilarie Burton.
For our family, our loss was more of an idea than a person.
We lost a baby so young that we hadn’t gotten to know him or her yet. I like to think that made things easier for us, but there is no easy time to lose a child.
Last March, my husband and I were going back and forth about when the best time to add a second child to our family would be. That decision seemed to be made for us when we found out that I was pregnant. For me, something felt off from the very beginning. I didn’t get a positive pregnancy test until I was 8 days late – and that first test was a very faint positive. I told my husband, who was of course excited. We decided to wait to tell our families until we had seen the doctor, but started talking about how we would share the exciting news. We ordered a shirt for our little guy that said “Only Child expiring 2018.” My husband made an Easter egg that said Baby on it to go along with the rest of our family.
That excitement only lasted 5 days. After spending a whole morning in the ER, we learned that there wouldn’t be a baby for us at that time.
A part of me felt like I had known that something was wrong, but of course having the idea of a child taken from you is always devastating. All of the sudden, every thought is attached to the idea that you’re not pregnant. Watching friends and acquaintances go through pregnancies of their own is just a reminder of what you could have had. Now, the question of “when is the best time to grow our family?” had an answer. Unfortunately it was an answer that was in the past and unattainable.
We kept trying, and I became obsessive about early pregnancy testing.
Since I knew that something was wrong when my second pregnancy didn’t test positive as early as it should have, I needed the reassurance that my hormones were starting to rise when they should in my cycle with the next pregnancy.
This ended up turning the start of our current pregnancy into an emotional roller coaster and a hard reminder of what we had already been through.
I got my faint positive test right when I would have expected it. I was cautiously excited and waited until the next day and a second test to tell my husband. We decided that we wanted our families to be involved from the beginning and told our parents the next day.
That’s where things got hard.
I went to an Urgent Care that day for something completely unrelated. The doctor there told me that their pregnancy test was negative and that I had most likely gotten a false positive at home. She seemed confident that her test was right and my four at home tests were wrong.
I went home and immediately took another test – positive and even darker than the day before had been. I felt a little better, but then that night I had the tiniest bit of spotting and immediately felt like we were going to go through the same thing a second time.
It was the weekend, so I couldn’t get into my OB’s office for another two days. I talked to the on call nurse who was much more helpful and reassuring than the Urgent Care doctor. Still, I had to wait until Monday morning to go in for a blood test and then Monday afternoon for results. Even after that test confirmed that I was pregnant, I had to wait 48 hours for a second test to confirm that it was a viable pregnancy.
We are so fortunate to have gotten good news.
We have been to the doctor a couple of extra times early in pregnancy, and everything has looked good so far. It’s hard to let yourself get excited after you know what the worst case scenario feels like. We are getting more confident every day that our little one is healthy and happy and we will soon be a family of four.
There is no way to understand how someone else feels when it comes to loss. Every loss is different just like every pregnancy and every child is different. It is never a good feeling to hear about someone else’s pain, but there is comfort in knowing that someone else can imagine what you are going through. Talking about a terrible experience is never easy. Some people prefer to talk to cope and to move on. Others prefer to keep to themselves. I think that as long as you are able to keep mentally healthy, either one is ok.
I don’t know that there is a point to this post other than to share my story.