Our Baby Story (Part 1)

I will never forget the summer of 2013… I had a miscarriage… I never thought I would say those words to others besides my close friends… but here I am… sharing with all of you now…

Only a select number of people knew this about me until now. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to go through.

Let me start from the beginning… My mom shared with me before I married Henry, that she had started praying for her grandchildren when I was 16 years old. I was shocked because at that time I wasn’t even thinking about marriage. I wasn’t even allowed to have a boyfriend at that time so you KNOW I wasn’t thinking about my future children. My mom always encouraged me and told me that I would be a great mother. At the time I didn’t really think much about it, but now that I’m a mommy myself, her words have come back to me several times. They have been encouragement to me even now as I’m walking in this new role.

Fast forward to when Henry and I started dating/courting. As we would talk about our future, we started making plans for when we wanted to start a family. We wanted to wait two years and then have a baby. We even had full names for our three future children. Well two years went by and then we realized that we were not ready to have kids. We were enjoying the perks of being able to be big kids ourselves. We decided to put the baby thing on hold. I wanted to start and finish grad school. We both wanted to get solid in our careers and in our income. It was a good thing we waited because we ended up going through a really tough time in our relationship/marriage. The Lord knew that we still had some growing to do before we could be parents. Thankfully things finally began to get better and settle down. We were more open to having a baby, but not actively trying or not trying to have one.

One day in July of 2013 I noticed that I felt more tired than usual. I also realized that I was late and I wasn’t typically late.  I decided to take a pregnancy test. Sure enough it was positive. I was so surprised but excited at the same time. I decided to take a couple more just to make sure it was really positive. After taking a couple more tests, I found myself analyzing the results… Do I really see a plus sign? Am I just seeing things? Maybe if I look really close it might not actually be positive…. Etc. All of those things went through my mind. I was 31 going on 32 so the timing as far as my age was concerned was pretty good. I shared the news with Henry. I can’t remember how I shared it… but I remember we were both excited, but didn’t want to over do it with the excitement. We wanted to make sure we really were pregnant before getting too excited.

Prior to finding out that we were pregnant, we had a wonderful time on our anniversary vacation. We talked about where we were in our relationship/marriage, we talked about our future goals, and of course we talked about starting a family.  We talked about how we were glad I had finished grad school, was in a new position at work, etc. We got home still in the vacation frame of mind. I was on summer vacation, so I was relaxed and enjoying my time off.

One morning (in July) shortly after we returned home from our vacation I woke up in excruciating pain. It felt like cramps x 1,000,000. It was THE WORST pain I had experienced in life (so far). I woke Henry up and told him that I was in a lot of pain and decided to go to the bathroom. It was then that I realized I was having a miscarriage. Without going into too much details, I realized that this is what a miscarriage looked like and felt like. I was in the bathroom for what felt like HOURS. I remember crying so much. Crying in pain and crying because of the loss. It was a hard experience to go through. I had heard of others having miscarriages, but didn’t understand the experience and the pain that comes with it. Even though it was an early miscarriage, it was still a loss. Henry was such a great support for me during that time and really helped me get through that challenging time.

I was sad for a while after it happened. I didn’t really know how to feel or think. I remember racking my brain to figure out what I did that could’ve caused the miscarriage. I felt guilty…Like I did something to cause this loss. I had to work through all the emotions that come with something like this.

That summer was very busy for me.  My school was in the midst of a HUGE change and I was working and helping to keep things going smoothly. Looking back on it, it was a good thing because it helped keep my mind busy and off of the miscarriage.

Sometimes it was hard not to think about the miscarriage… especially when a lot of people were asking us when we were going start a family… all those questions that come when you’ve been married for a while and don’t have kids yet. I would give them a rehearsed answer “Oh we are not actively trying, but we are not actively not trying.” But deep down inside I would be so sad because I had and then lost…

{ Click here to read part two }