[in honor of pregnancy loss and remembrance day]
 |
| My favorite tree is a Jacaranda. After we lost the baby we bought a baby Jacaranda Tree and planted it in a small pot. I named it Hope. I knew as long as this tree grew I would have hope. Today the tree is in the corner of our yard, still skinny but so tall and strong. I love this tree and what it stands for. |
I woke up in a hospital bed. Sleepy, so sleepy. For some reason my mom was next to me. I smiled before it came flooding back to me.
This happened to me again. Again I was robbed of joy.
My baby was dead.
My baby's tiny unformed body had been scraped out of my body and was now lying in a hazardous waste trash bag somewhere.
When they removed my baby from my body, the baby I had been bonding with and nurturing for over two months, they also removed my hope.
Hope is a compartment in our brain. It's a little box. Or a big box, depending on how much you stuff in there. And they robbed me of mine. It was stolen during the surgery.
I was on so many pain killers I can't tell you how much or how often I cried in the days that followed.
I only know that I was so angry.
Why should
I have to go through this twice? Why can girls make a stupid
choice of unprotected sex and then
choose to kill their baby and I, a married woman who wanted nothing more than to be a mother, had my baby
die inside of my body?
I didn't understand. To this day I do not understand.
We decided to try again as soon as the doctor would allow us.
What I didn't realize after this miscarriage was how
hard it is to get pregnant. How much I loathed women who said careless things like, "Oh! I just sneeze and get pregnant!" How much those words would be a knife in my gut. How much I loathed all pregnant women. How much I loathed women with kids who complained about them.
I was desperate.
Every single month after my miscarriage I missed my baby.
I missed my baby and tried to replace it with another.
Every single time I got my period I would sob. I fell apart every month. I tried not to let bitterness encompass me. I tried to replace the hope that was stolen.
I painted and painted and painted and cried.
I made countless videos pouring out my heart and soul. They never made it to Youtube. I am not that real with people.
I faked a lot of friendships, I faked smiles and I faked happiness.
Inside I was wilting away.
Yet each month I
knew it was going to be the month I would get pregnant and be healed of pain.
It took ten months to get successfully pregnant from the time we lost the baby.
Now that we have Neely ten months doesn't sound like a lot but trust me. It seemed like years.
Even as I write this I feel so detached from the depth of pain.
I was wondering if it was because I blocked it out, but no. God gave us Neely and she healed my heart.
She is more than I could have ever imagined (and I have a great imagination) in a child. She is
so us it's crazy. We are a complete puzzle now, Brett, Neely and I.
I pray that none of my friends will ever have to walk this road that we walked. My heart aches for all of the women who have lost babies. It isn't fair and it freaking sucks. But there will come a time of healing and you better be ready to receive it. God will bless you beyond your wildest dreams. Trust me.
