Acceptance

It amazes me sometimes, how the human heart can grow to accept and embrace our life experiences, and how these experiences...or maybe the acceptance itself...can have such a profound power to change us.

I've only consciously known about my babies, their fleeting existence, and their silent passage from my life for a little over two months.

After having this time to process it all, I can honestly say I am at peace with what has happened. I don't know exactly when this peace came over me. I do know that it took a lot of prayer, tears, and long nights of God working His healing miracles within my heart to get here.

That does not mean I'm not sad. That doesn't mean I don't miss them. I am not by any means happy that I've lost my children. That's just absurd. I am happy...no, not happy. Glad? Maybe relieved is the word...to know that I actually was able to conceive. Apparently more than once. All this time, seven years, I believed that I had never conceived. That I truly was infertile. That we truly were incapable of creating a child. That we were destined to never become parents.

What is still hard for me to reconcile in my mind is that I will never know when they were conceived, what their due dates were, or when I lost them. I don't have those "anniversaries", no matter how morbid or sad some may think they are, to remember. To time-stamp. To mark down in my history. To say definitively "this is when I lost my first baby" or "today was my second baby's due date". I have approximate time frames in my mind when I believe these events occurred, but nothing concrete. I have nothing tangible from my pregnancies, from my lost babies. No positive pee-sticks, no ultrasound pictures, no cute little onesies or baby blankets, nothing. My children were here and gone before even I knew they existed; perfect tiny souls that slipped through me on their path to Heaven.

This not knowing, I've noticed, makes it hard for other people to fully accept my losses as valid or significant. There have been a few (albeit very few) people that have been wonderful in helping me to process all of this. Others, like they've done with the rest of my infertility, would like to gloss over it. Sweep it under the rug. Pretend it never happened. What they don't realize it that while my miscarriages might not have been recent, my grief still very much is. That I may still be hurting. That I may still cry when thinking or talking about my babies. That I need to talk about my babies. Even though my losses occurred what I believe was between four to six years ago, I JUST learned about them. I need and deserve acknowledgement and validation of my feelings just as much as someone who lost their baby six months, six weeks, or six days ago.

I have been changed by the knowledge of my pregnancies and the loss of my children. Not just emotionally, but fundamentally changed. I have been given a gift. That gift is the knowledge that I am a mother. I can hold on to that knowledge for the rest of my life and know that I was able to do something that I had believed for seven years I was incapable of doing. The sad realization of all of this, of course, is that I will have to wait until I get to Heaven to see and hold my babies. Oh how I await that day...

"Sweet babies,

I never truly knew I was carrying you until you were long gone.
I never knew I lost you until now.
I never knew I could miss someone I never knew, that I never felt, that I never held.
But I do, my sweet babies. I do. So much.
I know one of you would have been about five, almost six, years old. The other about three, maybe four.
I think one of you is my precious little girl, and the other, my sweet baby boy.
You are my sweet shooting stars. You were here and gone before we ever knew, yet you have left your mark upon our lives. The path you traced through your fleeting journey from my body to heaven will forever be emblazoned on my heart and soul.
There are so many things I've missed. Holding you. Rocking you to sleep. Nursing you. Sleepless nights, dirty diapers, colic, first fevers and first smiles. First steps. First words. First birthdays and first days of school. Teaching you about the world and discovering the world anew through your eyes.  Watching you both grow from babies to toddlers to childhood. Watching your sweet personalities develop. Are you laid back like your daddy, or more anxious like me? Whose eyes do you have? What color is your hair? What would it feel like to hold your chubby little hands as you toddled up the aisle at church?
My sweet babies, my beautiful shooting stars, I will love you forever and miss you always.
Until we are reunited through God's everlasting grace, I will always be...

Your loving Mommy"

Wandering through the mists...

I feel like that's what I've been doing the past week or so. Since I found out my bloodwork results and had the D&C, I feel like I've been standing behind a curtain of mist watching these events. I'm sure it's my head attempting to protect my heart; funny how the mind works sometimes.

(FYI the D&C went fine, I'll post more on that later).

I've talked at length with my Mom and husband about the "probable miscarriage" issue. We all agree it explains a lot in retrospect. I had several episodes of severe pain and bleeding after failed cycles. These were the times I truly believed I was pregnant. I had a very very faint BFP on one cycle...but it couldn't be confirmed because I started my period (or so I thought) before I could get a beta drawn. I always thought that it was a false positive because I tested again the next day and it was negative. I must have caught it at the tail end of dropping. I had called my doctor during these episodes, but they told me not to be concerned about it, that if I was testing negative and bleeding it was probably "just a heavy period". I could kick myself for not listening to my gut more.

I don't know 100% for sure that I did miscarry. I don't know 100% sure that I didn't. Truly, as my mom and husband both said, only God knows the truth at this point.

I was afraid to tell my husband about the probability of these miscarriages because he always said that he didn't want to try anymore if we got pregnant and lost it. He didn't want us going through that. We talked about the blood clotting issues and MTHFR, and he even said that the episodes make a lot more sense given this new information. I didn't know how he would react, but he surprised me. He took it extremely well. He was sad, and he said he wishes that it wouldn't have happened, but that he's glad we found out several years after the fact instead of when it was happening. I don't know if I agree with that or not. It makes sense in a way, because being removed from it by several years, it doesn't have the strong emotional trauma of knowing while it's occurring. However...it also makes it harder in a way. It's almost like trying to get someone to believe in a repressed memory that only I can remember. Although, in all honesty, I don't care if anyone other than my inner circle of family and friends believes it. I wish in a way I had known at the time. I wish I had the opportunity to know I was pregnant. I wish I would have been allowed to mourn them. I wish others could have shared in my grief. I wish there was a way I could acknowledge and honor them without feeling like a fraud. I feel like since I was never "confirmed" to be pregnant, I'm not "allowed" to claim losses. I have to be honest, knowing it's possible that I've miscarried brings a sense of closure to the intense questioning and grief and sense of emptiness I've felt for seven years. Almost as if I've received validation through a simple quick blood test. The reason I've felt so broken, so lost, the reason I've felt such a huge hole in my heart is because I have lost my children. I've always said I miss my children, but that they just hadn't been conceived yet.

I know now that they were. They existed.

I miss my babies. I will always miss my babies.

However, I know that God is watching over them for me until I can meet them in Heaven.

Reconciling Infertility and Faith, Part II: My Conclusions

I've been giving this topic a lot of thought since my last post.

I am finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile my feelings about my infertility with my still growing faith in God and my daily walk with Christ. There are so many negative feelings surrounding my infertility fight thus far, and I pray daily for God's guidance in this and many other arenas. I ask Him daily to lead me in the direction in which He wants me to proceed. I try to temper my own desires and wants, to surrender my dreams and follow the nudges, pokes, and sometimes shoves from my Heavenly Father. I still feel confident that my desire to be a mother is a desire given from God. There's no other explanation for it. I don't believe that He would have given me this desire if He didn't have a plan to fulfill it. I just wish, in the small sinful mistrusting secret places in my heart, I wish I knew when that plan was going to come to fruition. And what that plan is. Because also in that small secret place, I have the fear that this will be withheld from me forever. And I also fear that the ache will be there forever.

I pray for the ability to “delight in the Lord” (Ps 37:4), for the ability to relinquish my dream and “be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him” (Ps 37:7).

Maybe I'm not supposed to understand. That's the hard part for my analytical part of my brain and heart to comprehend. It's hard for me to understand the logistics of NOT understanding. All my life I've endeavored to comprehend, to know WHY. To find out the who, what, where, when, why, and how. Especially when. And why. Such tiny words. Such a huge stumbling block.

I know that when I allow Him to, He can heal the ache in my heart. What I don't understand is why He won't allow my aching heart to be healed by filling my womb. (HUGE AHA MOMENT): maybe that's the lesson? That the two are not interdependent? That this is not a cause and effect situation? Well, for seven years of battling infertility, my womb has been barren. Empty. Unfilled. Unfulfilled. As has my heart. So to me, it stands to reason (in my humanly skewed perception) that the heartache will remain until I am able to conceive or we are able to adopt. Until I am a mother. Is it possible that my happiness and lightness of heart and dare I say JOY isn't and perhaps shouldn't be contingent upon my reproductive status? Perhaps God is waiting for me to realize that true happiness and joy come only from Him and that once I can experience that...then, and maybe only then, can the rest fall into place for child(ren) He has planned for us to be born?

Wow. Talk about HUGE. *(and honestly...I truly had that revelation only as I was typing this...it literally just smacked me in the head).

I know God is enough. I know this life I have is enough. (Why do I have to physically restrain myself from tacking “for now” on the end of those sentences???)

Perhaps this is what I'm supposed to be learning.

Patience.

Courage.

Acceptance.

To live for today, not worrying over yesterday, not trying to over-plan for tomorrow. Trying not to dwell on the tomorrows that I want...but embracing with open arms the tomorrows that God has PLANNED for me.

Maybe there is no reconciliation.

And I think I'm okay with that.