I finished part one with the comfort of knowing that one day I will get to see my babies in Heaven. I will sometimes wonder what that will be like; our entire family all in one place for the first time. I can’t remember exactly when I found out we were pregnant again but it was sometime late April. This time wasn’t quite as surprising however once I found out I remember being anxious. The pain of our previous loss still felt fresh and I was worried we would walk through that again, but I do have to say that there was also a big part of me that didn’t expect it to actually happen again. Again, I knew that miscarriage was relatively common and I thought that since we had just experienced it, we weren’t likely to experience it again. Surely, not two times in a row.
We had an ultrasound scheduled relatively early, in the beginning of June. My doctor wanted to do one early on given the loss we’d just had. It was such a comfort to see a strong heartbeat at that ultrasound. Our baby looked healthy and that was so relieving to hear. I also had read that once you see a heartbeat in an ultrasound the chance of losing your baby goes down. I don’t remember anything remarkable about the rest of my first trimester, but I do still remember when it finished feeling like I had met another milestone. I thought that we would go on to have a healthy baby boy or girl the following year, this baby’s due date was January 14th.
My next appointment seeing the doctor was at 14 weeks. They did everything that normally happens at a prenatal visit with checking vitals and such, then at the end my doctor would always check for the heartbeat with the doppler. She had a hard time finding the heartbeat and spent quite a bit of time looking for it. She kept saying that she thought the baby was hiding but eventually sent me for an emergency ultrasound. Her office did not do them there but she sent me to an imaging office with orders to send her the results; she let me know that likely everything would be okay but that she would call me that night so we did not have to wait overnight for the results. I called my husband and asked him to leave work and meet me at home so we could drive to the ultrasound together. I then called my mom asking her to watch Jack and Eva longer.
I still remember what I was wearing and what it felt like being in that office for the ultrasound. It felt very cold and empty and I know that is partly because it was the end of the day, but it just felt dark. We waited for a while since it was a last minute appointment and the room for the ultrasound was very small. The tech positioned the screen in such a way that we could not see anything and it was such a sad and empty feeling compared to other ultrasounds where they show you photos of your baby. I remember at one point he left and I snuck a peek at the screen to see our baby. He then came back and let us know that he could not tell us anything but assured us that we would hear from the doctor that night. Unfortunately we did not, I later found out that the on call doctor did not have our number saved correctly but it was the next morning when I called the office that my doctor let me know we had lost our baby. She explained that since I was so far along she did not feel safe letting me pass the baby naturally and wanted to schedule a D&C. That part was hard for me to handle, it seemed like such a harsh way for my baby to come out but at the time I was unable to advocate for myself and ask for any other options. The earliest it could be done was that Friday and I went in on July 20 to have surgery to remove our baby. These dates will forever stay in my memory because they were six months apart to the day.
Once the surgery was over I completely lost myself emotionally. I still remember coming in to recovery just sobbing, I had held it together since finding out but once the baby was actually gone and no longer a part of me I felt such deep sorrow that I could no longer hold it in. I cried uncontrollably for a very long time. My husband and nurse sat with me and again I felt that ministry of presence by having people around me and felt less alone.
Recovering from this loss physically was not as rough, I did not have as much bleeding after surgery compared to the first miscarriage and was back on my feet quicker. However emotionally processing this loss was so much harder. I was an adult when I accepted Jesus into my heart and had often been told about enemy attack but was not aware of experiencing it myself until walking through that grief.
Jack was a month away from turning 3 and Eva had recently turned 1, those are such tough ages and it is a trying time as a mom. So it is normal to feel overwhelmed and to be dealing with tantrums or children resisting naps, but at that time I felt like I was not doing well enough as a mom. I thought that if I was doing better as their mom that they wouldn’t be having so many tantrums or would always nap perfectly. I was believing lies from the enemy which told me that if I was doing a good enough job with the kids that I already had, then I would have been blessed with more. I thought that since I was doing a poor job with Jack and Eva, I lost those babies. Now looking back I can see how untrue that is, but at the time I was so deep in those thoughts I didn’t even realize how much I was believing them, like in my core believing these awful things about myself and God.
I shared in my last post how much my Bible study helped me through the first loss, it is no surprise that those ladies again walked me through this grief. If I needed to sit and cry at our time together, they allowed that and sat with me. But it was the leader of my table who started a major change for me; she asked me if I was angry with God. She also then told me that if I was angry, that was okay because God could handle it. That really impacted me because I was angry but had not realized it. God’s timing is always perfect because at that time our church started a series focused on the Holy Spirit and my Bible study leader gave me a Bible study about the Holy Spirit.
Growing up in the Catholic church I did not have a full understanding of who the Holy Spirit was, but I now know that He is our helper. The Holy Spirit is the same helper that Jesus had when he was walking this Earth. I learned that I can pray to the Holy Spirit and ask him to guide me when I am struggling. I learned that the Holy Spirit will intercede for me and even if I do not know what to pray for, He knows for me. I learned that the Jesus left us the Holy Spirit when he ascended into Heaven. I felt like I had this untapped tool that I did not know existed. It was through all of this that I also learned the Holy Spirit will protect me from enemy attack; which I had been under without realizing it. Everything that I was believing about the kind of mom I was, or the belief that God would take babies away because I wasn’t doing well enough…it was all lies. Lies the enemy wanted me to believe about myself rather than how God sees me. It changed everything.
I found support online as well, and that felt like a space where I could direct my pain towards helping others. One of these places was a shop I found on Etsy called The Cooper Project. I ordered a bar necklace with two hearts on it, one for each baby in Heaven. I have also volunteered to make bracelets for her Pink and Blue Awareness Project that get sent out for October each year. We ordered this beautiful string art from a small shop depicting two hearts in an ultrasound. And, I was a guest on a podcast called Managing Miscarriage, which I actually don’t believe is currently sharing episodes, but I listened to so many episodes during that time. Hearing other women who had gone through what we went through made me feel comforted, I realized how great the stigma around miscarriage was after experiencing it myself. This is a major reason that I am sharing in as much detail here as I am. I have shared much shorter versions of these stories in the past, but writing it out and leaving it in a place for others to read is done in the hope that if you are reading this and going through loss yourself, you will feel less alone in the same way I was while going through it myself. They were women I had never met nor would ever meet but those women who were vulnerable enough to share their story helped me heal my own story.
Parts of this story are woven into another post I’ve made where I share how I felt when we found out we were having twins but I will summarize it here. God redeemed my story in such a beautiful way, the baby we first lost had a due date of August 21, 2018 and I shared how overwhelmed I felt about having three kids ages three and under. In January of 2019 we found out we were pregnant and the first week of February we found out they were twins. This meant a rainbow baby for each loss we had experienced. The twin’s due date was to be September 21 but I was told they would likely come early since I had a history of pre-eclampsia. The twins were born on August 25, 2019. Jack turned four on August 26, 2019, I had four kids ages four and under. It was like God was telling me “You thought you couldn’t handle three under three, but I have such faith in you and I have called you to do this so I am blessing you with four kids ages four and under” I still get emotional when I think about that redemption that can only happen through the Holy Spirit and recognizing who God has called me to be. It is not always easy and most days I feel overwhelmed and over stimulated, but I know in my core that this was how God wrote my story. He did not see me around a storm but saw me through the storm and I am so grateful for that. If you are in the middle of this storm that is loss, I pray that you cling to God as He guides you through it as well.
