After six hours of waiting in lines, getting my blood and urine tested, and getting an ultrasound done, I was finally sitting on the crinkly white paper of the examination table in urgent care about to hear my results. Soon the doctor whisked into the room with a cardiogram paper of the baby’s heartbeat in her hand.
She looked at me kindly and said, “So you’re pregnancy hormone is very low and the baby’s heartbeat is only 67. I think this is a miscarriage.” Even though I knew all along that this is what was happening, hearing it from her I felt a devastation rise in my heart and my throat. “I am so sorry,” she continued gently, “I want you to know that this is not your fault.” It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. Yeah, I’d heard that before. I heard it from the neurologist when he told me that Ezra had had a stroke. I heard it from the geneticist when she told me that Salem had some missing genes on his fifth chromosome. And now I was hearing it from the urgent care doctor about my dying baby. It’s not your fault. Somehow those words never made me feel better.
My miscarriage lasted for almost an entire month. Waiting day after day for the baby to pass was excruciating. I cannot even begin to describe what it felt like to have a dead baby inside of my body for that long. But what I also struggled with was that mixed in with the feelings of pain and sorrow, I also felt a huge sense of relief. Because the truth is, I didn’t want this baby. I didn’t want another child. I especially did not want another special needs child. I thought if I had to do the special needs journey over again it would wipe out whatever was left of me. I’m not supposed to feel this way, I thought, I’m not supposed to not want this child. So I would immediately shove the feelings away whenever they arrived. Before the miscarriage I kept putting away my thoughts and feelings of not wanting the baby because how could I think those things while it was growing inside of me? I didn’t want the baby to feel unloved and unwanted. And I did have moments where I felt so much love for the little life growing inside of me. I felt that God wanted me to name the baby Hope. But those moments were outnumbered by the moments of fear and wishing that I was not pregnant.
During the miscarriage I could barely focus when I tried to spend time with God. I would sit and stare and feel numb. I couldn’t read scripture, I couldn’t pray, and whenever I tried to listen to a sermon or worship music, it irritated me and I shut it off. I just sat while different questions would pop into my head. Why did this happen? Why did God allow me to get pregnant when I didn’t want another child only to allow it to die? Why have we had a progression of a child with a physical disability, the next child with a cognitive, social, and emotional disability, and now a child that dies? God felt silent and far away from me.
While on a walk a few days later I was thinking about this crazy pattern I’d been through in my mothering journey. It was in my womb that Ezra had a stroke. It was in my womb that Salem’s chromosomes suddenly reproduced with a deletion. It was in my womb that this baby had died. “What is wrong with my womb? Jesus, what is wrong with me?!” I asked angrily. He quietly and simply answered, “That’s why I came in the womb.”
One morning while I was trying to have worship, I opened up my Bible to John 16:33, and read, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” That verse alone became my lifeline during one of the worst months of my life. I couldn’t have all of my questions answered. I couldn’t get rid of the pain and guilt that I felt. But just holding on to the fact that this world has been overcome and therefore it would not overcome me, I was able to keep going.
The baby was taking too long to come out and I had been bleeding for too long, so I had to have it removed. It was a strange experience to have my doctor and all of the nurses listening to happy music and chatting away about what they were going to do for the weekend while I was laying down in the most vulnerable position about to have what felt like the funeral for my little child that I never got to know. As soon as the procedure was over I went out to the OB waiting room where Nick was and fell on his shoulder and sobbed. I didn’t care what anyone thought about me. I didn’t care that the waiting room was filled with happy pregnant women who all left smiling with new ultrasound pictures. My baby was gone.
Once the baby was physically out and the miscarriage was complete, I started to get a lot better. I was finally able to start moving on. But I still had days where I broke down. I was able to pray again and I asked God to help me recover and continue to live healthily on this earth even with this new scar on my heart. For just as Jesus chose to keep his scars on his hands, feet, and side, I wanted to continue to walk around this earth fully alive and able to love even with scars on my heart.
A week later on a Friday night I had a dream that I was at church talking to my friend Jennie and I was crying. The next morning, I forgot about the dream and I didn’t feel like going to church, but something inside of me felt like I needed to go. I roamed around the church with Salem in my arms not really wanting to go anywhere. I ended up going into the youth room where my husband teaches Sabbath School. After I entered I heard someone call my name and I turned around to see Jennie. She asked me how I was doing and suddenly the tears started to pour. And suddenly I remembered my dream. She took me out into the hallway so we could have more privacy and it all started to come out. “I had a miscarriage…that’s been really hard…but I feel so guilty, Jennie, because I didn’t want this baby…what if it had an issue like Salem or Ezra?…when I found out I was miscarrying, I was so relieved…I feel so terrible because who is happy about a dying baby?” I went on and on not able to stop the words or the tears. I’m not sure if I made a lot of sense. Jennie stayed still, compassionately listening to my every word. Then she said, “Given the circumstances, Deanne, it completely makes sense why you would feel this way. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good person and it doesn’t mean that you’re not strong because you are.” I cried the rest of that day. All afternoon. All evening. Every ounce of guilt and pain that I felt, I laid before God.
The next day I told two of my girlfriends about my guilt over the baby. And slowly, I started to tell more and more people about how I really felt during my miscarriage. And every single one of them validated my feelings and affirmed that I was not a bad person for feeling that way.
A few days later, Jennie came over to check on me. We chatted over all the struggles of motherhood. She shared the challenges she has with her kids in the teenage stage and she empathized with me having kids in the little stage. We laughed a lot over of our shared misery and over the awe that we have experienced in parenthood. Then towards the end of our time she asked me how I was doing in relation to losing the baby. I told her that after I saw her on Sabbath a chain reaction of healing began. I came to accept my feelings and I ultimately came to accept myself. Even when all of those different doctors told me that it was not my fault, God knew that I needed to be able to say it to myself. It’s not my fault. Jennie then said, “there’s a verse in the Bible that I think about during hardships. It’s, ‘In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world (John 16:33).’” My eyes widened as I heard her recite the words that kept me alive during my miscarriage. Then what she said next made me know for sure that God Himself was orchestrating my healing process because He knows me and loves me that much. She said, “Even through all the most horrible things that happen in this life we can still have hope. Hope is not lost.”
Whatever is... 