Author’s Note: These words were written in Jan. of 2021, and I have just now had the courage and personal strength to release them. While we have welcomed baby #2 in the past year, looking back, it doesn’t make the time I have written about here seem any easier or less painful. My prayer is with each of you walking through infertility, you are not alone.
In the spring of 2020, my husband and I started trying for baby #2. We delightfully recalled how quickly we got pregnant with our first just two summers ago and expected a similar timeline for baby #2. Like all things in parenting, it never goes how we expect. Months went by and while my bathroom waste bin filled with ovulation test strips, the pregnancy tests continued to come up negative.
Comparatively speaking, this time in our marriage was prime for welcoming another baby. When I got pregnant for our son, now 20 months old, it was just a few months after my youngest brother was tragically killed, we were newlyweds while in the middle of a whole home live-in remodel, and I was preparing to run a three-day race in southern Utah that Fall. Why was I spending this past Fall grieving the loss of baby #2?
I didn’t get it; I struggled with “giving it to God” and then taking it all back into my “control” again. The truth is this pregnancy, for some unknown reason to me, wasn’t meant to be. As the logical and faith-based thinking individual that I am, it still consumes the background of all of my thoughts and actions. While I have a true and deep faith in God, I still have the all-consuming ideas that my thoughts and actions are the only factors in getting pregnant again. I doubted God, and myself, to do what He has called me to do; be a mother. Phew – I said it. Insert eye-roll at myself.
Every woman wanting to be pregnant right now has doubted how much alcohol they’ve had to drink, though it only be a glass, if they do/don’t work out enough, sleep patterns, the way they lay after sex, the make-up they put on their skin, their diet, the soaps with which they wash their hands. It is maddening how much pressure the inability to get pregnant puts on us, and it is nonsensical in every way! I know this so deeply because I am ‘us.’
While I have a deep and intimate relationship with God that has endured doubt, loss, grief, joy, faith, hope, love, and perseverance; it has recently grown most in trust. Trusting in the fact that if there’s no vegan organic bar soap for me to wash my hands with, that I can still get pregnant using the highly processed hand sanitizer. On a more serious note, many personal friends have endured similar miscarriage experiences, like many of you reading. My heart aches for us. Though I don’t know you, I have cried many tears for you and your hopeful womb; I cry for us now as I type these words.
Writing this wasn’t on the agenda, like ever. I had no plans to share this part of my story because pain is difficult to process, and we are all going through it together but differently. I have many friends wanting, hoping, and trying desperately to have a baby join their family through IVF, adoption, timed intercourse, etc. I hope each of you reads this and feels unity amongst us as we are all trying to share the love we have with a baby of our own to hold. Since my miscarriage, I have quit using the ovulation test strips and timing intercourse, and instead, enjoy every moment with my son and husband focused on our present and hopeful for our future. Every night I go to sleep dreaming of the world where my backseat is full of kids and my house is too loud to handle; I know one day I will write about the frustrations of that time period. Hope you stick around to read about the days to come with me (us)!
