Mis(sed)car(e)riage

Each time someone asks me how many children I have, there isn’t one time that I don’t pause for a nano second and think of him before I say, “Two”.  I never got to meet him or even see what he looked like, but he (or she) and I were intimately connected for 7 weeks of our lives.

Every so often I find myself thinking about him. What he would have looked like. What his laugh would have sounded like. If he would have favored his dad more than me. None of these answers I’ll know this side of Heaven, but I still wonder about them on days when time allows my mind to drift.

I think I call him “him” because we wanted a boy so badly. And I always wonder if he was the boy we were hoping for. I love my girls more than life itself, but the curious parts of me wonder what our hearts would look like in boy form, walking around outside of our chests.

I didn’t even know he was there, living inside of me, until he wasn’t living anymore and my body began the process of removing him from my womb.  I remember sitting in my apartment one September day wincing with pain each time I felt the sting of what felt like menstrual cramps rushing in and out like ocean waves.  With each “wave” that came in, the pain got more intense, and I knew that something wasn’t right.  I assumed my period was coming soon and braced myself for a hellish seven or so days on the horizon. I would become best friends with my heating pad, drink lots of tea, and delight in all of the sweets my tummy could contain. I knew the drill…until I didn’t. This…began to feel… different.

“Could this be a miscarriage? Noooo. That’s silly! You’re not even pregnant!”  Those were the initial thoughts that creeped in to my head. As I ruminated on these thoughts for a while longer, I decided to call a good friend of mine who had experienced a miscarriage of her own a while back and see what she thought.  As I rattled off my symptoms to her, her voice got soft and she said, “ Yeah… that sounds a lot like what happened to me. If you want, you can take a pregnancy test to find out for sure. Even if you are miscarrying, the test will still pick up the HcG levels in your body. I have an extra test. Do you want me to come over right now?” “Yes,” I whispered as the reality of what could be began to settle in over my chest.

The + sign on a pregnancy test is usually met with joy, but I moved between joy and shock, and settled in on heartbreak fairly quickly.

I wish I could say it all happened that day and I was done, but the entire process – from start to finish – took about 3 weeks until it was over.

For some reason I kept the blood-stained sheets until I was finally ready to let them go.  They served as a painful reminder of what I had lost, but in a very odd way, those sheets also became a memorial to the little guy that I never knew.  When we moved from that apartment, I decided that the blood-stained mattress couldn’t come with us into the next chapter of our lives.  I no longer needed sheets and a mattress to serve as a memorial to our little guy; his memory now took up residence in my heart.

I never met him. We were only together for 7 weeks of our lives. But in a weird way, I feel this affection for him that has only been reserved for the two children that made it out of my womb alive.

I remember reading this book, Heaven Is For Real, shortly after I miscarried our second child, and there was a part in it where the little boy tells his Mom that he met his little brother while he was in Heaven. (His mother had a miscarriage before he was born.) He goes on to tell his Mom that his brother ran up to him in Heaven and hugged him and told him that he can’t wait to see his mother up there. 

I lost it. Crumbled into a ball and sobbed.

“I’ll get to meet him someday?!” I thought. “He’ll recognize me?!”  The image of a child running up to me and hugging my legs when I get to Heaven was actually too much for me to bear in that moment. I don’t know if that is Biblical or not, but in that moment, I truly did not care.

It took me a while to get to a point where I could think about all that happened and not sob. I don’t know when I arrived at that place, but I never thought I would be able to.

I think about him here and there, and especially when another Mamma shares her story of loss with me. He has taken up residence in my heart, and he can stay there for as long as he’d like.

I have questions that will probably never be answered on this side of Heaven, but I’m okay with that… finally. One day I’ll have them all answered. And one day, I’ll get to finally meet my precious baby boy.